Archaeology and history: a fruitful dialogue?

This is part of a series of posts commissioned by History Matters in response to the award of the MacArthur ‘genius’ prize to the historian Robin Fleming for her work on archaeological sources. All of the blogs in this series will appear here as they are posted.

In September, the early medieval historian Robin Fleming was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called ‘genius grant’. The MacArthur Foundation’s website praised Fleming for supplementing “the fragmentary and elite-focused written record with comprehensive consideration of material evidence unearthed by archaeologists” in her recent book, Britain after Rome.

For some archaeologists, though, there was something faintly scandalous about the award.[1] The issue was not whether Fleming personally deserved the prize or not. Rather, what riled was the implication in the reporting that archaeologists need historians to interpret their finds for them, and that a historian was apparently being lauded for innovation, just for doing what archaeologists did in their day-job. Underlying this controversy is the relationship, in other words, between the two disciplines of archaeology and history.

There’s no denying that the relations between these two disciplines have sometimes been fraught in the past. Some archaeologists have angrily denounced the ‘tyranny of the historical record’, suggesting that the mere use of written sources subordinates the material to the textual;  others have even attempted to turn that subordination on its head, claiming that history is really a subdiscipline of archaeology, since all written documents (till recently, anyway) have had physical forms (parchment, paper, etc).[2] Historians have responded with what seems like a supercilious indifference, or perhaps worse, condescension, briefly dipping into the material record to “illustrate” a textual argument. These tensions have often been at their most intense over the early Middle Ages (Fleming’s specialism, and mine), when the textual record is thin, and material evidence abundant.

In more recent years, though, the tensions have faded. Now there are few archaeologists who would object on intellectual grounds to reading the works of the Venerable Bede, and few in history departments who do not take the material record seriously, and respect the expertise of its excavators. And rightly so, given that much of the evidence makes a nonsense of the notion of dividing disciplines according to the nature of their preferred source. Manuscripts are indeed physical objects as well as text, but the same is true of many coins. And what should we do with objects like the one shown above, an early medieval stylus, used for writing on wax tablets? Arguments for the absolute priority of text over object, or object over text, break down when confronted with this kind of material. Anyway, specialists in the early Middle Ages – the so-called Dark Ages – just can’t really afford to be picky over their evidence.

So, does this mean all sources equally important and valid in their own way? In absolute terms, yes, of course. But – it’s also equally true that for certain questions, some forms of evidence are more useful than others. For instance, it would be pointlessly self-limiting to study patterns of trade in the early Middle Ages from texts alone, just as it would be self-defeatingly narrow to seek to understand concepts of time using only the material record.[3] And of course, the questions one asks are products of the discipline in which one works, in a process of engagement with both peers and predecessors. In reality, then, the division between archaeology and history is only superficially between two different forms of evidence: it’s actually between two intellectual traditions developed and refined over decades.