Here are some notes from Michael Shanks about historiography - documenting the past. The particular subject is the use of narrative in archaeology - building stories about the past on the basis of what remains.

Empirics.

Heretical empirics * - against the grain, disrupting conventional narrative. (It can never have just been that way).

Here is something I wrote as an introduction to such an exercise.

This experiment (Three Rooms) continues such an exercise in empirics. Along the lines of the historiography of Benjamin (1999) or of Gumbrecht (1997), it attempts to compound its sources, layering them in the presentation rather than redescribing them as a working model, plotting them in narrative, or seeing through them to what may be conceived as really going on. I want to try to hold on to the empirical texture of our archaeological sources. A broad context is therefore the search for a method that is specific to its object (see Shanks and Tilley Reconstructing Archaeology 1992, page 47-49, on this argument in Critical Theory). More generally, I am drawing on an old classical, indeed philological, tradition of source commentary and critique (see Shanks 1996, Chapter 4).

A project of manifestation.

Contrast social archaeology

Social archaeology is often considered as modeling the past. Some social or cultural process or logic is held to account for, to explain what is observed in the archaeological record. Interpretation, as another mode of social archaeology, may be conceived as reading though archaeological traces to perceive some deeper understanding of what was going on in the past. Social archaeology may present a model of an ancient economy, or an interpretation of a prehistoric ideology: in both, the empirical traces of the past are, necessarily and indeed appropriately, reduced to a process, subsumed within the model, or seen through, treated as symptoms of some underlying reality. This reduction can be part of what I have called the fallacy of representation or expression (Shanks Art and the Early Greek State 1999, Chapter 2) - that artifacts, for example, somehow represent or express someunderlying process, or that our accounts of the past are somehow in a relation of identity or similarity (through mimesis) to what happened in the past. In my work on the Greek city I added to analysis, explanation and interpretation manifestation - letting the material display itself (though this heretical empirics is not merely descriptive - see particularly Shanks Art and the Early Greek State 1999, Chapter 3).

At the heart of empirics is the database. We might well begin in this most traditional of ways - with approaches to classification, record and document that are implicitly prior or even antithetical to narrative - think catalogue, gazeteer, glossary; or wiki.

What does this look like? Try my chapter about the perfume jars (Chapter 3 in Art and the Early Greek State). Or try Three Rooms.

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