Organized knowledge

For people who are trained to write about the past, history is more than just “stories;” it is “organized knowledge.” In order to organize knowledge of the past, historians must draw evidence from a variety of sources.

For one of my upcoming books, I used many, many documents that were first published in Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and French.

In addition to documents, I draw evidence from oral traditions, archaeological digs, historical linguistics, studies of cultural patterns embedded in masks and other forms of material culture, regional and continental histories that provide essential context, and even biological anthropology.