Material Culture andthe Historian

by Jonathan Jarrett © Jonathan Jarrett 2009

Presentation breakdown

Definitions: the subject of the presentationTheorizing objects and analysing themTest cases: objects under analysisIntroduction to coins as a sourceCoins analysedCoins as statementsCoins in preservationReading list

Definitions We’ll concentrate on objects, and particularly coins. Many ‘objects’ also fit other categories, e.g.

document, building, artwork, that might be studied by separate disciplines.

This presentation doesn’t, however, cover textual criticism, architecture, fine art or archæological technique.

N.B. that, as a phrase, ‘material culture’ has been particularly adopted by students of United States history.

Its usage is now broadening (as reflected in the reading list), and historians, social scientists, archaeologists and anthropologists are all in this business now—the latter two have always been.

A historical object can be seen as having three ‘phases of action’:

1) Creation(including commission, design, processing raw material, crafting or manufacture)

2) Use(including distribution and sale, original use, any subsequent re-use including study)

3) Archivization and PreservationNote that these phases can overlap! Think of

some cases…

Theorising Objects (1)

Theorising objects (2): actorsCreation

We can think of many rôles in the creation of an object, but they break down, perhaps, into:

Maker(artisan, designer, artist, builder, workman, machine operator, programmer…)

Sponsor(patron, issuer, commissioner, authority, state…)

Sometimes, of course, the rôles are the same: picture a woman with a spinning wheel wearing clothes knitted from her own sheep’s wool… though that rather neglects the rôle of the sheep! But a sponsor can be maker and vice versa. Can you think of more rôles?

These rôles are usually deducible from the object itself, i.e. a potter for a pot, assembly line for a number of mass-produced objects, etc.

Theorizing objects (3): use and re-use 1

Sueno’s Stone, Forres, Perthshire, Scotland

A ‘Pictish symbol stone’ 10 m high, massive Celtic cross

on obverse, four-stage picture on reverse depicting a battle

Presumably a monument in its original prominent location, designed to be seen upright. How might we guess at the identity of the sponsor?

Combines Christianity and warrior celebration; mainly a cultural source now that its political relevance is obscure

Now in use as a historical source, but isn’t this its original function? Still performing 1100 years on!

Theorizing objects (3): use and re-use 2

Gairloch stone, Gairloch, Wester Ross, Scotland

Likewise a ‘Pictish symbol stone’ Originally found in a grave then

re-used as door lintel (as shown). Was it in its designed location when found? How might we tell?

Significance of designs obscure: perhaps a family identifier. Was it meant to be seen?

Now in local museum. Therefore in use as source – or as monument to antiquity of locale – but this potentially its third re-use (as funerary slab, as lintel then as museum object)

Is it useful to call this as the same sort of object as Sueno’s Stone? Think periodization and expertise!

Theorizing objects (4): preservation

This phase has to include: Discovery

(metal detector user, archaeologist, or someone going through an attic or rubbish tip)

Archivization(taking on by the heritage sector, or keeping as a curiosity or memento) and conservation

Study(or is that a use?)

Test cases (1): the Bayeux Tapestry

Sponsor obscure: how could we guess?

Makers confusing: the designer, the weavers, who’s actually making it as we see it? Is this the same answer for all its length?

Can be analysed like a text, a political history source as well as one for buildings, ships, etc.

Can also be analysed as object: weaving technique, size, origin of fabric, etc.

As a source, it tells us not just about the political events of 1066 and the material culture of the time, but also about the culture that created the tapestry: for example, that there was money to spend on tapestries, that heroic narrative was a subject that people would pay for, and that history was something with an audience. But who is the audience? Is it the sponsor? Maybe once, but now perhaps its main use is as a historical source.Consider also the possibility of dissemination and study. This is a 2D source, so can fairly easily be printed with full accuracy; but it still has to be broken up into pages or plates, which destroy its original continuity and breaks associations between scenes.

Test cases (2): Casserres, pergamins 3

A massive (3 ft) parchment charter recording seven different transactions of 1005 to 1006, not in order

Scribes are named, and others sign in places Nonetheless, creation not clear because it is a

write-up of earlier transactions; what then is real date and who are real scribes?

What is use? Pure record? Or to assert the ownership of a previous archive and its property?

Not just a textual source! Tells us about scripts, social use of writing, literacy, archiving... more?

2D and fully reproducible

Test cases (3): fragment of African Red Slip bowl

Piece of a larger bowl made in African Red Slip terracotta in fifth-century Egypt

Can only really be analysed by reference to others, no signature

But, in bulk becomes a source for economic history and helps through comparison of findspots over time to show the collapse of the Roman Empire’s trade system

More important as a find than as a museum object therefore

Use was to contain foodstuffs etc.; might be reused as mosaic tile? But mainly it’s rubbish that means something to historians.

