Introduction: What is History? What is Archaeology?

Introduction

How Do We Know What Happened?

What Is History?

Do you know where you were born?  Were you born at a hospital, or at home?  How much did you weigh when you were born?  What did you have to eat for your first birthday?
You don’t remember being born, do you?  And you probably don’t remember your first birthday party!  So how can you find the answers to these questions?  You can ask your parents!  They can tell you about things that happened long ago, before you were old enough to remember.  They can tell you stories about when you were a baby.
These stories are your “history.”  Your history is the story of what happened to you from the moment you were born, all the way up to the present.  You can learn this “history” by listening to your parents.  They remember what happened when you were born!  And they probably took pictures of you when you were a baby.  You can learn even more about your “history” from these pictures.  Did you have hair?  Were you fat or thin?  Are you smiling or frowning?  What are you wearing? Do you remember those clothes?
You have a history – and so do your parents.  Where were they born?  Were they born at home, or at a hospital?  Where did they go to school?  What did they like to eat?  Who was their best friend?   How can you find the answers to these questions?  You can ask your parents.  And if they don’t remember, you can ask their parents – your grandparents.
Now let’s ask a harder question.  Your grandmother was once a little girl.  What is her history like?  How much did she weigh when she was born?  Did she cry a lot?  When did she cut her first tooth?  What was her favorite thing to eat?
You would have to ask her mother – your great-grandmother!  And you could look at baby pictures of your grandmother.  But what if you can’t talk to your great-grandmother, and what if you don’t have any baby pictures?  Is there another way you could find out about your grandmother’s history?
There might be!  Perhaps your grandmother’s mother wrote a letter to a friend when she was born.  “Dear Elizabeth,” she might write.  “My baby was born at home on September 13.  She weighed seven pounds, and she has a lot of fuzzy black hair.  She certainly cries a lot!  I hope she’ll sleep through the night soon.”
Now, suppose you find this letter, years later.  Even though you can’t talk to your great-grandmother, you can learn the history of your grandmother from her letter.  You could also learn history if your great-grandmother kept a diary or a journal, where she wrote about things that happened to her long ago.
In this book, we’re going to learn about the history of people who lived a long time ago, in all different countries around the world.  We’re going to learn about the stories they told, the battles they fought, and the way they lived – even what they ate and drank, and what they wore.  How do we know these thing about people who lived many, many years in the past? After all, we can’t ask them!
We learn about the history of long-ago people in two different ways.  The first way is through the letters, journals, and other written records that they left behind.  Suppose a woman who lived in ancient times wrote a letter to a friend who lived in another village.  She might say, “There hasn’t been very much rain here recently!  All our crops are dying.  The wheat is especially bad.  If it doesn’t rain soon, we’ll have to move to another village!”
Hundreds of years later, we find this letter.  What can we learn about the history of ancient times from this letter?  We can learn that people in ancient times grew wheat for food.  They depended on rain to keep the wheat healthy.  And if it didn’t rain enough, they moved somewhere else.
Other kinds of written records tell us about what kings and armies did in ancient times.  When a king won a great victory, he often ordered a monument built.  On the monument, he would have the story of his victory engraved in stone letters.  Or a king might order someone in his court to write down the story of his reign, so that everyone would know what an important and powerful king he was.  Thousands of years later, we can read the stone letters or the stories and learn more about the king.
People who read letters, journals, other documents, and monuments to find out what happened in the past are called historians.  And the story they write about the past is called history.

What is Archaeology?

We can learn about what people did in the past through reading the letters and other writings that they left behind.  But this is only one way of doing history.  Long, long ago, many people didn’t know how to write!  They didn’t write letters to each other.  The kings didn’t carve the stories of their great deeds on monuments.  How can a historian learn the story of people who didn’t know how to write?
Imagine that a whole village full of people lived near a river, long ago.  These people don’t know how to write.  They don’t send letters to their friends, or write diaries about their daily life.  But as they go about their duties every day, they drop things on the ground.  A farmer, out working in his wheat field, loses the iron blade from the knife he’s using to cut wheat from the stalks.  He can’t find it, so he goes to get another knife – leaving the blade on the ground.  Back in the village, his wife drops a clay pot by accident, just outside the back steps of her house.  It breaks into pieces.  She sighs, and kicks the pieces under the house.  Her little boy is playing in the dirt, just beyond the back steps.  He has a little clay model of an ox, hitched to a cart.  He runs the cart through the dirt and says, “Moo!  Moo!” until his mother calls him to come inside.  He leaves the cart where it is and runs into the house.  His mother has a new toy for him!  He’s so excited that he forgets all about his ox and cart.  Next day, his father goes out into the yard and accidentally kicks dirt over the clay ox and cart.  The toy stays in the yard, with dirt over it.
Now let’s imagine that the summer gets drier and drier.  The wheat starts to die.  The people who live in the village have less and less to eat.  They get together and decide that they will pack up their belongings and take a journey to another place, where there is more rain.  So they collect their things and start off down the river.  They leave behind the things that they don’t want any more – cracked jars, dull knives, and stores of wheat kernels that are too hard and dry to use.
The deserted village stands by the river for years.  Slowly, the buildings start to fall down.  Dust blows overtop of the ruins.  One year, the river floods and washes mud over the dust.  Grass starts to grow in the mud.  Eventually, you can barely see the village any more.  Dirt and grass cover the ruins from sight.  It just looks like a field by a river.
But one day a man comes along to look at the field.  He sees a little bit of wood poking up from the grass.  He bends down and starts to brush dirt away from the wood.  It is the corner of a building!  He thinks to himself, “People used to live here!”
The next day he comes back with special tools – tiny shovels, brushes, and special knives.  He starts to dig down into the field.  When he finds the remains of houses and tools, he brushes the dirt away from them.  He writes down exactly where he found them.  And then he examines them carefully.  He wants to discover more about the people who used to live in the village.
One day, he finds the iron knife blade that the farmer lost in the field.  He thinks to himself, “These people knew how to make iron!  They knew how to grow wheat and harvest it for food!  And they used iron tools to harvest their grain.”
Another day, he finds the clay pot that the farmer’s wife broke.  Now he knows that the people of the village knew how to make dishes from clay.  And when he finds the little ox and cart that the little boy lost in the yard, he knows that the people of the village used cows, harnessed to wagons, to help them in their farm work.
He might even discover that the people left their village because there was no rain.  He discovers the remains of the hard, spoiled wheat that the people left behind.  When he looks at the wheat, he can tell that it was ruined by lack of rain.  So he thinks to himself, “I’ll bet that these people left their village during a dry season.  They probably went to find a place where it was rainy.”
This man is doing history – even though he doesn’t have any written letters or other documents.  He is discovering the story of the people of the village from the things that they left behind them.  This kind of history is called archaeology.  Historians who dig objects out of the ground and learn from them are called archaeologists.

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