|
I’m reading Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed right now, and it perfectly illustrates why I want to become a historian. If a civilization doesn’t write things down, they will become lost. Just writing is not enough, of course; the Maya wrote things down but Diego de Landa destroyed some of the most informative texts they wrote, and as a result we know less about the Maya than we could. Even with today’s wisdom we still destroy history - much of the National Museum of Iraq’s relics were lost and damaged in 2003 after the war began there, which Jacques Chirac referred to as a “crime against humanity.”
But reading about the Maya, the Rapanui (natives of Easter Island), the Polynesians who died out on Pitcairn Island long before the Bounty crew arrived…all of this makes me feel even more strongly about preserving history. Archaeologists have had to figure out the stories of those long-ago societies. As fascinating as it is to put together pieces of such puzzles, I just find it imperative that we take care to record our history. It’s all well and good to put a Kewpie doll and some alfalfa into a time capsule for 5000 years but how will the people who open it know the significance of these items?
We have to tell our story, because we are the only ones who know it. Realistically, archaeologists make guesses about their findings. “Well, let’s see, the carbon date on the bird bones we found in these skeletal remains indicate that they were from about 3000 years ago, so around then there must have been somebody living here who ate birds, but there are no other animal bones found, so presumably birds were their only diet.” It would have been so much easier if that person had written a diary and said “today I had some birds for dinner, I am getting really sick of them because they are all we eat, but we can’t find any other meat so we are stuck with what we’ve got.” Yes, the thousands upon thousands of publications on Amazon.com will tell a darn good story of what society is like right now…but it’s not enough. We have to record our own stories before we forget. Thank goodness for projects like StoryCorps that allow us to do just that.
So why do I want to become a research historian? Because I like putting those puzzles together. The closer we are to the time the puzzle was created, the easier it will be to solve. And I want to get it solved so future people don’t have to. It’s about posterity.
. |