El archivo tallado: documentos de piedra y barro en la iglesia de San Antolín de Bedón

Archives are defined as a organic whole of records; structured groups of recorded data with an «archival bond», proof of administrative and legal actions. Although new means of codifying information have changed recently the traditional state of affairs, giving rise to «hybrid fonds» in which new types of records are kept alongside conventional ones, this is not entirely novel: this is not the first time that a single process has been used for issuing and receiving both ordinary documents and others information-bearing objects that, without using the written word, relied on social conventions to provide proof of rights and to bear witness to activities with legal relevance: records «avant la lettre», so to speak. Is the case of the medieval stone mason’s marks, sometimes used as signatures or seals to constitute proof of economic rights: reliable legal instruments which bear witness to the rights and obligations that hold between two parties, making them records/archives in the true sense of the word, accumulated and deposited “stratigraphically,”inside the fonds as a structure and outside the archive as a physical place