Introduction
Museum collections are primary sources, offering first-hand testimony from peoples and places in various moments of time. The information they provide affords us insights into the cultures or people who variously made, owned, preserved, and interpreted them.
This guide will help you get started with your object research at the Peabody Museum, and is intended for use with archaeological and ethnological collections.
- In other courses, you have perhaps become familiar with close, critical readings of texts and the attention that must be paid to context, authorship, and audience. Looking at objects, however, incorporates some different skills. This guide will walk you through the process of looking at anthropological objects.
- Inside, you will find suggestions of questions to ask of an object, to help you draw connections between its physical qualities and your initial interpretations, and to help you formulate new avenues of inquiry.
- Your research on objects will also include examining documents at the Peabody Museum, as well as in University libraries. There are numerous textual sources at the Museum to examine, including accession files, accession cards, ledger books, and other associated archival documents and photographs. Not all of the object collections have associated documentation, but please ask so that you may review all potential textual sources with Peabody staff.
This guide is also intended to help you locate yourself in your research – much as you would when doing a close reading of archival or secondary sources – to help you to articulate the associations on which you are building your interpretation.
- An object will provide different information depending on the questions you ask of it, as viewed from different perspectives. Understanding yourself in your research process will allow you to gain from those perspectives and expand the possible meanings you may discover, as you learn from the peoples and cultures represented by or associated with an object.
Basic Procedures
- Looking is your starting point. Observations should prompt questions, connections, and further research.
- Focus on the object. Ask simple, straightforward questions based on what you see.
- Consider the onject on its own, and in its own right. Save interpretations for later.
- Spend as much time as possible with the object. Consider drawing the object; it will help you discover more detail. Use photography only as an aid to memory.
- Review associated Peabody Museum documentation. Depending on the object, these may include accession and/or catalogue cards, ledge entries, accession files, or archival materials.
