The Shang had a number of religious practices, one of which was veneration of dead ancestors; Shang people made sacrifices to and asked questions of their ancestors.
Ancient Chinese nobles sought to tell the future by writing on bone fragments or pieces of turtle shell and throwing those bones into a fire; the fortune seekers saw messages about the future in the cracks that formed.
Shang dynasty craftspeople mastered bronze, an alloy of copper and tin; bronze weapons gave Shang foot soldiers and charioteers a tactical advantage in combat.
The Mexican war was justified under the principle of Manifest Destiny <span />
Although science has come a long way in this regard, burials still often cannot reveal when the deceased person died, or even when exactly he or she lived. It also cannot tell much about the person's true beliefs, although it may give clues as to the profession or religion of the deceased.
What the burial can or cannot tell depends significantly on the age, complexity, and preservation of the burial itself, but generally there is a great deal that a burial cannot tell historians.
Renaissance Humanism – named to differentiate it from the Humanism we have today – was an intellectual movement which originated in the thirteenth century, and came to dominate European thought during the Renaissance, in which it played a considerable role in creating. At the core of Renaissance Humanism was using the study of classical texts to alter contemporary thinking, breaking with the medieval mindsets and creating something new.
