![]() ![]() (To be fair, on average people died young because the super young died often-a lot of children never grew up.) Some archaeologists and historians are interested less in what we should eat now, however, and more in understanding ancient menus. You may know someone on a "Paleo" diet, meaning they avoid processed foods on the theory that it is healthier to eat like our ancestors did 10,000 years ago, when their life expectancy was about 35.Discuss with your team: is it okay to breed animals to serve as props in these kinds of exhibits-and does it make it better or worse if they used for food, or taken home as pets? To make the experience more realistic, some of these museums have diligently bred versions of animals that look more like their counterparts in the past: wilder pigs, gamier hens, dogs that are less Pomeranian and more wolf.Discuss with your team: would it be better if they were-or would this be a different form of exploitation? Would it ever be okay for someone not of tribal descent to staff the Native American area of the museum? What if they weren't tribe members but had adopted tribal practices and cherished tribal customs? One concern: that the tribe members staffing a Native American settlement recently added to the museum are not descendants of the actual tribe the Pilgrims first encountered. The museum has recently been criticized for not paying enough attention to the indigenous peoples displaced and given smallpox by those same Pilgrims. Consider Plimoth Patuxet in Massachusetts, where visitors can explore a colonial village and take selfies with healthy Pilgrims. The most famous of these museums can also be the most controversial.Discuss with your team: do such living history museums offer valuable lessons in culture and history, or should we treat them mainly as entertainment-more Frontierland than the Smithsonian? Should schools take field trips to them? For those who can get visas to China, and local families on their first post-Covid-zero outing, the Millennium City Park in Kaifeng offers a hundred acres of life in the Northern Song Dynasty (a Northern Song Dynasty in which food vendors take WeChatPay). At Heritage Park in Calgary, Banff-bound hikers can stop to pose for photos (and eat 19 th century ice cream) with locals dressed up as Canadians from the days of fur trading and the occasional American invasion. Consider the Spanish Village in Barcelona, where travelers and scavenging scholars can efficiently inspect 49,000 square meters of historical buildings and tilt at old slides with Don Quixote. Those who find traditional history museums a stuffy procession of rusty spoons and dusty dioramas may want to explore an open-air alternative: "living history museums" where one can time travel on the cheap.The director Spike Jonze is credited with saying that "the past is just a story we tell ourselves." Is it? If so, could reconstructions of the past help us agree on what the story is-or will different people reconstruct different pasts?.Has the pandemic forced a healthy reimagining of past practices, like attending school and working at a real office, or should we go back to the way things were?."Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is a phrase many people repeat, but is it possible that those who do study history are doomed to absorb the worst things about it? Would it be better if we could scrub history clean and start over again with no memories of what came before us?.Taking it more literally, however: is the present really a unique point in history? If so, does it make it harder for us to understand what the past was like? The phrase "there's no time like the present" is usually meant as an antidote to procrastination.Is there a difference between remembering the past and reconstructing it?.Does it matter how the world came to be what it is, or should we focus on what it has become-and what we want it to be? In other words, is reconstructing the past a good use of time when we could instead be inventing the future?.What would you ask someone who was alive a thousand years ago, if they popped out of a very high-tech time capsule? Of everyone who was alive in the world back then, who would you want to talk to?.Should we ask our parents or grandparents, or other older people in our lives, to tell us what the world was like when they were growing up? If so, can we trust them to remember things accurately, or to share them honestly?.If you wanted to learn about a certain time in the past, would you rather read a book, visit a museum, watch a documentary, or explore an old architectural site?.What do you think the world was like a hundred years ago? How about the exact place where you're sitting or standing or lying down right now?.All new content are marked with an dagger symbol (‡). Editor's Note: a small number of items in this Starter Kit has been updated on for style and conciseness. ![]()
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