We explain what the sources of history are, why they are essential and the characteristics of each type of historical source.
What are the sources of history?
The historical sources or sources of the history They are the set of objects, documents, testimonies and representations that provide the historian with relevant and significant information regarding the events that occurred in the past. It is the raw material of the historian's work, obtained in different ways and from different sources.
Historical sources are the support of any historical speculation or deduction, since without them there would be no information about the past. However, not all sources are equally reliable.
For this reason, the work of the historian is to contrast the sources and understand their context of enunciation, trying to recreate as much as possible the instant of its origin. Even unreliable sources provide information on how an event from the past was represented at the time, or on the various interests involved in recording it.
For the same reason, the researcher in the field is expected to go to the greatest possible number and variety of sources, and also to proceed to assess and interpret their sources, in order to recompose a table as close as possible to a truth historical, taking into account the necessary production context of the sources it uses.
For example, it is not the same to deduce the events of a battle of antiquity from a mythological saga, from the testimony of a soldier of the victorious side, or from the version of events elaborated much later by historians of the defeated side.
See also: Information sources
Types of historical sources
When classifying historical sources, a distinction is made between primary sources and secondary sources, as follows:
Primary sources. They are those that were produced practically simultaneously with the events that they record and make known, or that reach us without intermediaries, as they were made at the time. In turn, these sources can be classified into:
- Written sources. All those that depend on written language, such as treatises, literary works, Chronicles, documents, newspapers, inscriptions, etc. It is common to classify them into:
- Documentaries, when they are emitted by institutions or public entities, or are part of some kind of bureaucracy or formal registry.
- Periodic, when they are published or disseminated for informational, entertainment or other purposes, and are part of a continuous or daily publication.
- Literary, when they are part of written works of art, such as poems, novels, epics, songs, etc.
- Scientific, when they are the result of field investigations, direct observations or other tasks of the scientific thought.
- Personal, when it comes to personal writings made with the intention of recording someone's experience, such as memoirs, diaries, correspondence, or they were generated as support for other activities, such as notes, drafts, etc.
- Unwritten sources, such as monuments, paintings, utensils, ruins, oral testimonies, human remains, etc. They can be classified, in turn, into:
- Artistic, when they consist of aesthetic representations, such as sculptures, paintings, engravings, etc.
- Visuals, when they consist of Photographs, recordings of sound or audiovisual recordings, mostly from the 20th and 21st centuries.
- Oral, when it comes to the account made by someone who witnessed the events of the past, or some legend or story transmitted orally from generation to generation.
- Archeological, when it comes to human remains from the past, such as everyday objects, funeral objects, tools, or even tools, kitchen utensils, vehicle parts, buildings, walkways, etc.
Secondary sources. Also called historiographic, they are those that are elaborated from the primary sources, and that therefore offer a mediatized, partial or tangential vision of the original events. For example: history books, biographies, art treatises, archaeological documents, etc.
References:
- "Documentary source" in Wikipedia.
- "Historical sources" (video) at CEC-IAEN.
- "The sources of history" at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico.
- "Historical sources and their classification" in the Primary Virtual Educational Platform of the State Institute of Public Education of Oaxaca (Mexico).