It draws upon anthropology, history, art history, classics, Ethnology, geography, geology,
literary history, linguistics, semiology, textual criticism, physics, information sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleography, paleontology, paleozoology, and paleobotany.
The progress of Ethnology, for example with Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology,
led to the criticism of conceptions of a linear progress, or the pseudo-opposition between"societies with histories" and"societies without histories", judged too dependent on a limited view of history as constituted by accumulative growth.