This assignment is similar to your “There’s Always Something New in Prehistory” assignment. You will find a credible online secondary source (article, video, or blog by a specialist or in a newspaper or scientific journal) concerning a discovery about an Ancient Civilization, and write a one-page analysis of that source. Please note that once again, while the article/blog post/video etc. should be a secondary source, the discovery that it discusses should be based on primary sources. Whichever article, video, blog post, etc., that you choose should also have been published no earlier than 2015, i.e. I am asking that you find secondary sources on recent discoveries. As with the “There’s Always Something New in Prehistory” assignment, this assignment gives you practice in finding and evaluating a credible secondary source, and lets you practice critical thinking and communication by summarizing the secondary source and explaining its significance to our course. If you will recall, a secondary source is a source that comes to us secondhand, i.e., not straight from someone who was involved with an event. It can include reviews, articles, analyses, etc., of events or time periods, and is often written by a historian, archaeologist, anthropologist, or journalist. This is in contrast to primary sources, which are firsthand/eyewitness accounts of an event/time period. By now you have read many such primary sources. For the prehistoric era, there are no written secondary sources available because those societies were preliterate. Thus, primary sources for the prehistoric era are primarily archaeological. Many (though not all) ancient civilizations, however, did have writing. The secondary source that you will choose for this assignment can therefore be based on a discovery involving written materials from an ancient society. More often than not, though, the discovery will also be archaeological; the ability to write in ancient times was usually quite limited and, in addition, many ancient texts have been lost. Therefore, historians of the ancient world still get much of their primary source information from the remains of the civilizations they study. For more detailed information on the difference between primary and secondary sources, please read: https://libguides.calstatela.edu/primarysourcesLinks to an external site. What civilizations can we consider to be “ancient”? For purposes of this assignment, I am defining ancient as relating to any civilization we have studied and read about in Bentley and Ziegler from Mesopotamia through Rome or Axum (Aksum), as well as other societies existing in a similar timeframe that also demonstrated certain traits. These traits include urban development, social stratification, sophisticated, organized religion, and advanced agriculture. Ancient civilizations were commonly organized around a state, but today historians also recognize that not all developed societies have states – some are stateless. Moreover, historians used to see writing as a hallmark of civilization, but today we recognize that not all ancient civilizations had writing. For example, the Olmecs of Ancient Central America are considered an Ancient Civilization, but there is no evidence that they had writing. If you have any doubt that the article, etc., you have found is about an ancient civilization as opposed to a Paleolithic or Neolithic society (or for that matter as opposed to a Medieval society), please contact me and I will tell you whether your proposed article is suitable. Once you have found, read, and thought out how the secondary source relates to our course, then you are ready to write your short, 1-2 page paper. In the paper, you should explain the recent discovery about an Ancient Civilization by summarizing the relevant information (who, what, when, where, and how the research was conducted, and its significance). l.
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