Historical archaeology at the interstices between archaeology and history

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between the disciplines of archaeology and history through the lens of historical archaeology. This is not a unified subdiscipline and has indeed been defined in various ways. Here, the term will be used as a shorthand for (later) medieval, post-medieval and contemporary archaeologies. Historical archaeology is first and foremost archaeology focusing on material remains and producing knowledge claims about the past (history) from things. But it can complement and confront the data gleaned from the material sources with other types of evidence (textual, pictorial, oral), so it is an archaeology with texts. This represents a methodological and epistemological challenge. An uncritical reliance on textual information over the material has often been warned against as “the tyranny of the historical record”. Many (historical) archaeologists have been inspired by various historiographical concepts and approaches, such as cultural history, the Annales school of social and economic history, Braudel’s concept of the longue-durée, the history of the everyday (Alltagsgeschichte), and microhistory. Conversely, the knowledge produced by archaeologists tends to be disregarded by most historians. This is unfortunate, as the material evidence offers important insights into past lifeworlds and should not be ignored.

Keywords

• historical archaeology
• medieval archaeology
• post-medieval archaeology
• archaeology and history