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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
Introduction
Microscopic problems of historical research can and should be made macrocosmic – capable of reflecting worlds larger than themselves. It is in this reflected flicker of truth, the revelations of the general in the particular, that the contribution of the historical method to social science will be found.
(Postan 1939: 34)By and large, social scientists have not attempted to link the day to day events in the lives of individuals (ecological or synchronic processes) and the long term or large scale patterns of human societies (historical or diachronic processes).
(Boyd and Richerson 1985: 290)To inherit the past is also to transform it, or so a recent geocultural synthesis maintains (Lowenthal 1985: 412). As historians “auto-reflexively” narrate past processes or events by means of concepts and terms drawn from their own culture, so social anthropologists often treat the past as a “boundless canvas for contemporary embroidery” (Appadurai 1981:201). Archaeology's most prominent historiographer regarded the past as something discovered chiefly through the filter of modern society's beliefs and attitudes (Daniel 1975).
Anyone involved in the study of the past realizes that is is difficult to relate our own ideas about the past to ideas actually held in the past (Hodder 1986: 2–6; Gallay 1986:198–200; Trigger 1989: 351).
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