A source is an objectively given, material item from the past, created by human beings; a letter, for example, or a clay pot. But this item is not in itself a source. It can be called a relic of the past or a source object. If the relic is to achieve the status of source-material it must be evidence from the past, it must tell us something about it. The relic must be capable of being utilized to give some of the information that it contains in a latent form. It is the historian who turns the relic into a source through his interpretation. By posing questions to it from particular hypotheses (that do not themselves need to have any documentary basis) the historian forces the source to disclose information. Unlike the relic, the source is not, as a source, a material item, but has to be regarded as information that has been released. The information disclosed by the source, and in that sense the source itself, becomes an interplay between the source object and the historian, a meeting between past and present. It follows from this that while the source object is fixed, the very same source can disclose different and possibly conflicting information.

In previous chapters we have seen that source materials are not given once and for all but that they originate in the dialectical process between the relics of the past and the interpretations of the present.