How Far Back can Oral History Go?

Factual Questions
21

To clarify this, for those who have not clicked on the link about Kennewick Man, although some Native American groups wanted to rebury the remains, they lost the legal case (at least for now). The remains were not reburied and have been made available for scientific study (fortunately).

This is purest nonsense. They may have oral traditions, but they have no idea how far they actually go back. Many Native American groups have moved around a great deal, both in historical times and earlier. Showing any geographical continuity would have to depend on archeological artifacts or the genetics of skeletal remains. As far as I know, this can be done for few groups beyond a few centuries, and for none beyond a few thousand years at most.

This said, there are a few Native American legends that may date back to the post-Pleistocene. The “Thunderbird” may correspond to the now extinct giant vulture Teratornis. But if groups have oral traditions that “go back 30,000 years,” why is there no clear mention of such distinctive animals as mastodons or sabre-toothed cats?

22

Which only goes to show the unreliability of oral tradition. Historians did know that the Romans made it that far west. Tacitus says so, when he describes the conquest of the Silures, southern Wales features in such well-known sources as the Antonine Intinerary and the Ravenna Cosmography, and other Roman sites had been excavated. But saying that historians didn’t know this makes for a better story. In other words, just the sort of distortion which cumulatively over a few retellings can make such anecdotes next-to-worthless as evidence of anything.

23

And of course, the mere existence of a Roman villa in the area does not prove that the local story about the princess throwing herself off the cliff was true.

24

I think the chance of an oral tradition remaining an accurate, and truthful account of historic events is about the same as the chance that there have been no deliberate liars in the same period of history being suggested. So, I figure a week, tops. Maybe a month, in exceptionally honest cultures. Possibly a year, if one guy is the only one telling the story, and it’s boring, and no one repeats it.

Tris

25

Yahh, I’m going out on a limb and calling BS unless you can come up with a cite for this friend. I’ve never heard of any ancient Native American oral tradition that recounts a trip across the ice bridge. Just about all I have ever heard have whichever tribe being created here in the Western hemi one way or the other, in other words just the opposite, i.e. they have always been here.

26

The story sounds plausible to me, a professional folklorist, though I suspect ralph124c changed the original to include a “sea of floating ice” because he is aware of icebergs. It’s the interpretation that is suspect. All sorts of groups have migrations as part of their origin stories, and an ice bridge would not exactly be a unique motif. It’s quite a leap to interpret this as an ancient memory of the Bering Strait, though, especially when there are so many other possible explanations. Also, you have to factor in translation — we don’t know, without being privy to the original conversation, if the Amazonian traveller didn’t mistake “crystal” or “quartz” for “ice” or something similar. Even anthropologists and other scientists are prone to selecting the interpretation that fits their preconceptions.

27

But does the persistence of an oral tradition necessarily depend on their staying in one place?

Well, I can’t speak to the provenance of it, but there is the story of the Bladder Headed Boy of the Kaska tribe of British Columbia. Nutshell version: the boy killed a huge shaggy beast that was menacing the village, and became the first chief as a reward. The creature does sound like a mammoth in the story, but was also said to eat people, which makes me think that, assuming the legend is genuine, several prehistoric animals were being conflated together.

28

Oral history tradition definately goes back to 1700 in the Americas.

http://www.oregongeology.com/sub/earthquakes/oraltraditions.htm

The stories were recorded long ago, but their relevance wasn’t realised until quite recently.

This particular incident is outstanding in its magnitude, the dating is accurate because of Japanese records, and although this earthquake zone has regular slippages, this is the one that stand out well above all the others.

Its reasonable to imagine that oral traditions in this region go back somewhat further than that.

There is also plenty of oral history tradition in places such as Iran and Iraq, where minstrels are taught by rote from very young ages to carry the history in the form of songs.
I’ve seen tv shows that demonstrate this, with referances made to the Crusaders and Baybers, so that goes back even further to the 1250’s.

These songs are very old and the chances of revision would appear to be great, however, they are spoken in archaic terms and it would be difficult to change the content without it being noticeable by linguists.

Its also true of the Nordic sagas which were not written down for centuries, and were first recorded only in the 13th century, by which time these were already ancient.

The tradition of oral storytelling is very old indeed Gilgamesh dates back close to 5000 years, and it must be set against oral histories.

