A Companion to Mediterranean History

A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.

© 2014 Tehmina Goskar. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chapter eighteen

The study of material culture is primarily the study of objects and the things from

which they are made. It is about gaining a better understanding of people and their

environments, past and present, through artifacts. The creation and use of complex

tools are distinguishing traits of the human animal. As such, material culture is intrin-

sic to the humanities, whether approached through archaeology, anthropology, his-

tory, art or museology. The subject is most often addressed in commentaries on

materials, such as metals, ceramics and textiles, or via particular object groups, such as

domestic furniture or jewelry. At other times material culture is discussed in the con-

text of human activities such as eating and drinking. Museums are object archives,

born and sustained by acts of collecting, conservation, public display and heritage

tourism, and so their study is critical to gaining a better understanding of material

culture.

Approaches to material culture

Two principal analytical modes have defined the field. The first is classification or the

ordering of artifacts to create an object-based timeline, and to provide a convenient

vocabulary to aid comparison. Classification schemes are often referred to as taxono-

mies or typologies and derive from an artifact’s form, function or fabric. Systems of

classification may also be arranged under geo-cultural or chronologically-defined cat-

egories where style and decorative motifs are used as defining features, resulting in

labels such as Classical, Egyptian, Roman and Fatimid. This systemizing movement

started in the seventeenth-century European Enlightenment, made tangible in cabi-

nets of curiosity—an encyclopedist effort to order world history. The culmination of

typological sophistication is found in the archaeologist’s ceramic assemblage. Pottery

is king amongst object groups used to define and date archaeological sites. While the

science of microscopy can provide us with information that those that made and used

objects in the past were not party to, the basic techniques still used today are based on

Material Culture

Tehmina Goskar

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