I spend more time on prehistory than history these days, but it occurs to me that almost everything is prehistory. I don't only mean that written documents only appear very late in the human record, though that is part of it. But even once writing and inscriptions come into play, they record so little that 99.99% of the rest of existence goes unrecorded. We have developed excellent methods for figuring out what languages names on columns, or palace financial records mean based on very little information, and it is loads of fun to know anything with any certainty about the past.
Certainty. Funny. In my nostalgia tour I have uncovered radically different memories of the same events among my friends - and these are highly literate people, often with excellent memories. When only two people remain who even remember that a particular event occurred, as happens with my brother and me, how ephemeral is the human record of it anymore when we disagree about what happened? Eyewitness testimony is increasingly regarded as almost pointless.
Literacy was widespread in NW Europe after 1500, which means there were more people who could read than there had been a few centuries earlier, but still not very many. Outside of that small area, there was less reading and writing still. Does that mean that most of Russia was prehistoric even though some history was being written in Moscow? How long do we consider the Native American record to be essentially prehistoric? Okay, how about the comparatively literate puritan settlers? We think of ourselves as having copious records of them, but that is only comparative. Really, we have no records of human existence, just a few scraps here and there. The internet has allowed many more people to record bits of their lives, and this is a qualitative as well as quantitative difference, I think. How much of my life exists now in record before my blog and current email address? My mother dutifully kept a baby book on me, and there is a birth certificate and baptismal record. We had a few report cards. A few photos. The school system records my attendance, as does my college. There are yearbooks that record a bit more about me. We kept some photos.
Really, there is nothing.
We are still living in prehistory, with occasional rays of sunlight piercing the forest cover.
2 comments:
There is a liberty interest in that lack of sunlight. The more records are possible, and the more they are kept, the more control becomes practical as well. The scholar who wants only to understand is not the only one who benefits from the increased visibility.
An excellent caution
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