Preface

NOTES
1. American Quarterly 26 (Bibliography Issue, 1974).
2. Edith Mayo, "Introduction: Focus on Material Culture," Journal of
American Culture 3 (Winter 1980): 597.
3. See, for example, works such as Bernard Karpel, ed., The Arts in America,
4 vols. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1979); W. Eugene Kleinbauer,
Modem Perspective in Western Art History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1971); Miles Richardson, The Human Mirror: Material and Spatial Images of Man
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974); Leland Ferguson, Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things (Columbia, S.C.: Society for
Historical Archaeology, 1977); and Robert Schuyler, Historical Archaeology: A
Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions (Farmingdale, N.Y.: Baywood
Press, 1978).
4. A useful digest of teaching with objects in historical archaeology, history
of technology, social history, folklife, and art history can.be found in Susan K.
Nichols, ed., Historians, Artifacts, and Learners: The Working Papers (Washington:
Museum Reference Center, Publications Division, Smithsonian Institution,
1982).
5. For a more detailed discussion of common characteristics of the contemporary material culture studies movement, see Thomas J. Schlereth, Material
Culture Studies in America (Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and
Local History, 1982), 72-75.
6. Don Yoder, "The Folklife Studies Movement," Pennsylvania Folklife 13
Ouly 1963): 43-50; Signurd Erixon, "European Ethnology in Our Time,"
Ethnologra Europea 1 (1967): 3-11.
7. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts
and Definitions (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).
8. Gene Wise, "The American Studies Movement: A Thirty-Year Retrospective," American Quarterly 31 (Bibliography Issue, 1979): 332-33.

xiv

1
Material Culture
and Cultural Research

Thomas f. Schlereth

MATERIAL CULTURE RESEARCH is both an old and a new scholarly

enterprise in the United States. While anthropologists and archaeologists have pursued its dimensions since at least the 1870s, historians
and some social scientists have only recently begun to discover its
potential in cultural analysis.
Who first fabricated the slightly awkward expression "material
culture"? When and where did someone first use the term? What was
meant by this phrase? Like many human creations-the bow saw, fresco
painting, the gerund-we cannot attribute authorship with absolute
accuracy to any one particular individual at a specific time or place.
Etymological dictionaries and conventional finding aids often neglect
the term. 1 Specialized glossaries of disciplinary terminology where one
might suspect to find it unfortunately provide descriptive rather than
historical definitions. 2
An early scholarly use of the term "material culture" was by the
nineteenth-century anthropologist, A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers. Writing
"On the Evolution of Culture" in 1875, Pitt-Rivers urged fellow researchers in the emerging social sciences to consider material culture as
the "outward signs and symbols of particular ideas in the mind." 3
Only certain American anthropologists and archaeologists pursued
Pitt-Rivers's injunction. Most were content to use the idea as a descriptive tool by which to categorize the objects of native Amerindian
civilizations. For example, Clark Wissler and Otis T. Mason, archaeologists at the Smithsonian Institution, did pioneering research projects
1

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surveying the material cultures of the North American Indians. Their

work was followed by studies such as Robert Redfield's research on
Meso-America and, still later, by Clyde Kluckhohn's magnum opus on
the material world of the Navaho.4
At the turn of the century, an occasional American folklorist
disagreed with the obsession with literary materials of many of his
colleagues and toyed with the potential uses of material data for the
interpretation of folk culture. These mavericks were few but, as Simon
Bronner has shown, their interests, if not their actual works, prefigure
some of the activities of the material folk culture revival that began in the
1960s. 5
Anxious to be able to make more precise distinctions in their
examination of human behavior, these early American anthropologists
and folklorists developed a tripartite division of cultural data. The first
component was ideological (evidence found usually in the form of oral
or written data). The second division was sociological (evidence documented by fieldwork observation of human behavior, such as childrearing or kinship patterns). A third resource was material (evidence
found in the work of human hands, such as ceramics, tools, houses, and
the like).
Folkloristic and anthropological interest in material culture atrophied in the 1930s as the evolutionary paradigm with which it was often
associated fell from favor and was eclipsed by other explanatory models.
With the exception of its continued use in archaeology and its token
appearance in anthropology textbook surveys, 6 the term largely
dropped out of scholarly discourse until its resurgence, in various fields
ranging from art history to social history, in the past two decades of
American scholarship.

THE DEFINITIONS OF MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES

In both past and present scholarship, "material culture" is often
considered a synonym for terms such as "artifacts," "objects," or
"things." Such interchangeability is frequently evident in both professional and popular writing. However, instead of treating the terms
"things," "objects," "artifacts," and "material culture" as coequals, it
may be more useful to regard them as terms of increasing specificity of
meaning, with "things" seen as the most general rubric and "material
culture" as the most specific label when used within the confines of
scholarly discourse.
2

Material Culture and Cultural Research

For example, only in its tertiary meaning does the word "things"
connote a sense of inanimate entities distinguishable from living organisms. Yet some scholars such as George Kubler prefer the general term
and have attempted to study "the history of things" rather than resort
to using what Kubler calls "the bristling ugliness of [the phrase] material
culture. "7 The word "objects," like the term "things," is another
highly abstract collective noun, whereas" artifacts" (artefacts in Britain),
coming from the Latin arte, meaning skill, and factum, meaning something done, at least includes an indirect reference to a human being (an
artificer) in its meaning. Objects lack this sense of implied human
agency and, unlike artifacts, can be used as an expansive covering term
for everything in both the natural and the man-made environment.
By contrast, the general definition of material culture specifically
includes the factor of human artifice and also aptly circumscribes the
scope of physical data that properly belongs within its research domain.
What is useful, therefore, about the term "material culture" is that it
suggests, at least among its current students, a strong interrelation
between physical objects and human behavior. Despite its cumbersomeness, the phrase continually presses the researcher to consider the
complex interactions that take place between creators and their culture.
In other words, the assumption is that there is always a culture behind
the material. Moreover, the name has one other asset: it simultaneously
refers to both the subject of the study, material, and to its principal
purpose, the understanding of culture.
Although scholars roughly agree on the label "material culture,"
they have differing ideas as to how best to define the concept. Definitions often vary by academic field. For, in addition to anthropologists
and archaeologists who pioneered in material culture research, scholars
in art history, history of technology, cultural geography, and folkloristics
now also use the term, often understood within their specialized
perspectives. A sampler of material culture definitions presently in
circulation would include:
Material culture entails the actions of manufacture and
use, and the expressed theories about the production, use, and
nature of material objects. B
Material culture is the ideas about objects external to the
mind resulting from human behavior as well as ideas about
human behavior required to manufacture these objects. 9
Material culture is the array of artifacts and cultural landscapes that people create according to traditional, patterned,
and often tacit concepts of value and utility that have been
developed over time, through use and experimentation. These
3

Material Culture and Cultural Research

Thomas f. Schlereth

different meaning-one that anthropologist Marvin Harris has devel14

oped into a controversial explanation of human behavior.
These obstacles to lexicographic clarity can be partially mitigated by
understanding the two words "material" and "culture" in a wide
perspective. For example, once the culture of material culture is seen to
include the objects of high culture (for instance, a J. S. Copley painting
or Daniel Chester French sculpture) as well as artifacts of popular and
vernacular culture (for instance, a Los Angeles freeway billboard or an
Upland South barn), culture is seen to be simply culture-that is,
socially transmitted rules for human behavior that entail ways of
thinking and doing things. The term "material" can also be expanded.
For example, James Deetz has proposed we consider cuts of meat as
material culture, since there are many ways to dress an animal. In
Deetz's view, the scientific breeding of livestock should also be included
in any definition of material culture since the conscious modification of
an animal's physical form is done according to culturally patterned
behavior .1s Kinesics (for instance, the body motions involved in performing Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring ballet or a southern
Indiana clog dance) and proxemics (for instance, the spatial uses and
interactions of people in New York's Rockefeller Center or at Anaheim's
Disneyland) are other culture expressions that assume, if but for a
limited time, physical form and could be included within the legitimate
boundaries of material culture.
Although the scope of the material in material culture continues to
be expanded in various directions, this does not mean that it includes a
totally unrestricted spectrum of all possible objects. Human agency is
either implicit or explicit in all the definitions we have been examining.
Therefore, natural objects such as trees, fossils, or skeletons_ are usually
excluded from definitions of material culture on the grounds that they
are not man-made or man-modified artifacts. However, when natural
objects are encountered in a cultural pattern that suggests human
activity-a stone wall in Pennsylvania or a fence row of Osage orange in
an otherwise random Ozark forest, a concentration of pig bones in a
midden site in Arkansas, a pile of oyster shells prepared for the making
of tabby along the Florida coastline-these are examples of natural
materials that have become materials of culture.
Where does all this semantic searching and definitional dancing
leave us? What might be an adequate (but not elaborate) working
definition of material culture that would be useful to scholars in various
research fields? Here is a brief one that will be used throughout this
chapter: material culture is that segment of humankind's biosocial
environment that has been purposely shaped by people according to
culturally dictated plans.

