- [<] Status Log - created:: 2021-06-06 - status-updated:: 2022-03-18 - current-status:: #used - [S] Marketing - purpose:: Promotion for [[Tt2021-05 On History]]. - Link:: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/EleanorKonik/status/1401627158783705091). THREAD START Chatting with @brimwats this weekend, one thing that becomes increasingly clear to me is that classification systems are hard to get right. I'm not sure I realized before my time in the obsidianmd & broader pkm community just how hard, but now I see it everywhere. --- I'm sitting here reading a 2011 article about the origins of agriculture in the Near East, and immediately I'm stuck trying to figure out what exactly "Near East" means. Is it the Levant? Phoenicia? Mesopotamia? Apparently... the Middle East! --- The same article, discussing early domestication, goes so far as to say outright that the "broad middle ground between wild and domestic, foraging and farming, hunting and herding makes it hard to draw clean lines of demarcation between any of these states." --- Apparently, the people who colonized Cyprus brought "their entire ecological niche" with them, including useful wild animals (foxes, deer), resources that needed some maintenance, and animals that show physical indications of domestication. --- Dividing "wild" and "tame" and "domestic" is useful, just like it's handy sometimes to categorize distinctions between "civilizations" / "cultures" / "languages" / "regions." But the more I learn, the more I realize how many things are spectrums, not binaries. --- This isn't the first time I've had this thought -- https://eleanorkonik.com/hard-history/ -- but I can't get over how OBVIOUS it all seems now, whereas a year ago I really did believe that I could eventually "learn" and "come to understand" the categorization boxes if I just studied more. THREAD END