Archives as sediments: metaphors of deposition and archival thinking

Abstract

In their Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, Muller, Feith, and Fruin compared the accumulation of archival materials with the geological process of deposit of sedimentary materials. This metaphor remained embedded in the European archival traditions and has continued to be discussed until the present, for instance, in the Italian archival literature. This paper explores, from a historical perspective, how and why this metaphor was adopted during the foundational period of modern archival science. The paper analyzes the links between geology and archival science as enterprises involved with historical reconstruction. The paper argues that as palaetiological disciplines, both shared a concern with issues of evidence in the study of individual, historically formed entities. Viewing the formation of archives as parallel to the deposition of sediments provided archival scholars at the turn of the twentieth century with a way of conceptualizing archival thinking as positive scientific knowledge of an essentially individual entity: the archives. This metaphor aligned archival science along with other historical sciences that could boast a measure of reputation and success. The metaphor also matched perfectly the modernist regime of historicity characteristic of the foundational period and culture of the modern archival discipline.