artifacts and landscapes objectiv~ly represent a group's subjective vision of custom and order. \o '
Material culture: the totality of artifacts in a culture; the
vast universe of objects used by humankind to cope with the
physical world, to facilitate social intercourse, to delight our
fancy, and to create symbols of meaning. 11
The underlying premise is 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 to which they belonged.12
Material culture is that segment of man's physical environment which is purposely shaped by him according to culturally
dictated plans_13
What do these contemporary definitions share in common? How do
they differ in purpose, scope, and use? To state the obvious, all embrace
the material, calling it variously the "physical environment," a "product," an "object," a "thing," or an "artifact." Agreement exists that
man-made materials are vital to any concept of material culture.
A second axiom is the belief that a link exists between material and
culture. In some definitions, this linkage is explicit; in others, the
interrelation of material and culture is more guarded, as in the suggestion "material culture entails the actions of manufacture." In any
event, each of the definitions recognizes the culture concept as integral
to understanding material culture. The definitions also generally concur
in defining culture as those socially transmitted rules for human
behavior that entail ways of thinking and doing things. This economical
idea of culture is expressed in phrases such as "patterns of belief,"
"concepts of value," "belief systems," or "culturally dictated plans."
Despite this basic definitional harmony, the term "material culture"
may still strike us as one of those awkward phrases that we suspect may
have been made up by a committee. Like many two-word explanations
(e.g., "Yankee ingenuity"), it appears to explain everything and yet
often ends up confusing everything. For example, we must admit at the
outset, the phrase is something of a contradiction in terms, since
material culture is not actually culture but its product. To compound this
self-contradiction, the phrase labors under another liability since, in
common parlance, there is a tendency to associate the word "material"
with base and pragmatic things, while "culture" is a word usually
connected with noble and erudite things. Moreover, if the terms are
inverted, as in cultural materialism, we have a phrase of an entirely

4
,

Thomas

f. Schlereth

Some investigators use the term "material culture" not only in the
sense that we have been describing it (that is, as a covering term for all
man-made or man-modified artifacts) but also as a method of cultural
inquiry employing physical objects as its primary data. In such usage,
material culture stands for both the subject to be researched as well as
the method of studying the subject. (The word "history," likewise,
often stands for both the work of the discipline and also for the content
of the discipline.) The possible misunderstanding that this double
meaning can cause can be avoided by using the phrase "material culture
studies" to describe the research, writing, teaching, exhibiting, and
publishing of individuals who endeavor to interpret past and present
human activity largely, but not exclusively, through extant physical
evidence.
The term "material culture studies" is by no means the only
nomenclature in current usage. In fact, the eclectic enterprise has often
been identified by several roughly synonymous labels. They and some
of their practitioners include: "artifact studies" (E. McClung Fleming), ,
"anonymous history" (Siegfried Giedion), "material life" (Robert St.
George), "pots-and-pans history" (Elizabeth Wood), "material history"
(John Mannion), "above-ground archaeology" (John Cotter), "material
culture history" (Brooke Hindle), "physical folklore" (Richard Dorson),
"volkskunde" (Andrew Fenton), "hardware history" (Larry Lankton),
and "material civilization" (Fernand Braudel).16
Material culture studies is deliberately plural because it comprises
several disciplines, among them the triad of art, architectural, and
decorative arts history; cultural geography; the history of technology;
folkloristics; historical archaeology; cultural anthropology, as well as
cultural and social history. To be sure, not all of these disciplines and
subdisciplines use material culture to the same extent. Practically all
archaeologists and most art historians share a common interest in
material culture evidence, although not necessarily the same type.
Artifact study is important to some, but by no means all, historical
geographers and cultural anthropologists. Such data are vital to the
research of a growing number of historians of technology, and to an
expanding cadre of folklorists and a widening circle of social and cultural
historians.
While it now possesses most of the disciplinary accouterments (for
example, scholarly journals, academic conferences, and tentative plans
for a national professional association), the present state of material
culture studies does not constitute an academic discipline. 17 As Richard
Dorson was wont to remind us, in order for an enterprise to be
6

r
\

Material Culture and Cultural Research

considered a scholarly discipline, it must be established in both a

pragmatic and philosophical way. Pragmatically, a discipline exists if it
can reach an intellectual audience with scholarly works, earn a place in
accepted fields of learning of its day, preserve and enlarge its area of
knowledge, attract converts and young disciples, and perpetuate itself
for another generation. Philosophically, the discipline exists if it can lay
claim to distinctive theoretical methods or empirical data important for
humankind's knowledge of self and of society. 1B At this stage of its
historical development, material culture studies performs several but
not all of these functions.
Material culture research can be best described at present as an
expanding movement or coalition of individuals (James Deetz calls it
"an emerging research community") working in museums, historical
societies, and cultural agencies, as well as in academic departments in
colleges and universities, who are intrigued by the idea of studying the
(possibly unique) explanatory potential of material evidence as cultural
meaning. Eschewing any single orthodoxy in methodology, the study of
material culture seeks to develop the explanatory power of artifact
knowledge in order that such knowledge might ultimately expand
human understanding. The principal task of material culture studies is
an epistemological one; it is an attempt to know what can be known
about and from the past and present creations of humankind.
What, if anything, do the diverse practitioners of material culture
research have in common? In addition to an obvious evidential concern
with physical objects as cultural data, the movement works under at
least four common- assumptions. Most studies of material culture, as
Warren Roberts has shown us, usually involve field-work research
during which artifacts are collected, identified, compared, and categorized either in situ or in assorted museums, in private and public
collections, and in historical agencies where such physical data are
housed. 19 A historical perspective also characterizes most material
culture studies, since (as several of their names indicate-the history of
technology, art and architecture history, historical geography, for example), they seek to measure and understand change over time. In
historical analysis, researchers use the culture concept in varying ways.
While some see culture only with a capital C, the majority view it as an
anthropological construct. 20 Finally, perhaps the hallmark of the current
emphasis in American material culture studies is an increased quest for a
truly interdisciplinary focus to its work, conceptually and methodologically, in order to analyze humankind's past artifactual record as a
concrete manifestation of cultural history.
7

Thomas f. Schlereth

Material Culture and Cultural Research

THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURES

OF MATERIAL CULTURE EVIDENCE
Why should we bother to investigate the material in search of the
meaning of cultural? Historical and other investigators of human behavior have long argued that words, rather than things, are better resources
for understanding the past and present. Can any particular claims be
made for material culture as a distinctive type of empirical data? Or, to
put it another way, does material culture have any special evidential
characteristics in cultural inquiry?
Before answering these questions, we should emphasize that no
serious student of material culture ignores any extant documentary or
statistical data that is relevant to his or her investigation. Material
culture invariably involves work with both words and things, and in
most research the two forms of evidence are used in tandem. Of course,
a great deal of material culture research (for example, this book) is
communicated through words. There are, however, several evidential
qualities that are more prominent in material culture evidence than in
documentary evidence. These characteristics include: (a) evidential
precedence; (b) temporal tenacity; (c) three-dimensionality; (d) wider
representativeness; and (e) affective understanding.
Recorded human history based upon written documents goes back
in time approximately six thousand years. Yet for many of these
centuries, the records consist largely of artifacts. In fact, in order to tell
our full human history (not merely our mislabeled "prehistory"),
archaeologists are able to extend the human saga by fifty thousand
additional years through their analysis of material culture evidence.
Human beings were making things long before they were speaking or
writing about such things. Material culture predates verbal culture by
several thousand years, since toolmaking, almost universal in all
cultures, preceded the invention of writing in practically all of them.
Material culture possesses, therefore, evidential precedence in that it is
humankind's oldest legacy of cultural expression. In fact, some scholars
argue that it is the oldest manifestation of our humanness.
In western cultures, historians normally mark broad stages of this
early period of human history by the kind of objects people could make:
the Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages define the times and
cultures in which things were first molded out of stone and then of
metal. Modern historians continue to use artifactual metaphors to
explain the past of the industrial revolution, a chromo-civilization, or the
atomic era. Our book titles-Engines of Democracy, The Dynamo and the
Virgin, The Republic of Technology, American Civilization in the First Machine
Age-also betray our predilection for historical periodization through
artifactual symbols.21
8

(.

Material culture is not only the most ancient of time's shapes, it is

also a tangible form of a past time persisting in present time. We can no
longer hear a sixteenth-century Spanish folk hymn or a seventeenthcentury New England Puritan sermon as they were once sung or
preached, but we can venerate a reliquary at the Mission of San Jose or
meditate in the Old Ship Meetinghouse at Hingham, Massachusetts.
This tenacious, although not indestructible, durability of the artifact
affords the researcher a temporal range of data that enables him or her to
explore human behavior over a much wider pattern of cultural change
than if only written records are consulted.
The temporal tenacity of material culture evidence should not be
exaggerated. All artifacts-like all humans-wear out, break down, are
damaged beyond repair, destroyed, or lost. This process occurs even
when the material culture is preserved in historical museums and other
cultural repositories. Numerous artifacts also often go through a succession of alterations, being worn, used, or weathered over time. When a
researcher encounters such objects, he must remember that their current
state may be only one of their former states. Most likely such objects are
not identically the same as when they were first fabricated.
Yet despite the fact that wood rots, metal corrodes, and stone
crumbles, material culture enjoys an exceptional longevity among the
other remains of the human past. Many interpreters also argue that such
physical remains have a remarkably high degree of evidential veracity
and a relatively low incidence of deliberate duplicity when compared
with other historical data. Anthropologist William Rathje sees this
aspect of material evidence as a data base that is usually nonreactive,
quantifiable, and largely independent of the biases of traditional interpretive techniques. 22 It is claimed that physical objects are less biased
records of past human activity in that they usually survive not as
transcriptions or translations or condensations of events but often as
events themselves.
For example, the statue of George Washington that we now see
displayed in the National Museum of American History in Washington,
D.C., is fundamentally the same physical artifact sculpted by Horatio
Greenough from 1833 to 1841. The sculpture has, of course, had many
different settings over the past century and a half-in the mall in front of
the U.S. Capitol, at the East Portico of the Capitol, in storage in the
Smithsonian's basement, and now on public view in the NMAH -but its
basic physical form remains as Greenough executed it from a block of
Italian marble. The sculpture is, therefore, a different type of historical
evidence (not necessarily a better type) in that its physical composition
separates it from, say, evidence such as Greenough's own writing about
the sculpture as well as what has been written and said about the art
work since the 1840s.
9

