Deep History?
There’s an article on history in the week’s Times Higher Education Supplement which has baffled me. It’s by Daniel Lord Smail of Harvard and its part of the promotion of his new book On Deep History and the Brain. It’s stuck in my mind because it also appeared in New Scientist (sub) and baffled me there as well. Smail’s idea is that there is a flaw in thinking that history starts with Mesopotamia in 4000 BC. The dependance on Mesopotamia for the start of history is, for Smail, a secular Garden of Eden Myth. The reason I’m baffled it doesn’t match any perception of History that I’ve come across. When I talk to people in the UK, it seems that history starts with either the Egyptians or Stonehenge or, if they’ve been in the news recently, Neanderthals. Smail is talking about academic historians, rather than the public.However, I don’t know any historians who work from this position. It is quite possible that I’m in my own little bubble.
For instance one excellent historian I can listen to is Campbell Storey. I know for a fact that Campbell Storey is a fantastic historian because I sat through a talk of his on the history of the Conservative Party in the 1980s and was genuinely interested. I’m not sympathetic to party politics in general nor the Conservatives in particular, but he was bringing out some interesting problems in the subject from a historical, rather than overtly political, point of view. I’ll admit you simply don’t meet people like that in real life, so I could be in my own private world. What do you ask a historian like that? There’s plenty of questions you could ask, but one I didn’t ask was when he felt his history started. I’d be willing to bet a small amount of money his answer wouldn’t have been Bronze Age Mesopotamia. It’s an extreme example, but a lot of historians tend to be based in a period. The origins of history don’t impinge on most studies.
It would if you were a more thematic historian. For instance a military historian could certain compare uses of landscape across many periods. This could extend back into prehistory, and Smail’s argument is that crucially it doesn’t. History is textual and because historians stick to texts they don’t enter prehistory. This is an interesting point but he doesn’t have much opportunity to go far with in the articles, nor have the previews brought much out of it. History is, in my opinion, a highly specialised form of archaeology. Historians deal with artefacts like archaeologists, but these artefacts are extremely rich in detail. Just like a palaeobotanist can get more out of seeds than I could with a quick dekko down a microscope, so too a historian uses specialist skills. So I don’t see a large problem, if you’re interested in history as a technique, in specialising in written sources. Smail is interesting because he’s very clear the purpose of this technique is to illuminate the past, and he seems to think the subject of study is more interesting than the tools we use.
I agree, but the tools do define what we can study. History is very good in examining past instants. If an archaeologist wants to do this they tend to require a convenient volcano or landslide. At the same time prehistory in particular has the ability to examine change over huge periods of time. The transition to farming for example took thousands of years in Europe. While to two disciplines deal with the same subject, the human past, they do it in different ways — which is why the problems I study I usually combine them. Combining the two brings different perspectives. That seem to be the big weakness in Smail’s argument. He sees the difference more as one of time. In his THES article he states:
An appreciation of deep time is nothing new to the fields of archaeology or palaeo-anthropology. Whether these fields want to be brought within the embrace of history is an open question, given the degree to which many practitioners identify themselves with the study of societies without texts.
This may be true of North American archaeologists who identify with anthropologists, but in Europe Archaeology is closely bound with history. The Three Age System (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) was invented in Denmark expressly to create a history for a society which lacked texts. Gordon Childe wrote the classic work What Happened in History? In my first lecture on my degree course Graeme Barker introduced the Annales school of history and stated that archaeologists write histories. They don’t just write histories, Prof. Barker’s moved to Cambridge where they were recently looking to appoint someone to study cognition, but writing a history is not in conflict with being an archaeologist.
Further the idea that archaeology is study without texts is dated. The Ovenstones Project is an archaeological investigation of 19th Century miner’s housing. The Changing Beliefs in the Human Body Project is a multi-period archaeological project bringing together classicists and archaeologists. The study ranges from the Palaeolithic through to the 17th — 19th Centuries. Hopefully in the New Year I’ll be talking about a project using archaeology to examine a 21st Century (AD) subject. Contemporary and Historical Archaeology is a fast growing subject and I don’t know of any archaeologists in the field who ignore contemporary texts. In contrast I do know some historians who ignore archaeological evidence, but not enough to concoct a convincing stereotype of a blinkered scholar. Perhaps it’s my fault for only hanging out with the coolest historians. If I was in History departments on a daily basis my view might differ, but the historians I talk to seem to be open to dialogue.
