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FeatureMonday Methods|How does Periodization affect our perspective? (self.AskHistorians)

CommustarModerator | Swahili Coast | Sudanic States | Ethiopia が 投稿

Thanks to /u/thefairyguineapig for the suggestion of this weeks topic.

Periodization is a term for the practice of categorizing the past into discrete blocks of time, organized by overarching characteristics. Concepts like the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the High Middle Ages, the Early Modern World are all examples of Periods, and determining when those periods begin and end is what periodization is all about.

Because these time periods are concepts created (usually) by later historians as a way of analyzing past eras, there can be a lot of debate about when specific periods begin or end, and differing scope of time can lead to different perspective.

For example, when talking about the Civil Rights Era in the United States, it could be defined as starting with Brown vs Board of Education in 1954 and ending with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. However, someone might argue that the beginning should be pushed back to 1948 with the integration of the armed forces. Or others could argue that analysis of the Civil Rights era should from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Still others could argue that rather than ending in 1968, that the Civil Rights Era continues to today.

How do these different definitions on when an era begins or ends change our perspective on the "lesson" or "meaning" of that era?

Should periodization attempt to be universal, and is that possible? Does breaking up history into periods that make sense for European or American history serve to impair understanding of African, Asian, or Precolumbian history of the Americas?

Does vocabulary matter? Does saying "Dark Ages" or "Medieval" color our perceptions compared to "early Middle Ages"?

Does dividing history into discrete periods create a false sense of distinctiveness/separation between these eras? Should we also/instead be looking at the similarities between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages? The continuity from the High Middle Ages into the Early Modern World?

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[–]04231993 14ポイント15ポイント  (1子コメント)

Should periodization attempt to be universal, and is that possible? Does breaking up history into periods that make sense for European or American history serve to impair understanding of African, Asian, or Precolumbian history of the Americas?

I think the problem with universal periodization is the fact that it tends to be universal Europeanization more than anything else. This isn't necessarily bad when making comparative studies or reference points, but when native periodizations already exist, for example the dynastic system in China, then it seems like a rather awful waste of time. Each historian then goes on to define what "Medieval China" actually is, and each has their own interpretation, some say it's from the end of the Han to the end of the Yuan, some say it goes from the end of the Jin to the end of the Tang. I guess it's a matter of prioritizing familiarizing the topic for reader, but at the cost of tacking on a construction on top of a construction, which has to be redefined or clarified at the beginning of each period study. My question is, is it worth it?

Does vocabulary matter? Does saying "Dark Ages" or "Medieval" color our perceptions compared to "early Middle Ages"? Does dividing history into discrete periods create a false sense of distinctiveness/separation between these eras? Should we also/instead be looking at the similarities between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages? The continuity from the High Middle Ages into the Early Modern World?

If it were up to me, I'd have any broad terms utilizing any form of "early" "middle" "late" "modern" simply scrapped wholesale. These words have an implication of inevitability and progress that everything that has ever happened and will happen was all for the sake of leading up to this moment that we live in, which dehumanizes the variety of experiences and lives of the past for the sake of justifying the "current" as "modern."

[–]CommustarModerator | Swahili Coast | Sudanic States | Ethiopia[S] 9ポイント10ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think the problem with universal periodization is the fact that it tends to be universal Europeanization more than anything else.

I agree with this. From the perspective of Africa, the concept of a progression of ages from Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age is problematic. That progression is valid for Mesopotamia and Europe or even Ethiopia, but in West Africa, archaeologically there is no "Bronze Age". Rather, the transition of tool use is directly from stone to Iron implements, and copper working shows up at the same time or a little later than the introduction of iron.

Additionally, if we are talking of Iron Age in Africa the time period varies across the continent. In Nigeria iron use is certain by 500 BC, but recent surveys suggest it might be older. In any case, iron use in southern Africa along the Zambezi river only shows up around 500 AD.

So, if we are talking about early Iron Age in Nigeria, we have a far different time span than if we are talking about Zimbabwe.

[–]alriclofgarPost-Roman Britain | Late Antiquity 10ポイント11ポイント  (7子コメント)

One of the things we should talk about more often is the way in which (modern) periodization changes the way we catalog, label, and explian primary sources.

In my period, there's a famous text that says Britain was left to 'look after itself' in 410 by emperor Honorius, who brought the Roman legions back home to deal with a local crisis. After 410, Roman Britain quickly disappeared, to be replaced by a completely different culture (the 'Angles' and 'Saxons') by the end of the fifth century. Following these texts, historians and archaeologists usually date the end of Roman Britain to 410, and the start of Britain's early middle ages either begins immediately thereafter, or dates from the supposed landing of the Anglo-Saxons c. 450.

