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Book

Title History from things : essays on material culture / edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery
Published Washington : Smithsonian Institution Press, [1993]
©1993

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  930.1 Lub/Hft  AVAILABLE
Description xvii, 300 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Contents Technological systems and some implications with regard to continuity and change / W. David Kingery -- Replication techniques in eastern Zhou bronze casting / Robert W. Bagley -- Technological styles : transforming a natural material into a cultural object / Rita P. Wright -- The biography of an object : the intercultural style vessels of the Third Millennium B.C. / C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky -- The sign of the object / John Dixon Hunt
The truth of material culture : history or fiction? / Jules David Prown -- Why we need things / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- Objects as instruments, objects as signs / Jacques Maquet -- Some matters of substance / Robert Friedel -- The ancestry of Chinese bronze vessels / Jessica Rawson -- The interpretation of artifacts in the history of technology / Robert B. Gordon -- Gardens and society in eighteenth-century England / Thomas Williamson -- Common landscapes as historic documents / Peirce Lewis -- The New England cemetery as a cultural landscape / Ian W. Brown -- Artifacts as expressions of society and culture : subversive genealogy and the value of history / Mark P. Leone and Barbara J. Little -- Why take a behavioral approach to folk objects? / Michael Owen Jones -- Machine politics : the political construction of technological artifact / Steven Lubar
Summary Spanning vast time periods, geographical locations, and academic disciplines, History from Things leaps the boundaries between fields that use material evidence to understand the past. It expands and redirects the study of material culture - an emerging field now building a common base of theory and a shared intellectual agenda
History from Things explores the many ways objects - defined broadly to range from Chippendale tables and Italian Renaissance pottery to seventeenth-century parks and a New England cemetery - can reconstruct and help to reinterpret the past. Eighteen essays describe how to "read" artifacts, how to "listen to" landscapes and locations, and how to apply methods and theories to historical inquiry that have previously belonged solely to archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and conservation scientists. The contributors demonstrate that artifacts can be prime historical evidence that discloses important facts about the nature of past cultures. The book shows how, for example, the detailed examination of Chinese Zhou bronzes revealed that a factory system of production - nowhere attested to in documentary sources - existed in China as early as the fifth century B.C
Analysis Culture History
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references
Subject Archaeology and history.
Material culture.
Author Kingery, W. D.
Lubar, Steven D.
LC no. 92020535
ISBN 1560982047 (alk. paper)