Exploiting excavation archives: Herculaneum from 1927 to 1961 as a case-study

International audienceWith the multiplication of excavations, archaeological research (and even rescue archaeology) increasingly faces sites previously explored and thereby has to deal with documentation made with different methods and of different scopes than those of today. Beyond the historiographical issues and differences in ways of describing the past as viewed from the present, such an archival documentation is generally fragmentary, often scattered between various institutions or in private archives. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a debate on an important issue: how might we best make use of previous material, from archival documents to publications