Question

Read the following literary excerpt:

In the dim, stone-vaulted archives of the historic mountain city, Teresa smoothed the brittle edge of a seventeenth-century ledger with a badger-hair brush. The official decrees that dominated the center of each page—proclamations of viceroys, inventories of royal bullion, and solemn declarations of imperial sovereignty—had faded into uniform, rigid calligraphy. Yet it was the cramped scribblings along the damp-stained margins that commanded her breath: a muleteer’s tally of borrowed grain, an anonymous botanist’s sketch of a mountain flower blooming between rock fissures, and a weaver’s prayer for rain in a year of drought. For thirty years, researchers had consulted these volumes solely to trace the genealogies of governors, overlooking the faint pencil marks pressed into the parchment by calloused thumbs. As the afternoon light slanted through the narrow window, Teresa understood that the true pulse of the era was not housed in the monumental declarations of state power, but quietly endured in the uncelebrated testimonies of daily life recorded in the periphery.

Which of the following statements best expresses the central theme of the passage?