Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 15

It’s hard to get to know someone without knowing a little about their past, and the same goes for humanity; a lot of what we do today — good and bad — is based on the acts and decisions of our ancestors. To understand humanity any further than skin deep requires looking into the past. This is the business of archaeologists.

But the past can be foggy (on a good day) because history — the written record — can only take us so far (and if you believe everything written in the ancient historical texts, well, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Utah you may be interested in). However well-meaning they may have been, historians have had their biases like everyone else. And, of course, the ancient historians didn’t write down everything, especially if they were unaware of, say, the entire Western Hemisphere (North and South America, also sometimes known as the “New World”).

Archaeologists are the people who try to fill in the gaps of history by studying the material remains of ancient cultures. It’s archaeologists who get excited over discovering an ancient piece of pottery, not necessarily for that piece of pottery alone (though it may be beautiful) but because of what it can tell humanity about our past.

Archaeologists don’t just focus on correcting or fleshing out the historical record; they also study the roughly 2.5 million years of humanity before writing was invented (which was only about 6,000 years ago).

Chapter 5 tells you how archaeologists learn about the past, from carbon dating to meticulous excavation. Chapter 7 tells you about the spread of modern humans out of Africa and across the globe, and Chapter 8 gives some exciting examples of how humanity adapted to every environment imaginable, including the Arctic and the Pacific.