Sources

This book describes a long period during which writing was completely unknown or not commonly practised. Moreover, it deals with a time long ago and oral information is therefore also lacking. We do not know the people at all, except for roughly the last thousand years and then only fragmentarily. This implies that most of this book is based on information obtained through excavations. Information on crop plants, farm animals, tools, buildings, land, all rely on archaeological sources. This hampers our knowledge to a considerable extent as will be explained below. But even when written sources are available, these are of limited value.