The Archaeology of Knowledge

In "The Archaeology of Knowledge", Foucault says that history has moved from the use of the documents as a means to the ends of a timeline, to the focus on the document as object and constitutive element of history itself. Documents are arranged into a monument which is the focus of history - the seriation, stratification and interfunctionality of the monument. Now this is a bold claim and one which threatens to pull history away from non-academics. Is a child in school practicing history when she tries to learn the chronology of 20th century European battles? Is a history textbook even a summary of history by this definiton? It would be not a tome containing history, but an element of history itself, it's content relegated to infantile significance through it's staid insistence on treating events as though they actually occurred. I realize that the view that there are actual concrete events which took place that can be storied and delineated is hopelessly old-fashioned and modernist, as opposed to post-modernist. I still appreciate that historical documents leave more gaps than they fill in, and I think Foucault's point that the gaps can be used as a tool of analysis (for example a lack of publishing following a document that warns of an oncoming disruption in economies, paper supplies, etc can be taken as evidence supporting the event) is quite brilliant. However I feel that he is flying at such lofty heights of abstraction that the phenomena of original interest are too far below him to be seen. They are obscured by the clouds. And his thesis brings up the question of who history belongs to? Is it solely in the domain of the academics? I could almost believe this, if there are fractious definitions of "history". Academic history being the high culture history, and common understand of history being the low-culture history. But what purpose would this serve except to establish a field which can only exist in academia? Perhaps there is a purpose. I shall read on.