What are the advantages and disadvantages of using periodization in historical research?

Periodization is important not only to historians but even more to archaeologists and others who deal with deep time issues beyond the reach of documentary sources. In such cases, one cannot depend on the words of past participants in processes of cultural change to consider how they saw or divided their own pasts. Rather, one must be explicit about the criteria used to create divisions in time (periods, phases, etc) and be clear that these divisions are just models used to divide the continuum of past processes for ease of communication among scholars, with the public, and in collaboration with the descendent communities whose own visions of the past and cultural trajectories may be entangled in the periodization employed that one chooses.

Es gibt uns einen Rahmen, in dem wir uns bewegen. Aber natürlich sind die Grenzen der Perioden selten klar gesetzt, es gibt meist schon Vorzeichen für einen Wandel bzw. auch das Ende einer Periode verwischt mit dem Anfang der nächsten, auch weil von der Periodisierung oft nicht alle überall gleichermaßen betroffen sind.

Periodization is primarily a necessary heuristic tool that allows researchers, scholars, and members of the audiences we serve to connect points in time and communicate clearly about them, whether or not we agree with the implications that the divisions we create in temporal and cultural continua were "real" breaks felt and experienced by people in the past and/or that defined their own histories. I disagree that periodization establishes or explains how one period influenced or differed from another. Those processes have to be explained in terms of the intersecting agencies of the people who lived in those times rather than as the influence of periods that we have defined post-hoc for our own theoretical or research agendas.

Periodization is necessary for communication about the past but it tends to emphasize breaks in continua that may have been true for some members of the communities living then, while erasing or ignoring continuities that were more important for others. In North America, for example, archaeologists and historians divided the recent past into "prehistoric" vs "historic" or Colonial periods, privileging the trajectories of European settlers to the extent of redefining Indigenous communities as having no "histories" before Europeans arrived and discouraging understanding that Indigenous histories continued past the point of "first contact" with Europeans. Naming and periodization have practical and political implications, even if unintended.