History from things : essays on material culture

Book

History from things : essays on material culture / edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery.

Lubar, Steven D. (Added Author). Kingery, W. D. (Added Author).

Summary:

History from Things explores the many ways objects - defined broadly to range from Chippendale tables and Italian Renaissance pottery to seventeenth-century parks and a New England cemetery - can reconstruct and help to reinterpret the past. Eighteen essays describe how to "read" artifacts, how to "listen to" landscapes and locations, and how to apply methods and theories to historical inquiry that have previously belonged solely to archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and conservation scientists. The contributors demonstrate that artifacts can be prime historical evidence that discloses important facts about the nature of past cultures. The book shows how, for example, the detailed examination of Chinese Zhou bronzes revealed that a factory system of production - nowhere attested to in documentary sources - existed in China as early as the fifth century B.C.

Spanning vast time periods, geographical locations, and academic disciplines, History from Things leaps the boundaries between fields that use material evidence to understand the past. It expands and redirects the study of material culture - an emerging field now building a common base of theory and a shared intellectual agenda.

Record details

ISBN: 1560982047 (alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781560982043 (alk. paper)
ISBN: 1560986131 (Buchrücken)
ISBN: 9781560986133 (Buchrücken)
Physical Description: xvii, 300 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Washington : Smithsonian Institution Press, c1993.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references.
Formatted Contents Note:: The truth of material culture : history or fiction? / Jules David Prown -- Why we need things / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- Objects as instruments, objects as signs / Jacques Maquet -- Some matters of substance / Robert Friedel -- The ancestry of Chinese bronze vessels / Jessica Rawson -- The interpretation of artifacts in the history of technology / Robert B. Gordon -- Gardens and society in eighteenth-century England / Thomas Williamson -- Common landscapes as historic documents / Peirce Lewis -- The New England cemetery as a cultural landscape / Ian W. Brown -- Artifacts as expressions of society and culture : subversive genealogy and the value of history / Mark P. Leone and Barbara J. Little -- Why take a behavioral approach to folk objects? / Michael Owen Jones -- Machine politics : the political construction of technological artifacts / Steven Lubar.

Technological systems and some implications with regard to continuity and change / W. David Kingery -- Replication techniques in eastern Zhou bronze casting / Robert W. Bagley -- Technological styles : transforming a natural material into a cultural object / Rita P. Wright -- The biography of an object : the intercultural style vessels of the Third Millennium B.C. / C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky -- The sign of the object / John Dixon Hunt.