Between Archaeography and Historiography: Unsettling the Medieval?

Abstract

Do archaeology and history refer to the same real past? Their relationship has been understood primarily as epistemic, as one of the distinct techniques for knowing different aspects or epochs of the past. When archaeologies of more familiar, historical, medieval pasts are conducted, why do these accounts enthusiastically find and lose, provoke and distress, their specialist kin; or why do historiography and archaeography relate uneasily?

This article argues that it is useful to think of archaeography and historiography as two sensibilities, two activities, and following de Certeau, as two operations. Each operation is governed by distinct protocols of generalisation, different aspirations of synthesis, distinct poetics that govern their texts and the account they wish to give of their subjects. Appreciating these differences, this article focuses on the foreclosures shared by both operations with reference to the tangle of the medieval. It asks, what comes to count as evidence and how, which questions arise and why, and what aspects of pasts termed medieval appear familiar, alien, or interesting. From these questions it builds an account of what archaeology can disclose about shared modern historicist commitments to the medieval and those uneasily kept out of its scenes.

This article grounds these questions through an engagement with South Asian medieval historiography on the theme of settlement. First, through a genealogy of settlement it examines the reasons for the concept’s centrality to accounts of medieval life, (modern) politics and the state. Through examples drawn from research in Mewat, it examines what these commitments to thinking about settlement disable and enable, the questions its assumptions exclude. It demonstrates how archaeologies of settlement bring into view questions of anteriority, and how attention to spatial relations of remove and accrual reverse figure and ground in accounts of dwelling. In light of these disjoinders, it asks, must we continue to close our operations, to write our medieval, in the manner we do?