Applying the Criminalistic Methods in Research of Historical Documents

Abstract

The relevance of the problem stated in the article is due to the fact that often the establishment of the content of many historical documents requires the use of scientific and technical means and methods developed in forensic science. More often such sources are written documents, but there are also those that contain images of the external appearance of people whose role in historical events is considered crucial, but the authenticity of the image itself is questionable. The purpose of the article is to try to solve the problem of identification research of persons depicted in pictorial portraits, engraving images that are important for the history of a nation, state, on the basis of scientific achievements in the field of forensics and analysis of expert practice of portrait examination. The main importance in the study is given to the method of system analysis, which allows to systematize scientific knowledge about certain laws of the subject of theoretical foundations of expert research of various kinds of historical documents, to penetrate the essence of the investigated object, to more fully determine its properties, connections, structure. To conduct the study, the authors used methods of formal logic (analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, analogy), as well as individual special forensic methods. The materials in this article may be useful for museum workers, historians, forensic experts and art historians, researchers focused on conducting research on pictorial portraits.