Terrible news everybody. Boar Vessel 600-500 B.C Etruscan Ceramic is in fact Boar Vessel 1850-1950 A.D Etruscan Ceramic.
Somehow I couldn’t find a single thing about this put over the “don’t say that! it was real to me!” TikTok audio but I’m too lazy to make it myself so we persevere.
This is a very interesting thread about how archaeologists date finds at first, further techniques to refine the date, and the economics of forgery, but I threw my history degree away to talk memes on the internet and Boar Vessel 600-500 B.C Etruscan Ceramic is, primarily, a meme.
The thing is, though, I cannot for the life of me figure out why. A lot of memes have somewhat traceable histories, but why exactly the collective consciousness of the internet latches on to any given thing usually remains a mystery. Boar Vessel 600-500 B.C Etruscan Ceramic is a particularly obscure one, though.
On its Know Your Meme page, for example, one of the earliest talking points is an r/outoftheloop question asking what’s up with all the boar vessel memes. That implies that it was already A Thing, and yet there’s not really any documentation for where or how it became one. The answers to that question are also like
Boar Vessel, 600-500 BC, Etruscan, ceramic. What more can be said?
Which is true.
But wait, let me dig out my history degree for a second here, because I’m imagining future historians getting a piecemeal picture of the internet circa 2014-2021 and being like “there was this weird boar craze for a second there.” If enough has been forgotten about this time period, they would probably be like “must have been some kind of religious ritual” which is historian speak for “fuck if I know.”
I’ve been thinking about this recently because they’re doing repairs at Stonehenge. And the thing about Stonehenge is that there were wooden poles erected in the area in about 8000BCE, a big ditch henge created around 3100BCE, and then the stones were put up and taken down and moved in phases between 2600BCE and 1600BCE. That’s a wildly long time! And it’s sort of all flattened into the same thing.
Stonehenge, 2600-1600BC, Beaker, stone. What more can be said?
But with enough distance, these repairs are going to be another point in that list. The context is going to lost; future historians might even see it as a continuation of the same mysterious religious function that we assign to its original construction (without acknowledging that that was itself a 1000 year process). (Also, this is not a knock on people who do currently consider Stonehenge a religious site, only that it’s not the main reason we’re repairing it.)
For some reason in history people rarely consider what ancient people were doing in parallel to what we’re doing now. We’re repairing Stonehenge because it’s old and we think it’s worth protecting. I don’t see any reason why we can’t assume that’s what people in 1600BCE were doing too.
The same goes for the popularity of Boar Vessel 600-500 B.C Etruscan Ceramic. We’re online and a distraction from the news is “hey look at this weird jug.” Other people like it, so we want to join in. Him round. I’m going to assume that’s why ancient Etruscans were making pig-based art in the first place, too. Because they were bored or wanted distraction and they saw someone with a cute water jug and they were like wow I want one.
I mean actually they didn’t because Boar Vessel 600-500 B.C Etruscan Ceramic is fake but that doesn’t really matter. Etruscan people did make things like Boar Pendant 500-400BCE Etruscans Amber. And then modern people thought they were neat enough to do forgeries of and then postmodern people thought it was neat enough that those forgeries became memes. Same difference.
Anyway all of this is an excuse for me to reveal that I have a whole folder of “humans love to make and share little guys.” Enjoy.