Studies in Material Culture BY THOMAS CARTER GUEST EDITOR
writes the historian Robert Berkhofer, "the historian knows the past only by the remains left over."^ Some of the surviving evidence is written and consists of the kinds of documents historians normally rely on. Diaries, journals, court records, tax rolls, and the like are the usual sources of history. But there are other remains, more numerous and more familiar perhaps, and these are, quite simply, things. Houses, chairs, dishes, tools—all the things you can think of that once were part of people's everyday lives—are also part of the historical record that has come down to us through time. Although their message is not explict, such documents—however mute they may at first appear—nevertheless have an important story to tell, and it is toward this story, the history of things, that this special issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly is directed. Exploring the past through objects is called material culture study or material culture., which is often what the objects themselves are called.^ The name is appropriate for it implies the existence of a fundamental relationship between the things people make, buy, and use and culture, the underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions of a society or community. Historians, folklorists, architectural historians, geographers, and others study material culture because it reflects the pattern of past life. The arrangement of rooms in a house tells us how people once lived; innovations in roof framing technology denote a progressive strain within the society; covering a rough pine cupboard with a painted mahogany veneer exposes a group's attitude toward nature; an egalitarian society is symbolized by a uniformity in furniture design; and so on. S I N C E TIME IS IRREVERSIBLE,"
Dr. Carter is an architectural historian with the Utah State Historical Society and also teaches in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Utah. 1 Robert Berkhofer, Jr., A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York: The Free Press, 1970), p. 11. 2Useful introductions to material culture study can be found in Thomas J . Schlereth, ed.. Material Culture: A Research Guide (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985); and Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, IT
