> The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes.
I read the paper. I found no such claim - please cite.
> The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.
They literally do not do so.
They claim that the stones we call handaxes were considered a separate type of rock. Then they discuss various conceptualizations of that rock at the time. They claim that one person thought it was interesting that category of stone including handaxes bore a resemblence to arrowheads from the new world, but his work wasn't published until 1717 (long after that person's death).
You seem mad at archaelogists for claiming things like "these handaxes are old" in general, and specifically at these guys for pointing out historical descriptions of things that sound like handaxes, and paintings that look a lot like handaxes. They literally (using a dictionary definition of the word - in this case the factual definition) state in their paper:
"In the knowledge that works of art are not exact transcripts of reality, it would be difficult, if not impossible, conclusively to identify whether a handaxe is represented in this fifteenth-century painting. We can, however, potentially strengthen the inference that a handaxe is depicted through three artefact-based routes of inquiry."
I'm not sure what you're going on about, your claims seem false upon reading the paper.
Read the last sentence of their abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world."
That clearly Indicates the authors believe the painter and his contemporary society of modern 15th century peoples already had a culture of appreciation for the objects as pre-historic axes, that their so-called finding "pushes back the date" for this appreciation. That is literally their thesis and conclusion.
That argument is reductive. They are saying that the painting is evidence that early modern people believed axe-theory because the authors have identified the rock in the painting as an axe from axe-theory. Everything else is speculation. It is complete garbage with a motive to push archeological axe-theory for academic crumbs. It is a desperate attempt to scrape empirical evidence for imaginary archeologies.
I read the paper. I found no such claim - please cite.
> The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.
They literally do not do so.
They claim that the stones we call handaxes were considered a separate type of rock. Then they discuss various conceptualizations of that rock at the time. They claim that one person thought it was interesting that category of stone including handaxes bore a resemblence to arrowheads from the new world, but his work wasn't published until 1717 (long after that person's death).
You seem mad at archaelogists for claiming things like "these handaxes are old" in general, and specifically at these guys for pointing out historical descriptions of things that sound like handaxes, and paintings that look a lot like handaxes. They literally (using a dictionary definition of the word - in this case the factual definition) state in their paper:
"In the knowledge that works of art are not exact transcripts of reality, it would be difficult, if not impossible, conclusively to identify whether a handaxe is represented in this fifteenth-century painting. We can, however, potentially strengthen the inference that a handaxe is depicted through three artefact-based routes of inquiry."
I'm not sure what you're going on about, your claims seem false upon reading the paper.