Territory, Memory and Archives: Toward a Theory of Implicit Territoriality

1. Introduction

“…the present concern is fundamentally one of space, much more than of time. Time probably appears only as one of the possible distributive operations among the elements that are arranged in space” [1].

Although this article is presented as a theoretical reflection, its purpose is to contribute to the understanding of cultural processes that constitute central areas of inquiry within contemporary studies of heritage, identity, memory, and territory. It proceeds from the premise that cultural practices, heritage policies, identity formation, and the transmission of collective memory rely upon documentary infrastructures whose territorial dimension has received insufficient scholarly attention. In this sense, the conceptual framework developed here is not intended to replace empirical research but rather to provide analytical tools for its interpretation.

The notion of Implicit Territoriality makes it possible to approach archives as cultural institutions that actively participate in the production of collective meanings, the consolidation of senses of belonging, and the configuration of shared historical narratives. From this perspective, archives may be understood as fundamental components of processes of heritagization, memory politics, the cultural construction of local and regional communities, and contemporary forms of global circulation of documentary heritage. The framework is particularly relevant to the study of historical communities, ethnic groups, culturally differentiated territories, and transnational networks dedicated to the preservation and accessibility of memory.

The theoretical character of this article responds to the need for an interpretive framework capable of bringing into dialogue phenomena that are often examined separately—archive, identity, memory, and territory—and of providing analytical categories applicable to comparative research and case studies across diverse cultural contexts. Consequently, the article should not be understood primarily as a study of archives themselves, but rather as a theoretical proposal for understanding the role of archives in the cultural processes through which heritages, memories, and territorialities are produced, reproduced, and transformed. In this respect, it seeks to strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue among cultural studies, anthropology, archival studies, human geography, and heritage studies by offering a conceptual foundation for future empirical research on the relationships between memory, documentation, and territoriality.

This article is structured into six sections: the introduction, general considerations, archival management, the territorial scope of archives, conclusions, and references. The general considerations introduce concerns regarding contemporary forms of archives and the logic of political-cultural territoriality; the section on management addresses archiving and implicit territoriality; and the section on scope explains, through three groups of analogies, three dimensions of the archive: place, events, and records. The article concludes with final remarks and the cited bibliography.

The conceptualization, analytical strategies, and interpretation of the archive’s implicit territoriality are presented under the heading “archiving,” understood here as the ideational process of creating and shaping archives. The article addresses the following question: can an archive be conceived as an entity intrinsically linked to the territory–culture relationship, such that its particularity may be interpreted through this lens across different archival manifestations? Drawing on the notion of “Social Relations of Site” [1], it is argued that this is indeed possible, provided that such relations are understood as relations of place whose meanings are emically assigned by local inhabitants. In other words, these are social relations conditioned by where archives are territorially situated, distributed, located, and assembled.

These relations emerge through the functioning of archives within territorial facilities (buildings, centers, and other situated physical infrastructures). This spatial, social, and institutional dimension informs the ways in which archives define and reflect geographical and administrative boundaries. The implicit character of an archive’s territoriality arises because it can project relations of site into concrete territorial actions without the need to state them explicitly, in accordance with the spatial logics inherent to objects arranged within a physical, social, or political space.

Does the archive play a role in territorial planning and settlement? It does, and that role is significant. Archival practice depends not only on the spatial arrangement of its components, functions, and services in order to ensure social access to collections, but also on the ways in which the information contained in documents is systematized and, on the capacity to deploy that information across the territory. Archives concentrate cadastral records, plans, deeds, maps, censuses, ordinances, and institutional memories that constitute the documentary foundations of territory. The ways in which these materials are classified, described, and systematized directly influence the definition of boundaries, the management of resources, urban and rural decision-making processes, and the legal and administrative memory of space. In this sense, archival studies become part of a territorial information system whose organization determines which histories, actors, and uses of space become visible or invisible for planning purposes, while preserving the Derridean impulse of selection and exclusion that is equally characteristic of all forms of identity [2].

If the archive—both container and content—is organized as a library, structured as a museum, or architecturally designed as a warehouse, it foregrounds the aesthetic dimension of space, since aesthetics influences both functionality and social experiences of space. Thus, the architecture, visual identity, and internal organization of the archive contribute to the cultural construction of territory, positioning it as a key element in processes of settlement, planning, and the configuration of territorial identities.

2. Background

Archives appear to be affected by such subsumption. What, then, is their relationship to territory? And what is their relationship to identity? The answer lies in the memory–place nexus, a powerful and indisputable connection whose recognition emerges from important struggles for justice and democracy [3]. Yet this requires further strengthening of the arguments concerning the territorial drift of sites. Thus, taking archives in their immense cultural diversity as its point of departure, this article seeks to examine the evolution of implicit territorialities, insofar as they reflect and reveal the expansibility of places, understood as a form of territorial unfolding. The Regime of Expansibility therefore constitutes the mechanism through which the archive’s implicit territoriality becomes socially and territorially effective, projecting place-based meanings onto broader territorial scales.

Such a regime entails reciprocity operating through multiple pathways, influenced by the political-cultural projection of the site, and provides a stronger basis for conceptualizing “Implicit Territoriality.” To think territoriality through the archive —just as workshops have been conceived as sites from which communities articulate their historical projects [4,5,6,7]— is not a diversion but a necessary epistemological turn. For wherever memory is organized, territory is simultaneously being produced; therefore, a process of territorialization is always underway.

