Introduction

The articles in this section are based on a Social Science History Association roundtable organized in 2008 in response to Donna R. Gabaccia's presidential call "It's about Time: Temporality and Interdisciplinary Research" (see Gabaccia 2008; see also Gabaccia 2010). Her emphasis on questions of periodization resonated with concerns with which we had grappled for a decade. The questions that the roundtable and these articles address initially emerged from our experiences as teachers of a course on world history with a temporal frame of a few centuries (1450 to the present). But the course that really forced us to confront the challenges of periodization is one we introduced in the fall of 2009 on "the family from 10,000 BCE to the present." In trying to connect research from around the globe on the domestic group as a site of world history to narratives that begin with human origins, we were struck by the inappropriate presumptions embedded in most conventional periodizations. Our inherited vocabulary of terms to describe eras, ranging from "the Neolithic revolution" to "early modern," implicitly place all regions of the globe on a yardstick measured against European temporalities and based on activities typically gendered male.¹

Gabaccia's (2008) call homed in on key questions in this respect: "The 2008 Program Committee especially seeks panel proposals that will focus on questions related to time. . . . How does periodization of the past figure across disciplines? . . . What are the advantages and disadvantages of treating time as a sequence of distinct eras rather than as a continuous flow, a progression or evolution, or a repeating cycle?" Questions of temporality, as Gabaccia suggested, manifest themselves differently across the disciplines, and they have huge implications for how scholars conceptualize historical change.

Among historians there is increasing interest in problems such as how to examine human life in the context of a chronologically "deep" history of the world as a material environment or why we should rethink the conventional line between "history" and "prehistory."² Some of these concerns have emerged from or been shaped by interdisciplinary conversations. In the process of thinking about the history of the family across the millennia, we necessarily delved into the realm of archaeology in particular. It occurred to us that encouraging a conversation among historians (of ancient and the modern eras) and archaeologists would be a fruitful way of addressing challenges that teachers and scholars face when grappling with the big problems of temporality, periodization, and "the historical record" in the framework of world history.

The scholars whose work is included in this special section complicate conventional periodization schemes and concepts in provocative ways. This special section brings some of this exciting cross-disciplinary conversation to the attention of readers of Social Science History and also, we hope, will highlight the potential for further engagement across this particular disciplinary border.

Our article, "Temporalities and Periodization in Deep History: Technology, Gender, and Benchmarks of 'Human Development,'" opens the section with a critique of inherited periodizations from the explicit perspective of scholars and teachers of world history. We work in the particular terrains of modern Europe and Ming (aka early modern) China, and we have been looking to the scholarship of archaeologists for analyses of family dynamics in early human societies. We start with a discussion of the connections between the domestication of humans—that is, the move of kin groups to settlements based on residential units—and the domestication of plants and animals. One challenge of this project involves the problem of trying to discuss the relatively simultaneous emergence of agriculture in different parts of the world in the face of a developmental temporality and vocabulary (e.g., "the Neolithic revolution") that we inherit from older, and now largely abandoned, archaeological traditions rooted in Europe and the Near East.³

In addition to its Eurocentrism, we suggest, this vocabulary of periodization rests on the centrality of one particular technology—that of stone tool manufacture connected with hunting and warfare—that marginalizes other important technologies. We then turn to research by feminist archaeologists and social archaeologists who have been developing frameworks and techniques...