Thomas f. Schlereth

Occasionally an object, although itself destroyed, survives in another material form to instruct the historian about the past. For example,
archaeologically, the terms "post construction" and "earthfast" are
used to refer to buildings whose wooden structural members are set into
or laid directly on the ground. Such structures are built without
masonry foundations. Although the wooden members of the buildings
have rotted away, they have left patterns of disconnected dots or molds
in the ground. From these residues, architectural historians and archaeologists working in Maryland and Virginia have deciphered important
information about the seventeenth-century vernacular buildings of
which there are but extant traces. In fact, as Dell Upton points out,
because of the tenacity of this material culture data more is now known
about earthfast structures of the Chesapeake region than about earlier,
similar buildings in England.23
Barring deliberate alteration or forgery or some other conscious
deceit, material culture evidence directly embodies actual historical
events. Such data can provide the historian with an opportunity to
explore a facet of the past, first-hand as it were, not as translated by
someone in the past, writing down experiences or orally describing
what he encountered. The claim here is that certain human activitiesparticularly tasks of making and doing-can afford the researcher
something like an "encounter of the third kind," providing data that
may be only hinted at or totally missing in statistical or verbal commentaries on the past.24
Past human experience is thus given a novel degree of permanency
in material culture. Past thoughts and feelings, it is argued, gain a
special degree of objectivity in things such as tools and chairs that
endure, across time, as historical events. Artifacts are thrust into the
world and past experience is made solid. In short, artifacts have the
power to stabilize experience of the past. To the historical researcher,
they are here in his time; and yet they are also still there in another
time-that is, in their time.
This dual personality of material culture evidence has at least two
cultural ramifications. On the one hand, it helps explain the reverence
and nostalgia that the antiquarian has for past artifacts, enshrining them
in public and private art galleries, museums, and historical societies
often designed as classical temples. (Of course, we also do this with
documents-for example, the public display of the nation's sacred
scriptures in a sanctuary we call the National Archives.) On the other
hand, the extant historicity of material culture data (our obsession with
only the "real things") will be one of the major arguments continually
used against the proposals of Wilcomb Washburn and others that
10

Material Culture and Cultural Research

historical museums should begin to collect information, not only objects.25

In his 1982 presidential address to his fellow historians of technology, Brooke Hindle posed two important questions: "Is there a truth
inhering in the three-dimensional survivals that is missed when they
become mere illustrations, even in exhibits reflecting the best possible
historical understanding? If so, what is that truth?" Professor Hindle
answered by suggesting what he considers to be one of the salient
characteristics of material culture evidence: its three-dimensionality-a
mode of knowing that entails a nonverbal comprehension of the
significance of mass, scale, and amplitude in human history. 26
Three-dimensionality is common to all material culture, including
objects such as maps, photographs, and graphics; but it is, of course,
more characteristic of some artifacts than of others. A Bessemer blast
furnace possesses greater dimensionality than a Kodak snapshot; mass
and proportion are more pronounced in the actual Brooklyn Bridge than
in John Marin's watercolors of the structure.
The common trait of three-dimensionality, claims Eugene Ferguson,
can be best investigated by analyzing the scale, texture, proportion,
style, mass, and workmanship of an artifact. These are evidential
features usually not found in any parallel way in books, diagrams, or
drawings.27 Therefore, three-dimensionality, is, tb quote Brooke Hindle
again, "a matter of spatial perspective, through sight, sound, and touch
of the real tool or machine. The best verbal historian has no possible way
of attaining this except after coming in contact with actual technological
artifacts. "28
Scholars have only begun to acknowledge the visual or tactile
dimensions of history. Rhys Isaac's Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790
and John Stilgoe' s Common Landscapes of America, 1598-1845 are recent
examples of this realization, but John Hale's indictment that "the
serious historical imagination is ... only marginally visual" and that
"the element of visual recreation in a historian's work is very small" still
characterizes far too much of our scholarship in American history.29
Surviving material culture evidence often provides us with a
broader cross section of society and, therefore, extends our sources of
cultural information beyond written or statistical records. For many
students of material culture, this expanded representativeness of much
material culture data is one of the most appealing reasons for using
objects in their research. Working from the premise that only a small
percentage of the world's past populations has been literate, that even a
smaller percentage has left records such as diaries, correspondence, or
personal papers, and that a still smaller percentage of such verbal data
11

Thomas

J.

adequately represents the entire socioeconomic spectrum of society,

these researchers have turned to artifacts. Material culture is consequently seen as one type of historical evidence that might mitigate some
of the biases of verbal data that (in the American historical experience)
are largely the literary record of a small group of mostly white, mostly
upper or middle class, mostly male, mostly urban, and mostly Protestant cadre of writers.3o
Material culturists assume, therefore, that extant nonverbal data
may provide a distinctive way of understanding the past cultural
activities of a larger majority of nonliterate people in a society whose
existence would otherwise remain inaccessible or unknown except
through surviving statistical data such as census tracts, court records,
and the often distorted views of their society's literary elite. In order to
redress the historical inequity of ignoring a large segment of the
population who produced no literary legacy, scholars have therefore
turned to studying, to use Leland Ferguson's felicitous phrase, "the
things they left behind." In so doing they have taken issue with some
historians who have arrogantly proposed that only a "history of the
inarticulate'' could describe this important cultural strata of the population.31
Finally, some material culturists argue that physical data provides
us with a certain type of knowing that art historian Jules Prawn has
called an affective mode of apprehension. By understanding artifacts,
suggests Prawn, "we can engage another culture in the first instance
not with our minds, the seat of our cultural biases, but with our senses."
As Prawn further explains, "this affective mode of apprehension
through the senses that allows us to put ourselves, figuratively speaking, inside the skins of individuals who commissioned, made, used, or
enjoyed these objects, to see with their eyes and touch with their hands,
to identify with them empathetically, is clearly a different way of
engaging the past than abstractly through the written word. Instead of
our minds making intellectual contact with minds of the past, our senses
make affective contact with the senses of the past. "32
While Prown' s argument can be criticized epistemologically, its
claim for a special sensory knowledge derivable from material culture
data has numerous supporters. Advocates are found not only among
students of the arts (where we might expect to find such devotees) but
also among historians of technology, cultural geographers, and social
scientists. For example, Brooke Hindle writes: "The historian of technology has to get inside the machines and processes of which he writes. He
12

Material Culture and Cultural Research

Schlereth

must feel [emphasis added] their three-dimensionality." Hindle later in

this essay recommends that the historian acquire "fingertip acquaintance and fingertip knowledge" of the material culture with which he
works. 33
The basis of this claim for a type of nonrational (not irrational)
affective knowledge ascertainable largely through artifacts rests, in part,
on the inherent limitations of most written or spoken language. Researchers as diverse as Prown, Henry Glassie, Clyde Kluckhohn, and
John Kouwenhoven have been distressed by the delusive generality of
words; that is, by the tendency for verbal evidence to take on an
averaging-out'' quality that reduces human experience (past and
present) to overly abstract formulas or symbols.34 One result of the
generality of verbal symbols such as words is that two people can be in
verbal agreement without meaning the same thing. For instance, a
farmer or an artist who has never been out of the American Southwest
and a farmer or an artist born and bred in the Scottish Hebrides could
not conceivably mean the same thing by the word "sunlight."
Words, therefore, are useful only to those who share a common
core of experience particulars, a fact that translators, diplomats, and
linguists all acknowledge. People who have not experienced similar
particulars usually have difficulty in understanding, from another's
words, the precise meaning that those words are intended to convey.
For this reason they often resort to other methods of nonverbal
communication-making drawings and diagrams, gesturing with their
bodies or apparel, or manipulating nearby objects in order to demonstrate their ideas. Such experiences suggest that meaning is not an
intrinsic property of words; rather, meaning is a process that words
sometimes facilitate, a process in which awareness passes from one
consciousness to another. As Kouwenhoven points out: "Words do not
have meaning; they convey it."3s Things, it can be argued, both embody
meaning as well as convey that meaning.
The claim for materjal culture as a resource for affective understanding also receives support from researchers who see much of human
creativity as primarily an aesthetic experience. Cyril Stanley Smith, a
historian of metallurgy, insists that within objects-be they copper
alloys, type castings, votive figures, coins, or electric generators-exists
"an instance of aesthetic curiosity." It is this characteristic of material
culture evidence to which Prawn, Smith, and others would have us turn
in order to have a human history that takes into account not only past
cognitive and behavioral activity, but also previous aesthetic and sensory experience. 36
11

