Ethnohistory

Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history.

The Handbook of Middle American Indians, edited by archeologist Robert Wauchope was involved with creating a multiple volumes on Mesoamerican ethnohistory, published as Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, appearing in 1973.

"[4] In the mid to late 20th century, a number of ethnohistorians of Mexico began to systematically publish many colonial alphabetic texts in indigenous Mexican languages, in a branch of ethnohistory currently known as the New Philology.

[8] The field has also reached into Melanesia, where recent European contact allowed researchers to observe the early postcontact period directly and to address important theoretical questions.

[9] Ethnohistory grew organically thanks to external nonscholarly pressures, without an overarching figure or conscious plan; even so, it came to engage central issues in cultural and historical analysis.

Ed Schieffelin asserted, for example, that ethnohistory must fundamentally take into account the people's own sense of how events are constituted, and their ways of culturally constructing the past.

[13] Finally, Simmons formulated his understanding of ethnohistory as "a form of cultural biography that draws upon as many kinds of testimony as possible over as long a time period as the sources allow."