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"History is a pack of tricks we play on the dead" Voltaire
Tobler's First Law of Geography is: "... everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." In spatial statistics this is formalized in the notion of correlation, near objects in space are more correlated than far objects. This applies to time also, near events in time are more correlated than distant events in time. Using Steven Jay Gould's famous "tape of Evolution" thought experiment for human history, rewind the tape back a week and then replay history. Would we notice much difference? Rewind it a thousand years? We might notice a difference. certain things correlate further back in time than others. Evolution gives us correlations going back billions of years. Species millions of years. Human cultures are much shorter, "Western Culture" as a global culture only goes back a few hundred years and for the most part was violently imposed upon the world. Archeology has returned to listening to the stories of remaining native peoples and in North America it has been shown that these peoples are direct ancestors to the peoples of the great pueblos of the southwest and the mound builders of the eastern woodlands. The concerns, participation, support, and stories of native people are now an important part of archeology. One critique of ethnographic studies is that it is difficult to tell just how far back current beliefs, stories, and practices can go, the past is a foreign country even to those whose ancestors lived it. This is a reasonable critique. It is hard for a society that has downloaded its knowledge first into writing and now onto silicon, to understand passing cultural knowledge strictly through memory. Any trial lawyer will tell you about how fallible human memory is yet cultures survived and thrived without writing. Just how was this accomplished?