13

Thomas f. Schlereth

COMMON ERRORS IN MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES

Despite the sometimes gradiose claims currently made for material
culture evidence-folklorist Henry Glassie recently insisted it was "the
deepest, broadest, and best historical source we have" 37-it must be
openly admitted that there are methodological difficulties involved in
using such evidence in cultural explanation. These problems include: (a)
fecklessness of data survival; (b) difficulty of access and verification; (c)
exaggeration of human efficacy; (d) penchant toward progressive determinism; and (e) proclivity for synchronic interpretation.
Material culture researchers have often failed to acknowledge the
fecklessness of data survival. There has not been sufficient reflection on
the enormous selectivity usually operating in the formation and survival
of material culture evidence. Much more research needs to be done on
the inscrutable processes of selection by which some artifacts survive
and others do not. For all of the great cache of objects now in our
museum storehouses, we have little quantitative sense of what has been
lost. We have no adequate awareness of how wide the gap is between
the former reality of the physical past and its present reality as extant,
material evidence in our presence. We must continually recognize that
historical explanations are based only on surviving data, certainly not all
that once was.
Increased methodological attention must also be given to the fact
that surviving objects are not necessarily representative of their makers
and users. We need to recognize, for example, that for certain historical
periods many more objects created by men exist than those made by
women. More artifacts survive from the upper and middle classes than
from the lower classes. The recent influx of social history into material
culture research may help alert us to the liabilities imposed by gender,
race, ethnic origin, and socioeconomic status of the makers and users of
objects.
Nonetheless, even when this information is known about objects,
they often come to the researcher's purview totally wrenched from their
original historical and cultural contexts. Frequently such contexts have
vanished. Kits of tools have been separated from the craftsmen, from
the shops where they were used, and from the products fabricated with
their help. Folk work is often studied totally removed from the folk
homes where it was produced. "Out of site" can mean "out of sight."
Without a documented context, artifacts are little more than historical
souvenirs.38
Although they claim special attributes for material culture evidence
in comparison with documentary or statistical data, most material
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Material Culture and Cultural Research

culture researchers acknowledge that we must find new methods of

analyzing and verifying artifacts-new methods that are analogous to
those commonly used with manuscripts and printed sources. In the
February 1984 issue of Museum News, historian Wilcomb Washburn
maintained that many scholars made little use of artifacts in their
research because of the difficulty of obtaining and verifying artifactual
data. Unlike most documentary data, material culture evidence cannot
be easily duplicated, microfilmed, published, and made widely available
to other scholars for further interpretation and verification. Not only are
surviving artifacts dispersed in institutional and private hands; even
within museums they are often inadequately catalogued, stored off site,
and hard to locate for systematic study. Washburn proposed to solve
this major limitation of material culture data by reducing artifacts to
photographs, drawings, and other more portable, quantitative, and
storable forms of data. Such extracted data would then permit the
disposal of many, although not all, preserved objects.39
Brooke Hindle has suggested that researchers now have a new tool,
the computer, that could greatly assist in the extraction of data from
material culture evidence in order to duplicate and manipulate such
evidence. Researchers may also use computer graphics, scale-modeling,
video-disk technology, and holography. Hindle is optimistic about the
potential of using such modern artifacts in analyzing material culture
data of earlier historical periods. In his judgment, the computer has
enormous capacities for "working with multidimensional constructs,
particularly two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional devices. For the first time, the basic verbal and mathematical records can
be collected in the same context with three-dimensional records and can
be accessed and analyzed by the historian in developing his syntheses."40
Collecting and analyzing information from objects, via the computer, may help mitigate another methodological fallacy to which
material culture research is susceptible. This problem might be called the
exaggeration of human efficacy. The very physicalness of a thing,
perhaps a metal object, especially one so old it possesses an alluring
patina, sometimes can be so emotionally compelling, so powerfully
evocative in size and scale that the researcher cannot help but center his
or her attention on what cultural anthropologists sometimes call "the
culture of agency." The existence of things still tangibly present centuries after their actual making can often oblige the researcher to
overemphasize the self-defining or self-assertive activities of their original makers. The history that is written from such data might, therefore,
champion only the activities of the doers and achievers, makers and
15

Thomas f. Schlereth

molders, movers and shakers of the past. Perhaps more triumphs than
tragedies survive in the extant physical record.
Exhibition of artifacts in museums often promotes a view of history
as a story of success and achievement. Such exhibits usually neglect the
downside of human life, common to us all but not commonly depicted.
For example, in many living-history farms in America there is little
material culture that helps a visitor experience something of the isolation, monotony, or high mortality rate of a frontier prairie existence.
Usually we do not see objects that would convey to a visitor the dread of
drought, fluctuating crop prices, or mortgage foreclosure. Where are the
artifacts of the anxiety over frequent childbirth, personal depression, or
chronic loneliness? Where are the instances of insanity, brutality, and
suicide that also characterize nineteenth-century American rural life?41
In these contexts, the documentary and statistical records (rather
than the artifactual) may prove more helpful to the researcher since
people could and did write about the dark and unpleasant side of their
existence; that is, the uncertainties, the false starts, the half-way
measures, the intentions that failed. Nonetheless, in object study we
also need analyses of material culture pathology so that we might know
more about what things, in various historical periods, did not work, that
consistently broke down or were quickly junked in favor of other
products. Inasmuch as most of the American material culture history
studied to date has been, like so much of American written history, the
history of winners, a greater appreciation of the losers (people and
products) might be a valuable corrective.
John Demos, in a review of New England Begins: The Seventeenth
Century, an exhibition and catalog produced by the Department of
American Decorative Arts and Sculpture of the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts (BMFA), suggests as much in his recognition of exaggerated human
efficacy in these two historical publications. 42 Demos notes that both the
material culture exhibit and its impressive three-volume catalog depict
New England settlers as uncommonly active, effective, and forceful in
coping with the circumstances of their lives. This viewpoint on their
experiences presents a sharp contrast to a generation of scholarly
opinion on seventeenth-century New England life. One thinks, for
example, of Bernard Bailyn' s Education in the Forming of American Society
and Oscar Handlin's essay "The Significance of the Seventeenth
Century," both written in the 1950s and both highly influential on
historical writing ever since. The emphasis in the Bailyn and Handlin
explanations falls on the element of the unanticipated and the unwelcomed effects of seventeenth-century life in a new environment.
Americans arrived with plans, expectations, and assumptions as to what
16

Material Culture and Cultural Research

l
~

they were about, but environmental circumstances transformed most of

these.43 The artifacts analyzed by the BMFA research team of archaeologists, decorative arts specialists, and social historians lead to quite
another conclusion. New Englanders were in control of their lives and
their actions, artifice, and artifacts show them so.
A belief in progress has been enormously influential in both
American history and material culture research. The latter often sees the
American past as one material success after another in an ever-upward
ascent of increased goods and services for all the nation's citizens.
George Basalla and others have traced this tendency in the history of
technology and in technical museums. Such museums, notes Basalla,
are often dominated by a "technological cornucopia" mentality in their
celebration of American progress. Michael Ettema sees the same problem in the American decorative arts as does Dell Upton in American
vernacular architecture. 44
Progressive determinism has sometimes pervaded another aspect of
material culture research that might be called "the national character
focus," a historiographic tradition so labeled because of its relation to a
similarly named and oriented trend in American Studies and, in part,
because its advocates have sought nothing less than a total explanation
of the American national experience. 45
Beginning with Roger Burlingame's two-volume survey of technology's impact on American life, through the work of}. C. Furnas,
John Kouwenhoven, Elting Morison, Alan Gowans, and Daniel
Boorstin, there has been a conscious attempt to extrapolate the ideological configurations of American history from American artifacts. At
present, such metahistory is no longer in vogue among most contemporary students of material culture. The most innovative work is currently
occurring at the local or regional level. There have been some macro level
hypotheses proposed by material culturists (discussed below in reviewing current explanatory theory), but the majority of researchersinfluenced as they increasingly are by the social sciences-are wary of
making grandiose claims as to what might be most singularly "American
about American artifacts."46
Opposite the tendency to progressive determinism is a proclivity
toward synchronic method in material culture research. Some culture
anthropologists, literary critics, folkloristic scholars, and art historians,
for example, have been prone to this approach to the artifact. Synchronic analysis I take to mean simply a descriptive study of objects
without reference to time duration or cultural change. Its antonym,
diachronic analysis, is a comparative study of objects as historical datathat is, as resources that can be considered as being both effects and
causes in history. 47
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Schlereth

Synchronic analysis has been seen by some as the only sufficient

and proper task of material culture analysis. Others, while acknowledging the value of such an approach in solving interpretive problems of
form or design, insist that material culture research must also include a
diachronic element if it is to result in a cultural interpretation useful to
other scholars for whom the historical is a useful mode of knowing. 48
Two forms of the synchronic perspective, one conceptual, the other
methodological, might be noted here. The first could be called material
culture neo-criticism. Here the claim is made that objects can possess, as
literary critic Northrop Frye argues, "an imaginative element ... that
lifts them clean of the bondage of history. " 49 The artifact, therefore,
exists sui generis, possessing a life of its own, not shackled to time or
place. Material culturists influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel
Foucault have been especially attracted to this nonhistorical stance.
Richard Poulsen, for example, in The Pure Experience of Order, argues that
''it seems quite clear that psychic needs evident in material artifacts
cannot be explained through chronology." Paulsen sees his approach to
material folk culture as one that "describes movements or conditions
that are ahistorical-not explicable by history and actually in opposition
to it. " 50
The synchronic syndrome also expresses itself in a perennial quest
for aesthetic uniqueness, special artistic achievement, and Procrustean
stylistic periodizations. These tendencies manifest themselves in many
temporary and permanent museum exhibitions as well as in catalogs
and monographs. Despite their name's injunction, art historians can be
extremely nonhistorical in this respect. Material culture research in
American art, architecture, and decorative arts history still often resorts
to a flat, overly generalized, style nomenclature (e.g., Romanic, NeoGrec, Colonial Revival) in its historical periodizations. Such labels are
conclusions about material culture, not explanations of the data. Of
course, such approaches may increase our knowledge of a style's
components (that is, provide us with something of the what of the style)
but they are invariably deficient in explaining how a style came to be or
why it may have changed.

