4 ms·
> just in case I die and my family has to figure out the intricacies I'm reminded of how so much of what we know about history is because of the diaries and co
by gary_0 5y ago
> just in case I die and my family has to figure out the intricacies
I'm reminded of how so much of what we know about history is because of the diaries and correspondence that happened to survive to the present day. There are surprising gaps in what we know about day-to-day life in the distant past because nobody bothered (or was able) to write it down.
- eru 5y agoTo be slightly flippant: we get even more valuable information out of garbage dumps. People usually bias their writing towards what they consider to be important information. And they leave out what they consider obvious context. So we have a lot more information about battles and kings, then about daily life. People are less biased towards highfalutin in the ways they produce garbage.
- rpmuller 5y agoThis is a very wise observation. The most important things are always the ones we think are so obvious that we don't mention them.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoBattles and kings are not garbage.
- egypturnash 5y agoKings are definitely garbage.
- eru 5y agoI was talking about literal garbage dumps. They are incredibly important for archeology. Battles and kings and things that seem important when they are current, but aren't as interesting in a few hundred years as insight into daily life.
- CRConrad 5y agoNo, but all the ancient historians wrote about battles and kings, so we have that info all written up already. Very few of them wrote about the life of the average peasant, so to find out about that, one of the richest kind of archaeological sources are literal garbage dumps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden
- eru 5y agoWhenever I hear people complain that our digital media won't leave much for future archaeologists, I always think of our enormous output of plastic, metal and glass garbage.
- dan-robertson 5y agoOther places that tend to provide this sort of information are tax records and wills, both of which tend to be somewhat likely to survive. Even if you can only see tax laws it can tell you a lot about how the society fitted together.