American civilizations are more recent than one might expect—the big iconic pyramids at Chichen Itza date from ~1000 CE. Plus, a lot of the historical data is vague or hard to get at—not just because of spanish missionaries, but also because a lot of the big North American civilizations left monuments in the form of huge earthworks, not stone, and their written records, if they existed, are lost.
There are definitely upheavals and discontinuities in the archaeological record (the one that really comes to mind is the introduction of corn to north america), but I’m not so sure about our ability to reconstruct nontrivial engineering-type metrics.
I agree that it would be interesting to look at evidence from further in the past or from non-Western progress.
Unfortunately, we found researching progress from before roughly 1700-1800 (and sometimes even later) to often be quite difficult. Most sources are vague, disagree with each other, or have clear signs of unreliability. Even when we have good accounts of what the state of the art was at some particular time, it was difficult to establish a progress trend leading up to it.
You’re probably right that professional historians would be good at sorting some of these problems out. Usually when we did contact subject matter experts during the investigation, they could at help us to reality check out findings, but we did not try to get them to actually do work for us.
You should definitely try harder to connect with academic historians. They justify their existence by telling us they can help us learn from the past - this is a golden opportunity for it!
It would be interesting to find some more discontinuities that are unrelated to Western Civilization.
For example, what about Zheng He’s treasure voyages or the Great Wall of China? Or Mesoamerican civilizations?
Could you systematically contact relevant historians to farm this work out?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He
American civilizations are more recent than one might expect—the big iconic pyramids at Chichen Itza date from ~1000 CE. Plus, a lot of the historical data is vague or hard to get at—not just because of spanish missionaries, but also because a lot of the big North American civilizations left monuments in the form of huge earthworks, not stone, and their written records, if they existed, are lost.
There are definitely upheavals and discontinuities in the archaeological record (the one that really comes to mind is the introduction of corn to north america), but I’m not so sure about our ability to reconstruct nontrivial engineering-type metrics.
I agree that it would be interesting to look at evidence from further in the past or from non-Western progress.
Unfortunately, we found researching progress from before roughly 1700-1800 (and sometimes even later) to often be quite difficult. Most sources are vague, disagree with each other, or have clear signs of unreliability. Even when we have good accounts of what the state of the art was at some particular time, it was difficult to establish a progress trend leading up to it.
You’re probably right that professional historians would be good at sorting some of these problems out. Usually when we did contact subject matter experts during the investigation, they could at help us to reality check out findings, but we did not try to get them to actually do work for us.
You should definitely try harder to connect with academic historians. They justify their existence by telling us they can help us learn from the past - this is a golden opportunity for it!