According to our academic tradition, archaeology and history are inseparable brothers. Their goals are roughly the same, and they all take it as their responsibility to reveal the historical development law of human society. Therefore, Mr. Xia Nai compared archaeology and history in a narrow sense to the two wheels of a car and the wings of a bird, both of which are indispensable. Traditional historiography mainly digs research data from ancient documents. With the development of archaeology, history pays more and more attention to archaeology, and some key research fields of history are at a loss without archaeological society. As far as historical archaeology is concerned, archaeology and history are even more indistinguishable.
Theoretically, the main reason is that the research objects and methods are different; In the subject system, the two are independent of each other, with clear boundaries, and there is no question of who belongs to whom; When researchers study specific historical issues, they often use the data of the two, and sometimes it is even difficult to separate them (such as ancient philology).
Research object: Historical materials for historical research, and the most basic historical materials are documents, that is, written materials. Therefore, the history before the invention of writing, which has not been recorded by writing, is naturally a shortcoming in historical research. Archaeology studies physical objects, which are tangible and observable things left over from human activities, including relics, artificial relics and natural relics. Its characteristics are also obvious, that is, most of the relics themselves have no words, and archaeological materials can't speak for themselves, so they can only rely on people to endorse them; Moreover, not all human activities can produce tangible remains, and historical languages, philosophical concepts and belief systems may disappear without leaving any direct evidence.
Research methods: The nature of the research object determines that the research methods of archaeology and history are very different. Even if we study problems in the same field, it is basically a state of division of labor and cooperation in practical work, and few people can understand both. The basic way for archaeology to obtain information is field archaeological investigation and excavation, and the basic methods are stratigraphy, typology, burial, national archaeology and experimental archaeology. There are also various methods combined with natural science, which can be collectively called scientific and technological archaeology. It is not easy to generalize the special methods in history, which are called "indefinite methods in history", but the most basic ones are used to deal with documents, such as phonology, exegetics, edition, falsification, textual research, and slightly special ones such as comparison, measurement and psychoanalysis. There are exceptions, such as historical anthropology and oral history, which emphasize field work. Here, the concept of "historical materials" is.