9 - Annales and archaeology

Summary

The potential significance of the Annales school of history for archaeologists depends upon what is understood by “the Annales school of history.” As the relentless accumulation of human knowledge and the passage of time have conspired to break the totality of human understanding into discrete disciplines, subdisciplines, and specializations, so-called “interdisciplinary” adventures have become challenging, and sometimes seem heroic. The risk for appropriators of ideas and approaches originating in disciplines other than their own is that they will not properly understand them, or may wilfully misunderstand them, and thus will misapply them in a way that exposes the appropriators to criticism or ridicule. Social Darwinism is an apt example of such misapplied interdisciplinary appropriation. Yet how deeply must a scholar be steeped in the donor discipline to minimize the risk of such criticism? And, more to the point, if the conceptual borrowing proves of value for the receiving discipline, does this value outweigh the possible defect of the idea not being accurately and fully understood?

In consideration of these possible concerns, several propositions can be put forward regarding the papers contained in this book and their implications for archaeology:

First, the authors of the papers do not all understand the Annales school in the same way. Consequently, they apply significantly different insights deriving from their differing understandings.

Second, the Annales school itself does not have sufficient coherence and self-understanding to make appropriating ideas from it an easy or straightforward task.…