In-Situ Sociological Studies
From the very earliest records of sociological and anthropological observations, much is taken for granted or glossed over and not actually verified. Making individuals produce tools without circular dependencies is an exacting process and requires substantial effort on the part of the studied people. This includes Margaret Mead and her study Coming of Age in Samoa.
Synthetic Micro Environments
This strategy "brings the mountain to Mohammed". Rather than having the sociologist or archaeologist go to the source, the environment to be studied is recreated in a more convenient place, and experiments are done within it.
Experiments with various technical scopes and time scales have been carried out in academia.
|Prehistoric||10||Thor Heyerdal's Kon-Tiki||Peru; Pacific Ocean; Raoria, Tuamotu|
|Iron Age||n/a||Butser Ancient Farm||Hampshire,United Kingdom|
|Viking||10||Roskilde Viking Ship Museum longship builds||Aarhus, Denmark|
While there are vast numbers of historically themed venues oriented toward visitors (Rennaisance Fairs in the US and UK, Park Asterix in France, etc.) there are also hybrid set tings where education and research are carried out in tandem with the profit making enterprise. Some of these include:
|15th Century||Dozens||Guedelon Castle ||Burgundy, FR|
|18th Century||One Hundred||Colonial Williamsburg ||Virginia, USA|
|18th and 19th Centuries||One Hundred||Old Sturbridge Village ||Connecticut, USA|
More recently the television industry has created programming involving specially prepared closed environments based on a historic or hypothetical premise, in which the partici pants or volunteers live for the duration of the production.
|N/A||1||Naked Castaway ||Ed Stafford||Discovery Channel.|
|N/A||2||Naked and Afraid ||Renegade 83||Discovery Channel.|
|N/A||The Island ||Bear Gryllis||BBC Channel 4|
|Ice Age||10||I, Caveman ||Morgan Spurlock||The Science Channel.|
|Iron Age||15||Living in the Past ||The BBC||The BBC|
|19th Century||13||Frontier House ||Hoppe & Shaw||PBS|
|21st Century (Postapocalyptic)||10||The Colony ||Metal Flowers Media||Discovery Channel|
Literature has been exploring the concept of small-scale recreations of civilization for more than 300 years.
- See Robinsonade at Wikipedia
An entire subgenre of literary work which deals with stories of the recreation of civilization by small groups of people.includes stories such as.
- Robinson Crusoe
- Swiss Family Robinson