2.1. Memory, Archive, and Territory: Foundations

Contemporary scholarship has increasingly deepened the study of the relationships between memory, archives, and territory through convergent analytical perspectives. Studies of Indigenous and reparative archives by Christen demonstrate that documentary processes are inseparable from relations of belonging, reciprocity, and territorial repair [8]. Complementing this view, Hunt shows how colonial archives actively participate in the production of geographies of sovereignty, dispossession, and legitimacy [9], while Shepard demonstrates that postcolonial archival disputes are simultaneously disputes over memory, authority, and territorial control [10]. From another perspective, Richards (1992) argues that archives can operate as devices of political imagination capable of projecting spatial and social orders, highlighting the anticipatory and projective dimension inherent in every practice of archiving [11].

Research on cultural memory, heritage, and the living archive further expands this horizon; i.e. emphasize the capacity of archives to continuously update the contents they preserve, reactivating memories and projecting them onto new communities, contexts, and generations. Consequently, the archive ceases to be understood exclusively as a structure of preservation and becomes, instead, a mechanism for the cultural expansion of memory [12,13]. At the same time, other works demonstrate that transformed landscapes, reclaimed territories, and intervened habitats preserve material records accumulated over time that can be interpreted as long-term archives [14,15,16]. In turn, show how heritage infrastructures contribute to the territorial organization of collective memory through networks of places, monuments, and cultural facilities [17]. Taken together, these studies extend archival reasoning beyond conventional documentary institutions toward landscapes, habitats, heritage infrastructures, and territorial networks of memory.

Considered as a whole, this body of literature allows for the reconstruction of a conceptual sequence that is particularly relevant to the purposes of this study. Nora explains where memory is anchored by asserting that “memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects” [18] (p. 9); Casey explains why memory remains emplaced by arguing—in paraphrase—that places constitute active conditions for its preservation and renewal [19,20]; Tuan shows how spaces become meaningful places when “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” [21] (p. 6); Ricoeur helps explain how traces are transformed into history through processes of documentary interpretation [22]; Assmann demonstrates how such traces acquire continuity through cultural infrastructures of transmission [23]; Derrida reminds us that “there is no political power without control of the archive” [2] (p. 4), while Agamben defines the archive as “the archive is the system of relations between the unsaid and the said” [24] (p. 145), revealing the conditions of intelligibility that structure memory; Jelin [3,25,26] explains why memories become objects of dispute; and Raffestin helps us understand how these relations ultimately take shape as territorialities [27].

Yet this sequence remains incomplete so long as territoriality is understood solely as a condition of belonging or spatial appropriation. At this point, it becomes particularly important to recover Zambrano’s early anthropological reflections on culture, legitimacy, and historical projects. In paraphrasing his arguments, communities generate forms of collective recognition through culturally legitimized projects that orient social practices, shared aspirations, and modes of territorial organization [4]. Territories thus appear not merely as inhabited spaces but as historical realizations of collective projects that articulate memory, identity, and action [4].

Three decades later, Dematteis offers a convergent formulation from the perspective of human geography through his notion of the implicit project. Territories cease to be understood exclusively as inherited spatial configurations and are instead conceived as processes oriented toward desired futures [5]. Territoriality is not merely a consequence of existing social relations; it also operates as an organizing force capable of mobilizing resources, coordinating actors, and projecting collective meanings onto space.

Although they emerge from different disciplinary traditions, both authors converge on a fundamental intuition: territories are historical productions oriented by shared horizons of action. In this sense, Dematteis’ proposal may be read as a conceptual reinforcement of Zambrano’s earlier concern with cultural projects and the forms of legitimacy that sustain collective action. Where Zambrano identifies communities as producers of historical projects, Dematteis shows how those projects acquire territorial expression through processes of spatial organization, network articulation, and the construction of territorialities [4,5].

This convergence is especially relevant to the purposes of the present study because it allows memory, archives, and territory to be understood not only in relation to the preservation of the past but also to the production of socially imagined futures. Archives participate in this dynamic by organizing traces, testimonies, and documents that simultaneously serve to remember, interpret, and project. From this perspective, archives do not merely preserve evidence of previous historical projects; they also provide symbolic resources for the elaboration of new territorially situated projects.

From this perspective, archives are more than repositories of documentary evidence. They constitute cultural infrastructures through which memories, meanings, and relations of belonging are organized, interpreted, and projected territorially. This understanding provides the foundation for the analytical framework proposed in this article: Modes of Differential Documentation, Territorial Systems of Site, and Condensed Informational Potential. The interaction among these three dimensions generates territorialized subjectivities and makes it possible to understand the emergence of Implicit Territoriality as an inherent quality of archives and other devices for organizing memory. In this sense, archives may be understood as cultural infrastructures through which memories, sites, and meanings are articulated into territorially organized and continuously updated historical projects.

2.2. Territorialized Subjectivity

The interdependent relationships between archive and place contribute to shaping diverse territorial manifestations and representations. A territory is a “place of places” that must be governed, and territoriality—in as much as it constitutes a form of identity—functions simultaneously as a frame of reference and as a principle of action within each of them, thereby contributing to their governability.

No archive is autarkic; its collections contain memories of different places woven together through multiple events and interrelationships in which disagreements and agreements converge, as do the altruistic and self-interested exchanges characteristic of each. It may therefore be argued that, through an “archival studies of facilities,” it is possible to observe how an archive contains a territoriality of its own (internal and implicit), emerging from its site and its contents, which may in turn influence the configuration of the external territory. From this perspective, the Political-Cultural Projection of the Site can be characterized.

