Objects—pottery, tools, textiles, architectural fragments—require systematic description and analysis. Examiners document form, material, wear patterns, manufacturing marks, and decoration. Classification reveals technological change, trade routes, social hierarchy, and daily practices that texts do not record.
Your prerequisite in archaeological evidence established the basic principle: physical remains are historical sources, and stratigraphic context tells you when and where something was deposited. Artifact examination builds on that foundation by asking: once an object is recovered and contextualized, how do you read it as evidence? The answer requires a disciplined vocabulary and a sequence of questions that move from pure description to interpretation.
The first step is always formal description — recording what the object actually is before you start interpreting what it means. This sounds obvious but is methodologically essential: premature interpretation colors perception. Describe form (shape, size, proportions), material (clay type, metal alloy, fiber, stone), method of manufacture (wheel-thrown or hand-built pottery? forged or cast metal? woven or knotted textile?), surface treatment (slip, glaze, paint, polish, burnishing), and decoration (motifs, patterns, iconography). Each of these dimensions is a potential data point for later analysis.
Wear patterns and use-marks are among the most informative but most easily overlooked features. A knife blade worn asymmetrically on one side suggests a right-handed user who used a particular grip. Residues on the interior of a ceramic vessel — identified through chemical analysis — reveal what it held. Repair marks (rivets, patches, rebinding) tell you the object was valued enough to fix rather than discard, which carries social and economic implications. Discard context itself is informative: a broken pot thrown in a midden (refuse heap) was treated differently from one deposited as a grave offering, even if the objects are otherwise identical.
Classification connects individual objects to broader patterns. When you can date a ceramic type — because it appears in stratigraphically dated contexts across many sites — sherds of that type become diagnostic artifacts that date the layers where they appear. When a distinctive pottery style appears at multiple sites hundreds of kilometers apart, it maps a trade network or sphere of cultural influence. When the same object type appears in both elite burials and ordinary domestic contexts, it tells you something about social distribution of wealth and goods. When it appears only in elite contexts, it marks status. Objects thus become proxies for social processes that texts either do not record or record from a single perspective.
Material analysis adds a scientific dimension. Provenance analysis (determining where raw materials originated through isotopic or chemical signatures) can trace obsidian from specific volcanic sources, marble from specific quarries, or metal ores from specific regions — mapping exchange networks with precision impossible from texts alone. Experimental archaeology — actually making and using replica objects under controlled conditions — provides a check on interpretation: does this object function the way the hypothesis claims? Artifact examination is therefore both humanistic (requiring historical imagination about past uses and meanings) and empirical (requiring precise observation, controlled comparison, and scientific methods). The two modes reinforce each other.
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