Studying Complex Societies - past and present

Topic 1: Studying complex societies, past and present

1. Explain how different academic fields in the social sciences concentrate on different means of studying societies in the past and present.

Economics: decisions about resource use, forces that affect production, consumption, trade, national and global economies, and standard of living

Geography: Earth’s physical features, political boundaries, and human alteration of the environment; how location and resources affect settlement and migration and cultural diffusion, the complexity of ecosystems

History: change and continuity over time, causes and consequences of events, and connections among individuals, their contexts, and events; changes caused by interactions among societies such as conflict, conquest, colonization

Archaeology: explanations of how people lived in the past and the evolution of complex societies reconstructed from artifacts and other data

1. Give examples of ways in which a current historical interpretation might build on, extend, or reject an interpretation of the past.

2. Give examples of how archaeologists, historians, geographers, economists, and political scientists work as teams to analyze evidence, develop hypotheses, and construct interpretations of ancient and classical civilizations.