ABSTRACT
The greatest challenge to contemporary history as a whole is arguably not the lack of access to official documents, but the difficulty of evaluating the credibility and comparative value of the increasing number of extremely diverse sources. In the case of Yugoslavia's dissolution and wars, this includes: newspaper articles; television footage; oral histories; resolutions, declarations and statements of a range of national and international organizations, institutions; declassified official documents; trial witness testimonies and various types of evidence generated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Sometimes, however, factual inaccuracies and source selection bias in the field of study of Yugoslavia's dissolution are not the results of difficulties in dealing with the mountains of evidence at the researchers' disposal. Any archaeology of myths and 'controversies' in the debates on the end of Yugoslavia bound to find the foundations of the myths and 'controversies' exactly in such warped cognitive realities about the foundations of historiographical practice.
