Anthropology and history are inseparably linked. We do not refer just to the scholarship derived from written documents, but to the primacy of chronological perspective, whatever “texts” must be consulted. In the narrow, documentary sense, there is a growing history of anthropology, which productively decodes the discipline's own archives. But increasingly one finds robust endeavors in anthropological history (incorporating traditional “ethnohistory”), and in historical archaeology (which consciously integrates the study of documents and material culture). In some parts of the world, ancient texts even extend such enterprises well back into antiquity. For the Maya of prehistory, the recent ability of scholars to read the Classic Period glyphs has opened the door to a political history of named actors, places, and dates.

As we observed in our Prologue, some scholars would extend historical anthropology to encompass an entire range of evidence well beyond written texts, and have labeled such an approach “holistic archaeology.”