The archaeological evidence confirms these starting and end dates, and shows evidence for a sudden, catastrophic collapse and rupture in between them. Roman material culture disappears in the early fifth century, and there's an almost total gap of evidence until the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period about two generations later. This seems to confirm the periodization we use to divide the Roman period as ending in 410, and the middle ages starting shortly after.

Except, the gap we see in the archaeology is not entirely independent from the periodization. Roman artefacts have long been conventionally been dated as no later than the end of the Roman period (410), so any site discovered with Roman material is labeled something like, 'Roman, Nth century - 410)'. Similarly, sites with 'Anglo-Saxon' artefacts have almost always dated after 450, because it's assumed there weren't any Anglo-Saxons in England before that official arrival date. This creates a tragic loop of circular reasoning, where our belief that Roman Britain collapsed on (or shortly after) 410 prevents us from identifying any Roman sites as continuing in use after this date, and our belief that Anglo-Saxon cultures didn't overlap with Roman prevents us from recognizing any such overlaps when they do occur. Consequently, the archaeological evidence has long confirmed the assumptions that went into its creation: all Roman material disappears shortly after 410 (the latest possible date on which it was thought to be created), and Anglo-Saxon material doesn't show up until after 450 (the earliest date we think it could have appeared).

It is becoming clear that this division is inaccurate, now that radiocarbon dating has become more common. Many artefacts that were once thought to date before 410 are being found in later sites, while 'Germanic' 'Anglo-Saxon' material is increasingly being shown to date as early as the beginning of the fifth century, overlapping with the end of the Roman period. But for many years, this overlap was made invisible not only because people didn't imagine overlap might be possible, but because the act of cataloging material between these two periods prevented any sites being labeled as bridging this gap. Anyone who looked for evidence of overlap struggled to find it, because, by definition, Roman sites (before 410) could not overlap with Anglo-Saxon ones (after 450).

The picture is only right now changing (for example see this short article from 5 months ago; a PhD student I know is right now finishing a project that will close this gap, and several archaeological site reports published in the last couple of years like Wasperton and Spong Hill have identified sites that were in use on both sides of the traditional divide).

What this means it that periodization doesn't just affect how historians today evaluate the (unchanging) evidence. It also influences how we make that evidence; the dates we give to archaeological material, the dates we assign to texts, to art - that is, our understandings of periodization shape the evidence from the past as well as our understanding of it in the present. When you read that Gildas' history of Britian was written in the mid 6th century, that's largely because historians agreed that the events it described had to occur after the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period, and that means after 450. When you read that a Roman city was abandoned in the early fifth century, that's often because the pottery archaeologists found there is dated something like '300-410'.

So being critical about periodization doesn't just mean questioning our own assumptions about how time is divided up when deciding how early or late we should allow a specific research project or paper to go. It means questioning how other contemporary historians' (etc) assumptions about the division of time may have caused them to group certain sources together, and keep other sources separate, in a way that artificially, misleadingly gives the impression that these chronological divisions are real when, in fact, they are products of the way we have translated, cataloged, interpreted, and dated these sources.

[–]shlin28Moderator | The End of Late Antiquity, c.500-700 3ポイント4ポイント  (1子コメント)

To add to this, I went to a fascinating seminar last year which argued that the famous passage about 410 from Zosimus was misread and that Honorius did not effectively abandon Britain, but that he was only telling to province to be on its guard (implying that the province was still seen as part of the empire). Another version of the paper was helpfully written up here. So yes, there does seem to be plenty of scope for us to revise our narrative of this period, both from a historical and a archaeological perspective. The question is, how long would it take for these changes to pass into the popular consciousness?

[–]alriclofgarPost-Roman Britain | Late Antiquity 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Let alone the fact that this is Zosimus, hardly a contemporary or local account!

Guy has raised doubts (in Worlds of Arthur) about the traditional interpretation of H.'s letter, but the arguments in the writeup you've linked are more compelling. I'm willing to buy it.

What fascinates (horrifies? excites?) me is how this one ambiguous and debatable source has so thoroughly shaped our entire understanding of the chronology of fifth century Britain, down to the structures of museum collections, artefact typologies - everything.

Hills and Lucy's 2013 volume on Spong Hill is, I think, one of the most important challenges to this archaeologically; it completely upsets the idea of Anglo-Saxon immigration beginning only in the second half of the fifth century. The chronological arguments in the Wasperton volume (which show continuous use of the cemetery from the 4th century, with Roman-style burials, through the 7th century construction of barrows) are similarly important.

[–]agentdcfModern Britain | Environment 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

This is brilliant. Could you put together a reading list of, say, three to five items that show this?

[–]alriclofgarPost-Roman Britain | Late Antiquity 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

For this specific period, or in general? Primary sources (whose dating has been affected), or secondary (that discuss this issue)?

