📚 How to solve these questions: 12 tips for all 6 Interactive Reading question types, with a worked example for each.
Popular accounts of ancient societies rely heavily on monuments, for a reason that has nothing to do with their importance at the time. Stone survives, and the buildings that survive were commissioned by the small number of people who could commission buildings. The resulting picture is accurate about temples and 1 about almost everything else. Corrections have come from unglamorous sources. Analysis of household waste indicates what ordinary families actually ate, which frequently 2 the diet described in official inscriptions. Isotopes in teeth reveal where a person grew up, and the results show far more 3 between regions than the textual record suggests. Neither method depends on anyone having decided that ordinary life was worth recording. This creates a tension the field has not fully resolved. Written sources are rich, specific, and produced by people with reasons to 4 what they said. Material evidence is impartial in the sense that a rubbish pit has no agenda, and it is also mute about intention, belief, and everything that made a society coherent to the people inside it. The most convincing recent work treats the disagreement between the two as the 5 rather than as a problem to be resolved. When an inscription claims a city was fed by tribute and the bones indicate a local diet, the gap is itself informative, since it tells you what the authors of the inscription wanted people to believe.