ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some provocative attempts to open pathways to the past through reading the archive using the lens and questions of anthropology. This means, first, turning essentially historical sources into ethnographic material and investigating it using innovation and, second, developing strategies to read these sources as if they were living informants. In this sense, we discuss the enormous potential to practice triangulation between different sources, whether written, oral or visual. These primary methodological challenges involved in the analysis of archives and other sources from the past entail the adoption of a processual view of society based on epistemological problems about the situated nature of researchers, the concepts they work with and ideas about time in their own societies and in the societies they analyse. This requires understanding what concepts about time and history each society has. A transcultural comparison reveals the existence of linear and circular conceptions of time, which have produced different concepts about history, and even its absence. In this sense, we pay attention to the notion of chronocentrism and the challenge of how to confront the tension between past and memory, considering the possibility of recognizing those people excluded from history.