As an example I’m co-organising a session on ancient astronomy for the Classical Association conference in 2008. There’s room for four papers and the four speakers we have are a classicist, an archaeologist, an astrophysicist and someone from a History of Science department. It only occurred to me as I was writing this that there’s a mix of disciplines. It wasn’t a self-conscious attempt to create an interdisciplinary panel, it was simply bringing together interesting people.
If this kind of cross-disciplinary communication isn’t happening in the USA, then it would be interesting to know why. Deep time may be a problem. A small department focussed on modern history does not need someone searching for the secret of fire. Nonetheless as far as the use of technique such a department can benefit from archaeological and anthropological viewpoints. I’ll be adding On Deep History and the Brain to my to read list, but if it’s about the scale of time I suspect I’ll find that it’s something archaeologists have been doing for years. If historians aren’t then the book could be a useful primer explaining what basic propositions have to be explained to historians.
You can also read Smail on When Does History Begin? at Powells. There’s also an interview with him at the Harvard Gazette and a review of his book in the Boston Globe.
Google+
I’ve gotta go on the limb here and say that people where I am, in the archaeology department I mean, use the term history as being the period with writing. This means that for Mesopotamia it is bronze age. However, it is different in different areas.
We don’t ignore what comes before, but this is the academic definition of history, and we do use it like that quite frequently.
I would agree with thadd. The usual short-hand that I am used to says history has writing, prehistory doesn’t. It’s just an academic division though really, and it doesn’t mean that anyone studying an historical period isn’t doing archaeology. History and archaeology overlap a lot, as do many other disciplines.
Blog Carnival - Four Stone Hearth #30 « Archaeozoology
[…] and linguistic anthropology. All are well worth a read, but I particularly enjoyed ‘Deep History?‘ by Clioaudio and ‘the year in pseudo-archaeology‘ by Hot Cup of Joe. Why not […]
I cross-posted this to Revise and Dissent and I think another possible reason why I don’t see a huge divide between history and archaeology is that I’m in the UK. Though because I’m working in classical Greek history that also means I see a lot of very historically minded archaeologists.
Sent here by the Four Stone Hearth carnival and much interested by what you have to say here. I think that currently in Europe generally, at least in my medieval field, interdisciplinarity is hot stuff so archaeologists and historians are talking more than before because there is now funding for doing so. I’m afraid that is probably more important than the actual aims of the field…
A second observation is that although I have certainly seen more historians be sniffy about archaeology and material evidence in general than I have archaeologists reject texts, I have seen the latter. Moreover, this is actually a more developed stance, because the reason that those archaeologists reject texts as evidence has usually been because texts are nuanced and what tthey have to tell us is often very hard to trust. Such archaeologists seem to me to have picked up how much stress historians lay on the problems of textual material and decided to stay clear of it, whereas all too often archaeologists who do use texts do so with a naïveté that makes cynical historians cringe. Then the historians are sniffy about archaeology as a result and it all goes round again (and I’ve written about that not so long ago on my blog, indeed).
The ultimate point is that we both disciplines need to read enough of each other’s theory not just to understand each other’s work, but also to judge when someone from the opposite side is talking rubbish. Not as easy as it could be, but far better for one’s own work than trying to do the other discipline’s study yourself and screwing up, or else just ignoring it…
In short: historians need to make friends with archaeologists and read stuff till they can use archaeology critically; and archaeologists often need the same kind of help with texts. This shouldn’t be controversial because we each side invest years and years of training in our disciplines that prevents us working outside it so easily… but it does still cause such trouble.
Ah yes! I’ve taught students on such a joint course, indeed, and the problem there is teachers. As these courses continue to grow, hopefully this will ease, but people who can teach archaeology and history with equal facility are hard to find. One such person started the medieval B. A. course I was helping with, and then left halfway through my year there, leaving only one archaeologist on staff at the relevant (high-profile!) institution and him an early modernist. The place more or less had to recruit an archaeologist in order to keep their students. They got a good one in the end but in the meantime were seriously considering letting me take over one of the Special Subject courses because I, with a small component of a Masters course and my own reading my only archaeological training, was the best clued up about medieval archaeology on staff… I wouldn’t have minded, but my students might justly have wondered if they were getting their money’s worth. Meanwhile, any such students who go on to further study still more or less have to specialise in one or other half of their degree unless they can manage to work with one of those rare dual practitioners. So though I think change is coming, it’s being force through a very narrow dripfeed meanwhile…