Following Dematteis, territoriality is both a source and a component of territorial politics because it seeks to “govern networks,” that is, to order the emergent territorialities of each place in the world [5] (pp. 44 ff.). This perspective further reinforces a territorial reading of the archive as a site. The genuinely political dimension of territory—territoriality itself—is situated both near to and distant from the archive’s physical space. Its narratives, performatively, site even as they are sited, enunciating the territorial as identity, subjectivity, or legitimacy.

Interrogating this capacity—Implicit Territorialized Subjectivity—its deployment and modes of operation, makes it possible to articulate the geo-socio-historical with political-cultural action. In practice, this articulation within territoriality constitutes the driving force of the historical projects underpinning territorial struggles, both as stimulus and as outcome. Territoriality is both source and component of the process insofar as it constitutes a relation of forces implicit within a project [4,5,6].

Implicit Territoriality, understood as Territorialized Subjectivity, affects communal life because it endows it with ethnic belonging (whether local, municipal, regional, or national). Its Regime of Expansibility encompasses, for example, flowers, trees, landscapes, music, traditions, foods, songs, and memories. Identity refers to community, and community, in the very act of delimiting itself, refers to territoriality; memory orients, updates, and renders all three intelligible. Within the archive, the intimacy of collective experience is organized, narrated, and projected into a renewed circuit of identity: a “we” situated within a space that recognizes, sustains, and locates it, and that acquires meaning through being narrated, selected, and projected by memory. These four dimensions form an inseparable assemblage: each function as expression, support, and condition of the others, such that invoking one necessarily implicates the rest.

Territories may be understood as the corollary of forms of territorialized subjectivity; that is, as expressions of an Implicit Territoriality manifested in practices, memories, and social relations even prior to their spatial materialization. Archives exemplify this process through their capacity to organize traces, order narratives, and project collective memories, thereby expressing the Implicit Territoriality that precedes and guides the configuration of territories. Jelin and Da Silva [3,25,26,28], from the perspective of geographies of memory, and Dematteis [5], from that of cultural assets, examine the role of contradictory collective aspirations in the production of territories, particularly when ordinary practices are oriented toward shared projects through coexistence and collective well-being [2].

2.3. On Archiving and the Archive

Can the archive be conceived as an entity intrinsically linked to the territory–culture relationship? As already suggested, the answer tends to be affirmative. This position is grounded in the objective presence within the archive of the political-cultural elements that configure a territoriality. Such elements forge territoriality through diverse collective practices of cohesion, governance, residence, and sustainability, which can be described and analyzed from the perspective of the reference group itself. In addition, territoriality is nourished by the contents of the documents preserved within the archive.

This image is reminiscent of the nocturnal songs of the Nukak-Makú heard in the forests of Guaviare. For one thing is the territorial organization of the Nukak, and another is the reinforcement of their territoriality through what their songs recount. If the analogy may be allowed, these songs would constitute something akin to the historical documents of the Nukak archive.

The singer narrated the group's memories while the others listened, swaying gently in their hammocks or completing the final tasks of the day. A sense of solidarity and companionship prevailed as the fire from the day's last cooking slowly died away, illuminating the scene. The territoriality of the archive is not immediately evident because it remains implicit; it is constructed gradually and somewhat contingently as one delves into the collections and events are progressively revealed—the Social Life of Documents [7]. Understanding this complexity is essential for enriching archival practices, particularly those related to organization, symbolic projection, and the social construction of the reality represented by the archive.

From a holistic perspective, this understanding makes it possible to appreciate how the territorial and cultural expression of an archive—whether personal, familial, local, regional, or national—reflects the influence of its Implicit Territoriality and contributes to the consolidation of collective identities. Such a notion of territoriality is not apparent at first glance; rather, it emerges gradually through engagement with the documents themselves. Understanding this Implicit Territoriality is therefore crucial for enriching archival practice.

In what sense can this relationship be useful for interpreting the particularity of the archive? It allows for a broader understanding of archives by arguing that their territorial and cultural expression reflects the specific ways in which Implicit Territoriality operates within each of them, thereby reinforcing the collective identities of place. At the same time, it offers a critique of purely metaphorical uses of the territorial and emphasizes that the aim is to foreground the territorial reality implicit not only in the notion of the archive but also in the other LAM institutions [29]. This perspective aligns with the hypothesis that archives produce territoriality because they are concrete expressions of territorially determined identity formations. It is for this reason that some authors have defined the archive as “the place of all places” [30], including Indigenous places [31], even when doing so requires the “(un)disciplining” of research [32].

Not all peoples possess spaces dedicated exclusively to archives—at least not in the sense in which we understand them today—but all possess times for remembering. There are individuals, men and women alike, who fulfill this function at the community, neighborhood, or family level, each with their own place and moment. Such a place might be a ritual setting or a Nukak hammock sheltered beneath heliconia leaves that serve as a dwelling, protect against the rain, and provide warmth during the night.

Mexico City maintained the position of Official Chronicler until 2007, a role that until then had been entrusted to a single individual. Since that time, the responsibility has been assumed by the Council of the Chronicle of Mexico City, an institution that recognizes the plurality of chroniclers, their territorial distribution, and the collective, cultural, and territorial purpose of their work: “we chroniclers did not wish to submit ourselves to a detested duty, for we do not wish to produce an official chronicle, but rather one committed” to the city [33].

