Documentary Archaeology: Dialogues and Discourses

Oxford Handbooks Online

Documentary Archaeology: Dialogues and Discourses
Mary C. Beaudry
The Oxford Handbook of Historical Archaeology
Edited by James Symonds and Vesa-Pekka Herva

Subject: Archaeology, Historical Archaeology Online Publication Date: May 2017

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199562350.013.3

Abstract and Keywords

Documentary archaeology involves a process that is begun afresh for each archaeological
site or research project: that of constructing the archive through integrating differing
lines of evidence. For historical archaeologists, the archive includes written records, oral
traditions, and material culture; often elements of the archive provide overlapping,
conflicting, or entirely different insights into the past, requiring resolution and
integration because of differences in scale, completeness, representativeness, temporal
resolution, and lack of correspondence. This chapter explores how historical
archaeologists use and analyse textual sources in writing archaeological narratives and
considers the intertextuality of sources by analysing contrasting examples of success and
of failure in attempts to establish a dialogue between above-ground and below-ground
evidence.

Keywords: discourse analysis, documents, inscription, intertextuality, linguistic turn, literacy, text, writing

The imagination is at its most powerful and most fragile in writing that could be
said to be archaeological, that digs down in the dirt to bring other worlds to life.

Jennifer Wallace, Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination

1 The Significance of Writing and Literacy

Swedish scholar Anders Andrn, in his 1998 book Between Artifacts and Texts, defined
historical archaeology as the archaeology of all cultures that produced texts of any form,
regardless of time period. Andrn argued that historical archaeology is a methodological
approach that constitutes a dialogue between artefact and text. His definition of historical

Page 1 of 16

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 10 May 2017