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Historic archaeology

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Historic archaeology takes advantage of the fact that about 6,000 years ago, some human groups invented language and began to write down things that can tell about the past. In a way, because I’m primarily a prehistoric archaeologist (normally working on cultures that did not have writing systems), I envy historic archaeologists; they have a lot more information to go on when they start their research. On the other hand, when I start looking into the billions of pages of historic records about the ancient world, I realize that the historic record presents as many problems as it does solutions!

Historic archaeology proceeds with many of the same concerns and methods as prehistoric archaeology, but it often addresses two issues of particular importance.

History, as the saying goes, is written by the winners, which is another way of saying that each story has (at least) two sides. The use of propaganda, the convenient omission of inconvenient facts from state records, and the wholesale creation of “facts” by those who control the written records, are nothing new; these occurred in every ancient civilization, from Sumer to the Incan empire. Unless you’re happy to simply believe what ancient governmental records tell you about their illustrious (and they’re always illustrious) leaders, historic archaeology is a good way to test that written record against artifacts in the ground. Words describe policy; artifacts show what was really built, or not.

Similarly, written records of the ancient world often dealt with the royalty and their activities, military conquests, or religious ceremonies and ideas, but they rarely discussed the common people — the peasants — who formed the bulk of the population of every ancient civilization. And unless you’re directly descended from royalty — and I mean without a drop of commoner’s blood in your veins, which is pretty unlikely — the history of the common person is partly your history. Historical archaeology sometimes focuses on these forgotten ancestors, fleshing out the history books with a fuller picture of the ancient world.

Anthropology For Dummies

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