Exploring non-archival trajectories of written artefacts: an introduction

Historians are biased.They tend to be strongly pro-archive, as archives, according to standard assumptions, enable their work.Archival silence is perceived as an existential threat to historical memory, since historians reconstruct the past from corpora of sources that are ideally well contextualised and interconnected.Historians hope for organised, intentional, and (at least theoretically) accessible record-keeping; based on that belief, modern historiography has often assumed that archives and historical consciousness are closely aligned and have coevolved.'Written artefacts' (Bausi et al. 2023) that have not travelled the archival high road from past to present are, of course, valued as historical sources, but are usually designed in special ways, indicating deficiencies or anomalies: stray finds, accidental survival, dispersed corpora, material seemingly counter-archivally preserved in wells, caves, and other 'weird' repositories. 1 This special issue of Archival Science aims to challenge these underlying assumptions.It does so by putting forward two major arguments that are closely connected, yet distinct: 1.The non-archival transmission of written artefacts is ubiquitous; it is the rule, not merely an aberration.The archival transmission of artefacts through time should be considered the exception rather than the standard option.