ABSTRACT
The final chapter of the book examines questions about the relevance of current archival science to the records made, kept, and used in early societies. Can 21st-century archival thinking be of value to studies of the clay-tablet records of south-west Asia, the shufu repositories of early China, or the knotted-cord khipus of Inka Peru? How far can modern ideas about topics such as security, integrity, selection criteria, or provenance be applied to records and archives in early societies in different regions of the world? How far – if at all – did the aims and methods of early record-keeping resemble those of our own era? While there are dangers in assimilating the concerns and practices of early societies too closely to modern norms, we can perhaps identify points of similarity in the challenges that early record-keepers faced, if not always in the solutions that they adopted. People in early societies would not have articulated their concerns using the language of archival science, but we may sometimes find it helpful to employ archival-science concepts when we seek to construct interpretations of their record-making and record-keeping practices.
