Tapia, Reeza Mei B.

Professor Jessica Peña

2014-20601 October 28, 2018

ARCHAEOLOGY 2 REACTION PAPER

On October 23, we did activities that demonstrated how stone age people used to live
their day to day lives. We had two activities, the first one was practicing how to throw spears
at a prey simulating their hunting activity, and the second one is preparing the spears,
sharpening them with the use of stones.

I find the activity really interesting since we are so used to advanced methods and
techniques nowadays. We are used to the ease of our daily activities that we don’t get to
wonder what it is like to live without machines, and without specific people doing specific
tasks for us. What is it like to eat food that does not come from the market directly? What is
it like to have to prepare your own food from acquiring of food source that isn’t from the
store down to the preparation of food manually? And what is it like to do everything yourself?

The task was tiring but fulfilling. As a human being who was so used to machines and
everything that is modern, I find the tasks exhausting to the point where I wonder if I am even
leading somewhere. The spears were hard to sharpen with just using stones. I realized how
convenient it is to have metal tools like knives. The task if done now, would have taken only
10 minutes or so. But that was not the case, so we had to repeat sharpening the end of the
spear over and over again with stone. And that stone even had to be sharpened too – the
edges of the stone wear over time. I felt the same thing with throwing the spears. Since this
was the first time I threw a spear, I did not expect to be adept at it but I didn’t know that it
would be so hard to throw at the exact target. If I lived in the stone age I probably would have
starved since I seldom do sports or that I am always expecting everything to be convenient
otherwise, I will be complaining about it.

However, despite how tiring the task was, I thought it was fulfilling to be able to learn
something new and to experience a completely different thing from our mundane activities.
It made us step back and appreciate the simplicity of life. It was like tracing the root of all our
activities down to the very basic. Throwing spears is a simple task but it is the foundation to
which we prepare our food – you have to get the food itself. Nowadays there are special
facilities which does this for us. Poultry farming, livestock, and aquaculture businesses does
this for us. They breed animals which serves as our food sold on the market. And consumers
easily access these resources by buying.

My favorite part of the activity was preparing the spear or sharpening its end. Partly
because the other activity was tiring and I did not know if I was making any progress at all
with my bad aim and partly because I also liked anything that had creativity in it. What’s
creative about preparing the spear is thinking about different ways on how best to sharpen
the end. You can be creative with how the tip would look like, and you can be creative on how
you are to sharpen it. It is a simple activity but fun nevertheless. You don’t get to do something
that is not as intellectually demanding as these stone age activities.

Thinking about the activities though, they were done for survival – to have food every
day. It is basically subsistence. Now comparing that to our way of life now, our food is readily
available at the supermarket. But I can’t really say that our life is easier now because life now
is so demanding compared to how simple it was before. I thought, well, at least they didn’t
have to go to college, to prepare for a job, to have money to be able to buy food. The point is
that, for me, they’re the same - before and now. The way of survival back then just changed
into these more advanced but definitely not easier tasks.

Conclusion

I think the purpose of the workshops is to demonstrate past activities. Hunting and
gathering used to be the normal way of life of people back then. It is always important to look
back at the past because their methods and techniques. From understanding what they did
back then, we get to understand the things as they are now and probably appreciate the
resources and tools that we have now. Learning about the past makes us appreciate the
present. For me what the activity did was appreciate what I have daily – the breakfast readily
made for me by my lola and the convenience of acquiring food in the 21st century. When I eat
I just have to go to the market for food, there isn’t a need to hunt for food. And when I need
to tools to do certain tasks, I just need to go to the local hardware or kitchenware shop where
a number of tools can be found.

But despite the differences on how life is lived now versus before, I don’t think that
early practices are inefficient and outdated. Looking back, they are actually helpful because
in a sense they trace the very basic concepts of the world we live in. Who knows that tracing
the roots of our technologies today may pave the way for new and more advanced
breakthroughs. By piecing out information from the past, we may begin to recognize patterns
we haven’t before. I think that is the goal of archeology – to understand the past to be able
to look for new techniques and innovations. One might say why look at the past to understand
the future?”. I think the reason lies on the limitations of us human beings. We fail to recognize
patterns, realize that these innovations can be done, or discover a number of things because
of our limitations like we can only live until a certain age, or we are limited by our senses, or
our intelligence at that moment. So, I guess looking back to the past is done to make up for
our backlog in trying to decode our way of life, and our surrounding environment as well.

An example of a past technique that is still useful today is trephining. I learned from
my STS class that it was an old way of surgery, a sophisticated way despite it being done
before. The difference now is that we have anesthesia to ease the pain for the patient, unlike
before that they had to endure the pain throughout the surgery. We must not forget where
the techniques we do now started. It’s when we are far from things that we see the bigger
picture. Who knows that by stepping back and taking it all in from a farther perspective (the
present), a paradigm shift or breakthrough may ensue?