Practice question · Select all that apply
Why is material culture essential for some populations?
Hints
- For excluded populations the objects are the whole record.
- Written sources about them may not exist at all.
Show the answer
- B. They left pots, houses, tools, rubbish, and bones instead
- C. For most of humanity across most of the past, objects are the entire record
- D. The illiterate, poor, enslaved, and colonized generated little or no writing
Why
Not a supplement, the record itself. Where the archive’s filters exclude a population entirely, the rubbish heap is the only witness that was ever there.
Practise Material Culture as a Source
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