[–]agentdcfModern Britain | Environment 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

This specific time and place would be perfect, but if you have other examples I'll take them. What you described is such a perfect example of how periodization or other elements built into the literature can shape our evidence. That's such a valuable lesson to learn for potential historians, and it looks like such a powerful example. I don't teach a history and theory course right now, but I might in the future, and I'd love to have such a clear example to draw upon.

[–]casey2y5 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

Your replies always break my brain. I think I take it for granted that of course things overlap for a time before one period really moves into another so it baffles me that it's just becoming a thing. The historiography of periods I'm not familiar with never fails to interest me. For you personally, do you take a more anthropological stance, in that you try to remove yourself from your own biases when analyzing or do you more or less accept the given divisions of time as they are?

[–]alriclofgarPost-Roman Britain | Late Antiquity 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think most people try to remember that time periods overlap; it's just that few specialize sufficiently in both Roman and early medieval material to recognize how the evidence itself is shaped by chronological assumptions. James Gerrard, who is one of the leaders in questioning how things have been divided up in the fifth century, is a pottery specialist, so unlike many he actually knows the material itself well enough to question how others have artificially separated some of it into Roman vs. Anglo-Saxon periods. But if you specialize in, say, early medieval burial practices, and accept the dates for artefacts that other archaeologists (who know their material better than you) have already established, you might never have cause to examine how that evidence (which is one or two places removed from what you specialize in) was structured.

I do my best to try to step back a few levels of analysis to try to see how many of these assumptions are actually well founded, but there's only so much one person can do. For my own topic, spears, I'm not just looking at the fifth century (and later) material I study; I'm also looking at fourth century material from multiple regions to see where the fifth century material came from / developed from, and it is showing me that some of the assumptions of rupture were wrong. Some of the features of 'Anglo-Saxon' spears are, for example, also common on late Roman spears in Britain - but the assumption that early medieval British people were from Germany was so strong that the person who wrote the Anglo-Saxon spear typologies never stopped to compare the early medieval spears with Roman ones (though he did compare them with German styles, and was surprised to find how quickly, he thought, they diverged stylistically after the invasion - but if you compare them to local roman styles, their difference from German models is easier to explain). If he had, he'd have found that there was actually more continuity than rupture in this weapon's design.

But I can't question everything; archaeology has to be a colaborative project. Thankfully, others (often with far more resources) are picking apart many of the other unchallenged assumptions.

[–]chocolatepotHistory of Western Fashion 7ポイント8ポイント  (1子コメント)

I am a fan of periodization when there's an understanding that this is an invented system to allow specific conversations to be simpler, but unfortunately this is often not the case. Sometimes this is because the name of the period has taken on a more specific connotation: "colonial America" seems to be used popularly to refer to the last couple of decades before the American Revolution rather than the actual colonial period; when people say "Victorian", they often mean just the last few decades of the 19th century. Neither usage is technically wrong, but in practice statements containing these phrases are actually making a huge generalization a lot of the time.

A form of periodization that doesn't tend to come up in discussions of the concept but that frustrates me is the tendency to talk about "the 1870s", "the 1920s", and so on, which is very common in fashion history. If you clarify when you mean the early/mid/late part of a decade, that's reasonable - you're then cutting the swath of time you're referring to into 2-4 year chunks. But it's infrequent that any element of fashion changes on the turn of a decade, and that everything stays the same from 1XX0 through 1XX9. As with my first point, it's often technically correct but a generalization - yes, this dress is from the 1920s and is therefore a "1920s dress", but it's only typical of about 1924-1927. Dresses from earlier in the decade more closely resemble those from 1918-1920, and from the end of the decade, 1930-1932. Dividing dress history out into decades absolutely creates a false sense of distinctiveness.

[–]casey2y5 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

When people say Victorian when they really mean the 1890s it always throws me off. I argue the Victorian period extended through the end of WWI, though I'm also guilty of using colonial America, at least coloquially, when I'm referring to the last few decades before the American Revolution. I definitely agree with you on the fashion element (which I should since your flair indicates you probably know more than me anyway).

[–]DonaldFDraperFrench Political History | Early Mod. Mil. Theory | Napoleon 6ポイント7ポイント  (1子コメント)

One thing that often I've either been called out or said it myself that for me, the Early Modern Era starts in 1648 and /u/elos_ has effectively simplified my argument, religious warfare is amodern. And that does sit at the main point of how I look towards the Early Modern Era, which I see as the rise of centralized state power that works towards unifying and solidifying state power to ensure state security.

So, this comes to the problem state power is of course put together and rises during the 15th and early 16th centuries to be challenged by confessional differences that exist for both honest confessional reasons (people will believe what they believe) and political reasons (looking to get out of heel of the Holy Roman Empire or push against the rising state, such as in France).

