Introduction people Many other fields of research also contribute to our understanding of how people lived in the past The story of the ancient world spans the globe and covers vast amounts of time It is the largely overlooked story of the tremendous diversity in human experience, ranging from the ice age societies whose way of life is so remote from ours to the citizens of Greece and Rome whom we easily recognize from history books During the million years since we became human, members of our species have settled every corner of the earth and organized their lives in countless different ways The articles in this encyclopedia will provide you with an overview of the various ways in which people lived in the past and point to sources where you can find more information about the topics that interest you To learn about the modern world, all we have to is look around, travel, read, or watch a video about what we cannot see But we cannot travel back in time to see what life was like several thousand or several hundred thousand years ago We cannot hear an ancient Roman speak, nor can we meet a Stone Age hunter in Siberia We have to rely on researchers to piece together many different bits of evidence to come up with a picture of past life A lot of the pieces are missing Many people say that it is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but it is a puzzle in which most of the pieces are missing and, worse, there is no picture on the box The people who study the humans of the past call themselves various names Archaeologists excavate and study the physical traces of past societies, called sites and artifacts, while physical anthropologists study the remains of ancient humans to learn about their evolution, health, and genetics Researchers who study both the archaeology and the physical anthropology of the earliest humans are called paleoanthropologists Historians and epigraphers study the texts and monuments of ancient civilizations, while historical geographers examine the ways in which past societies interacted through exploration and trade Paleobotanists and archaeozoologists study the remains of the plants and animals that were used by ancient people, while geologists study events in the earth’s history that may have affected the lives of nearby SOURCES OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE ANCIENT WORLD Scholars who study the ancient world have many sources of information to reconstruct life in the past The most important categories are ancient sites, ancient artifacts, and ancient texts, supplemented by information on the ancient environment and climate These are the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that researchers must fit together SITES Ancient sites are the locations where human activity took place in the past Since there are many different types of human activities, there are diverse types of sites The most important are settlements, burials, and ceremonial sites, but any location where ancient people performed some activity and left traces behind can be considered an archaeological site Settlement sites are probably the most common form of ancient site, for they are the locations where people lived These can range from Stone Age caves to the residential parts of cities such as Athens and Rome All settlement sites have characteristics in common that are of special interest to archaeologists The first special characteristic of most settlement sites is that people built structures of various types In the Stone Age cave they might have built a hearth by digging a pit and lining it with stones, while in larger settlements they built houses and other domestic buildings, along with storage pits, barns, and other necessary structures The other important feature of settlement sites is that people create a tremendous amount of rubbish, and this rubbish contains a lot of information for archaeologists In addition to the broken tools, pots, and other equipment of daily life, it also contains animal bones and charred seeds that provide information on the ancient diet xxv