Introduction

What the Annales school of historiography means to historians often differs from what it means to archaeologists. At least that is my perception as a historian who has published in Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations. For archaeologists, one attraction of the Annales approach may be that it provides a set of hypotheses, or at least rubrics, which enable them to integrate some of their data into a historical framework that is meaningful both to them and to a broader audience.

As a historian, however, I see the Annales approach less as a set of ideas than as a revolution in the concept of historical data. Nineteenth-century historiography was broad enough to encompass the precise attentiveness to documents of Leopold von Ranke's disciples, the hazy spiritualism of historians influenced by Georg Friedrich Hegel, and the attempts at scientific analysis of the Marxists. Yet there was comparatively little breadth in defining historical data. Some historians favored government documents and diplomatic correspondence.