The potential significance of the Annales school of history for archaeologists depends upon what is understood by “the Annales school of history.” As the relentless accumulation of human knowledge and the passage of time have conspired to break the totality of human understanding into discrete disciplines, subdisciplines, and specializations, so-called “interdisciplinary” adventures have become challenging, and sometimes seem heroic. The risk for appropriators of ideas and approaches originating in disciplines other than their own is that they will not properly understand them, or may wilfully misunderstand them, and thus will misapply them in a way that exposes the appropriators to criticism or ridicule. Social Darwinism is an apt example of such misapplied interdisciplinary appropriation. Yet how deeply must a scholar be steeped in the donor discipline to minimize the risk of such criticism? And, more to the point, if the conceptual borrowing proves of value for the receiving discipline, does this value outweigh the possible defect of the idea not being accurately and fully understood?

In consideration of these possible concerns, several propositions can be put forward regarding the papers contained in this book and their implications for archaeology:

First, the authors of the papers do not all understand the Annales school in the same way. Consequently, they apply significantly different insights deriving from their differing understandings.

Second, the Annales school itself does not have sufficient coherence and self-understanding to make appropriating ideas from it an easy or straightforward task.…

In recent years archaeologists appear to have rediscovered history. For many the Annaliste history of Fernand Braudel has proved especially attractive. In this paper it is argued that an overemphasis on the determinism of long-term structures, and the lack of a dialectical relationship between the longue duree and the history of events fundamentally flaws Braudel's enterprise. Drawing upon the work of sociologists and anthropologists like Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, an alternative theoretical perspective is provided and applied to further our understanding of the formation of hilltop towns in central Italy during the early Middle Ages. It is argued that this perspective, with its emphasis on the social contruction of reality and the recursiveness of the relationship between structure and agency, is similar to that of a later generation of Annales scholars like Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff. Annalisme is not rejected: le monde Braudellien is.

Little attention has been paid thus far to explaining either the different rates of cultural change in the archaeological record of the Northern Plains of North America or the epistemological relationship between the prehistoric and historic pasts of the area. These two problems are examined by combining Braudel's conception of time with more recent Annaliste explications of the relationship between structure and event. With specific reference to the later prehistoric and early historic record of southern Alberta, Canada, structures of mentalite are defined in prehistoric processing and procurement activities and traced into historic period gender relationships. Geographical structures are identified in subsistence activities. These structures were transformed through a recursive relationship with human action, manifested in specific events: the adoption of the bow and arrow and ceramics, and the arrival of European cultures. By denying the existence of the prehistoric and historic pasts as epistemologically separate entities, archaeology may be used to amplify specific ethnographic and historical studies, rather than the other way around, as is usually the case.

Archaeological and documentary evidence from the southern Levant's Middle and Late Bronze Ages (2000/1900–1200 BC) reveal two latent geopolitical structures. Documentary evidence relevant to the North Jordan and Jezreel Valleys (in the modern-day states of Jordan and Israel, respectively) is discussed as one independent data source. Archaeological material from the same region, and particularly from the North Jordan Valley site of Pella, is presented as a separate, independent data source. An Annales framework facilitates reciprocal examination of these two streams of evidence, and makes it possible to offer new perspectives on politico-economic factors that affected independent and imperial polities in the North Jordan, Jezreel, and Beth Shan Valleys between about 1700 and 1200 BC.

This paper discusses the need for a hierarchical arrangement of explanations used by archaeologists to deal with processes that occur over different scales of space and time. The aim is to define what type of hierarchy is needed. In a hierarchical structure of theories, large-scale processes cannot be reduced to small-scale ones and small-scale ones are not determined by large-scale ones. By contrast, a reductionist view holds that the nature of the smallest component sufficiently explains the largest system or is essential for a basic understanding of it. Hierarchical explanations are usual in the biological sciences, the earth sciences and the hard sciences, contrary to much misapprehension about them by humanistic disciplines. The trend is toward these integrative explanatory structures.

A version of hierarchical explanation introduced to history by the Annales school (Braudel in particular) suggests that it is not incompatible with studies of human beings. Biologists such as S. J. Gould have no difficulty in arguing that history – in the sense of successions of unique events – matters in a study of the vast patterns and processes of biological evolution, and is consistent with “science.” It follows that a history/science dichotomy in archaeology or any study of human beings is founded on suspect premises about the significance of uniqueness and determinism. Since biological, geographical, and historical theories are regularly used in archaeology, tacit hierarchical arrangements of theory are accepted but without a rigorously defined hierarchy of explanation.…

This paper applies insights from the work of Fernand Braudel to the problem of correlating archaeology and native history in Postclassic central Mexico. Two aspects of Braudel's model of hierarchical temporal rhythms are emphasized. First, Braudel's theoretical construct provides a useful framework for conceptualizing past time and processes of change in complex societies. Second, his empirical findings on the diverse types of socioeconomic change and their rhythms contribute to the dialectical interaction between changing research questions and chronological refinement. These points are illustrated through an examination of archaeological and native historical data on processes of socioeconomic change in Postclassic central Mexico. Greater attention to temporal rhythms and chronological issues leads to more successful archaeological/historical correlation in central Mexico and thereby helps advance our understanding of processes of change.

Microscopic problems of historical research can and should be made macrocosmic – capable of reflecting worlds larger than themselves. It is in this reflected flicker of truth, the revelations of the general in the particular, that the contribution of the historical method to social science will be found.

By and large, social scientists have not attempted to link the day to day events in the lives of individuals (ecological or synchronic processes) and the long term or large scale patterns of human societies (historical or diachronic processes).

This chapter relates Fernand Braudel's model of hierarchical temporal rhythms to current theoretical work on time and chronology in archaeology. The debate between Lewis Binford and Michael Schiffer over the existence of a “Pompeii premise” in Americanist archaeology serves as a point of departure, and it is shown that Binford's distinction between “ethnographic time“ and “archaeological time” is encompassed by Braudel's model. The varying temporal rhythms associated with diverse socioeconomic processes are relevant to the methods of chronology-building, periodization, and cultural reconstruction. It is argued that these associations need to be considered not only at the level of interpretation, but also at the levels of research design and data recovery. Chronology-building is an integral part of the research process, and Braudel's formulation contributes to an understanding of the dialectical relationship between changing research questions and chronological refinement.