There is plenty of evidence that parts of the bible started life in the oral tradition, and some of those are attempts to record historical events.

China has its tradition of folk epics that go back several thousand years too.

I would think that much of it is either not accurate, or impossible to verify, but certain events of similar scale to the Cascadia earthquake would be reasonably dateable, such as the Santorini eruption and may well appear in oral histories that have been subsequently recorded.

I hope someone like Tomndeb will happen along, I suspect that we may get better illumination of the subject.

29

I think even the posters who actually support the validity of oral histories have unconsciously shown up the weaknesses entailed.

(ignoring the chinese whisper effect,poor memories,embarassing incidents forgotten and not so heroic episodes built up out of all proportion,parables religious tales etc.).

Taking the O.H. accounts and then trying to fit them to what we already actually know from archeology,climatology ,all the other scientific disciplines and written history from other parts of the world doesnt really further our knowledge to any degree.

To be of any use the histories should be able to tell us new information without too much ambiguity on a stand alone basis.
When an oral tradition convincingly suggests a series of straightforward historical events which lead us to then search for physical evidence that we would otherwise not even thought of doing and at least some proof is discovered then O.H. will be vindicated.

Just as I will start believing in Nostradamus having the power of precognition when one of his fans points to his writings and tells me what they fortell BEFORE the event and not a long time afterwards .

30

I asked basically the same question five years ago. The answers I got were surprising. The estimates of how old they were ranged from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago!

:smiley:

(There’s actually a serious discussion in the thread, but that line is so priceless, I had to quote it so that anyone who didn’t click the link wouldn’t miss out.)

31

My roommate in college was an Indian. I had dinner with his mom, a Commanche. She mentioned that oral tradition was that “the people” (what the Commanches called themselves) came from the south. That was contrary to what I had heard about the migration from Asia over the land bridge. Now, many years later, there is evidence that some North American Indians did move back up from South and Central America after first migrating south along the coast using boats.

32

The Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered on cuneiform tablets in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh and translated when Gurdjieff was young. When he read it, he says, he recognized it as the same story from Armenian bardic tradition his father had been singing when he was a boy. (But then Gurdjieff was known for telling things as fact that had no factual basis.)

33

Now here’s where the skeptic in me forces a little different interpretation of “he recognized it as the same story…”

Maybe it is the same story. Maybe it’s not. What Gurdjieff probably did was find some similarities between two stories and he made the match in his mind. Were they significant similarities? Tenuous ones? Did he bash them to fit what he wanted to prove? Did they match in exact dates and events in every single part of the story or did he ignore parts that didn’t match? Was it a story that exists in all cultures in some form or just this one? Could just as good a match be made to a folk story from another hemisphere where the source is unlikely to be the same?

Maybe it is the same story. Maybe it’s not.

34

Yes, easily. There is a whole complex of tools used to analyze similarity, and similar motifs and even similar tale types are no guarantee of any sort of relationship. (Though the Roman writer Aelian did mention a king Gilgamos in the second century A.D., which is either a powerful example of oral tradition or evidence of long-lost written records, since the cuneiform tablets were long buried by then and Aelian never left Italy [but read a lot of Greek].)

No matter what scholars and skeptics say, people keep seizing on isolated, de-contextualized facts with a superficial similarity and demonstrating them as proof of a relationship. The Cinderella story comes from China! (No, it doesn’t, but Chinese literature does contain an early written Cinderella story). The Comanche comment above is another good example: oral tradition records a migration from the south, and scientific evidence also suggests one. However, it is a fallacy to assume there is any connection without further evidence.

Just to address a different point, scholars of oral tradition aren’t usually looking to it to provide us with facts. It is one source of information which must be interpreted in the context of the individual’s cultural beliefs and narrative patterns. Not just falsehoods and therefore useless, but not a magical source of truth, either.

35

Don’t know if this helps, but I recently found out that Toumani Diabate is a 71st-generation kora player. So that’s roughly 1400 years of tradition into which he traces himself. He’s also a griot (hereditary historian), so presumably he can recite 1400 years of history as well.

36

My remark was mainly in reference to the tribal spokesman’s claim that their oral tradition indicated some relationship between the tribe and Kennewick Man. If they had moved around a great deal, there would not be any connection between that tribe and the remains that were found, no matter how long their oral traditions.