I had an entire essay that I was preparing but decided to give up part way through because it’s such a complicated and convoluted topic.

There’s really no easy answer, at least from the archaeological side of things. Archaeology is such a diverse and varied discipline and when you look beyond the superficial it’s hard to even call it a field.

That diversity pulls from a range of philosophies, theories, and methodologies from the historical sciences to the social sciences to the natural sciences and each has turned into a fragment of distinctly different philosophies, theories, and methodologies.

You could ask 100 archaeologists how they view history and you’ll get 300 different responses. I primarily worked in Mycenaean archaeology and little to no attention was paid to historians or their trends.

I now focus more on CRM or commercial/development-led archaeology and, for the most part, there’s very little scholarship done in that sector. Most of it is recording before destruction so most of what comes out of these is gray literature.

Overall, archaeology has a weird relationship with all of its many related fields. It’s never really been well-defined or given the opportunity to define its foundational concepts so it’s constantly being pulled in different directions.

Again, that all depends on the archaeologist. There are the more anthropological archaeologists that pull from anthropology, the classical archaeologists who focus more on classics and art history, the historical archaeologists who, sometimes despise history because of colonial influences, but also sometimes love history.

There are some archaeologists who look down on historical archaeologists and worse for contemporary archaeologists. They often think those roles are unnecessary because of history. I don’t agree but it exists. There was recently a plea on r/archaeology to get people to stop looking down on historical archaeology.

It’s a really huge mess and I don’t think there will ever be a good answer from the archaeology side. I am curious what historians view of archaeology though.

A big complaint I have of archaeology however is that we don’t have a very good history of archaeology. Most archaeologists are hesitant to get into our own history because of how sloppy and terrible archaeological methods were up until recently (and still are depending on where you work).

I used to work primarily in Mycenaean archaeology and everything from the chronologies to the theories are based on seriously garbage evidence as well as stubborn views that started with guys like Schliemann and Evans yet have never really been challenged.

It really depends on the field of history. One example of a field where historians and archaeologists work quite closely together is Pictish studies. In case you're not familiar with who the Picts are, I've given an overview of them here - they are a people from early medieval Scotland who spoke a Celtic language closely related to Welsh. They are quite well-attested archaeologically and appear in the texts of their neighbours from the time, such as the Irish and English, and even earlier, the Romans.

However, the Picts left pretty much no texts of their own for us. The Pictish language can only be reconstructed in tiny pieces from place-names and personal names preserved in kings' lists. We know that they did write things down - 11th century Scottish texts allude to "the books of the Picts" from which stories in Latin were copied, and a letter from one of their kings is preserved by Bede - but none of it survives. Why is this? Well, the Pictish language died out by about AD 1000, to be replaced by Old Irish, the ancestor of modern Scottish Gaelic. Scotland also has quite poor medieval text preservation in general thanks to the extremely destructive nature of the Scottish Reformation, so any Pictish texts in Latin have a low chance of survival. The only Pictish "texts" which survive are names and sometimes unintelligible phrases scratched into stones using the Irish ogham alphabet.

The thing is though, the Picts are quite important for understanding Irish and English history of the time. And they leave behind some very compelling archaeology which has sparked the imagination of many - namely, the Pictish stones, discussed in the linked post above. So there are a lot of historians who want to understand the Picts. But you run out of texts with which to study them pretty quickly. For this reason, historians of the Picts are trained to be interdisciplinary, and the discipline drawn on most is archaeology. Besides the ever-alluring unsolved mystery of what Pictish symbols mean, archaeology provides so much more information about settlement sites than the texts do. You can't get a picture of Pictland without looking at the archaeology and seeing how the texts and placenames relate to it.

Pictish archaeology is going strong in Scotland these days, particularly at the University of Aberdeen where the Northern Picts Project is doing all sorts of awesome digs. There's also been some really cool work done on digitally documenting the art and archaeology of the Wemyss Caves. Recent publications on the Picts are often collaborative between archaeologists and historians, such as 2019's The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce and 2010's Pictish Progress: New Studies on Northern Britain in the Middle Ages. The Pictish Arts Society is the main organization which hosts conferences and talks about the Picts, and its talk schedule regularly features a mix of archaeologists, historians, museum professionals, and lay enthusiasts. One of the main journals used in the field is the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal of Scottish history and archaeology.

There are times, of course, when historians and archaeologists of Pictland don't always see eye to eye. Historians such as James Fraser have lately started to favour a much more narrow definition of "Pict" which only refers to the united kingdom of Fortriu from the late 7th century onward in order to focus on how they tried to bring together the different kingdoms they'd conquered using a "Pictish" identity. Archaeologists have not really bought into this (and the idea is not particularly popular among diehards of the Pictish Arts Society, either!). Historians also tend to be more skeptical about the idea that the Pictish symbols constitute a writing system, which was recently promoted by Gordon Noble, Martin Goldberg and Derek Hamilton.

On the other hand, art historians and archaeologists (for there is also a contribution from art history towards Pictish studies, e.g. Jane Geddes and Isabel Henderson), as well as lay enthusiasts and heritage industry professionals, are often much more attuned to the artistic styles and their differences across regions than historians are. Some historians unfortunately look down on the popular interest in the Pictish symbols which dismisses some of the most important (and fun) evidence we have about the Picts. But of course, there is also plenty of disagreement about the Picts within each of these sub-groups. Pictish studies is a small world with lots of enthusiastic and opinionated individuals, so you are bound to find just as many differences within a discipline as between disciplines.

All of that is to say that there are certainly disciplines of history where archaeologists and historians work closely together. You can't have Pictish studies without that interdisciplinary combination of the two. Pictish archaeology has always been informed by the historical sources available on the Picts - it probably helps that there are so few of them! So even an undergraduate history student can come to terms with the corpus fairly quickly, meaning an archaeologist will easily be able to do so as well. Perhaps Pictish studies is a bit unusual because of this - it just about qualifies as "history" (see this discussion) but there is very little a historian can do about them with their traditional tool-kit without dipping heavily into archaeology, art history, and topynymy.