This is kind of hard to put into words. What I’m asking is, how would an archaeologist be able to tell if what they’ve just found is evidence of a massive cultural phenomenon or just a weird and singular thing?
Like, if someone dug up an ancient carving that they hadn’t seen before, would they assume that it had some sort of religious or cultural purpose immediately? Or would they just think “the guy that made this must’ve been really into carving”? Do they just always assume the latter until they see the carving pop up in different areas, or do they go towards the former more often without explicit backup evidence?
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Like other scientists, archaeologists are cautious about making any assumptions and statements without evidence.
Artifacts themselves are often less important than the context in which they are found. In your example of finding an unusual carving the questions would be along the lines of:
– What material is it made of? – this lets you know if it was locally sources or potentially traded
– What was it found in association with? (eg. in/on/adjacent to a structure, and if so, where in it and what type of structure) – identifying what type of structure and where the artifact was found in relation ship to the structure helps to determine potential significance
– Does it have anything on it? (eg. paint, blood, grain meal, soot, etc) – this helps to determine if it had some sort of ritual significance, and if it had a role in offerings or something similar
– Are there any symbols or writing associated with it? – if so, these may be shared more widely and may be indicative of wider use or recognition, also, they might actually say with its was for
– Etc.
Each of these, and a great deal more, questions helps to establish a larger and more complete picture of what an individual artifact represents. Something as simple as what it is made of tells you a lot, if it’s from bronze, for example, that tells you that it was part of a trade network and cultures that participated in industrial levels of work (eg. mining and trading the tin and brass needed to make bronze), or if it’s of a particular stone that’s not found in the region that (for larger artifacts) tells you that it must have been important enough to the culture to organize enough people to bring it to the site, which in turn indicates a relatively complex potentially hierarchical society.
No real archaeologist finds an artifact and immediately comes up with a theory without first looking carefully at all the contextual clues they can find, and even then they are extremely conservative in their proposals of what an item may be representative of.
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