Topic 1 - Roots

1. Topic 1 - Roots • All peoples, places and things have sources of origin, or roots. • Timelines are a means of showing, in chronological order, the important people, events and ideas that identify a particular time and place.

2. Topic 2 & 3 — Measuring Time & Measuring Time Historically People have devised two major categories for the concept of time: • Cyclical - Earth’s rotation, relationship with the moon; and Earth’s revolution, relationship with the sun. • Cyclical time reflects an attempt to live in harmony with the natural environment (e.g., waking and sleeping, agricultural patterns, holiday patterns, hunting patterns of traditional societies).

3. b) Linear - historical periods considering broad divisions: past, present, future, B.C., A.D. • Linear time is used to organize the past at the personal level, the historical level and the geological level.

4. Historical time refers to the period that has elapsed since people first began to keep records of historical events. Historical time is measured in years, decades and centuries, and includes social, political and economic events created by people.

5. Dates before Christ’s birth are listed as B.C. or Before Christ. Before the birth of Christ the years are counted backward; the numbers get bigger as they go farther back in time. • Dates after the year of Christ’s birth are listed as A.D. or Anno Domini-in the year of our Lord.

6. Generalizing about Historical Time: • Spiral - some view the passage of historical events through time as either an upward or downward moving spiral. The generalization they are making is that history repeats itself either as it progresses to something better or regresses to something worse.

7. Generalizing about Historical Time: (cont.) • Pendulum - others view historical events as a pendulum (which on a graph appears as a horizontal line with highs and lows), and make a somewhat different generalization about the meaning of historical events.

8. Topic 4 — Learning About Our Historical Roots Ways That People Learn about the Past: • Oral history traditions provide evidence for the development of civilizations in the recent past. • Written history is recorded in a variety of languages and symbols, on a variety of materials (e.g., cave walls, parchment, paper).

9. Ways That People Learn about the Past: (cont.) • Archeology provides evidence from the distant past by providing data about the lives of people before written records were left or where the written records have been lost.

10. Definitions: • Archeology: is a way of finding out about the past/our roots. It includes location of sites, systematic collection of artifacts and data, and systematic dating of sites and artifacts. If the record of the past is to be preserved for the future, archaeology must be conducted in an environmentally and socially responsible manner • Generalize - form general principles or notions. • Interpret - explain the meaning of. • Infer - deduce or conclude from facts and reasoning.

11. Topic 6 — Technological Developments • Technology refers not only to products or hardware, but also to knowledge and organizations that make it possible to manufacture and use the products.