Frieman (2024) observes in her own, highly metaphorical language that one can offer an unbounded number of interpretations to explain the distribution of archaeological remains in time and space. These interpretations offer different perspectives that can inform action—in Frieman's case an explicitly feminist understanding of the past informing the present. She provides two brief examples from the literature, suggesting that each embodies present-day biases: the distribution of Bronze Age swords relative to the provenance of ornamentation sets in Denmark and Germany, and the ‘Egtved Girl’, a Bronze Age burial of a young person of undetermined sex clad in a bronze-decorated tunic, associated with jewellery and the cremated remains of a child. Interpretations previously advanced for the first example include a patrilocal residence system wherein male warriors brought to their natal homes women ornamented with objects from their own homelands; from this interpretation we hypothesise the presence of patriarchal chiefdoms. The second example, the Egtved individual, has been characterised as a foreign bride, isotope analyses suggesting an itinerant life in the months prior to death. As each interpretation lingers in the literature, it becomes a certitude on which researchers build. Alternative interpretations go unimagined. But Frieman argues for the need for multiple, culturally complex interpretations that emerge from the gaps in the evidence, or the ‘unproofs’.

Frieman （2024） 用她自己的高度隐喻语言观察到，人们可以提供无限数量的解释来解释考古遗迹在时间和空间上的分布。这些解释提供了不同的视角，可以为行动提供信息——在弗里曼的情况下，对过去的明确女权主义理解为现在提供了信息。她从文献中提供了两个简短的例子，表明每个例子都体现了当今的偏见：青铜时代剑的分布相对于丹麦和德国装饰套装的来源，以及“Egtved Girl”，一个青铜时代的葬礼，一个性别不明的年轻人，穿着青铜装饰的束腰外衣，与珠宝和儿童的火化遗骸有关。先前为第一个例子提出的解释包括父权居住制度，其中男性战士将女性带到他们的出生地，用他们自己家乡的物品装饰;从这种解释中，我们假设了父权制酋邦的存在。第二个例子，Egtved 个体，被描述为外国新娘，同位素分析表明在死亡前的几个月里有流动的生活。随着每一种解释都在文献中徘徊，它成为研究人员建立的确定性。其他解释是无法想象的。但弗里曼认为，需要从证据的空白或“无证”中出现多种文化复杂的解释。