Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Prehistory and antiquity

I started going through history in general again, and made quite a few links to pages I created in the last round. It's a relief to be able to make better connections, especially to areas within religion, government, and economics.
I also made some progress at adding connections for prehistory. But when I got down into lower levels, early prehistory, middle prehistory, and late prehistory, I ran into a barrier. For one, I don't know nearly enough about how the field of prehistoric archeology has developed in the 20th century to give anything like an outline of the subject. For another, I haven't pursued particular countries or communities back this far in any detail. So, there's no real content to this section. That leads me to the conclusion that I'm going to be freezing progress in prehistory for a while, except as I'm able to make connections to the main prehistory page.
I ran into similar problems with antiquity. Although this has some highly interesting topics that I can connect at the main antiquity page, I'm going to have to freeze development of its detail for a time. However, I hope to be able to pick it back up before long.

When I was trying to look up material on the internet on 20th century archeology, I was unable to find a web site that gives a good summary. I did find references to a number of books that discuss the history of archaeology, which would be fine if I had convenient access to a good library, but right now I don't. This is an area where I'm going to have to wait.
Also, when I went to look at the sequence of events to give detail to early prehistory, I found such a difference of opinion among different prehistorians about exactly what took place when, that I didn't even try to put together what looked like a consensus. I've found this kind of situation time and again when I'm exploring a topic. I'd like to investigate such puzzles, but lack the expertise.

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