Assam HSLC Class 10 Elective History cheat sheet

Historical Method, Sources and Historiography

• Primary sources are contemporary with the event (inscriptions, coins, charters, letters, diaries, oral testimony); secondary sources interpret them later.

• Source criticism has two steps: external criticism tests authenticity, provenance and date; internal criticism tests the credibility and meaning of the content.

• Chronology conventions: BCE counts backwards, there is no year zero, and a radiocarbon date is reported as BP (before present, conventionally 1950) with a laboratory error range.

• Numismatics, epigraphy and palaeography are the disciplines for coins, inscriptions and ancient scripts; the Ashokan Brahmi script was deciphered using the bilingual Greek-Brahmi edicts.

• Archaeology: stratigraphy (law of superposition) orders layers; relative dating uses typology and seriation, absolute dating uses radiocarbon, thermoluminescence and dendrochronology.

• Heritage categories in India: the Archaeological Survey of India (1861) protects centrally protected monuments; the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention governs World Heritage listing.

• Historiographical schools: colonial/imperialist, nationalist, Marxist, subaltern (Ranajit Guha), and Annales; each selects different evidence and asks different questions.

• Bias and corroboration: a single source is never sufficient for a factual claim; historians triangulate independent sources and distinguish fact, inference and opinion.

• Oral history and Buranji-type chronicles are legitimate sources but require checking for genre conventions, patron interests and transmission errors.