Methodology in the HistoryThis period, which deals with the world the Indians knew before the arrival of European explorers, poses difficulties flowing mostly from the lack of the usual evidentiary foundation for doing history: written documents (for example, letters, speeches, treaties, constitutions, laws, books, newspapers, magazines, almanacs). This lack need not be a major obstacle to historical study, however. Indeed, one of the most important things we can accomplish in teaching this period is devising ways to give students a sense of the spectrum of methods that historians use to investigate and understand the past. We can give students a sense of the breadth and depth of the historian's task and the remarkable array of tools and techniques available to the historian to find out about the past. In seeking to understand the first human beings who settled North and South America either 15,000 or 40,000 years ago (the dates are a matter of vigorous historical dispute), historians use some or all of the following: archaeology (digs for artifacts, examinations of burial sites, close study of ancient constructions such as the cliff dwellings of the western United States, or the mounds left by the mound-builder peoples of the southeastern United States); comparative religion and folklore -- the study of creation myths, legends, and folktales told by Indian peoples; medicine -- tracing such biological factors as human bloodtypes to show how different peoples (the Aztec, the Comanche, the Seminole, the Kwakiutl) may well share a common ancestry, or studying the differing responses of Indian and European peoples to diseases to illustrate how contact between the cultures occasionally proved fatal to the indigenous culture; geology, climatology, and ecology -- to reconstruct the land as the Indians found it, to identify the ways they lived off the land and in harmony with it, and to provide a basis for comparison between Indian and Europe...
