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In archaeology, there seems to be an assumption that people in the past only ever did things for two reasons: Utility and religion. If an object doesn't seem to have an obvious usefulness, it's assumed that the artifact is of religious nature.

This isn't really true at all. For example, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri[1] is an ancient rubbish dump full of all kinds of random documents. One of the more amusing ones is "The contract of a wrestler agreeing to throw his next match for a fee".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri



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