CHAPTER 18
Social Change—II Reconstructing the Past
Human society has a much longer history than the social sciences devoted to its study. Efforts are continually being made by pre-historians, archaeologists, and scholars of ancient history to reconstruct our past. In doing so, they have searched for whatever cred- ible evidence they could gather, mostly in the form of artefacts and elements of material culture. The gaps in our knowledge were mostly filled with conjectures. Besides descrip- tive accounts, some of the scholars attempted to build theories of change. While we have a somewhat better understanding of our past compared to our ancestors, gaps still remain.
There are many unanswered questions about our past. As we go further back, we ...
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