1.1 On the possibilities for a deep history of humankind  (Page 3/7)

In the reflections below, I shall begin with a brief historical analysis of why the short chronology typical of the study of history was maintained, with rare exceptions, across the twentieth century. I offer this study on the grounds that the task of designing a deep history will be clearer if we understand why it has taken so long for historians to accept the full implications of the time revolution of the 1860s. Here, I shall focus on trends in the discipline of history, though it is important to acknowledge that for much of the twentieth century, archaeologists were just as interested as historians in clinging to a methodological division of time. According to this division of labor, historians were confined to the short time of written evidence. Archaeologists, in turn, limited themselves to the periods associated with unwritten evidence and had little interest in studying societies that left written records. With this survey in hand, we can more easily appreciate how to move forward in developing a new architecture for the writing and practice of deep history. The key task is to outline a mode of history-writing that escapes the style, much in vogue for thirty years and more, whereby historians plot their histories according to ideas of birth, origins, and revolutions. The use of such metaphors renders deep time invisible. What we need to develop anew is a genealogical instinct.

In his 1962 work, The Idea of Prehistory , the archaeologist Glyn Daniel posed this rather plaintive question: “Why do historians in a general way pay so little attention to this fourth division of the study of the human past; while recognizing ancient history [why] do they not give more recognition to prehistory?… Historians are taking a long time to integrate prehistory into their general view of man.” Glyn E. Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (London: Watts, 1962), 134.

To answer this question, we need to go back more than a century and consider the trends afoot as the modern practices of history and archaeology took shape. When History formed as a discipline in the late nineteenth century around the three divisions of History’s short chronology—ancient, medieval, and modern—it adopted as its signature method the analysis of written sources. In a manual of historical studies published in 1897, probably the most influential of its kind, the historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos argued, “the historian works with documents. Documents are the traces which have been left by the thoughts and actions of men of former times… For want of documents the history of immense periods in the past of humanity is destined to remain for ever unknown. For there is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history.” Charles V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1897). I used the English translation, Introduction to the Study of History , trans. G.G. Berry (New York: Holt, 1898), 17. Or in the words of V.A. Renouf, “historians get their knowledge from written documents. No history of any country can be written unless its people have left some such record of their activities.” V.A. Renouf, Outlines of General History , 2 ^nd ed., ed. William Starr Myers (New York, 1909), 2.