For example,say that you remember climbing the Eiffel Tower.To remember this is to presuppose thatyou visit-ed the tower. But if the concept of your continue

All our memories are reconstructed memories

The brain abhors avacuum. Under the best of observation conditions, the absolute best, we only detect, encodeand store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us, and they'restored in different parts of the brain.

Testimonies and artifacts, whether oral or written, may have been in-tentionally created, perhaps to serve as records, or they might have beencreated for some other purpose entirely. Scholars sometimes think of thefirst as having had an "intention," the second as being "unintentional." Infact, however, the distinction is not as clear at it may at first seem, for asource designed for one purpose may come to have very different uses forhistorians. For example, a film taken to record one event but which inad-vertently captured ano

testimonies are the oralorwritten reports

relicsorremains,

ourc~s are artifacts ~hat have ,~een~eft,~Ythe past. T~ey e~ist eitheras rehcs, what we might call remams,oras the testlmomes of wit-nesses to the past.