The interpretation of soil archives, although complex, is nevertheless essential for understanding the impact of soils on present-day environments and deciphering the environmental history of a site. Soil archives are local, although within a continuous soilscape, they allow the study of spatial structures. This chapter presents some key elements for understanding the archiving process through to the reconstruction of a fragment of paleoenvironmental history. It describes the biological, physical and anthropological archiving elements of pedological processes. Geomorphological processes also affect the soilscape and can produce excellent soil and sediment archives or destroy them. The combined study of the different soil archives (plant remains, soil organic matter, chemical parameters, macro- and micromorphological features, microtopography, archaeology) allows an increasingly less lacunary picture to emerge of the environmental history and its legacies in the soil; an environmental story whose heritage, while fading, still structures today's terrestrial ecosystems