Abstract: We call our approach a documentary archaeology because it is wholly aligned with the intellectual goals, general methodologies, and objects of study characteristic of the discipline of archaeology. The only difference is that DALME does not rely, for its primary source of evidence, on descriptions of artifacts and objects generated by archaeologists and museum curators. Instead, we rely on descriptions of things generated by contemporaries in the act of reflecting on their own material world. Indeed, our goal is to lay the theoretical and methodological foundations of a novel approach for the study of past material culture. A documentary archaeology approaches things, as described in extant documents, as traces of the attributes and relational networks of objects that once existed, and aims to define a conceptual framework that would make it possible to draw legitimate comparisons between these textual things on the one hand, and museum objects and excavated artifacts on the other. Watch the symposium's video.