EXPLANATIONS IN MATERIAL CULTURE RESEARCH

What can material culture research explain about the past? How
valuable might it be to scholars such as historians, many of whom
traditionally have been either hostile or indifferent to it?51 What are the
levels of its veracity and persuasiveness in cultural inquiry?
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Material Culture and Cultural Research

Few would argue with the claim that material culture evidence of
the past should obviously be used in historical research when it is the
only evidence available. Such historical explanations can be labeled
explanations of singularity. Much of the Native American history of this
continent (for example, that being uncovered at the Koster site in
Illinois) has been written by archaeologists and anthropologists in this
explanatory mode.s2 Studies of Inca copper objects have also yielded
precise information about complex gilding processes while the examination of the microstructure of other metals has taught us much about
various heating, forging, and quenching processes that we would know
in no other way. Social history information on such diverse subjects as
the rate of consumption of alcohol in the urban workplace and living
conditions of Chinese immigrants in the American West has also been
generated from artifacts used as the primary data. 53
Here the research on earthfast construction in the colonial Tidewater might be cited again. Not only did the careful scrutiny of that
material culture provide documentation for a chronological and geographical distribution of these frontier houses, it also enabled the
researchers to understand the colonial economic context and how such
structures reflected a value system nurtured by single-crop, laborintensive tobacco farming.
No documentary, statistical, or oral data survives yielding sufficient
information on the history of a distinctive type of Dutch barn in
America. In order to understand both how such barns were built and
who built them, architectural historian John Fitchen had to rely almost
exclusively on the extant structures. His book The New World Dutch Barn:

A Study of Its Characteristics, Its Structural System, and Its Probable

Erectional Procedures (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968) has
rightly become a classic in material culture research. Henry Glassie
would later apply a structuralist interpretation to 156 Middle Virginia
houses in a similar attempt to ascertain the architectural competence,
community values, and mentality of their makers. 54
In the history of numerous manufacturing processes and technological activities, there are often no documentary resources for us to explain
how such processes were employed or how various manufacturing
techniques were developed. A methodology of material culture studies
known as experimental archaeology is helping to explain the work force,
the work place, and the work routine of the American worker who
created such processes. As folklife scholar Jay Anderson explains,
"experimental archaeology was developed as a means of 1) practically testing theories of past cultural behavior, especially technological
processes involving the use of tools and 2) obtaining data not read19

Thomas f. Schlereth

ily available from more traditional artifact analysis and historical

sources." 55 Major centers for this type of historical research have been
the country's outdoor living-history museums such as Old Sturbridge
Village, Colonial Williamsburg, and Plimoth Plantation, where experimental archaeology has been applied to expand the historian's understanding of agricultural practices, metal working, and dietary habits.
While their interpretations to date have been mostly microexplanations, researchers who have produced explanations of singularity from
material culture data have often been the very first to establish any type
of explanation whatsoever in their area of historical interest ..We are in
their debt for the incremental knowledge they are slowly adding to our
portrait of the past.
Artifacts can be used as supporting or supplementary evidence in
research when the available documentary and statistical data for a topic
are limited, seriously flawed, or problematic in some fashion. We might
refer to these interpretations as explanations of support. Such explanations involve both visual and verbal, artifactual and documentary
evidence.
Scholars use this explanatory mode in two ways. For example, if the
historian has formulated his hypothesis initially on the basis of material
culture evidence, he may wish to substantiate or further document his
argument by careful examination of parallel documentary data. Or, in
reverse, a historian who has developed his hypothesis primarily from
statistical and documentary data may wish to scrutinize the material
culture record that parallels (in time and place) the verbal record he has
already mastered.
Harvey Green and Rhys Isaac have done recent studies integrating
both material culture data and documentary materials to explain issues
such as nineteenth-century Victorians and eighteenth-century Virginians.56 On certain other topics of interest to contemporary scholars,
material culture research may prove especially supportive in its contributions to explanatory theory. For example, if economic historians such
as Neil McKendrick and Mario Szabo are correct in their claim that "the
way that people spend their money in the consumption of goods, can be
said to be the way that they order their lives," then consumerism may
be a historical issue on which we will see increased cooperative research
based upon documentary data and material culture evidence.s7 So, too,
on the roles of diet, advertising, childhood, recreation, domesticity, and
creativity in the American past. On the last topic, the historical origins,
dimensions, and ramifications of innovation and invention, we are
already seeing research combining traditional documentation and material culture evidence. ss
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Material Culture and Cultural Research

Such collaboration increasingly characterizes material culture research strategies presently being employed in the exploration of several
broad explanatory concepts such as modernization, mechanization,
urbanization, and consumerism. Modernization theory, for instance,
guided some of the research of the BMFA investigation of seventeenthcentury New England and presently informs part of the interpretative
program of the Henry Ford Museum's analysis of nineteenth-century
America. The implications of the "consumer revolution" thesis argued
in France by Fernand Braude! and in England by McKendrick is partially
now being explored against the material culture evidence amassed in
places like Colonial Williamsburg and the Strong Museum. 59
Material culture research, argues social historian Cary Carson,
performs a final supportive role in historical explanation when it assists
in communicating that explanation in a format understandable to an
audience broader than that of the professional history fraternity. Carson
maintains that historians have only begun to explore the enormous
heuristic potential of artifacts, sites, settings, reenactments, and ethnographic dramas in the communication of their knowledge of the
past. 60 If he is right, material culture may both significantly widen the
evidential basis on which American history is explained and play a
major role in explaining it to a wider audience of the American people.
Finally, the third major research 1?trategy in which material culture
evidence can be-aep1oyed is to subject established interpretations \
usually based strictly on documentary and statistical data to a careful '
critique. Here the objective is to revise or overturn an interpretation if
there appears to be some discrepancy in the material culture evidence
surrounding the topic. This revisionist perspective subjects long-accepted
historical generalizations-such as the interchangeability of parts in early
American manufacturing, the importance of the fall line in American
historical geography, the introduction of log building by the Swedes, or
the superiority of nineteenth-century American agricultural machinery-to close scrutiny from another angle and with the aid of
different evidence. We might call these explanations of superiority
simply because they prove material culture evidence to be the superior
data base in explaining a part of the past heretofore interpreted largely
(and mistakenly) through documentary data.
Typical revisions of our understanding of the American past that
have been made by comparing material evidence with previously
established documentary and statistical data explanations would include
Allan Ludwig's reinterpretation of the Puritans based upon his analysis
of their funerary art rather than their sermons. 61 James Deetz has
suggested a format for the rewriting of the cultural history of seven21

Thomas

f. Schlereth

teenth- and eighteenth-century New England (and by inference much of

colonial America) based upon ceramics, architecture, foodways, decorative arts, and household furnishings. 62 Ivor Noel Hume, in Martin's
Hundred, has recreated a nearly forgotten British settlement at Wolstenholme that was wiped out by an Indian massacre in 1622. He learned
from the material culture data "more about the struggles to maintain
European standards on the frontier of civilization" than he could have
from all the written records of the time. 63
In the history of technology, Robert Howard, Merritt Roe Smith,
and other American scholars have suggested that one standard explanation for early nineteenth-century American technological creativity-the
idea of the interchangeability of parts-simply does not square with the
historical reality of the extant museum specimens. For example, the fact
that Eli Whitney did not achieve true interchangeability, despite his
voiced enthusiasms, was not clear until the parts of his muskets were
actually examined. Generations of historical writing about the "interchangeability" of the parts in Whitney's muskets was finally confronted
and revised with the empirical fact that, once taken apart, the extant
specimens proved not to be interchangeable at all. 64 Such comparative
analysis can prompt the historian to seek another explanation for his
data. "Seeing devices" only through the written word, suggests Carroll
Pursell, puts one in danger of "reproducing old errors of perception, of
mistaking rhetoric for reality," and often of completely misunderstanding complex interconnections of acts, artifacts, and authors in the past. 65
Most material culturists have thus far been content to practice a type
of incremental revisionism, re-evaluating historical explanations within
the boundaries of their disciplinary or subdisciplinary precincts. Kenneth Ames's critique of American folk art is an instance of this practice;
Ruth Schwartz Cowan's perceptive study of the ironies of household
technology is another example. Some have taken on the reinterpretation
of a particular historical era such as the seventeenth century, which Alan
Gowans two decades ago labeled as medieval and now Robert St.
George and Robert Trent explain as mannerist. 66
James Deetz's tripartite explanation for interpreting cultural change
in colonial American society currently looms as one material culture
paradigm that seeks to challenge traditional historical explanation on a
macrolevel. Deetz initially argued his theory and method in a working
paper ("A Cognitive Historical Model for American Material Culture")
that he subsequently elaborated in a small volume called In Small Things
Forgotten: The Archaeology of North American History (1980).
Documentary and material culture evidence suggested to Deetz that
New England culture evolved through three phases: a Stuart yeoman
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Material Culture and Cultural Research

phase (1620-1660), .a localized Anglo-American era (1660-1760), .and a

Georgian period (1760-1830). Although Deetz used all the ev1dence
available, including census records, cartography, probate inventories,
and other assorted documentary data, he made a special attempt to
employ ''aspects of the material culture record which represented
universals in the lives of people of early Anglo-America: ceramics, since
everyone ate; housing, since everyone lived in some kind of a building;
gravestones, since everyone died, although not all were commemorated
by a memorial."67 To a lesser extent, Deetz also used musical forms,
trash disposal, and foodways in his analysis. His conclusions challenged
the traditional political and diplomatic history interpretation of the
American independence movement as the major cultural watershedthe major cultural change, if you will-of American colonial history. The
documentary and material data that Deetz assembled and integrated
suggested that the political revolution actually had little impact on
American cultural history; in fact, the general American cultural pattern
before and after the war was closer to British material culture than had
previously been believed.
In summary, the formulating of explanations, the testing of explanations, and the revising of explanations that we have examined afford
us a typology of how material culture research has been used in cultural
interpretation. Two caveats, however, are worth noting before reflecting
on the future of material culture studies.
First, it would be hubris indeed to assume that we can acquire
complete access to a culture's behavioral and belief systems simply
because ample objects have survived. Like explanations written with
verbal data, our understanding of material culture will always be a mere
approximation, a conjecture based at best on fragmentary evidence.
Moreover, objects may prove appropriate only to decipher certain kinds
of human intentions; it may be that only certain specific patterns of
thought can be teased from them. In the study of objects, there may be a
spectrum of explanatory potential that extends from one end of a scale in
which material culture is highly revelatory of culture (architecture,
furniture) to the other end where objects have little cultural content for
human activities.
Second, we must always remember that it is the culture, rather than
the material, that should interest the material culture researchers. As
Brooke Hindle reminds his fellow historians: "It is the spatial and
analytical understanding offered by artifacts, not the things themselves,
that is the historian's goal. He has to see through the objects to the
historical meaning to which they relate." 68
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J.