3D source; hard to reproduce, size hard to grasp (the scale is marked in centimetres); one cannot easily imagine the whole from the part

Test cases (4): Catholic church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge

Many makers: architects, builders, workmen and craftsmen doing fittings, mouldings etc.; composite object

Sponsor: Yolande Marie Louise Lyne-Stephens, a former dancer at the Paris Opera and Drury Lane, London, who had married money and put it to good works

Built 1885-90 by Rattee & Kett, legendarily 1 ft outside the city limits and 1 ft higher than the Anglican church, Great St Mary’s, after refusal of permission to build in the city

It can therefore be analysed as architecture, Neo-Gothic etc., but the back-story and location are more informative about C19th Cambridge

Also a source for study of worship, then and now; nowadays hosts weekly foreign-language services so also source for changing city demography

3D source, impossible to reproduce and very difficult to perceive all at once

Still an object! How would a house differ as analysed?

Coins as a source

First point: a coin is a twofold source, both object and document, as it obviously has physical qualities that tell you something about it (its metal, its weight, its value... I’ll expand on this) but also usually bears a message about itself and its issuer.

There are also a bunch of technical terms used in describing coins which this diagram may help with...

Coins as archæological objects

Archæologists like to find coins because they can usually be closely dated, thus providing dates for more of a site, if genuinely deposited there and not later or in fill from elsewhere

Such a find also tells you that a site generated or accumulated wealth, and that it was connected with the usually-distant centre and authority of issue, e.g. a coin of King Edgar of the English (959-975) in the Shetland Islands

Attribution to such a ruler however not always easy! Forgery and imitation can mislead. Here, the nicer-looking silver penny on the right is a contemporary imitation.

Coins in useThe use of a coin seems pretty obvious: it’s a way of storing wealth, at a recognised value and an acceptable standard, for convenient exchange. Right? The Visigothic tremissis at top left, struck c. 550, is one of a sort of coin whose market value would have been too high for small purchases, so it has been suggested that they were struck as state-backed treasure, like Krugerrands. On the other hand, the Kentish gold shilling at top right is of a sort usually found on market sites, but is of the same order of value. What goes on? Metal-detector laws, is what; it’s illegal in Spain so they aren’t found in fields there... The hole in the gold solidus of the Emperor Valentinian III (425-55) shows that someone thought it was not a piece for exchange but for wear, and it came from an Anglo-Saxon grave dated a century and a half after the coin’s issue. And the countermarked ‘piece of four’ shows how issuers can be confused; observe the small head of George III of England (1760-1820) on the neck of Charles IV of Spain (1759-88). Such plundered coins circulated in England during the late C18th at a value of 2 shillings and fourpence.

Attribution problems with coins: an example

Here’s one good example of how attribution can inform, mislead or both.

The top item is a silver denier of King Charles the Bald of West Francia (840-77), grandson of Charlemagne and inheritor not only of his name but of the coin type featuring the monogram of KAROLVS, Latin for Charles (can you find all the letters?)

The second item is that same monogram, this time taken from a charter of King Charles the Simple of West Francia (899-923)...

... and the third item is a rather degenerate version of the monogram on a silver denier of Count Odo the Old of Déols (1022-47), in whose time neither he nor the king were called Charles but by which time the monogram had come to be irremovably associated with good coin. Not all that says KAROLVS is Carolingian...

Discovery of coins: biases and considerations

Modern historic coins may well be discovered in an old chest of drawers or hidden in a wall, which has its own factors of chance and bias but older pieces (and lots of newer ones) are most usually discovered by metal-detecting.

Metal-detecting naturally favours flat open areas, not necessarily therefore all kinds of settlement sites, e.g. not the Bronze-Age barrows and cairns at Bollowal, Cornwall, shown at right with Land’s End in the distance.

Metal-detectorists usually ignore iron (because there’s so much of it that’s worthless) so only precious-metal or copper-alloy artefacts are found so, and therefore only sites where those existed.

Archæological digging and metal-detecting can thus create complementary maps of finds distribution.

Interpretation of coin finds (1): finds evidenceThere are obvious implications in a coin find: that wealth existed that could be stored, that metal could be got, that smelting technology was available, and that money was used at all, as opposed to bullion, produce or cowry shells. However, there are also deeper implications that can be got from study of coin evidence in bulk.

The map on the left shows the findspot and origins of the parts of a Frankish coin-hoard found at Veuillin in Burgundy. The hoard was deposited c. 819, and shows the spread of the trade-routes of the Carolingian Empire: a huge parcel from Venice, numbers from Spain and North-West France, all meeting in the middle of the Empire. Compare the similar map at right for a hoard from Belvezet in the Languedoc from only a few years later, showing coins from a far narrower range of territory. Here again we see mapped the shrinking of an Empire, but because of their identifiable mints, coins can do with one large find what only hundreds of African Red Slip finds could show.

