SOURCES OF HISTORICAL DATA

SOURCES OF HISTORICAL DATA

Historical data are sourced from artifacts that have been left by the past. These artifacts can either be relics or remains, or the testimonies of witnesses to the past. Thus historical sources are those materials from which the historians construct meaning.

Relics or remains offer researchers a clue about the past, for example, relics or remains of a prehistoric settlement. Artifacts can be found where relics of human happenings can be found such as a coin, a ruin, a manuscript, a book, a portrait, a stamp, a piece of wreckage, a strand of hair, or other archaeological or anthropological remains.

Testimonies of witnesses, whether oral or written, may have been created to serve as records. All these describe as event, such as the record of a property exchange, speeches, and commentaries.

Two Main Sources of Historical Data

1. Written Sources

2. Non-Written Sources

Written sources are usually categorized in three ways:

1. Narrative or literary – are chronicles or tracts presented in narrative form, written to impart a message whose motives for their composition vary widely. For example, a scientific tract is typically composed in order to inform contemporaries or succeeding generations.

2. Diplomatic sources – are understood to be those which document or record of an existing legal situation, in which professional historians treat as the purest or the best source. A classic example is the charter which is a legal instrument. A legal document is usually sealed or authenticated to provide evidence that a legal transaction has been completed and can be used as an evidence in a judicial proceeding.

3. Social documents – are information pertaining to economic, social, political, or judicial significance. They are records kept by bureaucracies in the form of government reports such as municipal accounts, civil registry records, property registers, and records of census.

Unwritten sources are as essential as written sources.

Two Types of Non-Written Sources

1. Material evidence – also known as archaeological evidence, is one of the most important unwritten evidences. This include artistic creations such as pottery, jewelry, dwellings, graves, churches, roads, and others that tell a story about the past. These artifacts can tell a great deal about the ways of life of people in the past and their culture.

2. Oral evidence – is also an important source of information for historians. Much are told by the tales or sagas of ancient people, and the folk songs or popular rituals from the pre- modern period of Philippine history. During the present age, interviews is another major form of oral evidence.

There are two general kinds of historical sources:

1. Primary sources – are original, first-hand account of an event or period that are usually written or made during or close to the event or period. Their sources are original and factual, not interpretive, and their key function is to provide facts.

Examples of Primary Sources

• Diaries

• Journals

• Letters

• Newspaper and magazine articles

• Government records

• Photographs

• Maps

• Postcards

• Posters

• Recorded or transcribed speeches

• Interviews with participants or witnesses

• Interviews with people who lived during a certain time

• Songs

• Plays

• Novels

• Stories

• Paintings

• Drawings

• Sculptures

2. Secondary sources – are materials made by people long after the events being described had taken place to provide valuable interpretations of historical events. A secondary source analyzes and interprets primary sources. It is an interpretation of second-hand account of historical event.

Examples of Secondary Sources:

• Biographies

• Histories

• literary criticism

• books written by a third party about a historical event

• art and theater review

• newspaper or journal articles that interpret