Material Culture and Cultural Research

Schlereth

FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES

Most scholarship on material culture in America in the immediate
future will most probably be concentrated on a micro- rather than a
macrolevel. The monograph, the field report, and the specialized exhibit
catalog will dominate the field as researchers nibble away at previously
unexplored topics, artifact genres, time periods, and geographical
regions. Case studies and tightly focused research will be the norm.
Eventually, of course, some audacious soul will initiate a new synthesis
of all this piecemeal research, and we will see a new array of broad
interpretations of American culture (past and present) in which physical
evidence will play its relevant and necessary part. Such a new synthesis
may be wound around any one (or a combination thereof) of several
cultural theory models (for example, structuralism or modernization)
presently contending for our attention. Or we may also see a new
explanatory principle (perhaps one empirically derived from material
culture data itself) enumerated, documented, and defended.
In the age of particularism, we may see more polemics. Heretofore,
intellectual discourse in material culture research has been a rather
genteel endeavor. This may change as scholars come to feel more
strongly about their methodological turf. Attacks on and defenses of
research technique and evidential usage may become more spirited and
vigorous, serving, as a result, as important catalysts in promoting more
rigorous scholarship. Perhaps even an occasional methodological "slaying of the father'' will take place as some young scholars in the field
(many of whom are the first to be trained specifically as material
culturists) take on their graduate-school mentors and challenge older
research techniques and interpretive positions. It could be a heady
time. 69
If the number of conferences, symposia, museum exhibitions, and
publications that have appeared recently on the collecting of contemporary material culture is any bellwether, then we can anticipate seeing
more research based upon the physical remains of the twentieth
century.7o In short, we are seeing a major redefinition of what constitutes a historical artifact and what artifacts are suitable for cultural
study. This redefinition is concerned with, first, the acceptable antiquity
of artifacts for study, and, second, their provenance.
The old prescript coined by dealers, collectors, and the U.S.
Customs Office, "one hundred years doth an antique make," no longer
holds among those who now work with American artifacts. Instead
there has been a drift away from the fascination with the colonial
material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particu-

lady of revolutionary America, to artifacts of the recent past. In addition

to expanding research on the post-Civil War era, there is interest
developing in art deco and art moderne decorative arts and architecture,
in documentary photography since 1900, and in the material culture of
roadside America. Now, for example, a Society for Commercial Archaeology studies artifacts of the highway strip. 71 All of this professional
collecting of the contemporary is paralleled on the amateur level by the
growth of flea markets and innumerable house, lawn, and garage sales
where objects of every kind are offered, traded, and bought by an everwidening public. Nearly everything is fair game today.
Along with the collapse of the definition of what constitutes a
"historical" artifact has come an absorbing interest in the material
culture of the American Everyman. As Fred Kniffen put it, "There must
be, for example, less concern for a house because some famous character
lived in it and more concern that it is or that it is not typical of the houses
of its time and place. The study of the unique normally adds little to the
sum of understanding of human behavior. The study of the kinds of
things used by people during a given historical period reveals a great
deal about them." 72 This emphasis helps explain the vogue of the social
history approach among material culturist as well as why there has been
a slight shift in research interest from the public sector to what Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg has called "private places" -that is, to the household,
the bedroom, and the nursery.73
The new populist emphasis on artifact studies that focus on
vernacular, commonplace, and mass-style objects, as opposed to that
which is unique, elite, or high-style, has had analogs in other dimensions of the American material culture movement. The historical preservation cause in the United States now seeks more aggressively to save
whole "historical districts" (even industrial or commercial ones) instead
of simply the home of the town founder. American museums now
mount more exhibitions devoted to the material culture of varied ethnic
groups, of workers, of dissidents, and even of people who were the
counter-culturists of yesteryear.74 The popular culture movement has
also added to the democratization of American objects studied, arguing
that mass-produced lawn ornaments and suburban garden plots are as
crucial as indices to the American experience as are Tiffany lamps or
Duncan Phyfe chairs. 75
Although the historical profession as represented by the American
Historical Association has been laggard in recognizing material culture
scholarship in its journals and at its professional conclaves, there are a
few signs that more collaboration is ongoing between those whom E. M.
Fleming once defined as "university historians and museum histo25

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Material Culture and Cultural Research

Thomas f. Schlereth

in Canada, twelve anthropologists participated in detailed discussions

of material culture in contemporary anthropology. By no means is this
renewed disciplinary interest in material culture among anthropologists
confined to aboriginal or exotic physical data. The work of Mark Leone
on structures, Grant McCracken on clothing, and Michael Schiffer on
refuse indicates that there is a growing fascination with contemporary
North American data. 80
The renewed interest of anthropologists and the new interest of
historians ought to make for a more boisterous and bountiful house of
material culture students in the next decade. There will probably be
some attempts to organize, maybe even domesticate, the inhabitants. In
recent years, there has been talk of a need for a national scholarly
association, but this still awaits its impresario and its institutional home.
James Deetz thinks we will eventually see interdisciplinary departments
of material culture in the country's colleges and universities. 81 Before
this happens on a large scale, it is more likely that we will see a number
of American museums vying to become, in concert with neighboring
universities, major research centers in material culture. At such centers,
the continual research agenda will be simply what can we learn about
human behavior from the objects that human beings have made or
modified.
Whether or not we see a revival and an expansion of museumuniversity collaboration such as that which took place in the 1950s with
the birth of the Cooperstown and Winterthur programs, the material
culture field is ready for another step forward. As Brooke Hindle
recently told the Early American Emeriti Conference, "material culture
is at an early stage of professional development." 82 The struggle for
recognition will, of course, continue, but that battle is going well. More
important issues, however, now demand attention. Questions of definition, methodology, verification and documentation of data, and interpretation strategies need to be addressed in the next decade of
scholarship. If this is done with the enthusiasm we see demonstrated in
this book, the state of material culture research in future years should
continue to be, as Ken Ames recently characterized it, "a new frontier
for scholarship," one worthy of our time and talent.83

rians." 76 In 1984 the Organization of American Historians highlighted

material culture scholarship in a special session ("Interdisciplinary
Perspectives: Material Culture and History") devoted to new approaches to material culture research of special interest to academic
historians. A year-long symposium on historical methodology, sponsored by Indiana University at Indianapolis, makes similar recognition
of the growing awareness by historians of material culture's potential. 77
If material culture research is to make a difference in historical
studies, it will probably do so because of the discipline's current
fascination with social history. If social history's influence continues to
expand within the academic history profession, so too will material
culture's role. Already common allies, they may be expected to share
common causes in the future-common causes such as a mutual concern
for e~planations of human behavior over time and place; a willingness to
challenge an older view of history as only past politics; a wish to
demonstrate the great pluralism of the American people and their
lifestyles; and a desire to expand the traditional boundaries of American
historical scholarship, thereby actually redefining what constitutes the
American historical experience. 7 8
At the same time that the discipline of history may be turning up as
the newest kid on the material culture block, we may also be seeing the
return of anthropology, the field's parent returning to some of its old
haunts. Nothing could be more fortuitous: the study of material culture
was, as Jane Dwyer has argued, "one of the foundations of early
anthropology." At the turn of the century, the customary ethnographic
report was filled with lengthy descriptive accounts of "tools," "house
types," or "body ornamentation." Such data became outmoded as
ethnologists concerned themselves more with social organization; and,
by the early 1930s, material culture studies in anthropology waned.
Now, a half century later, different theoretical and methodological
orientations in anthropology have renewed interest in material data. As
Dwyer suggests, anthropologists are now recognizing "that the range of
objects which a society creates is the product and residue of the
thoughts and behavior of its members. " 79
The re-emergence of anthropology as promoter of and perhaps
major policymaker in material culture studies should give future scholarship in the field a stronger social-scientific perspective-an orientation
it has not had in the recent past. Examples of the flavor of this
perspective can be found in Miles Richardson's The Human Mirror, as
well as in the recent material culture sessions of the International
Congress of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences. At those meetings, organized by anthropologists Barrie Reynolds and Margaret Stoff

NOTES
The author extends special thanks to Brooke Hindle, David Kyvig, and Ian
Quimby for their valuable critique and useful suggestions on earlier drafts of this
chapter.
27

