After a period of not subscribing to the Economist, I returned to the fold late last year. In the 2024-year end double edition, there was an article titled Clear and present danger. Giving children the wrong (or not enough) toys may doom a society.
Since Greenland is in the news these days, this article was timely as it was actually a report about archaeology in Greenland. Researchers studied toys that were collected from archaeology sites of the Inuit and Norse settlements. According to the researchers, the records showed that Inuit children had far more toys than Norse children and the types of toys was telling. Norse children “had access only to toy arrows, axes, and swords” while the Intuit children had access to “toy bows, crossbows, darts, harpoons, harpoon mountings, lances…”.
The gist of the archaeology research is that the choice of toys indicted that the while the Norse were adapting to the Greenland environment, they were giving their children “old fashioned toys.” Simply put the toys used by Inuit children better prepared them for survival than did the toys used by Norse children.
Whether this theory is accurate, the research points out that artifacts from archaeology sites can be used to understand or attempt to answer research questions such as why did the Norse abandon their settlements in Greenland by 1400.
Bonus Content: Pile Higher and Deeper (Ph.D.)
In the same issue, the Economist published the article Hot Air, Academic writing is getting more impenetrable. The Economist staff applied the Flesch Reading Case, which is a simple and accurate method to measure readability of content, to 347,000 Ph.D. abstracts from the British Library between 1812 and 2023 and found that dissertations are harder to read since the 1940’s where the average score was 37 to 18 in the 2000’s. The Economist states that a score lower than 30 is “very difficult to read” and the article itself scored a 41. (This post earned a 45.5 score.)
My summary: As the adage goes, Ph.D. means piled higher and deeper. I would add that the increase in citations probably follows the decrease in readability.
Source: The Economist Holiday Double Issue, December 21st to January 3rd, 2024, Volume 453 Number 9428