翻译——室内设计史.docVIP

大 连 理 工 大 学 本 科 外 文 翻 译 室内设计史 A HISTORY OF?INTERIOR DESIGN 大连理工大学 Dalian University of Technology CHAPTER ONE Prehistory to Early Civilizations Living in the modern, technologically advanced world, we take it for granted that a major portion of our time is spent inside, or “indoors.” We live in houses or apartments, we work in offices, shops, or factories, we study in schools and colleges, we eat in restaurants, we stay in hotels, and we travel inside automobiles, buses, trains, ships, and airplanes. To be outside is most often a temporary situation while traveling from one inside space to another. Human beings differ from other living creatures in this acceptance of inside space as the most usual environment for living everyday life. PREHISTORIC INTERIORS There have been human beings on earth for about 1.7 million years. The detailed record of events and developments that we call “history”stretches back for only about six or seven thousand years. Before the beginning of history we have only myths, legends, and guesswork to tell us what events occurred and in what order. Thus the questions of when and where people first learned to use shelters, and what the earliest shelters were like, have long been the subject of much speculation. Guesswork is aided in some measure by information that comes from two lines of inquiry. These deal with, on the one hand, prehistoric remains of various kinds known to archeologists and, on the other hand, with the current or recent practices of the “primitive” peoples usually studied by anthropologists. Prehistoric materials are physical objects, artifacts, or structures that date from times before the beginning of the recorded history of the regions where they exist. The term “primitive,”as used here, does not signify simple, crude, or inferior, but refers to peoples, cultures, or civilizations untouched by the modern technological world as it has developed during the few thousands of years for which we