Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 51

The earliest writing systems go back to about 6,000 years ago, and the entire period between that time and the time of the first stone tools (the first artifacts), around three million years ago, is called prehistory.

Prehistoric archaeology studies this period with many of the same concerns as historic-period archaeologists. However, some aspects of prehistoric archaeology are unique:

 A concern with ecology and adaptation: Whereas most peoples written about in the historic period were agriculturalists, people of the prehistoric period were mostly foragers (formerly known as hunters and gatherers) who moved across landscapes to hunt and gather their food; figuring out what they ate and how they got their hands on it (that is, adapted to their selective environments) is a central focus of prehistory.

 A focus on stone, bone, and antler artifacts: Before the historic farming societies, artifacts made from these materials were the most likely to have survived decay over the millennia. Wood was also important, but it decays quickly and not much survives beyond a few thousand years.

 A concern with egalitarian social organization: Unlike the farming societies, which ranked members according to how much they did or didn’t have, prehistoric societies were essentially socially equal. A significant question is how ancient cultures maintained this egalitarian mode of social organization.

Keep in mind that just because some societies took up writing around 6,000 years ago, not all did; many remained foragers living outside the boundaries of growing civilizations, like that of the Aztecs or the Maya. These people included the Native Americans, people who lived in the Americas for well over 10,000 years before the arrival of European explorers. Those explorers wrote down what they observed of the Native Americans, so documents do exist that describe people on the margins of history. But of course the Native Americans had their own histories, told as oral traditions, so they weren’t people without history. Today, a lot of their past is told through archaeology.