2.4. Regime of Expansibility

The Regime of Expansibility of Implicit Territoriality is understood as the set of norms, procedures, relationships, and operations through which an archive projects, extends, and reproduces the territorial meanings embedded in its relational configuration. This follows from the fact that a regime is defined by the logic that organizes a given phenomenon, in this case expansibility. Accordingly, expansibility is not conceived merely as a process of spatial enlargement, but rather as the capacity to project territorial meanings across multiple scales. Such an understanding situates the concept within contemporary debates on scalarity, territorialization, and the production of meaning, while enhancing its theoretical integrative potential.

This capacity is grounded in the articulation of the Mode of Differential Documentation, the Territorial System of Site, and the Condensed Informational Potential (contents), which serves both as a source of and a constitutive component within Territorialized Subjectivities, highlighting that such subjectivities are not external to the archive but are generated through multiple forms of engagement with the contents it preserves, organizes, and renders intelligible. Together, these dimensions enable the traces preserved by archives to transcend their immediate location and acquire the ability to generate memories, identities, and spatial and temporal representations. In this sense, the archive operates not only as a repository of documents (which it is), but also as a mechanism through which territorially situated meanings are organized, circulated, and expanded beyond their original contexts, contributing to broader processes of territorial construction and collective sense-making.

Expansibility is both capacity and capability. Capacity refers to the ability to increase in size, volume, functions, or scope; capability refers to the functional skill through which such capacities are expanded [34]. The regime intertwines norms and procedures relating to three domains—gnoseological, epistemological, and anthropological—concerning the production of the territorial identity implicit in archives, whether LAM, GLAM, LAMMS [29], or ecological repositories such as the Colombian Community Seed Houses. It is gnoseological because it begins with knowledge of the archive and archival practice; epistemological because it concerns the contestation among convergent forms of knowledge involved in the territorial, memorial, and projective production of the “archive” [35]; and anthropological because it adopts a disciplinary perspective grounded in the recognition of political-cultural diversity. Since anthropology is fundamentally a place-based craft [36] (p. 195), the study of the archive begins by locating it: situated somewhere, established in a site, and embedded within a community [37,38,39,40].

An archive is the coupling of a threefold undertaking: the formation of collections comprising information, data, documents, records, letters, and related materials; the creation of the space through which these collections are organized; and the investigation of the hermeneutic community. The first corresponds to the Mode of Differential Documentation, the second to the Territorial System of Site, and the third to Territorialized Subjectivity. Archives may be personal (such as custodians of community memory), institutional (for example, judicial archives), communal (the neighborhood, village, or community itself), natural (a habitat or ecological niche), or object-based (libraries, newspaper archives, oral archives, sound archives, and similar repositories). This formulation highlights the archive’s ontological breadth and its deep roots in diverse territorial and cultural configurations.

Modes of access to and use of collections distinguish the substantive, adjectival, and operational dimensions of the archive’s territorial character as a particular system of site. Each of these dimensions is linked to the archive considered individually and therefore to notions of singularity, particularity, and specificity characteristic of the diversity of spaces, places, and settlements. In this sense, archives both denote and connote territorial diversity in its unique and individual expression. These distinctions, together with those that follow, make it possible to infer the archive’s Territorial Substrate and its multiple archival manifestations [41,42].

The substantive dimension consists of the Condensed Information Potential contained within documents. This potential emerges through the intervention of diverse perspectives and research interests—the Hermeneutic Capacity—which makes it possible to identify, characterize, and project archival materials. Such potential does not depend upon documentary volume but upon the analytical quality mobilized by researchers. It is inherent to each archive and resides within its documentary corpus, whereas the products derived from it result primarily from the division of archival labor rather than from the nature of the archive itself [43].

The adjectival dimension refers to the archive’s “surname”—historical, anthropological, geographical, and so forth—such that archaeological sites, historical archives, ethnic memories, trophic chains, or ecosystems may all be understood as archival formations. The operational dimension, in turn, refers to the organization, arrangement, functioning, and specialization that make possible the activation of Differential Documentation Regimes.

The hiatus between the Territorial Systems of Site and the Mode of Differential Documentation —despite their close interrelationship, each retains a distinct identity—allows for the deployment of a territorial substrate that varies according to cultural and spatial contexts. This hiatus reveals the intimate relationship between the archive, places of settlement, and the ways in which senses of communal belonging are organized; that is, between territoriality and its expansion. Expansibility thus constitutes a regime of territoriality. It is neither a metaphorical nor an accessory attribute within archival studies, but rather a constitutive—even structural—element whose identification is indispensable for a more holistic and political-cultural understanding of the archive.

3. Problematization

Contemporary archives face technological challenges and the digital management of information, the result of a profound transformation in a Territorial Systems of Site and a particular Mode of Differential Documentation that functions as a regime. These changes require treatment beyond the scope of the present article. Nevertheless, LAM institutions represent one strategy for addressing them, driven by the growing international recognition of the archival heritage value of archives [44,45,46,47,48,49,50]. In a certain sense, this recognition constitutes a response to the human need to preserve collective memory in the face of an uncertain future. Some authors have described this phenomenon as the “archival impulse” [6,51]. The documentation of human survival as we know it has become a global policy of archiving and enclosure: as the world appears increasingly fragile, urgent measures are deemed necessary to preserve traces of humanity’s passage through it.

The immense capacity for storage and the extraordinary forms of archiving now available evoke Borges’s short text “On Exactitude in Science” [52] (p. 325). Since everything is information and everyone produces it, anyone can archive in the cloud, whether they intend to or not. In the art of archiving—to paraphrase Borges—the ultimate aspiration would be to archive all the documents in the world, including those that do not yet exist. Every discovery, birth, and event exponentially multiplies the collection. Every occurrence can generate multiple interpretations, and all of them, without exception, begin and end with that occurrence, however insignificant it may seem. In time, archives—always excessive and yet always sufficient—may come to impose microscopic territories governed by their own algorithms.

