For example when wars happened hundreds of years ago , how do we know certain events happened when written documents could have been destroyed or people keeping records could have been killed.
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Historians paint a picture of the past based on what artifacts a society leaves behind. These are called primary sources. Primary sources can be anything from simple everyday objects to written accounts of something happening, to talking with someone who lives through the event if we’re talking about more recent history. We can often make assumptions based on what we find, so say we find a rock that looks like an arrow head we can use chemistry to put a date on that rock, we can use the geography of where we found it to link it to a society, then we can make assumptions like “the ancient French people probably knew how to make bows and arrows since we found this arrowhead dating to 1000 BCE.”
Truth is a lot of the times we just kind of don’t know stuff and we make a lot of assumptions. If you take like a college level ancient history class you’ll find a lot of the stuff you read about will have big asterisks like a lot of Roman stuff will be like “we only have Caesar’s account of the battle he was known to exaggerate so these numbers probably aren’t accurate” or “in this conflict only the Greeks had a written language so we only have their perspective.” It’s also not uncommon for our understanding of certain primary sources to change like say finding an artifact from a time period thinking it was for religious purposes but then finding more information later that the object was like just a bowl or something. Of course as we study history and get closer and closer to today, the rule of thumb is generally we can paint a clearer picture of the time period because more from that period exists. The reason this is often glossed over in high school and lower grades is because it can make teaching about societies kind of confusing and often making small lies claiming we know more than we do is better for teaching than pausing the class every five seconds to be like “alright class Caesar wrote about this conflict so we mist assume that Rome didn’t actually kill a gazillion carthaginians in this one battle” and you’ll say like “Rome won the battle” instead to keep it simple.
There’s also sometimes where we will know very little to nothing about a society, the common example of this is Native American tribes found from the area making up modern US vs tribes in what is modern day Latin America. The stereotype is those US tribes had fewer permanent settlements, didn’t have writing systems, and often were wiped out before we learned much about them. Whereas the Latin American ones had permanent settlements had simple writing systems etc. so for the US natives we often only have either accounts from European colonists (often unreliable but all we have) or we have nothing. Where Latin American tribes we can find out more.
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