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A condensed history of archives, and archiving, might go something like this: Man invented agriculture. (More on that "man" later.) Writing followed soon after as a way of keeping account of the land and its produce. Across the globe, at its several different independent sites of invention, writing, skill in which was initially restricted to scribal elites, was a tool for those in power, a kind of external memory system, allowing them to keep track of production and trade and levy taxes across the years.1 Records were generated. With agriculture, there was a need for storehouses for grain; with writing came a need for storehouses for records. Rulers accruing power through their control over resources invented the archive as a mechanism for consolidating and reinforcing that power. Over the millennia, with the gradual, fitful expansion of states and their bureaucracies, writing came to be used to record more and more things (poetry, mythology, divination, music, and math, to name a few) and archives expanded, too. Official records of one kind or another now occupy thousands of miles of shelves and many terabytes of computer hard drive storage space (the United States National Archives alone currently contains 10 billion pages of records and 133 terabytes of data, and it preserves less than 5 percent of government records generated in any given year).2 Archives have become, incidentally, useful to historians and other sorts of scholars.
According to this story, archives are sources of history, but they are also its subjects, sites with histories and politics of their own. Recognizing this, the history of archives, or archival studies, a field that is closely affiliated with the study of paperwork, information management, and the material page, seeks to understand archives as such.3 It understands archives as the product of decisions made by a range of stakeholders, from those who wrote the papers they contained, to the archivists who have processed and cared for them, to the state bureaucracies and officials who have determined which records were saved and which were destroyed, to the scholars who have excavated their contents over the years. No archive is innocent.
Historians, and other scholars who rely on archives, do well to understand the histories that have shaped them: these histories constrain the kinds...