Archives thus become dispositifs of civilization’s symbolic continuity. They are cultural signs of a tragedy yet to come, driven by the need to preserve, duplicate, digitize, stabilize, and encapsulate information—a need intensified by climatic, technological, and political uncertainty. The authors cited throughout this article, including [1,2,4,24,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61], each from their own theoretical perspective, incorporate into their anthropologies the processes through which the Political-Cultural Projection of the Site is channeled by means of Differential Documentation Regimes.

This section may be divided by subheadings. It should provide a concise and precise description of the experimental results, their interpretation, as well as the experimental conclusions that can be drawn.

3.1. Archival Practice

Archiving is the process through which objects, documents, and traces are incorporated into a space of waiting, meaning, and projection, where they acquire the dual condition of being both pending and preserved [39,62,63]. It is not merely a technical act but a symbolic operation through which documents are inscribed within an order that postpones, condenses, orients, and reconfigures territorial meaning.

Filing cabinets are pieces of furniture in which documents are deposited once they have been used, deferred, or left pending further action. The archive, in turn, may be understood as the assemblage of projects yet to be realized: personal papers, manuscripts, newspaper clippings, field notebooks, photographs, one’s own publications and those of others, treasured transcriptions, sketches, personal documents, diplomas, letters, official correspondence, and countless other materials invested with hope and expectation. Within archiving operates the unbounded desire to encompass everything—a metonymy of the unfinished and persistent condition of the human being. Folders are contained within drawers like neurons awaiting synapses, silent repositories poised for future connections.

The document is a milestone along the path—whether file, trace, vestige, feature, or practice. It connotes territoriality, sites memory, produces archival landscapes, constructs buildings, erects monuments, composes narratives, generates museums and interpretation centers, and, in doing so, orients the meaning of identity. It makes territorial movement possible, fixes collective imprints, and establishes foundations for communal conduct. This logic constitutes, in a certain sense, the Territorial Substrate: the marker post that indicates routes and distances, points toward directions of travel, and delineates the boundaries of land [64].

3.2. Implicit Territoriality

Regarding territoriality [56,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72] agree that it is a quality encompassing the territorial, whether understood as identity—the ways in which a territory is experienced, controlled, and made meaningful—or as politics, that is, as a mechanism for the delimitation, control, and legitimation of space. Its implicit character lies in the existence of inherent territorial elements that are not directly perceptible [69], such as intentions of territorial transformation [2,3,4,5,6].

Implicit Territoriality renders visible the invisible substrate of archives: Social Relations of Site, practices of spatial control, narratives of power, and collective forms of belonging. This underlying framework gives meaning to the archive and guides its political, cultural, and territorial projection across the places and populations it encompasses. Consequently, it manifests itself across multiple scales —from regions and nations to homes and neighborhoods— revealing the intentions of control and the power relations inscribed within documents. It constitutes a complex quality, continuously subject to resignification, capable of reinforcing identity and communities’ sense of belonging to a particular territory.

Within this framework, the archive is transformed from a passive repository of documents into a site endowed with Condensed Information Potential. When activated through appropriate hermeneutic capacities, this potential contributes to the formation and deepening of territorial attachment by generating emotional, social, and cultural bonds with specific places. Such bonds operate as fundamental reference points in the configuration of both individual and collective identities. Consequently, the archive cannot be reduced to a physical location. Rather, it is defined as a complex interrelationship among authority [73], documentation [28,30,38,58,74], Space [28, 54), identity [56,59,61], memory [3,28,35,37,63], power [44, 49, 75), and politics [41,44,62]. It is precisely in the convergence of these elements that its Territorial Substrate resides. Two perspectives converge here. The first conceives territoriality as archival infrastructure and function. In its physical dimension, the archive delimits a space—whether shelf, room, cave, building, ritual site, hiding place, refrigerator, or digital server—from which practices of use, control, classification, and document management may be inferred. The spatial organization of documents, restricted-access areas, consultation protocols, and, more generally, the architecture of the archive itself generate territorial hierarchies that determine who may access particular forms of information and under what conditions. This same logic is reproduced in the digital sphere through access platforms, security systems, and copyright regimes that regulate information flows, users’ capacities for selection, and the appropriation of materials.

Likewise, archival policies—acquisition, preservation, and disposal—constitute a functional and selective territoriality, often shaped by political criteria. Although such decisions do not determine absolutely which histories are remembered or forgotten—since this ultimately depends upon the interpretive activation of the Condensed Information Potential—they nonetheless make it possible to infer how power relations, local identities, and cultural narratives become inscribed in the structure and functioning of the archive.

Documents—photographs, maps, artifacts, instruments, and related materials—contain a Condensed Information Potential fundamental to the construction of collective memory, whose collateral effects are incalculable, ranging from academic and scientific developments to the formation of identity meanings. These documents function simultaneously as supports for the legitimacy of territorial narratives and as vehicles for advancing knowledge of the past. By extension, they also affect the present by updating and situating data, references, and markers of identity. Within this framework, the historical narrative constructed from archival documents may be either inclusive or exclusionary, depending upon the archive’s policies of selection and management. In this way, it both reflects and decisively shapes territorial identities and the ways in which communities recognize themselves within the historical project of their own territory [35,64].

