University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
KNAW Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Science. 2022 Feb 18;375(6582):765-769. doi: 10.1126/science.abl7655. Epub 2022 Feb 17.
The study of ancient cultures is hindered by the incomplete survival of material artifacts, so we commonly underestimate the diversity of cultural production in historic societies. To correct this survivorship bias, we applied unseen species models from ecology to gauge the loss of narratives from medieval Europe, such as the romances about King Arthur. The estimates obtained are compatible with the scant historic evidence. In addition to events such as library fires, we identified the original evenness of cultural populations as an overlooked factor in these assemblages' stability in the face of immaterial loss. We link the elevated evenness in island literatures to analogous accounts of ecological and cultural diversity in insular communities. These analyses call for a wider application of these methods across the heritage sciences.
由于物质文物的不完全幸存，对古代文化的研究受到阻碍，因此我们通常低估了历史社会中文化生产的多样性。为了纠正这种幸存者偏差，我们将生态学中的未见物种模型应用于评估从中世纪欧洲失传的叙事，如关于亚瑟王的浪漫故事。所得的估计值与历史证据相符。除了图书馆火灾等事件外，我们还发现文化群体的原始均匀性是这些组合在面对非物质损失时稳定的一个被忽视的因素。我们将岛屿文学中的高均匀性与岛屿社区中生态和文化多样性的类似描述联系起来。这些分析呼吁在遗产科学领域更广泛地应用这些方法。
