How Much Should We Care About Ancient Civilization?
Entertaining the Ancient Past
How old is civilization and how much should it matter?
These are some of the questions I found myself asking while reading Samo Burja’s new piece, “Civilization is Older Than we Thought.” He writes:
We underestimate both the social and material technologies needed for ancient life. When we find remains of beavers, we assume they built beaver dams, even if we don’t immediately find remnants of such dams. The beaver dams are part of what biologists would call the animal’s extended phenotype, an unavoidable necessity of the ecological niche that the beaver occupies. When we find Homo sapiens skeletons, however, we instead imagine the people naked, feasting on berries, without shelter, and without social differentiation. The contemporary imagination of the state of nature has been bounded by the thought experiments of Western political theorists.
The problem with studying ancient society is that we need a theory of human nature to interpret the trace-like evidence of the past, but we also need to let the data we find challenge our theories, otherwise we end up simply corroborating our prejudices. Additionally, history, unlike laboratory science, is far more more speculative.
One could argue that some of our desire to know the ancient past is rooted in a simple urge to understand human nature and evolution—to understand ourselves and our origins. And yet the funding for archaeology is often fueled by a sense of nationalist pride and/or imperial ambition. Add onto this the economic dependence of many places on tourism and the study of the past becomes even more challenging.
Nietzsche argues that the point of history is constructive (i.e., all history is revisionist). He is joined by pragmatists like Richard Rorty, for whom the only reason to care about the past is to use it in the present. Yet if history is entirely constructive, why all the hullabaloo?
If the past is a foreign country, the ancient, pre-historic past is another planet. Perhaps we seek to travel there as much to know ourselves as to escape ourselves, to relieve ourselves of what David Mamet calls “the burden of consciousness.”
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