What kinds of personal meanings might the objects have had,as well as larger social meanings?

Unobtrusive Measures Start Assignment

How do you go about analyzin g material artifacts? It is certainly not easy, nor are there any general guidelines. Analyzing these artifacts always involves the study of loc al, particular cultures. One analyst states, “There is nothing easy in our work, but its basic strategy is not hard to state. We hunt for patterns” (Glassie 1991, p. 255) . Archaeologist Ian Hodder suggests that the analyst of material artifacts must work “between past and present or between different examples of material culture, making analo gies between them” (1 998, p. 121). To do this, you need to immerse yourself in the spe-
cific historical context (Tuchman 1998), and you need to know enough about the cultural context in which something has meaning. Specifically, you need to address these issues:

Where and when was this item (or group of items) produced?
What do you know abo ut the society in which it was produced?
What kinds of people made the object you are analyzing? How?
Who used it?
How was it sold or distributed?
Did different people use the object in different kinds of ways? How?
How was the meaning of the object transformed in different contexts?
What kinds of personal meanings might the objects have had,as well as larger social meanings?
What kinds of things were used in similar ways?
What are the economic and political systems in which the items were produced?