1.1 On the possibilities for a deep history of humankind  (Page 4/7)

This seems logical enough. Yet it is important to realize that this claim represents a significant departure from previous understandings of historical evidence. Universal history, as practiced in the Judeo-Christian tradition, was never defined by methodology. It was defined as a subject: the genealogy of humankind. By way of example, consider the History of the Franks , written by Gregory of Tours around 590 CE. Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks , trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Though the work was a particular history devoted to the lineage of the Frankish kings of Gaul, Gregory began his account with Genesis and continued through the Flood, the generations of Noah, and the story of Moses and the Children of Israel wandering in the deserts of Sinai. His account of the Hebrew race gradually leads up to the Romans and then, by stages, back down to the race of the Franks. Particular histories like Gregory’s ended up focusing on the twigs and branches of the family tree, but the genealogical instinct was common in works of history in medieval and early modern Europe.

Since history was a subject and not a methodology, rules of evidence mattered little. As late as 1885, as all academia was beginning to fragment into disciplines, the American historian George Park Fisher recommended that young historians learn how to use written documents such as registers, chronicles, inscriptions, and literature, but he also advised them to consult oral tradition; material structures such as altars, tombs, and private dwellings; and language, using the techniques of comparative philology. History, in Fisher’s view, was written from a broad spectrum of evidence. To this, Fisher added a recommendation to use indirect evidence, to tease historical conclusions out of an array of recalcitrant sources. George Park Fisher, Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-Book and for Private Reading (New York, 1885), 3.

So in 1897, why did Langlois and Seignobos narrow down the sources of history so radically to documents alone? History, in trying to recast itself as a methodologically rigorous science, was undoubtedly keeping up with the fashions of the day. But the narrowing of evidence had a second consequence, for it helped to exclude prehistory from the ambit of history. As Langlois and Seignobos put it, “for want of documents the history of immense periods in the past of humanity is destined to remain for ever unknown.” Langlois and Seignobos, Introduction , 17. Writing in 1897, they knew that this was untrue. Their famous contemporary, the French archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet, had already used the substantial evidence at hand to classify the phases of the Stone Age by tool type. Perhaps, then, their insistence on documentary evidence was an epistemological sleight-of-hand, a ruse, motivated by their pre-existing desire to preserve the realm of history from the vague and terrifying antiquity of which Victor Duruy had spoken. Whatever the motivation, we can see how humanity’s deep history broke apart at practically the same moment that it became thinkable.