No Certainty For Man-Written History

Late in the trip our group was led across Dr. Moore’s archaeological site on Cyprus.  A man explained his ideas about a wall he was digging on the side of a hill.  It consisted of hand-sized rocks filled in with quite a bit of dirt.  The guy said it was possibly for a bit of fortification and it is shoddy because it’s an easy area to defend.  It occurred to me that they could have built a quick wall in preparation of an imminent attack by an enemy.  These are two of a hundred different bases that one could go off of.  Seeing the miniscule steps and hearing the wary hypotheses of the workers caused me to wonder more about the confidence with which history is taught.  Of course, history always depends on who is telling the story, but I think the root of what is misleading is much deeper than that. The world’s past is entirely based on assumptions.  When people initially began writing history and speculating, they personally came at the story with their own assumptions and consequently built everything they recounted on those assumptions.  The same goes for archaeology—people come at a site with an idea of what it is they are looking for, and pretty soon the evidence being found can easily be pushed to fit into their puzzle.  What if they picked a detail of a site, made an assumption, and based their entire “findings” on that?  If you look deeper into what the world claims as “scientific fact,” you will see that many conclusions are drawn entirely from a single, minute detail.  History is much like this, jumping from island to island instead of searching for the connecting bridge.  This is an obvious occurrence that we cannot escape, but then I wonder: if people have been doing this from the very beginning, and people later take this as truth and then build their histories on it, how far from the truth have we written ourselves?