List of Auxiliary Sciences of History

The auxiliary sciences or auxiliary disciplines are those that, without fully devoting themselves to a specific area of ​​study, are linked to her and they help her, since their possible applications contribute to the development of said study area.

Most of the auxiliary sciences of the Story have to do with specific fields in which it may be interested, such as the Literature, an autonomous and independent area of ​​the to know, whose encounter with History gives rise to the birth of the History of Literature: a punctual and specific branch.

This type of meeting serves the themes of interest and the contents addressed by History, and can be recognized because they open up new segments of the historical study, of which they become the object of study.

The other possible case attends to disciplines of existence inseparable from History as such, and that attend to the methods, to the forms of understand documentation or address historical events or even how to record and record file. Such is the case of the

Chronology, for example, whose objective is to fix the temporal order of historical events on a timeline.

The latter can often be referred to as the historical sciences.

List of auxiliary sciences of History

1. Economy. Just as this social science studies the ways in which man transforms nature for his benefit, that is, the ways of producing goods and services and satisfy human needs with them, its connection with history opens up a whole branch of study: the History of the Economy, which delves into the changes that society has given in economic matters since our the beginning.
2. Literature. As we have seen before, literature and history can collaborate to give rise to the History of Literature, a form of the History of Art. much more focused on its object of study, since it focuses on the historical evolution of literature from its first mythical forms to today in day.
3. Chronology. As we have said, it is a subdivision of History, focused specifically on the temporal ordering of events. Its name comes from the union of the Greek words Chronos (time) and Logos (writing, knowing).
4. Epigraphy. Auxiliary science of history and also autonomous by nature, focuses on ancient inscriptions made of stone or other durable physical supports, studying their preservation, reading and decoding. In this, it is also linked to other sciences such as palaeography, archeology or numismatics.
5. Numismatics. Perhaps the oldest of the auxiliary sciences in history (born in the 19th century), it is exclusively interested in the study and collection of coins and banknotes officially issued by any nation in the world at a given time. This study can be theoretical and conceptual (doctrinal) or historical (descriptive).
6. Paleography. Auxiliary science in charge of the critical and systematic study of ancient writings: the preservation, decipherment, interpretation and dating of the texts written in any medium and from ancient cultures. It is often found in close collaboration with Information Sciences, such as Library Science.
7. Heraldry. Auxiliary discipline of history that systematically describes and analyzes the typical figures and representations of the coats of arms, very frequent in families of lineage in the past.
8. Codicology. Discipline that focuses its study on ancient books, but understood as objects: not so much their content as the way of making them, their evolution in history, etc., paying special attention to the files, codices, papyri and other forms of information support of the antiquity.
9. Diplomat. This historical science focuses its attention on documents, whatever their author, attending to the intrinsic elements of writing: the support, the language, the formality and other elements that allow extract conclusions on their authenticity and allow their correct interpretation.
10. Sigillography. Historical science dedicated to the stamps used to identify letters and documents of official provenance: their specific language, their conditions of creation and their historical evolution.
11. Historiography. Often considered meta-history, that is, the History of History, it is a discipline that investigates the way in which constructs the official (written) history of the nations and the way in which it was preserved in documents or in writings of some nature.
12. Art. The study of art is a completely autonomous discipline, which focuses its interest on the various forms of manifestation of art in human society and tries to answer the infinite question of what thing is. However, when combined with history, they produce the History of Art, which only contemplates art. in the passage of time: the initial forms it had, its evolution and its way of reflecting the passage of time, etc.
13. Right. Like the two previous cases, the collaboration between History and Law produces a branch of historical study that circumscribes its object of study to the ways in which humanity has known how to legislate and administer justice, from ancient times (especially the Roman era, considered of vital importance for our understanding of justice) to the modernity.
14. Archeology. Officially Archeology is the study of the ancient remains of disappeared human societies, in favor of the reconstruction of the life of ancestral peoples. This makes your object of interest broad, as it can be books, art forms, ruins, tools, etc., as well as the ways to recover them. In this sense, it is an autonomous science whose existence would be impossible without History and which, at the same time, provides important evidence regarding its theoretical formulations.
15. Linguistics. This science, interested in the languages ​​of man, that is, in the various systems of signs available for its communication, can often be joined with history to constitute Historical Linguistics or Diachronic Linguistics: the study of the transformation in time of the methods of verbal communication and of the different languages ​​invented by the man.
16. Stratigraphy. This discipline is a branch of geology, whose object of interest is constituted by the ordinances of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks in the earth's crust, visible in cases of cuts tectonic. By collaborating with History, he gives birth to archaeological stratigraphy, which uses this knowledge on stones and strata to establish the history of surface formation land.
17. Mapping. A branch of geography, interested in the methods of spatial representation of the planet, that is, the elaboration of maps and atlases or planispheres, can collaborate with history to form the History of Cartography: a mixed discipline that seeks to understand the historical development of man from the way in which he represented the world in his maps.
18. Ethnography. Ethnography is, broadly speaking, the study and description of the peoples and their cultures, which is why many consider it a branch of social or cultural anthropology. The truth is that it supplies history with a lot of information, since one of the tools most used by ethnographers is the Life history, in which individuals are interviewed and their life trajectory is used as an approach to the culture to which belongs.
19. Paleontology. Paleontology is the science that studies the fossils of organic beings that inhabited our world in past times, with the desire to understand how they lived and better understand the enigma of life in the planet. In this they are very close to history, since they address the times prior to the appearance of man, giving historians the opportunity to think history before History.
20. Philosophy. The science of all sciences, Philosophy, is supposed to be the science occupied with thought itself. In conjunction with history, they can give rise to the History of Thought, a study of the changes in the way of thinking about himself and the universe of man from ancient times to today.

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