Prehistory and History -- with Susan Wise Bauer

In The Penguin History of the World (1976; 1st ed.), J. M. Roberts notes 'history is one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning.' The statement speaks to a real difference between pre-history and actual human history. The sorts of material evidence historians have to work with changes. The data of prehistory is drawn from the ruins of buildings, tools, agricultural implements, evidences for animal husbandry, possibly even scraps of cloth. The data of actual human history includes of these material objects, but adds something else.

At the beginning there is still little evidence about the life of the mind except institutions so far as we can recover them, symbols in art and ideas embodied in literature. In them lie presuppositions which are the great coordinates around which a view of the world is built - even when the people holding that view do not know they are there... Many of them are irrecoverable, and even when we can begin to grasp the shapes which defined the world of men living in the old civilizations, a constant effort of imagination must be made to avoid the danger of falling into anachronism which surrounds us on every side. (History 44-5)

Especially from artwork, pictograms, hieroglyphs, and other such markings do evidences emerge, not merely of primitive humanity responding to a natural environment, but of human beings reflecting on the nature of life.  Lengthier texts, especially, allow historians to see the ancient world from the inside.

A correspondence between historical periodization and different sorts of historical evidence needs to be made explicit: between 1) pre-history and history and 2) the material products of the human response to and human reflection on life. How we periodize the human past flows from something essential to humanity, something which in pre-history is absent from the material evidence that has come down to us today. The Ancient Greeks termed it logos; its definition encompassed both human thoughts about things, the things themselves, and the physical expression of the spoken or written word.

History begins, in a paraphrase of the words of the 19th century Roman Catholic controversialist, G.K. Chesterton, with the human being standing absolute and alone. How s/he got there is not the historian's business to inquire into or speculate about. Leave that to scientists, philosophers, or theologians. The historian does not begin at the VERY beginning; because historian cannot do without logos, s/he already finds themselves in the midst of things.

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I have called Susan Wise Bauer a historian's historian because the fruitful results of considerations weave their way through her work, like the ones dwelt upon, both above and in previous posts. The History of the Ancient World begins with an observation: 'EVEN THOUGH world histories routinely begin with prehistoric times, I suspect that prehistory is the wrong starting place for the historian.' Robert's Penguin History, for example, begins in prehistoric times; he also demonstrates, however, a sensitivity to Bauer's concerns, as the above quotation illustrates. Bauer may overstate her case here, with regards to more recent attempts at drafting a world history. Her comments are nonetheless apropos in the case of H.G. Wells' The Outline of History (1919) and comparable attempts to do the same.

It's my suspicion, in fact, Bauer understates her case in the name of scholarly modesty. She does not so much suspect, as much as she knows prehistory is the wrong place for a world historian to begin. On the very next page, she plays her hand:

But for the historian who concerns herself with the why and how of human behavior, potsherds and the foundations of houses are of limited use. They give no window into the soul. Epic tales, on the other hand, display the fears and hopes of the people who tell them--and these are central to any explanation of their behavior. (Ancient History xxv-xxvi)

Bauer smartly observes evidence unearthed in archaeological digs and subjected to rigorous scientific analysis is no more secure, no 'more reliable than speculation anchored by the stories that people choose to preserve and tell to their children.' These are different sorts of evidences; historians who rely on them are competent to speak to different aspects of past human lives.

Bauer does slip up in one significant place.

To concentrate on physical evidence to the exclusion of myth and story is to put all of our faith in the explanations for human behavior in that which can be touched, smelled, seen, and weighed: it shows a mechanical view of human nature, and a blind faith in the methods of science to explain the mysteries of human behavior. (Ancient History xxvi)

Here my suspicion is that Bauer errs in being over-zealous in her attack on the over-extension of supposed scientific competencies. She forgets that physical evidence is all the historian ever had and will have. Unless they were written down, or sketched out--that is, unless, at the very least, there is something for us to see--we would never know the myths and stories of ancient peoples.