Scientific American September 1997 [antikvár]

From the Editors Making (Up) Fiistory God cannot alter the past," Samuel Butler wrote, "but historians can." Even in the absence of revisionist impulses—remember the better known maxim that history is written by the winners—anyone reconstructing past events will almost inevitably get parts wrong, either through errors of commission or omission. Strict deduction can go only so far at making sense of spotty physical clues and personal accounts (of whatever dubious reliability) before at least a measure of imaginative inference creeps in. Also, like the apocryphal blind men who felt parts of an elephant and assumed the whole animal was either like a snake or a tree or a wall, historians may unintentionally over-generalize from the relatively few details that they understand best. For archaeology, as an extension of history, the problem grows worse because time wipes away so much of the evidence. As Michael E. Smith points out in "Life in the Provinces of the Aztec Empire," the records most studied by archaeologists in Central America have generally been biased to reflect pre-Columbian Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Researchers made assumptions about how the other half lived, but they might as well have been guessing the habits of middle America by surveying the mansions of Bel Air. Real data to the rescue. After digging more extensively at sites outside the Aztec capitals. Smith and other archaeologists have started piecing together a more well informed view of the average Aztec's life and have learned that it was a richer, more cosmopolitan existence than had been supposed. You will find a description of their findings, beginning on page 56. a people's history is vulnerable to distortion, but per-haps a more disturbing finding is that personal histories are, too. We all know that memory is unreliable: we forget appointments, we misremember addresses, we're mistakenly sure that we've picked up our keys. We would probably like to think these lapses are confined to minutiae. But a growing body of psychological study demonstrates that with a bit of prompting, people can be convinced that they "remember" in detail totally fictitious events of major consequence. To paraphrase George San-tayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to invent it. Psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus reviews some of the research on "Creating False Memories," beginning on page 50. Obviously, these findings do not mean that every remembrance is untrustworthy, but they should be of concern to anyone involved in law enforcement, psychotherapy, journalism and other activities that depend on memory to get at the truth. CLUES to everyday Aztec life are in these figurines. JOHN RENNIE, Editor in Chief editors@>;ciam.com