Coins as a source for local and cultural historyIn the years around the English Civil War and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the

Royal Mint effectively stopped issuing small change, but since you can’t really buy a loaf of bread with a week’s wages and no change, local merchants took the currency into their own hands. Large numbers of copper tokens, which could be redeemed in bulk for silver coin, were manufactured (in the C17th, often by the Royal Mint on the side, and in the C18th, by new machine foundries especially in Birmingham) and issued from shops and, in London especially, pubs. The earlier issues thus tell us lots about local tradesmen and economy, and the later more commercial pieces about advertising, local civic pride and monuments, propaganda, sloganeering and generally how manufacturers of the time could appeal to popular culture so as to sell the tokens…

Coins and portraitureBecause coins usually bear portraits and artwork, they also tell us things that are usually the domain of art history, about how issuers wanted themselves to be seen, or the messages they wished to send. They are also sometimes genuine sources for issuers’ historical appearance. Below, one can plot the slow degeneration of the Emperor Nero’s rule in his coinage, but the design of the very relaxed Securitas shows that he was alive to the propaganda possibilities of currency. The last triptych shows how some ideas never change, Athena becomes Roma becomes, well, you know the last one…

Entitulature: reading coin legendsAs mentioned before, most coins also make some kind of statement in text. Here we are told by coins that:King Æthelstan of Wessex (924-39) was no less than King of All Britain, +EĐELSTAN REX TO[TIUS] BR[ITANNIAEElizabeth II (1952-) is Defender of the Faith, ELIZABETH D[EI] G[RATIA] REG[INA] F[IDEI] D[EFENSOR]the 1668 heart-shaped farthing token is the issue of “William Overend in Bentham”, Yorkshirethat the 1790s London reformer Thomas Spence felt that he should be ranked with Thomas Paine and Thomas More as a right-thinking victim of repression…

Coins in preservation: limitations as a source• Coins as preserved are usually at least slightly worn, which means that

assessing their precise intended weight is often mostly guesswork.• Wear can also make the design hard to understand, and the pieces too

fragile to handle, though this is usually safe.• Coins are a 3D source; you can’t get thickness from a publication, nor read

around the edge from an image, even though there’s lots you can do with just images as this presentation shows.

• Several sorts of analysis require lots of similar pieces, but museums usually collect broadly rather than deeply, so as to be representative; therefore large corpora have to be assembled as images and notes, though the web is now making collecting and sharing such data much easier.

• Museums therefore have to concentrate both on conservation and safe handling for visitors and publication (ideally online) if they’re to help historians and numismatists. Coins in private collections present considerable difficulties when considered like this, though they are sometimes collected precisely for study.

Suggestions for reading• Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” in idem (ed.), The

Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge 1986), pp. 3-63, pp. 3-11 online at: http://assets.cambridge.org/97805213/57265/excerpt/9780521357265_excerpt.pdf

• Patricia Galloway, “Material Culture and Text: Exploring the Spaces: Within and Between” in Martin Hall & Stephen W. Silliman (eds), historical archaeology (Oxford 2006), pp. 42-64.

• Philip Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: a critique of the evidence” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series Vol. 9 (London 1959), pp. 123-140; repr. in idem, Dark Age Numismatics: selected studies, Variorum Collected Studies 96 (London 1979), II.

• — Numismatics, Opus 70 (Oxford 1975, many reprints).• Guy Halsall, “The Sources and their Interpretation” in Paul Fouracre (ed.), The New

Cambridge Medieval History vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700 (Cambridge 2005), pp. 56-93, latter part covering archaeology; online at: http://histories.cambridge.org/extract?id=chol9780521362917_CHOL9780521362917A005

• Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture, Routledge Guides to Using Historical Sources (London 2009).

• Thomas J. Schlereth, “Material Culture and Cultural Research” in idem, Material Culture, pp. 1-33.

• — “Social History Scholarship and Material Culture Research” in idem, Material Culture, pp. 155-195.

• — (ed.), Material Culture: a research guide (Lawrence KA 1985).• Daniel Waugh, Material Culture – Objects, online at http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources

/unpacking/objectsmain.html, last modified 2005 as of time of writing, whole article viewable as PDF at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/unpacking/objectsguide.pdf

• Robert Chadwell Williams, “Material Culture” in idem, The Historian's Toolbox: a student's guide to the theory and craft of history (Armonk 2007), pp. 161-165, of which the relevant excerpt is at time of writing previewable online through Google Books, URL: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nyEgaF1AZBQC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161