reference to foreign institutions and personnel. Not until the late 19th century did they begin to be used at all widely in domestic contexts. The adjective formed from archive is archival. History The practice of keeping official documents is very old. Archaeologists have discovered archives of hundreds (and sometime thousands) of clay tablets going back to the third and second millennia BC in sites like Ebla, Mari, Amarna, Hattusas, Ugarit, and Pylos. These discoveries have been fundamental to learning about ancient alphabets, languages, literature, and politics. Archives were well developed by the ancient Chinese, the ancient Greeks, and ancient Romans (who called them Tabularia). However, those archives have been lost, since documents written on materials like papyrus and paper deteriorated relatively quickly, unlike their clay tablet counterparts. Archives of churches, kingdoms, and cities from the Middle Ages survive and have often kept their official status uninterruptedly to the present. They are the basic tool for historical research on this period. England after 1066 developed archives and archival access methods. The Swiss developed archival systems after 1450. The first predecessors of archival science in the West are Jacob von Rammingen's manuals of 1571. and Baldassarre Bonifacio's De Archivis libris singularis of 1632. Modern archival thinking has some roots dating back to the French Revolution. The French National Archives, which possess perhaps the largest archival collection in the world (with records going as far back as 625 A.D.), were created in 1790 during the Revolution from various government, religious, and private archives seized by the revolutionaries. In 1883 French archivist Gabriel Richou published the first Western text on archival theory, entitled Traité théorique et pratique des archives publiques (Treaty of Theory and Practice of the Public Archives), in which he systematized the archival theory of the respect des fonds, first published by Natalis de Wailly in 1841. Users and institutions Historians, genealogists, lawyers, demographers, filmmakers, and others conduct research at archives. The research process at each archive is unique, and depends upon the institution that houses the archive. While there are many kinds of archives, the most recent census of archivists in the United States identifies five major types: academic, business (for profit), government, non-profit, and other. There are also four main areas of inquiry involved with archives: material technologies, organizing principles, geographic locations, and tangled embodiments of humans and non-humans. These areas help to further categorize what kind of archive is