Collide-a-scape

From 3 Quarksdaily, an intriguing post flows from this question:

Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.”

The author, Sam Kean, argues that our collective behavior (or non-actions, when it comes to such problems as climate change), will make future generations wonder how humans in the 20th century could have been so clever as to split the atom and send a man to the moon.

Perhaps, but what would make me just as as suspect, if I were looking back at history in 2200, would be the tremendous technological leap between, say, 1870-1970. Quality of life, for those fortunate enough to reap the benefits, improved immeasurably.  It’s hard to believe that happened in such a short time span.

Kean makes a more solid case when discussing our depth of time problem–that we have a habit of shortchanging the achievements of past civilizations:

A span of thousands of years is both extremely short and impenetrably long. It’s short because human nature will not change much in that time. Which means our human tendency to discount the past and pooh-pooh the achievements of antique cultures will not have diminished. Dismissing  technical achievements in the remote past is especially tempting. We’re willing to believe that people philandered and murdered and philosophized uselessly like we do today, but we conveniently reserve the notion of technical progress for ourselves.

This thoughtful essay argues for reconciling the institutional divide between history and archaeology.  Daniel Lord Smail, a professor of history at Harvard, writes that

The discovery of ‘deep time’ during the middle of the 19th century has long been understood as a transforming moment in the histories of biology, archaeology and geology. We are only just beginning to realise, however, that the time revolution also shaped the practice of history itself.

After tunneling separately back in time, the moment has come, Smail asserts, for archaeology and history to join forces:

The bodies of evidence now available to students of the human past are growing by leaps and bounds. To the pot shards, texts and phonemes…we have added genes, isotopes and other traces. Imagine each as a filter in a different colour. Using just one, you see your subject in an unreliable light. But now layer them one on top of the other and peer through the ensemble and, if you do so, the bright light of the original can be reconstituted to some degree.

What kind of history might such a merger yield?

So if you want to find out what was really going on in Anglo-Saxon Britain you need to layer any texts at hand on top of the coins and the shards, the ceramics and the glassware, and then add the chemical traces of spices left in pots, the isotopes of carbon and nitrogen left in bones and the modern distribution of genes. The result isn’t a truth but it is a more robust understanding of something we did not know before. And it is a vision of the historical enterprise that is indifferent to specialisation and method.