4. Development

Three principal implications emerge from the archive’s Implicit Territoriality. The first is the possibility of understanding the archive as a symbolic-territorial device of continuity that ensures the persistence of the bonds between a community and its territory, even after historical ruptures or profound transformations [32, 51, 76, 77, 78). It is the archive’s Implicit Territoriality that allows memory to remain anchored in places, practices, and situated meanings rather than becoming abstract. Through this quality, the archive stabilizes territorial meanings, transmits them across generations by fostering attachment to space, and provides the materials necessary to reconstruct relationships with territory when they have been disrupted. Implicit Territoriality thus transforms the archive into a mechanism of symbolic continuity, ensuring that a community can continue to recognize itself within its territory through time.

The second implication lies in the recognition of archives as part of the common heritage of humanity. This development represents a milestone for the anthropological understanding of archives through the relationship between culture and territory. It transcends the traditional nationalist conception of archives [76] by establishing a global responsibility for their preservation and accessibility [77]. This perspective, promoted through the Universal Declaration on Archives (UDA), not only redefines archival practice but also raises fundamental questions concerning the very nature of the archive in the digital age and its role in the construction of collective memory on a global scale. Indeed, it incorporates the global dimension of Implicit Territoriality [46,47,48,49,50,62].

This section highlights the global territoriality of archives—globality understood as an emerging planetary identity fostered by the UDA and by growing international interest in archives. Within this framework, archival territoriality is redefined as it transcends traditional geographical boundaries and contributes to the configuration of a global archival space, described by some authors as the Archive Era [79]. This implicit global territoriality is configured both through political processes and through forms of governance that organize the new system of particular sites on the Web (a territorial system of emplacement), international archival networks, and the regime of digital documentation enshrined in the UDA, whose scope and influence are both extensive and significant (46, 48, 49].

Although it may be premature to describe this process as a form of “territorial updating,” it can nevertheless be argued that the UDA acquires greater practical significance through a consciousness of renewal (60, 64), one that contemporizes archives and contributes to the emergence of a global identity consistent with both their historical foundations and their innovative contexts.

The third and final implication concerns the diversity of archival practice in general [80]. Although the juridical force of the UDA is necessary, it remains insufficient to guarantee the full temporal objectivity that emerges, in the first instance, from its own process of formation. The particularities of globality itself must also be studied. Hence the importance of recovering the documentation of the deliberations that preceded its adoption, the proceedings surrounding its approval by the United Nations General Assembly, and the record of its diverse impacts on international archival practice [74]. The UDA may therefore be understood as the global archival-territorial event par excellence, one that is both a source and a component of the construction of its own cultural and global objectivity.

Archival territoriality—previously delimited by national borders and local practices—has undergone a profound transformation. The recognition of archives as part of the common heritage of humanity and of nations [45,49] generates a global spatiality in which international cooperation and universal access become imperatives of the Global Territorial Substrate.

The inferences that may be drawn regarding Implicit Territoriality from the UDA empirically demonstrate the interconnection of geographically dispersed archives. A shared framework emerges for understanding archival practice worldwide, global research, and the very meaning of civilization on a planetary scale—one that remains open to critique and to the expansion of human possibilities. Ultimately, the UDA does not create the temporal objectivity of archives; rather, it updates it. In doing so, it expands both their significance and their territorial scope, propelling them toward global consciousness and its identity corollaries: shared and contested singularities.

The following section explores three analogies through a series of analytical approaches that assemble the symbolic-territorial structure of Implicit Territoriality.

4.1. Sites, Archives, Communities, and Habitats

The territorial character of these four domains is beyond doubt. It therefore seems reasonable to ask whether archival analogies may be established among an archaeological site, a historical archive, a community (or cultural group), and a mountain habitat. Such a question may initially appear trivial; however, reconsidering it proves fruitful, especially when one takes into account that these analogies may contribute to reflections on research practices and their repercussions—both feedback effects and projections—for the arrangement, use, and management of information sources, as well as for the construction of territorial identities. Among these four domains there exist not only territorial similarities and correspondences but also epistemological considerations that inform and extend our understanding of the archive [81].

Anthropological research in its various branches—paleontological, ethnohistorical, linguistic, and biological—pursues a holistic approach grounded in in situ inquiry and the ethnographic method. Sites, archives, communities, and habitats are therefore constructs resulting from the application of different disciplinary perspectives to heterogeneous realities. Although conceptually these domains may appear distinct, ethnographically they tend to converge as territorial sources of anthropological information, each possessing its own specific nature—material, documentary, social, or ecological—yet remaining interconnected and situated within the same place. This territorial convergence allows elements as diverse as an archaeological site, an institutional archive, a local community, or an ecological habitat to function, in practice, as complementary repositories of information concerning ways of life, memories, practices, and socio-environmental relations, whether associated with ethnic groups or with other forms of social organization.

The analogy among sites, communities, and habitats as “archives” resides precisely in their differential capacity to contain documentary collections understood in an expanded sense: not only written documents, but also material remains, ecological traces, social memories, oral narratives, and everyday practices that register, in different ways, the interaction between a community and its territory. Conversely, an archive may itself be considered a site of archaeological vestiges, a repository of historical memory, or even an informational ecosystem reflecting the biotic and abiotic interactions of a community. This capacity to contain and organize situated information is what has been termed a Differential Documentation Regime, a dispositif that makes it possible to recognize how each of these domains produces, preserves, and activates its own forms of evidence, always in articulation with the territory in which it is inscribed.