26

!
'I

Material Culture and Cultural Research

Thomas f. Schlereth
1. An exception to this claim, however, would be George I. Quimby,
"Material Culture," Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 14 (1968): 1054-1055.
2. For a recent example of this descriptive focus see the entry "Material
Culture" in Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. David E. Hunter and Philip Whitter
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 260. Here material culture is described as
"the tangible expression of changes produced by humans in adapting to, and
exercising control over, their biosocial environment. If human existence were
merely a matter of survival and satisfying basic biological needs, then material
culture would consist simply of the tools and equipment of general subsistence
and the weapons of warfare and defense against aggression. But human needs
are varied and complex, and the material culture of even the simplest human
society reflects other interests and emphases. A representative sample of the
material manifestations of culture would have to include works of art, ornaments, musical instruments, ritual paraphernalia, and exchange currencies, as
well as shelter, clothing, and the means of procuring or producing food and
transporting people and goods.''
3. A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, "On the Evolution of Culture," in The Evolution
of Culture and Other Essays, ed. J. L. Myers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), p.
23.
4. Clark Wissler, "Material Cultures of North American Indians," American
jnthropologist 16:3 (July-September 1914): 447-505; Otis F. Mason, The Origin.._pf
/ ln'QaJligp (London: W. Scott, 1895); Robert Redfield, "The Material Culture of
Spanish-Indian Mexico," American Anthropologist 31:4 (October-December
1929): 602-19. Clyde Kluckhohn, W. W. Hill, Lucy Wales Kluckhohn, Navaho
Material Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
5. Simon Bronner, "The Hidden Past of Material Culture Studies in
American Folkloristics," New York Folklore 8 (Summer 1982): 1-10. An early
discussion of material culture research in folklore theory can be found in Pliny
Earle Goddard, "The Relation of Folk-Lore to Anthropology," Journal of American Folklore 28 (1915): 22.
6. The persistence of the idea in the theoretical literature can be traced from
Clellan S. Ford, "A Sample Comparative Analysis of Material Culture," in
Studies in the Science of Society, ed. G. P. Murdock (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1937), 225-46; to Alfred L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York: Harcourt,
Brace; 1948), 296; to Harry L. Shapiro, Man, Culture, and Society (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1956), 176.
7. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New
_,_,....
Haven: Yale University Press).
8. Ford, "A Sample Comparative Analysis of Material Culture," 225-46.
9. Cornelius Osgood, Ingalik Material Culture (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1940), 26.
10. Howard W. Marshall, Folk Architecture in Little Dixie: A Regional Culture
in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981), 17.
11. Melville Herskovits, Cultural Anthropology (New York: Knopf, 1963),
119.
12. Jules Prown, "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture
Theory and Method," Winterthur Portfolio (hereafter cited as WP) 17:1 (Spring
1982): 1-2.
13. James Deetz, "Material Culture and Archaeology-What's the Difference?" in Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things, 10.
28

14. Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture
(New York: Random House, 1979).
15. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of North American
Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1977), 24-25.
16. E. McClung Fleming, "History 803: The Artifact in American History,"
unpublished course outline, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture,
~69; Elizabeth B. Wood, "Pots and Pans History: Relating Manuscripts and
Printed Sources to the Study of Domestic Art Objects," The American Archivist 30
(July 1967): 431-42; David Goldfield, "The Physical City as Artifact and
Teaching Tool," The History Teacher 8 (August 1975): 535-56; Charles F.
Montgomery, "Classics and Collectibles: American Antiques as History and
Art," Art News (November 1977): 126-36; Kenneth L. Ames, "Meaning in
Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America," Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 9 (Summer 1978): 19-46; John Cotter, Above-Ground Archaeology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1972); Ivor Noel Hume, Historical Archaeology (New York: Knopf, 1968), 21; American Association of Museums, Museum
Studies: A Curriculum Guide for Universities and Museums (Washington: American
Association of Museums, 1973); Alexander Fenton, "Scope of Regional Ethnology," Folklife (1973): 6; Richard Dorson, Introduction to Folklore and Folklife
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 2-3; Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1948), 2-4.
17. Two American scholarly journals now carry the term "material culture"
on their mastheads. In 1978, Pioneer America, a quarterly that publishes the
research of scholars and amateurs alike, assumed the subtitled Journal of Historic
American Material Culture. Five years later the organization changed the name of
its journal to Material Culture: The Journal of Pioneer American Society. In 1979 WP
(begun in 1964 as a clothbound annual devoted primarily to the specialized
research of professionals in the American decorative arts) became a quarterly
emphasizing the research of several disciplines that seek "to integrate artifacts
into their cultural contexts." Significantly, WP has also acquired a subtitle, A

Journal of American Material Culture.

18. Richard Dorson, "The Fields of Folklore and Folklife Studies," in

Introduction to Folklore and Folklife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972),

2-3.
19. Warren Roberts, "Fieldwork: Recording Material Culture," in Folklore
and Folklife, An Introduction, ed. Richard Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1972), 431-44.
20. One statement of the position is suggested by James Deetz: "The central
paradigm with which we as archaeologists are dealing is culture. It's not
behavior. It's not commodity flow. So the best thing we can do is use
archaeological methods to block out and define, from a material perspective, the
form of American Culture at different times at different places." As quoted in
Robert Friedman, "Digging Up the U.S.," American Heritage 34:5 (August 1983):
45.
21. Roger Burlingame, Engines of Democracy (New York: C. Scribners, 1940);
Lynn White, The Dynamo and the Virgin Reconcidered (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1970); Daniel Boorstin, The Republic of Technology (New York: Harper and Row,
1978); Gilman M. Ostrander, American Civilization in the First Machine Age (New
York: Harper and Row, 1970).
29

Thomas f. Schlereth

Material Culture and Cultural Research

22. William Rathje, "Archaeological Ethnography ... Because Sometimes

It Is Better to Give Than to Receive," in Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology, ed. R. A.
Gould (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 51-52.
23. Dell Upton, "Traditional Timber Framing," in Material Culture of the
Wooden Age (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1981), 52; also see Cary
Carson, Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell
Upton, "Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies," WP
16:2/3 (Summer-Autumn 1981): 135-96.
24. Prawn, "Mind in Matter," 9. Also see Yi-Fu Tuan, "The Significance of
the Artifact," Geographical Review 70:4 (October 1980): 463.
25. Wilcomb E. Washburn, "Are Museums Necessary?" Museum News 47
(October 1968): 9-10. Also see note 45 below.
26. Brooke Hindle, "Technology through the 3-D Time Warp," Technology
and Culture 24:3 (July 1983): 455.
27. Eugene Ferguson, "Technical Museums and International Exhibitions,"
Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 45; also see Ferguson's "The Mind's Eye:
Nonverbal Thought in Technology," Science 197 (1977): 826-27.
28. Hindle, "Technology through the 3-D Time Warp," 456. For Hindle's
extended discussion of "spatial thinking," see pp. 456-57.
29. John Hale, "Museums and the Teaching of History," Museum
(UNESCO) 21 (1968): 67-27.
30. Henry Glassie, "Folkloristic Study of the American Artifact: Objects
and Objectives,'' in Handbook of American Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1983), 377.
31. Rhys Isaac, in his The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982), summarizes this arrogance in this
footnote manifesto: "Historical understanding has too long been enthralled by
the assumptions, preferences, and definitions of intellectuals-a high priesthood
of which historians themselves form a part. In highly literate milieus the
assumption is unquestioned that significant communication is conveyed by
words, especially by written words, and above all by printed words. Yet one
may ask: How many people in our own society-among the elite even-arrive at
articulate verbal statements of the meaning of their own lives? For all persons
such statements are most often implied in patterns of behavior. In face-to-face
oral cultures like that of 18th-century Virginia, action in a social context assumes
an even more important place in the total process of communication. Scholars'
predilections have long placed undue emphasis in early American history on
New England, with its great output of printed sermon commentary about
society and the nature of things. In Virginia it was not in words but in vivid
dance forms that the meaning of life was most fully expressed. Historians must
seek to 'read' these kinds of statements."
32. Prawn, "Style As Evidence," WP 15:3 (Autumn 1980): 208.
33. Hindle, "Technology through the 3-D Time Warp," 456, 458.
34. See, for example, John Kouwenhoven, "American Studies, Words or
Things?" in Material Culture Studes in America, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth
(Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History [hereafter
cited as AASLH], 1982), 80-92; Clyde Kluckhohn as quoted in Richard B.
Woodbury, "Purposes and Concepts," in The Teaching of Anthropology, Memoir
94, ed. David B. Menolbaum et al. (Washington: American Anthropology
Association: 1963), 228.
30

35. Kouwenhoven, "American Studies: Words or Things?" 85-86.

36. Cyril Stanley Smith, "Metallurgy Footnotes to the History of Art," in
American Philosophical Society Proceedings 116 (1972): 128; also see Robert R.
Armstrong, The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1971); Prawn, "Mind in Matter," 9-10.
37. Glassie, "Folkloristic Study of the American Artifact," 377.
38. James Deetz, "The Artifact and Its Context," Museum News 62:1
(October 1983): 26; Hindle, "Technology through the 3-D Time Warp," 453; A.
E. Parr, "History and the History Museum," Curator 15 (1972): 54.
39. Wilcomb E. Washburn, "Collecting Information, Not Objects," Museum
News 62:3 (February 1984): 5-15; also see Washburn's earlier statement of his
position in "Are Museums Necessary?" Museum News 47:2 (October 1968): 9-19.
40. Hindle cites Wolfgang K. Giloi, Interactive Computer Graphics: Data
Structures, Algorithms, Languages (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978), in
reference to his argument in "Technology through the 3-D Time Warp," 461.
41. Thomas J. Schlereth, "It Wasn't That Simple," Museum News 56:3
(January-February 1978): 36-44; a parallel argument is found in "Causing
Conflict/Doing Violence," Museum News 63:1 (October 1984): 45-52.
42. John Demos, "Words and Things: A Review and Discussion of 'New
England Begins.'" William and Mary Quarterly 40:4 (October 1983): 584-97.
43. Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and
Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960);
Oscar Handlin, "The Significance of the Seventeenth-Century," in SeventeenthCentury America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 3-12.
44. George Basalla, "Museums and Technological Utopianism," in Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby and Polly Anne
Earl (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1974), 360; Michael J. Ettema,
"History, Nostalgia, and American Furniture," WP 17:2/3 (Summer-Autumn
1982): 135-44. See Upton's "The Power of Things," chapter three of this book.
45. Thomas J. Schlereth, "Material Culture Studies in America, 18761976," in Material Culture Studies in America, 63-68.
46. Thomas J. Schlereth, "American Studies and Students of American
Things," American Quarterly 35:3 (Summer 1983): 236-41.
47. For a review of the merits of synchronic versus diachronic analysis, see
Jeffrey L. Eighmy, "The Use of Material Culture in Diachronic Anthropology,"
in Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us, ed. Richard A. Gould and
Michael B. Schiller (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 31-50, and Henry
Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), vii-viii, 8-9, 11-12, 17, 20,
36-37.
48. Henry Glassie, "The Nature of the New World Artifact, The Instance of
the Dugout Canoe," in Festschrift fur Robert Wildhaber, ed. Theodore Gartner and
Walter Escher (Basel: Schweizerische Gesellschaft fiir Volkskunde, 1973), 168.
49. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), 347.
50. Richard Poulsen, The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the
Folk Material Culture of Western America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1982), 29; also see pp. 15-16 for an even stronger critique of historical
knowing.

