I've read once that the term "Dark Ages" refers not to the social, economical and political condition of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, but to the lack of written records, meaning we are "in the dark" about events that ocurred in that timeframe. Do historians acknowledge this?

by dezassete
SheepExplosion

We definitely have fewer sources for the early middle ages than we would like, and what we do have is spotty and problematic. As Patrick Geary showed in his book Phantoms of Remembrance, most of what we know about the period before 1000 is the created memory of those who lived after. And Brown et al.'s recent collection of essays, Documentary Culture and the Laity, shows that the very archives we rely on for information are certainly not representative of original production, and are the product of (ecclesiastical) institutions' biased collection and preservation habits.

Having said all that: we have a lot of stuff from the early middle ages. Charters, hagiographies, acts, deeds. If we loosely define the "Dark Age" by authors, to be from after Augustine (d. 430) to before Peter Damian (b. 1007), the collected writings for the period take up about 100 volumes of the Patrologia Latina. The PL itself is 212 volumes and totals ~800MB of raw text on my hard disk. The Vulgate Bible (about 4 million words) takes up about 4MB, for comparison, so a rough estimate would say that the PL has about 300-400 million words of Latin that survive from "Dark Age" authors. And the PL is far from complete! It was compiled in the middle of the 19th century, and it doesn't contain any texts of charters, or any non-literary text, for that matter. So that's a lot of stuff from a supposedly "dark" age. It's also significantly larger than the surviving Latin corpus for the period before 430, which we don't think of as "dark" at all.

Within this larger time frame, we do have periods of relative "darkness", specifically ca. 650 to 700 and 850-900 in the West, and what we do have is not well-distributed geographically. Records from Merovingian France, for example, have survived much better than those from say, Visigothic Spain.

rdC19

In general, I'd like to note that the term "Dark Ages" is falling (or fallen) out of fashion among historians. It's kind of a loaded term and makes it seem like the period between the Fall of Rome and 1000 CE were somehow inferior to other periods.