Things Do Not Intend
A letter is written to persuade; an object is made to be used. That difference is the whole argument for material culture as evidence.
A cooking pot has no argument. Its soot, repairs, and wear are unwitting testimony: the object cannot lie because it never made a claim. And things reach where writing does not. The poor, enslaved, and illiterate left pots, houses, tools, rubbish, and bones. For most of humanity, material culture is the record.
| Property | What it reports |
|---|---|
| Material | Origin and trade routes |
| Technique | Skill and labour organization |
| Wear | Use and frequency |
| Repair | Value and scarcity proxy |
| Deposition | Discard method and actor |
| Distribution | Social ownership |
Repair deserves emphasis. A society that mends values the object over the labour to fix it; a society that discards reverses that ratio. You read it from a rubbish heap.
Buildings and Landscapes
A house plan is social relations rendered in stone. Georgian corridors are a machine for privacy, replacing rooms that opened into one another. Landscapes—field boundaries, terraces, and ridge-and-furrow—record centuries of decisions about labour and inheritance. Enclosure is visible as straight lines cutting across curved ones.
The survival trap: Stone, ceramic, and metal survive; wood, textile, leather, and food do not. The record over-represents the durable and elite, and under-represents daily life.
The historian's move is to read silence as physics, not absence. "No textiles" means "acidic soil," not naked people. Waterlogged sites like bogs or shipwrecks prove the durable 10% is often misleading.