History & Archaeology Research: Archives, Journals, Standards

History and archaeology share a research base of primary evidence: documents, objects, sites and the records made about them. The field is organised by learned societies and a few shared journals. In the United States the American Historical Association, founded in 1884 and chartered by Congress in 1889, publishes The American Historical Review and keeps a Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct. The Organization of American Historians, founded in 1907, publishes the Journal of American History. For archaeology, the Society for American Archaeology publishes American Antiquity, Latin American Antiquity and Advances in Archaeological Practice, the Archaeological Institute of America (1879) publishes the American Journal of Archaeology, and the European Association of Archaeologists (1994) publishes a code of practice alongside the European Journal of Archaeology.

Funding comes mainly from the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose grant categories include digital projects, preservation and access, and fellowships, from the Mellon Foundation, and from the American Council of Learned Societies fellowship competitions.

Practice rests on shared standards. Radiocarbon results are reported against the current IntCal calibration curve with the software named. Archaeology in the United States is bound by Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and by NAGPRA (1990, revised regulations effective January 2024), and internationally by the 1970 UNESCO Convention on illicit trafficking in cultural property. Texts are encoded in TEI, museum records follow CIDOC CRM, and images are served through IIIF.

Data and archives matter as much as publications. The Archaeology Data Service, Open Context, Europeana and HathiTrust hold deposited data and digitised sources, and Historical Abstracts indexes the literature. The specialisation pages in this hub cover each sub-field's own sources and methods.