At this point, a clarification becomes necessary. The expansion of the archival category proposed here should not be understood as an attempt to dissolve the archive into an unlimited concept in which every social or ecological phenomenon becomes archival. Rather, it reflects a theoretical effort to overcome a historically restricted understanding of the archive, one largely confined to documentary institutions and administrative repositories. As with many analytical categories that have undergone conceptual renewal within the social sciences, broadening the scope of the archive does not imply the loss of its specificity but the recognition of a wider diversity of localized forms through which societies organize, preserve, transmit, and activate meaningful traces of collective existence. The analogies developed in this article are therefore neither taxonomic classifications nor ontological equivalences; they are heuristic devices intended to reveal shared relational properties among distinct territorial formations. In this sense, the archive is approached not as a fixed institutional form but as a situated configuration whose manifestations vary according to the historical, cultural, social, and ecological conditions in which they emerge. As Geertz observed, “the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local” [36]; consequently, any effort to understand archives as cultural phenomena requires attention to the plurality of forms through which different communities produce, organize, and territorialize memory, knowledge, and meaning.

This analogy is further strengthened when one considers the common nature of these four domains: all are repositories of information—written, oral, material, or visual (artifacts, utensils, documents, landscapes, resources, ways of life, paintings, photographs, memories, habits, and customs)—that can be observed and analyzed because they contain information about events, whether present or past. The difference between a museum and an archive lies in the fact that the former exhibits and renders objects visible, whereas the latter focuses on the investigation and discovery of events through the exploration of Condensed Information Potential. Although a museum may fulfill archival functions, the reverse is less evident, beyond the occasional exhibition of documents, an activity that belongs to the archive’s services rather than to its fundamental structure.

Their principal similarity, however, lies in the fact that they are essentially entities that host information occupying a differentiated physical place. In other words, they possess a particular Territorial System of Site that is open to interpretation. Informational potential depends less upon the quantity and quality of the collection than upon the qualitative information that can be extracted from a document or from an organized set of documents. Ultimately, sites, archives, habitats, and communities are documentary condensations of human action, inscribed within environmental processes, ordinary and extraordinary events, actions, ideas, artifacts, ceramics, tools, structures, documents, letters, books, files, skeletal remains, architectural constructions, and evidence of plant and animal activity that testify to human activities in specific places.

All four are also characterized by their incompleteness, the result of processes of natural, territorial, or cultural selection, whether individual or collective. Such incompleteness may arise through loss, diminution, intentional or accidental manipulation, natural degradation, weak environmental sustainability, or simply because it is an inherent characteristic of every documentary collection. No matter how complete an archive may appear to be, it is always incomplete; completeness is ultimately provided by the narrative that emerges from the results of research.

An archive—like a site, a community, or a habitat—contains documents of diverse kinds, each offering particular forms of information about the reality it represents. Consequently, not only incompleteness but also fragmentation and heterogeneity prevail. There is no such thing as documentary purity, nor any method capable of achieving it in absolute terms—not even ethnography, despite its holistic aspirations. This is not a methodological problem but rather a condition intrinsic to archival reality itself.

4.2. Vestiges, Records, Traits, and Traces of Interaction

This tetrad represents the things we observe: intimations of a discovery and gateways to knowledge. They are elements whose nature evokes a potential informational content that must be unveiled through specific interpretive devices (discussed in the following section), and which directly project the territoriality of both the places where they were found and the territories they will subsequently come to represent, at least for those fortunate enough to do so. In terms of their thingness—or documentary character—vestiges, records, traits, and traces may be imagined as a potsherd, a datum, a cultural manifestation, or an ecosystem resource. Through their Condensed Information Potential, they function as actualizers of territorial events and memorable occurrences.

Vestiges, records, traits, and traces of interaction constitute a phenomenon that often remains latent—sometimes hidden, sometimes manifest—until it is brought into presence. Yet their territoriality is activated from the very moment of discovery, even prior to any scientific interpretation. The simple fact of being found in a particular place produces an initial territorial presentification, since discovery spontaneously ascribes them to the territory from which they emerge. This immediate ascription does not constitute a “primary form” but rather an initial mode of territorial attachment—spontaneous and unmediated—which expresses the implicit character of territoriality: something that precedes analysis and that guides, conditions, and sometimes determines subsequent research questions.

To this first presentification is added a second, legitimizing and affiliative one, produced through the study, interpretation, and integration of these elements into a historical, cultural, or scientific framework. It is at this stage that vestiges become historical facts, acquire public recognition, and are projected across broader territorial scales: from site to municipality, from municipality to region, nation, or even continent. At that point they fully enter the public territorial sphere through the publication, dissemination, and circulation of the discovery. An illustrative example is the paleontological finding of the Forensic Anthropology Laboratory at the National University of Colombia, whose interpretation progressively linked it to the histories of Boyacá, Colombia, and Latin America, thereby endowing it with an explicit and expanded territoriality [82].

The territorial provenance of vestiges (sites), records (archives), traits (communities), and traces (habitats) becomes a sign of territoriality when they are transformed into data by observers and researchers, and into instruments of identity by those actors who animate collective life. In this sense, they function as documents of both natural and human cultural life. All four may be understood as sediments preserving physical or spiritual records, material or energetic reserves that can be discovered, analyzed, and interpreted. Only then can a provision or a palimpsest be projected into society and subjected to public processes of identity formation and contestation.

In other words, the operation of the implicit is not passive. It is an active construction involving the presentified interaction among data, context, and the researcher. Without such interaction there are no vestiges, for vestiges are things endowed with meaning. Only meaning confers upon them the symbolic-territorial capacity through which they may influence the political-cultural debate surrounding territories and contribute to the configuration of collective identities.

