HST 140 Spring 2008

Study Guide for Reilly, Week 1

Selection 1 - Natalie Angier.

Historians often use the term "pre-history" to identify the long thousands of years of human existence that took place before writing was "invented".  Of course this means that historians define "history" as that part of the human past for which there is written "evidence."  The assumption behind this definition is that written evidence is the only type of evidence that we can trust and believe.

In other professions, this is not true, and has not been true for a long time.  For example, "forensic" evidence is often used to determine issues of guilt in legal cases, when the oral and written evidence is contradictory, incomplete, or unreliable.  Doctors use non-written evidence in establishing diagnoses of patients' problems.  DNA evidence has been used in recent years to redetermine guilt and innocence in criminal cases that often depended solely on written and spoken evidence.  And we know that both written and spoken accounts of events are often very unreliable.

Legal, medical, criminal, and other investigators today know that there are many reasons why both the written and spoken word can be unreliable, misleading, even false.  The writer or the speaker may have some personal "agenda" of their own and may wish to mislead the reader or listener.  They may be influenced by bias caused by their cultural and/or educational background. 

So historians today are far more sceptical about all written and spoken evidence and have come to expect and depend upon other forms of evidence to be able to reconstruct and understand the past.

In part, earlier historians' almost automatic acceptence of written evidence (they assumed of course that the people who inhabited the earth more than 100 years earlier were not able to provide "spoken" evidence!) came from the fact that very little writing from the ancient world had survived, and much of this was "religious" in nature - for example, the Torah, the entire Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Qur'an.  Anyone who might have questioned the reliability, or accuracy, of these ancient sources was called an enemy of true religion.  (In the Presidential campaign for 2008, in one debate among the Republican candidates in fall, 2007, all were asked to raise their hand if they believed every word in the "Bible" to be "true", which meant in that context, not the Torah alone, but the "Old and New Testaments," and every one raised a hand.)

But in most cases today, historians are asking for other sorts of evidence which can be used to corroborate written sources, juust as lawyers and physicians do in their respective professions.

The first assigned reading in Reilly, vol. I, by Natalie Angier, raises this question:  How can we understand or explain physical evidence from the ancient world from the period before writing was invented?  In this selection are photos of several small stone figurines which have no writing accompanying them.  What were they?  They are often called "Venus figurines" - "Venus" having been a Greek goddess associated with beauty.  Where these meant to portray goddesses?  Were they "fertility" symbols?  Historians have used both of these ideas to explain them.  But more recently, historians have begun to examine them more closely to see if the figurines can "tell" us more about their ancient past.

And these historians notice that earlier researchers apparently had overlooked (or looked through) the braided string clothing they wore.  If they are right, this discovery means that weaving and textile production was invented thousands of years earlier than had been previously thought.  Most books say that textile manufacture was one of the results of the agricultural revolution that began about 10,000 years ago.  But since these figures were made as long ago as 27,000 years ago, and some are apparently "wearing" textiles, the earlier theories are being seriously questioned.  More "forensic" evidence is here at work.  Ms. Angier reports one scholar who puts the textile "revolution" at more than 40,000 years ago.

Selection #3 - by Elise Boulding. 

Although I have not assigned #2 in this book, it shows that one of the ways we "examine" the lives of women in the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic Era) is to study people who live in hunting-gathering societies today - that is, people who have not yet taken part in the agricultural "revolution."

Selection 3 discusses the roles that women play (and played) in "gathering" societies, roles which continued to be important in "horticultural societies."  The importance of women's roles began to decline in societies based around plough-agriculture and irrigation.

Gordon Childe, quoted on pg. 18, wrote in his book Man Makes Himself (1936), that human history should be organized in terms of two "revolutions" - the agricultural and the urban.  This focus was on the many changes by which humans changed the world in which they lived and themselves.

While more recent historians have revised Childe's views (for example, they have found the past to be much more complex than these two developments would imply), it is still useful to think of the beginnings of agriculture about 10,000 years ago (the beginning of "horticultural society") and the first cities about 5,000 years ago.