Editorial: Microhistory and Archaeology

Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo

doi:10.1515/opar-2024-0006

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Editorial: Microhistory and Archaeology

Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo

Published/Copyright: June 27, 2024

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From the journal Open Archaeology Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

This is an introduction to the Special Issue on Microhistory and Archaeology.

Keywords: microhistory; archaeology; history

By definition, archaeology is a mixed discipline with a unique epistemological status among the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Moreover, in recent decades new hybrid approaches have been developed in order to understand the functioning of past societies and the social and heritage dimensions of material culture. Consequently, concepts, approaches and perspectives from other disciplines have been incorporated. They have greatly enriched the research agenda and theoretical framework, although the original disciplines may have rejected or abandoned these concepts, which they considered to be outdated.

As a result, in the last three decades archaeologists have been paying attention to major topics such as time, space, agency, sciences and materiality. Indeed, archaeology today no longer merely focuses on antiquity, but has introduced powerful concepts such as multiple temporalities. In the same way, the major theoretical and methodological approaches to landscapes and territories have opened up new avenues for dealing with previously marginalised people and evidence. The so-called Third Science Revolution is a disruptive trend designed to produce new archaeological paradigms. New Materialism refines the understanding of the relationship between people and things.

However, other subjects have yet to be addressed or need to be in the mainstream of archaeological discussion. In particular, this issue focuses on scale, the tension between local and global following the decline of the grand narratives in social sciences, and the implications of the generalisations arising from singular case studies that are the major raw archaeological research data. This is particularly notable in a context marked by a huge number of poorly documented rescue excavations, which is one of the major problems of our discipline, as well as the emergence of Big Data approaches.

The main reason for promoting this special issue has been to open up a discussion on the multiscale dimension of archaeological inferences, taking into consideration the experience of microhistory approaches developed since the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Although there are numerous approaches to microhistory, it is useful to propose a common ground for defining the subject, taking mainly into consideration the Italian experience, highlighting how microhistorical approaches have been introduced into the study of the archaeological record and suggesting some topics for discussion.

1 The Italian Microhistory Path

All the commentators suggest that there is no single microhistory but different experiences, studies and scholars who fit into this framework. However, there is a consensus that the Italian experience has some relevant interests and particular traits (Ginzburg, 1994). In general terms, Italian microhistory production can be divided into two main periods. In the first (1975–1995), microhistory arose as a reaction to serial history, structural approaches and ethnocentrism, as well as the rise of narrative and cultural history (Levi, 2019). The three characteristics of this approach have been a micro-analysis of singular events, villages and communities; the intention to deal with great historical questions considering high-resolution case studies; and the role of the agency of singular individuals compared to the previous accounts of social history (Magnússon & Szijártó, 2013). Other secondary traits have been the attention to subaltern groups, the heuristic nature of conflicts, the role of the Modern Age, and the extensive use of the anthropological perspective. The most significant contribution of Italian microhistory has been to theorise the small scale and multiscalar analysis (Wickham, 2017).

Although the significant exponents of these practices considered this episode closed before the new millennium, I believe that we can envy a second generation of Italian scholars who have focused on the spatial dimension of social action (spatial turn) and the role of social practices rather than agents (Revel, 2006; Torre, 2011). As a result, new studies in the last few years have followed this approach, reframed in a new intellectual methodological and social context (Ago, 2006).

2 An Ecumenical Church

However, the micro-historical tag can be found in other historical traditions, sometimes with some affinities to the study of material culture and landscapes. The first comprehensive international survey was published almost 10 years ago, offering a complex framework using national approaches (Magnússon & Szijártó, 2013). All these studies share some common ground: small-scale analysis, the cultural history approach, the role of narratives and the focus on modern history and everyday context. Today, new initiatives from an international perspective are relaunching the role of the microhistory approaches (Bertrand & Calafat, 2018; Cohen, 2017; Ghobrial, 2019; Pérez Piñón, Hernández Orozco, & Trujillo Holguín, 2019).

Considering this broad approach, microhistory is not just a limited episode in historiographical terms but a fertile and relevant approach destined to prevail over time. Indeed, Chris Wickham has argued that “microhistory, in this respect, has not gone away, and will not go away; it may be historiographically located in the recent past, but it marks the future of the discipline too” (Wickham, 2017).

