In the Grip of Sacred History

Bibliographic Data

ID5836957
AuthorsD L Smail (0000-0002-2232-145X, corresponding author), Dan Smail
Year2005
Volume110
Issue5
Pages1337-1361
Publication date2005-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/ahr.110.5.1337
OpenAlexW2115385773
LanguageEN
Citations received20

EDEN lies a vast stretch of human history punctuated by compelling stories and events.'The ancestral Eve, the Out-of-Africa hypothesis, the Great Leap Forward, the settling of the Americas, the debates that rage around megafaunal extinction and the demise of the Neanderthals: all these and more have gripped the imaginations of academics and amateurs alike.If humanity is the proper subject of history, then surely the Paleolithic is part of our history.Yet despite enormous strides in the field of paleoanthropology over the last several decades, the deep past of humanity still plays a marginal role in the grand historical narrative that is taught in secondary schools and colleges in the United States.Most textbooks used in Western Civilization courses include very little on the Neolithic era, and even less on the Paleolithic.Some books in world history extend human history back to the outset of the agricultural revolutions, breaching the date of six thousand years ago that dominates some Western Civilization textbooks.Yet even world history surveys currently do not deal significantly with the Paleolithic.Î f history is biography-if the study of history, to be satisfying, requires us to make contact with the thoughts and psyches of people with names-then there is little point in advocating a deep history of humankind.But if history is also the study of the structures and patterns that shape the human experience, if acts such as handling a flint arrowhead or tracing one's mitochondrial family tree back to a small African valley can fulfill our desire for wonder, then the exclusion of humanity's deep history cannot be so easily explained.Puzzling over this exclusion, the archaeologist Glyn My thanks to Doris Goldstein, Lynn Hunt, the members of the Fordham history faculty seminar, and the undergraduates who have taken my course "A Natural History," especially Edward Djordjevic and Maria Dembrowsky, for reading and commenting on preliminary versions of these arguments.I

American Constitutional Law and Politics

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