Unit 3: Reconstructing the Ancient Past - Sources, Methods and Schools of Thought
What Unit 3 asks you to do
Unit 3 is about how historians and archaeologists know what they claim to know. You must be able to classify evidence (written, archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, artistic), distinguish primary from secondary sources, and judge reliability, bias, provenance and corroboration. Learn the vocabulary of method: stratigraphy, seriation, typology, dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating and its calibration, context, and taphonomy. You also need the major interpretive traditions - positivist empiricism, the Annales school with its longue durée and attention to mentalités, Marxist readings focused on class and mode of production, feminist and postcolonial critiques of who is silenced, and postmodern scepticism about textual objectivity.
Traps candidates fall into
The commonest error is treating a source as a transparent window rather than a constructed artefact: a victory inscription tells you what a king wanted remembered, not necessarily what happened. Another trap is confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence - a gap in the record may reflect survival conditions, not historical reality. Students also over-claim from single finds and forget that dating methods carry error ranges. Watch for questions that ask about interpretation but are answered with mere description.
Rule of thumb
For any source, run the four-step test: Who made it, for whom, when, and why? Then ask what independent evidence corroborates it. A claim supported by two unrelated source types (for example, an inscription plus excavated destruction debris) is far stronger than two copies of the same tradition.
Worked example
Asked to assess a royal inscription boasting of a conquered city, do not simply quote it. Identify the genre (commemorative propaganda), the audience (court and gods), the date relative to the event, and then seek archaeological corroboration such as burning layers or abandoned occupation. Conclude with a calibrated judgement: the inscription is reliable evidence for royal ideology, less reliable for the scale of conquest.