3 Microhistory and Archaeology

Archaeologists have long been interested in historical innovations and microhistory approaches. The microhistory approach and archaeological research share clear similarities, given that the starting point in both cases is singular small case studies. However, the idea of microhistory in archaeology has been proposed widely and sometimes even contradictorily.

Some authors have considered microhistory a scale of analysis, the cultural biography of things, places or landscapes, the study of households, daily lifestyles, osteobiographies and even the professional biographies of archaeologists (Beaudry, 2015; Borić, 2007; Díaz-Andreu & Portillo, 2021; Hosek, 2019; Magnússon, 2003; Pauketat, 2001).

Only a few scholars have explicitly considered the microhistory approach proposed by Italian historians and usually only the Carlo Ginzburg production (Ginzburg, 1994; González Ruibal, 2019).

Artur Ribeiro has proposed two paths to use a microhistory approach. On the one hand, this perspective allows the conciliation between explanations based on external constraints and human agency. On the other, microhistory can replace the middle-range theory to fill the gap between the archaeological record and interpretation with a long-term historical perspective (Ribeiro, 2019).

Charles Orser has embraced the idea of singularising the past to reinforce archaeological interpretations by exploring social networks and connectivity within specific historical contexts (Orser, 2016).

Italian postmedieval archaeology has received the microhistorical experience directly, producing relevant contributions aligned with historical production (Stagno, 2018).

More recently, Corinne Riva and Ignasi Grau recalled a microhistorical method for promoting genuinely global archaeology, considering the variability of scales across time and space (Riva & Grau Mira, 2022).

4 Goals of This Special Issue

This special issue brings together eight different experiences from prehistory to the contemporary age. The vast majority of the papers are explicitly theoretically informed, providing a good starting point for understanding the scale and multiscale analysis in archaeology, in particular in the context of the emergence of global archaeology. In addition, the papers have challenged the Cartesian contrapositions top-down vs bottom-up and micro-scale vs grand narratives, promoting more integrated approaches. Finally, the papers consider various types of evidence (oral, material, writings) and scales of analysis (objects, households, sites, landscapes, regions).

Summing up, this issue intends to relaunch the discussion regarding the multiscale analysis of archaeological research in light of the microhistory experience.

5 Microhistory and Archaeology: Contents

Nicolas Poirier

Contribution of the Microhistorical Approach to Landscape and Settlement Archaeology: Some French Examples

Tânia Manuel Casimiro

Female Microhistorical Archaeology

Antonio Blanco-González

Microhistory, Conjectural Reasoning, and Prehistory: The Treasure of Aliseda (Spain)

Artur Ribeiro

On Traces, Clues, and Fiction: Carlo Ginzburg and the Practice of Archaeology

Ben Jervis

Urbanity, Decline, and Regeneration in Later Medieval England: Towards a Posthuman Household Microhistory

Carlos Tejerizo-García

Unveiling Local Power Through Microhistory: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of Early Modern Husbandry Practices in Casaio and Lardeira (Ourense, Spain)

Jesús Bermejo Tirado

Microhistory, Archaeological Record, and the Subaltern Debris

Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo

Two Sides of the Same Coin. Microhistory, Micropolitics and Infrapolitics in Medieval Archaeology

quiroscastillo@gmail.com

Special Issue on Microhistory and Archaeology, edited by Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo.

Funding information: Publication of the Special Issue on Microhistory and Archaeology has been supported by the project “Archaeology of the local societies in Southern Europe: identities, collectives and territorialities (5th–11th centuries) (PID2020-112506GB-C41)” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Research Group in Heritage and Cultural Landscapes (Government of the Basque Country, IT1442-22).
Author contribution: The author confirms the sole responsibility for the conception of the study, presented results and manuscript preparation.
Conflict of interest: Author states no conflict of interest.
Data availability statement: The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Received: 2024-03-27

Accepted: 2024-05-02

Published Online: 2024-06-27

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2024-0006

Keywords for this article

microhistory; archaeology; history

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