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Publications and research programs on the history of archives, their actors, their methods, and their social, political, and cultural significance have multiplied in recent years. These concerns question in new ways the relevance of the dyad formed by archives and history since at least the early modern era. Two movements, described as “turns”, seem to be developing without always converging: the “archival turn,” which appears to have emerged from the world of archivists (and anthropologists), and the “documentary turn” of historians who no longer consider documents and archives simply as materials but as historical objects in their own right, producing social, political, and cultural meaning. Archival science, understood in a very broad sense, sometimes claims a break with historical science as a way of gaining academic recognition in the contemporary social science landscape, while the essentially European “documentary turn” more readily focuses on the medieval and early modern periods. The analysis of recent research developments in these two directions nevertheless suggests that their mutual hybridization is to be desired, particularly in terms of historians deepening their contextualization and historicization of the archival foundations on which part of our historical knowledge is based.