Archives played a critical role in the formation of History as a professional discipline. This focus encouraged a degree of detachment from ancient historians, who lacked access to archives in the narrow sense of curated documentary collections. In response, great efforts were made to create functional equivalents in the form of corpora of inscriptions or papyri alongside archaeological field reports. Even so, there has long been a lingering sense of qualitative difference, reflected in practices of academic training. More recently, critiques of the biases, power plays and silences of the archive as a means of studying the more recent past have helpfully broadened the concept and challenged earlier hierarchies of evidence. This growing openness helps realign the study of antiquity with that of later history.

Our session shows that ancient historians have access to datasets that are functionally comparable to archives broadly conceived. We introduce key archival resources that support ancient historical research, challenging misconceptions that sources for studying the ancient world are particularly scarce or excessively centered on elite literary texts. In fact, abundant and diverse evidence sheds light on the lived experience of many different segments of society and reshapes our understanding of their histories. Tying in with other sessions on ancient history at this meeting, we take a global approach.

Roman Egypt exemplifies ancient archival wealth thanks to its papyrological and numismatic evidence. More than 100,000 largely documentary papyri – such as census records, official correspondence, military documents, wills, letters, accounts, tax receipts, and payment orders – have been made accessible in online databases. These records illuminate administrative practices and provide crucial evidence for the study of social, economic, and demographic conditions. More than seven million coins recovered from Roman-period hoards enable reconstruction of circulation patterns, access to precious metals, and economic stress periods, illuminating widely shared experiences.

Archival materials are transforming our understanding of early imperial China. Archaeological recovery of texts on bamboo strips, wood, and silk has dramatically accelerated in recent decades. Originating from local archives discarded in wells, frontier documents from the northwestern periphery, and elaborate funerary contexts, these records raise fundamental questions about the cultural embeddedness and historical contingency of archives themselves.

Ancient DNA represents an entirely new type of archive. Over the past fifteen years, genetic evidence retrieved from organic remains has contributed substantially to our understanding of diseases, crops, migrations, and social structures across both non-literate and historical societies. Much like traditional archives, DNA requires critical treatment and triangulation with written and archaeological evidence, but offers a truly global and quintessentially human archive with unprecedented potential.

Finally, a recent database constructed from surveys of modern scholarship to compile vast numbers of standardized records from societies throughout the Holocene and around the world demonstrates how comprehensive data aggregation coupled with systematic statistical analysis allows us to test competing theories about socio-political development and assess cross-cultural trends. Taken together, these different kinds of archives hold out the promise of novel forms of historical inquiry supported by massive data collection and AI-assisted analysis.