The New Past: From Region to Macroregion

Abstract

Archaeology has produced a record of a past that was not known to scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Archae-ology's excavations, surveys, and better chronologies contribute ac-tual cases of societies changing over long periods of time, quite dif-ferent from the fragmentary or shallow histories and comparative inferences from present-day cases that earlier scholars had available. The scale of archaeology's new cases has been regional. Theory-building has been slow to catch up to these empirical contributions. In the last decade, archaeology has begun producing sequences cov-ering much larger geographical areas composed of multiple, adjoin-ing regions. This richer, more detailed ‘new past ’ is uncharted terri-tory that requires a third generation of conceptual tools. THE PAST WE USED TO KNOW What do we know and what do we not know about the human past? Let us restrict the question to the last 30,000 years, but still adhere to anthropology's broad mandate to comprehend all the world's societies or cultures. Let us simplify matters by saying that we are not demanding to know very much, just a few basics from an ethnographic schedule like Murdock's Outline of World

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