HOWEVER, we have a very big difference between the time periods of before Westphalia and After. Politics was far more complex and less linear before Westphalia with a focus towards Church Politics while after, it becomes dominated by the political personalities of the leaders of State (Louis XIV, Catherine, Maria Theresa, Frederick II, etc). So... there is a sort of... tonal difference that I have problem with the prioritization.

[–]ItsalrightwithmeEarly Modern Europe 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

I'm calling you out on this yet another time because pragmatically speaking, these periods are defined by academic convention; you are not yet at a position to arbitrarily define your boundaries ;-).

If you are to use 1648 (Westphalia) as your starting point of the early-modern era, then you omit 150 years' worth of struggles -- dynastic, political, economic, social, religious -- that closed the curtain on the late medieval era and challenged states to change themselves fundamentally. This was a multi-faceted challenge. Locally in Europe, it was the question of church and state; the question of how to change the way wars are conducted, the way the apparatus that we now call "the military" came to be defined; the question of how to harness the riches of the newly-found global reach; the question of how to deal with the logistics of ever-larger armies; and perhaps the question of how states should be organized to enable all of the above.

As we go past Westphalia, it became clear which directions states had to change. Before Westphalia, different models were tried and of course some succeeded and some failed. I understand what you mean by "far more complex and less linear before Westphalia" and I strongly think that one should understand that very tumultuous period in order to understand the early modern era, and that that period is part of the early modern era.

We as a community could have defined 1500-1648 as the "post-late-medieval era" but that terminology isn't used for many reasons that I think are good reasons. There were simply too many fundamental shifts away from the late-medieval era for that period to still carry the overloaded word "medieval". Rather, we started to see many aspects of what is now accepted as defining a "modern" world, thus "early modern" it should be.

[–]casey2y5 6ポイント7ポイント  (2子コメント)

I definitely don't think periodization should be universal especially when applied across cultures since that usually just leads to Euro-centrism.

As for vocabulary, I remember in elementary school when they shifted from using Dark Ages to Medieval my entire perspective of the period shifted. I'm not sure if at this particular level vocabulary matters quite as much, but it certainly makes a different when teaching especially K-12.

The whole point of periods is to create a false separation. There's nothing to say that Late Antiquity didn't continue up through the invention of the printing press or that the Renaissance didn't end until 1800 (those are just random examples and not anything meaningful per say). Periodization is just a tool we use to say this is a time when a significant innovation/event/way of thinking developed and altered the world in some fundamental way. So we should definitely be looking at similarities between periods because especially close to division lines it's not an abrupt change.

I guess essentially what I'm trying to say is that periodization is a useful tool but we shouldn't use it as a be all end all of how we look at history. Boundaries between periods are usually fluid (with a few exceptions) and certainly don't always hold true across cultures.

[–]04231993 3ポイント4ポイント  (1子コメント)

I guess essentially what I'm trying to say is that periodization is a useful tool but we shouldn't use it as a be all end all of how we look at history. Boundaries between periods are usually fluid (with a few exceptions) and certainly don't always hold true across cultures.

A good deal of the problem with periodizations is that people simply don't seem to understand that they were made by other people, and not necessarily even by historians, and therefore subject to whatever circumstances or biases (as always) existed when these terms became popularized. What are meant to be tools in aiding the laymen get a handle for what happened at certain places and times then get taken out of proportion, and suddenly people start believing there are literal lines, gateways, and checkpoints to pass through and TADA suddenly it's a brand new world.

[–]casey2y5 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

Exactly. Which is why I think they're incredibly useful in teaching small children about the general concepts but should be emphasized as a construct as they pass through the school system. They certainly be seen as more than a guideline once a student is in late high school or early undergrad.

If there were literal lines and society always progressed in a forward motion then history would be a whole lot easier to study and actually would be as boring as some laymen seem to think.

[–]WARitterEuropean Armour and Weapons 1250-1600 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think vocabulary really does matter. It can be useful to think of how periodization can be used to serve a particular worldview or agenda. Take 'The Renaissance.' It's an ambiguous term (I mean, all periods are) but if it is used aggressively, it can be used to basically claim many of the late middle ages' accomplishments (Late Gothic Northern Art, the Printing press) on behalf of 'The Renaissance' (and thus the 'modern era' that the Renaissance supposedly marks the beginning of). Since a lot of older historiography of the Renaissance emphasizes it as a break with the past, this periodization becomes self-reinforcing - invention, innovation and discovery all belong to 'The Renaissance', so the Middle Ages (or 'Dark Ages') are a period of stagnation and ignorance. Then there is the ambiguity of using a term coined to describe an artistic/aesthetic movement for describing an entire period - it colors our understanding by filtering the entire period's history through a narrow cultural lens and subordinating other aspects of history to cultural/intellectual/artistic history.