What is...
Material Culture?

"Too often we focus on the quaint aspects of an artifact, viewing it as an interesting antique or as a prized possession, and ignoring its value as a mute witness of the ingenuity and self-sufficiency of our ancestors." D. Duncan, The Artifact: What can it Tell us about the Past? 1981

Textual evidence provides the historian with only a partial glimpse of the past. The dead speak to the living in many voices. Although often overlooked by professional historians, material evidence such as clothing, buildings, household appliances, gravestones, toys, books, medicine bottles, etc., provide the point of entry into a tangible and accessible past. The words of T.S. Eliot are worth remembering: "Even the humblest material artefact, which is the product and symbol of a particular civilization, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes."

Material culture study is the use of artifacts to understand people's lives. Thomas Schlereth, author of Material Culture Studies in America, notes that the study of material culture is guided by the underlying premise that "objects made or modified by humans, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, reflect the belief patterns of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension, the belief patterns of the larger society of which they are a part." Material manifestations of all cultures are encoded with meaning and can relate details about a culture and its people. Such information can enrich our understanding of the history of objects, design, trade relations, manufacturing techniques, social values and taste.

The study of material history has interdisciplinary dimensions, most notably museological, anthropological, historical and geographical. Despite its newness as an academic discipline, material history rests on firm methodological foundations. The best known models for object-based study have been formulated by theorists E. McClung Fleming and Jules David Prown. Their methodologies provide the student of material culture with the basic tools for descriptive and interpretive analysis and demonstrate the need to train the eye and mind to study and question the artifacts around us and to comprehend their socially constructed values.

The curatorial management of artifacts has also been systematized. Parks Canada has developed a collections classification system based "on an object's original function." Look and Learn about our Collections of Objects: Descriptive and Visual Dictionary of Objects (1997) provides a useful reference work for standardizing the identification of objects by terminology, definition and illustration. This handbook has enabled museums across Canada to apply an organized plan and structured nomenclature to their collections according to the following categories: structures; furnishings; personal artifacts; tools and equipment for materials; tools and equipment for science and technology; tools and equipment for communication; distribution and transportation artifacts; communication artifacts; recreational artifacts; and unclassifiable artifacts.








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