Albert Silbert’s explorations of Portugal’s central archives, particularly the Torre do Tombo, were less successful than he had hoped. He found the archive inaccessible and unaccustomed to the presence of historians. In contrast, his experience with the National Assembly (now the Assembly of the Republic) was more fruitful. There, he studied the documents of the agricultural commission of the first Portuguese liberal Cortes, leading to his complementary thesis, later published as Le probléme agraire portugais au temps des premiéres Cortès libérales [The Portuguese agrarian problem at the time of the first liberal Cortes] . Silbert developed a marked preference for regional and local archives, which he found less restrictive, even if poorly organised. This preference is evident in the acknowledgements in the preface to Le Portugal Méditerranéen , where he meticulously credits numerous individuals for guiding him through these archives. His gratitude is extended person by person and locality by locality, reflecting his characteristic thoroughness and precision.

The knowledge of the terrain gained through consulting regional and local archives, combined with the most comprehensive understanding he could achieve of central archives, provided a firm foundation for his work. This was further enriched by his solid historiographical training under some of the most eminent figures in contemporary French historiography and his close collaboration with Portuguese historians, geographers, and anthropologists. Sociology, viewed with suspicion in Salazar’s Portugal, was not yet practised at the time. This combination of broad and deep perspectives enabled Silbert to approach his work with great ambition.

However, he later expressed regret over the disparity between his ambitions and the resources available to him. The limitations of historical research in Portugal at the time—whose backwardness he found surprising even in comparison with Spain—were a source of frustration but did not discourage him. Instead, they motivated him to embrace the role of a défricheur , a "pathfinder," breaking new ground in the field. This was the path that seemed safest given that, in his own words, "The documentary base we dreamed of turned out to be impossible to find. We found no statistical source that could be used for a comprehensive study of ownership and exploitation, none that led to a scientific analysis of the movement of production, incomes, or even prices, and none that allowed for a precise examination of the rural landscape and its details. This means that applying the rigorous methods of economic, social, and geographical history, as they are currently conceived and practised, has proved impossible for us." (Albert Silbert, Le Portugal Méditerranéen..., p. 10). Faced with this scarcity of resources consistent with what had begun to shape the economic and social history of the rural world in France, exemplified by works such as Georges Lefebvre’s La Revolution Française et les paysans [The French Revolution and the peasants] or Ernest Labrousse’s Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au 18 éme siécle [Sketch of price and income movements in France in the 18th century], Albert Silbert based his study on detailed reconstructions of the agrarian reality of southern Portugal at the end of the Ancien Régime (Beira-Baixa and Alentejo). He sometimes worked village by village, relying, according to his own testimony, on isolated documents and even fragments. This approach made him not only a "pathfinder" but also, in a sense, a "decipherer”—a solver of enigmas, one might say, who at times prefigured the methods of microhistory more than 20 years ahead of its formal emergence. This similarity was partly due to the same challenges in organising archives that led to the development of that methodology. It should also be noted that the institutional architecture of the late Ancien Régime was first "deciphered" by Albert Silbert.

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