ABSTRACT
Humans have been writing stories for centuries for a number of important reasons: to teach, to preserve history, to entertain, to share news, to maintain traditions, and to persuade. But, the ways in which humankind have written stories has been in large part influenced by technologies, and stories have taken on many forms over time from books to baskets to jewelry to calendars. By studying the calendar systems of ancient Egypt, Egyptologists, for instance, are able to piece together stories of ancient civilizations. Uses of a lunar calendar tell of a civilization that was reliant on agriculture. Today’s societies are not much different from those of years past in terms of wanting and needing to tell and understand the passage of time. Today, we also utilize various calendars to remind us of and to record historical, cultural, political, financial, religious, educational, and weather events. In Chapter 7, readers will contemplate how technologies, like that of a calendar, tell the stories of their creators and users as well as the very places they inhabit. The history of a people is indeed the story of its technologies.