4.3. Stratigraphies, Paleographies, Ethnographies, and Geographies

This set constitutes the analogy that designates the modes of reading traces through which Implicit Territoriality may be revealed. The four elements are planes of technical interpretation operating within the Symbolic-Territorial Structure; each provides a distinct pathway through which facts, histories, and relationships become inscribed within territory.

Stratigraphies inscribe the territoriality of time, revealing its depth, depositional conditions, and sedimentary relationships. Paleographies territorialize memory through writing, drawing attention to the types, forms, styles, origins, and uses of inscriptions. Ethnographies identify territorially situated practices, habits, and customs through the observation and interpretation of the political-cultural configurations that produce them. Geographies, in turn, territorially label both physical and symbolic spaces, their locations, distributive patterns, and ecosystemic relationships. Together, these four approaches make it possible to understand each archival document as a territorialized—or territorializable—node, and each vestige as a situated symbolic artifact.

At a deeper level, this analogy constitutes a plurimethodological matrix that contributes to rendering Implicit Territoriality visible through the technical reading of traces. Historical, archaeological, anthropological, or ecological readings of existing explicit and primary information are transformed, through stratigraphic, paleographic, ethnographic, or geographical practices, into territorially meaningful knowledge generated within scientific, administrative, personal, or literary domains. Furthermore, by articulating themselves with the territorial location of the vestige, these interpretive practices reproduce the identification of the Implicit Territoriality that precedes analysis and guides subsequent interpretations.

The archive fully embodies the Symbolic-Territorial Structure. Its documents may be read paleographically, stratigraphically, ethnographically, or geographically. Analogously, an archaeological site, a community, or a habitat may be understood as an archive in which material, social, and ecological vestiges are organized through strata, practices, biological records, or narratives containing information that can be recorded and compared under a corresponding Differential Documentation Regime. Paleogenetic analyses of remote ecosystems, for example, illustrate how such ecological records generate indispensable information for reconstructing deep and ancient territorial memories.

Interpretation consequently requires multiple forms of contextualization—historical, spatial, temporal, functional, relational, and technical—without which meaning remains limited. An isolated document within an archive is as difficult to interpret as an archaeological fragment deprived of its stratigraphic context or an ecological indicator detached from the biotope that produced it. Interpretive validity depends upon the comparison, verification, and corroboration of these elements within their territorial contexts. Implicit Territoriality becomes visible precisely through the convergence of the historical, archaeological, anthropological, and ecological within the same interpretive horizon.

5. Implications and Conclusions

This article demonstrated that the relationship between archives and territorialities is neither incidental nor merely contextual. Rather, territoriality constitutes a condition internal to the archive itself, emerging through the interaction among Modes of Differential Documentation, Territorial Systems of Site, and Condensed Informational Potential. Through this configuration, archives participate actively in the organization, circulation, stabilization, and projection of meanings that contribute to the construction of territories, identities, memories, and historical horizons of action [60,67,70].

The principal contribution of this study lies in proposing a theoretical displacement of the archive from its conventional understanding as a documentary repository toward a broader conception of the archive as a territorially situated configuration of meaning. From this perspective, archives are not passive containers of records but cultural infrastructures through which traces are selected, organized, rendered intelligible, and continuously updated within the political-cultural processes that give them significance. Territoriality therefore appears not as an external attribute of archives but as an emergent property of their own modes of organization and operation.

The identification of Implicit Territoriality has required confronting the disembedded rhetorics through which concepts, categories, and documentary realities are often treated as if they existed independently of the territorial and cultural conditions that make them possible. The framework proposed here argues for the theoretical and methodological necessity of restoring those conditions to analytical visibility. In this sense, Implicit Territoriality makes it possible to recognize the territorial dimensions embedded within archives, even when they remain unrecognized or unarticulated, while revealing the influence of place, memory, identity, and political-cultural action in the production of documentary realities.

The analogical framework developed throughout this article further demonstrates that the archive cannot be reduced to a single institutional form. Sites, archives, communities, habitats, and other documentary assemblages differ substantially in their material constitution and historical trajectories; nevertheless, they may share relational properties that allow them to function as territorially situated configurations for the organization, preservation, and activation of meaningful traces. These analogies are not intended to establish epistemological equivalence but to illuminate a broader diversity of localized archival forms. Taken together, they demonstrate that archives emerge through particular cultural and territorial contexts, revealing the fundamentally local character of archival knowledge, memory, and practice.

This perspective also suggests a reconsideration of the archive’s temporal role. Archives do not merely connect present societies with their pasts. Through processes of documentary updating, they contribute to the elaboration of future-oriented projects, to the production of territorial objectivity, and to the construction of shared horizons of interpretation through which communities define themselves, remember, and project their aspirations. Archives therefore mediate not only memory but also historical projection.

The growing global recognition of archives, exemplified by the UDA, may be understood as a contemporary expression of the same processes described throughout this study. The emergence of a global archival consciousness does not eliminate the singularity of places or the specificity of local memories; rather, it reveals the coexistence of localization and expansibility through which archives continually extend their scales of influence and significance while remaining rooted in situated forms of meaning. The global archival space that emerges from this process constitutes not the negation of territorial diversity but one of its most recent historical expressions.

Territories do not merely produce archives. Archives also produce territories. They do so by organizing traces, stabilizing meanings, articulating memories, legitimizing narratives, generating territorial objectivities, and projecting horizons of collective belonging. Understanding this reciprocal relationship makes it possible to situate archives at the center of the political-cultural processes through which societies remember, interpret, dispute, and continually reconstruct the worlds they inhabit.