I've just read "Peak Document and the Future of History" by J.R. McNeill. It is the Presidential Address he delivered on as outgoing President of the American Historical Association (published now at 125 Am. Hist. Rev. 1-18 (2020) and available at https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/125/1/1/5721569.
Professor McNeill is alerting all historically minded persons to the rather impressive array of techniques being developed by practitioners of the natural sciences that promise expand the practice of history. "Paleogenomicists, paleoclimatologists, paleopathologists, paleo-everything are flooding the scientific landscape with new information about the human past and other pasts that infringe upon the human." He gives quite a few examples of scientific work that has already changed prior understanding of historical matters, and he surmises that scientific information and discoveries may supplant texts as the main sources of history, in the near future.
His conclusion:
"Historians must not be shy. We bring to the table skills and sensitivities that others often lack. We are by training alert to the complexities of causality and rarely enchanted by monocausal explanations. We are by training alive to context and comparison, almost instinctively assessing the plausibility of arguments and interpretations by making reference to other situations. We are by training aware that not everything that counts can be counted. We are experts in understanding how and why societies change and how people operate in groups. And of course we know the documents—where there are documents—and can blend, or help blend, textual evidence with paleoscientific data to achieve something akin to parallax vision. So we should not hesitate to offer our expertise at every opportunity when and where paleoscientists are at work reconstructing the human past."
My mind has been opened to some new possibilities for my projects!