ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what I consider to be the most useful tool given to archaeologists by historians. The grand achievement of the French school of historians known collectively as the ‘Annales’ movement, from the journal where their work continues to be showcased, has been to deploy in-depth knowledge of the historic eras of Europe to create a brilliant and effective methodology for analyzing human society over time. Two central principles lie at the movement’s heart: first a holistic attitude to using all sorts of information relevant to comprehending how societies functioned and changed, in which scientific, artistic, literary works accompany traditional historical sources in archives and formal histories. Second, and more useful for prehistorians, comes a layered approach to time and historical process, most famously expounded by the notable Annales’ historian Fernand Braudel (1972). To really account for the way the Past developed one needs to dissect the evidence along three parallel axes: the Time of Events (what happened and was observed by contemporaries in their lifetimes), the Medium Term or Moyenne Durée (trends only visible in retrospect and occurring over generations or centuries and not usually cognized by contemporaries) and finally the Long Term or Longue Durée (trends occurring over many centuries, millennia or even longer and till the Modern Era also not cognized by contemporaries). In this chapter I will seek to illustrate not only how all three levels of Annaliste waves of time are detectable in prehistory, but also what we can learn from this ‘Structural History’ approach for deciphering our Past.
