This can open a whole broad theoretical debate, but I'll start with this: whoever writes SMBVChas obviously never been to an archaeological conference. Only the tiniest portion of any presentation is conclusions, and they're rarely direct statements like this one. When they are, someone important will rasie their hand with a critique.Otherwise, a lot of the conclusions you see are relative: these people are all doing the same thing at the same time or these ones aren't doing what the others are doing or these people didn't do something that they used to. The kind of people that look for absolute conclusions are the kind us archaeologists sit around and laugh about at dinner.

When we do make solid statements, we expect a solid body of evidence. If the only thing people are painting is animals, we can assume something. We know the culture I study was engaged in frequent conflict because, among other things, 70% of the sculptures of people are holding shields and maces. We don't find a figure with a mace and say "Obviously there's warfare here." We say that when we've found 400 warrior images and 50 other ones.

Of course, we can't always have such a large body of data, and in these cases we must limit our conclusions. Some of my current works faces this issue, so I'm asking simple questions .Is this a house? Where's the door? Did the most recent residents remodel when they moved in? We're decades away from being able to ask "How in touch were they with the nature?" (Though it's a silly question to ask)

I'm going to copy/paste a response I gave in another topic.

The thing with prehistory is that a lot of the details are lost to us. There is no written record to draw from for the culture in question. What we have at our disposal are comparisons to other recorded cultures that may exhibit similar practices in some but not always all aspects. This requires us to shore up our arguments with a lot of facts and a lot of work because it is a guess, but at least it can be an educated guess. You look for patterns in the material culture, you look at the small details at what is left over, you look at nearby societies and cultures and what they were doing, and you make a guess.

For my area we have a wholly unique architectural structure that has no analogy elsewhere in Mesoamerica. There is nothing we can compare it to in order to better understand it. So instead we look at what is left and what is available. We have ceramic dioramas, we have ceramic vessels, we have ceramic figures, and we have the remains of their buildings. Well, the ceramic vessels only contain geometric or abstract shapes and there are no vessels that depict people, animals, or other common symbols used elsewhere in Mesoamerica. So we can't draw pictorial information from them, but we can draw distribution information within a site and within a region to see where these were coming from, where they were going, and how they were being used. The dioramas depict simplified versions of the architecture showing activity including a pole in the center of the structure with a person balanced on top. The figurines have some characteristics that may be considered high status, but the large amount of them do not. So there is no representation of rulers or kings. The buildings are circular, symmetrical, and no one platform on the structure is more ostentatious than the other. This has lead some to believe that this society was a corporate society in which multiple groups competed with one another for power and ruled together. They conducted a pole ceremony with all groups participating that strengthened their culture and identity. Comparisons have been made elsewhere within Mesoamerica like Teotihuacan which is a much larger city with more material culture to draw from including scenes on vessels and murals. Yet Teotihuacan, like my area, doesn't exhibit the characteristics of a central ruler like the later Aztec whom Cortes and his men encountered.

It's a guess, but a reasonable and educated guess that can change in light of new information. That guess has changed if one looks through the literature at places like Teotihuacan or within my own area.

To add to this in terms of rock art, we do our best. You make comparisons to known groups who made rock art like Australian aboriginals to understand their reasons for painting and compare it to the paintings you have and see if there is a pattern. A postmodernist will tell you that we can never truly know anything about the past and sometimes I am in agreement with that sentiment. Not everything is religious, spiritual, or a ritual, but if one is going to argue for something else they have to argue against decades of research. Sometimes anthropologists and archaeologists have blinders on and miss things, we are human after all. But that is why we work within a system that allows for change and revision in light of new evidence. So cave art like this may be interpreted as people painting what they hope to hunt, but if someone can offer a better explanation than the academic community must accept it.

hi! it would be worth x-posting to /r/AskAnthropology

There are two parts to your question worth more discussion. On the one hand, there's the question of how we can understand artifacts from the prehistoric past if they can't speak to us. On the other, there's the question of how much written histories can help us in that interpretation. I think these are great questions, and I think the answers to both are related.