31

Thomas J. Schlereth

Material Culture and Cultural Research

51. William B. Hesseltine, "The Challenge of the Artifact," in The Present

World of History (Madison: AASLH, 1959), 64-70; Brooke Hindle, "A Retro-

66. Kenneth L. Ames, Beyond Necessity: Art in the Folk Tradition (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1977); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of
Household Technology From Open Hearth to The Microwave (New York: Basic Books,
1983); Alan Gowans, Images of American Living: Four Centuries of Architecture and
Furniture As Cultural Expression (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1964); Robert F.
Trent, "Style," vol. 3 of New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston:
Museum of Fine Arts, 1982).
67. James Deetz, "Scientific Humanism and Humanistic Science: A Plan for
Paradigmatic Pluralism in Historical Archaeology," unpublished paper, 1981, p.
10.
68. Hindle, "Technology through the 3-D Time Warp," 464.
69. Controversies among folk material culturists stirred up by Michael
Owen Jones and Ken Ames in what some have called "the moldy fig wars" may,
for example, occur more often in the future. See Scott T. Swank's Introduction
in Perspectives on American Folk Art, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby and Scott T. Swank
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 1-4, and Michael Owen Jones, "Pink Plastic
Flamingos and Moldy Figs: American Folk Art Study in Controversy," unpublished paper presented at the UCLA Symposium, "Folklore, the Arts, the
Humanities, and the Social Sciences," 9-10 May 1980.
70. For a listing of such events, see Thomas J. Schlereth, "Contemporary
Collecting for Future Recollecting," Museum Studies Journa/113 (Spring 1984): 23.
71. Chester H. Liebs, "Remember Our Not-So-Distant Past?" Historic
Preservation 30 (January-March 1978): 30-35; Bruce A. Lohof, "The Service
Station in America: The Evolution of a Vernacular Form," Industrial Archaeology
(Spring 1974): 1-13; Robert Heide and John Gilman, Dime-Store Dream Parade,
Popular Culture, 1925-1955 (New York: Dutton, 1979); Warren J. Belasco, "The
Origins of the Roadside Strip, 1900-1940," paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Organization of American Historians, New Orleans, La., 13 April
1979.
72. Fred Kniffen, "On Corner-Timbering," Pioneer America 1 (January 1969):
1.
73. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman and the New History," Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 185-98. Gene Wise has parallel remarks on
pluralism in both the American studies movement and the material culture
movement; see Wise, "Paradigm Dramas in American Studies," American
Quarterly 31:3 (Bibliography Issue, 1979): 332-33.
74. Representative museum exhibitions in this category include "Plain and
Elegant, Rich and Common, Documented Country Furniture," New Hampshire
Historical Society, Concord, N.H., 1978; "American Folk Art from the Traditional to the Naive," Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978; "Bo' Jou, Neejee! Profiles
of Canadian Art," Renwick Gallery, Washington, 1979; "At Home: Domestic
Life in the Post-Centennial Era, 1876-1920," State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, 1976; and "The Afro-American Decorative Arts," Cleveland
Museum of Art, 1978.
75. Fred E. Schroeder, "The Democratic Yard and Garden," in Outlaw
Aesthetics: Arts and the Public Mind (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1977),
94-122; and Thomas J. Schlereth, "Plants Past: A Historian's Use of Vegetation
as Material Culture Evidence," Environmental Review 4 (Fall 1980): 20-38.
76. On the continual neglect by historians of material culture evidence, see
Charles T. Lyle, "The Historian's Attitude Toward the Artifact" (M.A. thesis,

spective View of Science, Technology, and Material Culture in Early American

History," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41 (July 1984): 432.
52. Stewart Struever, Koster: Americans in Search of Their Prehistoric Past
(New York: Anchor Press I Doubleday, 1979).
53. Heather Lechtman and Robert Merrill, Material Culture: Styles, Organizntion, and Dynamics of Technology (Proceedings of American Ethnological Society,
1975); Cyril S. Smith, A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and
History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), especially chapters 5, 8, and 11; Robert L.
Schuyeler, ed., Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America (Farmingdale,
N.Y.: Baywood Publishing Company, 1980).
54. Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of
Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975).
55. Jay Anderson, "Immaterial Material Culture: The Implications of Experimental Research for Folklife Museums," Keystone Folklore 21 (1976-1977):
1-13; a survey of experimental archaeology in the United States can be found in
Anderson, Time Machines: Living History Museums (Nashville: AASLH, 1984),
85-136.
56. Harvey Green, The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of
Women in Victorian America (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Rhys Isaac, The
Transformation of Virginia; also see David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old In America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Daniel Calhoun, The Intelligence
of a People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
57. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer
Society: The Commercializntion of Eighteenth Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Matyas Szabo, "The Use and Consumption of
Things," Ethnologia Scandinavia: A Journal for Nordic Ethnology (1978): 107-118.
58. On material culture resources for the study of creativity, see Eugene
Ferguson, "The Mind's Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology," Science 197
(1977): 827-36; Roger N. Shepard, "The Mental Image," American Psychologist 33
(February 1978): 125-37; Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York:
New York University Press, 1981).
59. The Braude! thesis can be found in the three-volume series Civilization
and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: vo!. 1 (The Structures of Everyday Life); vol. 2
(The Wheels of Commerce), vol. 3 (The World of Wealth) (New York: Harper and
Row, 1981, 1982, 1984).
60. Cary Carson and Barbara C. Carson, "Things Unspoken: Learning
Social History from Artifacts," in Ordinary People and Everyday Life, ed. James B.
Gardner and George Rollie Adams (Nashville: AASLH, 1983), 200.
61. Alan Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966).
62. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American
Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press I Doubleday, 1977).
63. lvor Noel Hume, Martin's Hundred: The Discovery of a Lost Colonial
Virginia Settlement (New York: Dell, 1982).
64. Merritt Roe Smith, Harper's Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The
Challenge of Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
65. See Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., "The History of Technology and the Study of
Material Culture," chapter 5 of this book.
32

33

Thomas ]. Schlereth
Hagley Museum-University of Delaware, 1972); on Fleming's call for a new
profession of material culturists, see E. M. Fleming, "The University and the
Museum: Needs and Opportunities for Cooperation," Museologist 111 (June
1969): 10-18.
77. Organi:mtion of American Historians National Meeting 1984 Program, Los
Angeles, Calif., p. 36.
78. On this realignment, see Carl N. Degler, "Remaking American History," The Journal of American History 67:1 (June 1980): 7, 16-17, and Cary Carson,
"Doing History With Material Culture," in Material Culture and the Study of
American Life, 41-49.
79. Jane Powell Dwyer, ed., Studies in Anthropology and Material Culture, vol.
1 of the Haffenreffer Museum Studies in Anthropology and Material Culture
(Providence: Brown University, 1975), 5.
80. Miles Richardson, The Human Mirror (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1974); Mark Leone, "The New Mormon Temple in Washington, D.C.," in Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things, ed. L.
Ferguson (Columbia, S.C.: Society for Historical Archaeology, 1977); Grant
McCracken "Clothing As Language: An Object Lesson in the Study of the
Expressive Properties of Material Culture," in Proceedings of the Xlth International
Congress of Anthropology and Ethnological Sciences (1984), in press; Michael B.
Schiffer and Richard A. Gould, eds., Modem Material Culture: The Archaeology of
Us (New York: Academic Press, 1981).
81. Deetz, "Material Culture and Archaeology-What's the Difference?"
11, 66.
82. Hindle, "A Retrospective View," 433.
83. Ames, "Meaning in Artifacts," 20.

2
Learning from Looking:
Geographic and Other Writing
about the American Landscape
Peirce F. Lewis

[T]here is really no such thing as a dull landscape. . . . Wherever we go, whatever the nature of our work, we adorn the face
of the earth with a living design which changes and is eventually replaced by that of a future generation. How can one tire
of looking at this variety, or of marveling at the forces within
man and nature that brought it about?l
records, people have wondered about manmade patterns on the surface of the earth-the patterns which together
compose the human landscape. Some of those people have called
themselves geographers, trying to describe those patterns in words or
maps, trying to explain how those patterns came to be, and trying to
unravel their cultural meaning. Those geographers who share a common passion to understand cultural landscapes habitually devour the
literature of any academic field that concerns itself-however marginally-with describing and interpreting material culture. And, quite
naturally, the literature of academic geography contains an alluring
array of writing and maps about material artifacts. This essay reviews a
body of recent literature about the American cultural landscape, a
literature that has deep intellectual roots, and that has flowered luxuriantly in the last twenty or so years. Given the fact that many of the
most imaginative and energetic students of American cultural landscapes are just now entering their most productive years, it is safe to
predict that the growth may become yet more fruitful.
FoR AS LONG AS HISTORY

34

35