Certain complex societies in the Old and New World alike generated numerous documentary records or prompted diverse ethnohistoric accounts. As a result, written evidence tends to dominate sociocultural interpretation, frequently at the expense of material evidence. In the study of past politico-economic or sociocultural processes, it is important to create a dialogue between material and written evidence, neither of which logically supersedes the other. In this regard, Annales-onentzd research has been exemplary in its attempts to combine material, documentary, and theoretical approaches to the past into a single human science approach.

A series of seminars presented at the University of Sydney – Rhys Jones, Roland Fletcher, Bernard Knapp (Prehistory); I. Wallerstein (History and Economic History) – first suggested the possibility of producing a volume that would explore the concept of time in archaeology, and the Annales approach to the study of the past. Subsequently, at the First Joint Archaeological Congress (Baltimore, MD, January 1989), seven papers in this volume were presented in a symposium entitled ‘Archaeology and Annales: Towards Resolution of the Archaeological-Documentary Dilemma.’ Two papers presented in Baltimore (J. G. Lewthwaite, J. A. Greene) are not included in this volume; studies by P. Duke and A. Sherratt have been added, and R. Bulliet contributed the historical overview.

An Annales approach demands that equal consideration be given to continuity and change, whatever the medium that reveals them.