Starting with artifacts first - how do we know what they mean? As /u/CommodoreCoCo says, archaeologists spend a lot of time discussing this question, because it's crucially important for the discipline. There are a lot of answers (and, if you want to pursue them more, you might look up a course or a published anthology on archaeological theory), so I'll focus on my own preferred approach which gets named with labels like 'object oriented ontologies,' 'thing theory,' or (more generally) 'relational' approaches to archaeology. Jargon, what's it mean? At the heart of many current approaches to artifacts, art, and architecture is the fact that these things did not exist in the past behind glass display cases. Artifacts were made and they were used, and we can learn a lot about their making and use by studying the artifacts themselves and the contexts from which they came (for example, we can tell what techniques blacksmiths used to make iron weapons by studying modern blacksmithing, metallurgy, and the physical and chemical properties of surviving artifacts). We can learn that certain types of artifacts could only be made by doing certain things or using certain other kinds of materials or at certain times of the year. We can see that certain types of artifacts were used for certain kinds of activities, but not others. We notice that some kinds of prehistoric rock carvings in Spain are only carved in parts of canyons where the accoustics are really good, suggesting that they were put their by people who used that specific place for musical celebrations (see Diaz-Andreu's recent work for more on this example). All of these facts add up to a context that shapes not only what people do with artifacts, but how they experience them, and we can piece together much (though not all) of those experiences.

To give another example: iron comes from the ground, it's used to plough the ground and plant crops, and it's buried in the ground as ritual offerings. Because of its use in agriculture, we know that iron is connected with growth and fertility. Drawing on this, and other evidence which also connects iron to growth and fertility, archaeologists have suggested that special deposits of iron objects (buried on purpose as some kind of offering) may be attempts to regenerate the soil or the society that lived on it. We don't know that this is what people believed - but we can look for where all the lines connect, and be relatively certain that, when lots of human practices intersect with each other, they're related (as is the case with iron and fertility in the iron age).

That's how prehistoric archaeologists draw inferrences about the past. It's never certain, but it's often possible to see that a lot of pieces are connected in ways that suggest conclusions.

On the flip side, you have texts. They're deceptively easy to read, because they speak very loudly for themselves. But of course, you can't just read a text and know what's going on. You have to think about who wrote it, why they wrote it, what they were trying to accomplish by writing it, what evidence they had access to, what evidence they chose to ignore, what evidence they gave too much weight to, and whether or not they were even trying to tell you the truth. Historians spend a lot of time answering these questions and, once we're done, we can say a lot. But often what we say isn't what the text says. For example, when a medieval saint's life (made up for the purpose of illustration, but not too far fetched if you know the kinds of crazy stories in saints' lives) tells us the saint lived to be 300 years old and burned pagan temples down with fire from heaven, we know we should be skeptical of the story's 'facts'. But that story might still tell us a lot about its author: for example, that the author thought it would be useful to write a story about the destruction of unbelievers. Why would the author spend so much time and effort to talk about unbelievers? To answer, we look at what else we know about the author's context and try to make sense of the author's objectives in light of other facts (perhaps there was a conflict within the church between two factions; suddenly the really old saint who burns unbelievers makes sense - it might be sending a message to the new faction about what happens to people who go against old, godly men with wrong - perhaps even pagan - ideas!). The pieces of the text and its surrounding context converge, and we learn more about the past. But in a very roundabout way that's no more certain than what we might learn from prehistory.

In the end, archaeology and history both deal in possibilities, not answers. We both use evidence and analyze it critically, and we look for relationships between all the pieces of evidence that point toward patterns that we can interpret to our best ability. These patterns allow archaeology to speak, though not as clearly as a text. But texts' clear speech can't be read at face value, and also requires careful interpretation that draws inferrences between the text and the rest of our knowledge of the world in which it was written and read.

That's why historians and archaeologists both spend so much of our time citing sources, discussing our evidence, and explaining the reasoning behind our conclusions. Our disciplines are all about process - and its the process that allows us to test, evaluate, and ultimately trust our conclusions.