Pressing problems

I confess, I am a maker too.

Historians are writers. Some interpret the job as storytellers, others as philosopher/theorists who dwell in the platonic world of ideas, others as proficient technicians who only follow the rule of good academia. Common terrain for everyone is the land of words. Sieged by armies of modern archeologists, collectors, and amateurs of vintage technology or folk art, historians need to find their niche and focus on doing what is their job: to write books.
Public historians are dismissed as half-historians perhaps for this precise reason, because to write books is not their goal. It could be, but in the interaction with the public that crowns the flag of public history writing books loses the monopoly of their attention.
What about Material Culture? Again the problem lies in the different nature of objects and words. Surely any word in any book is the result of the interaction among objects, from the relatively simple ink and pen to the sophisticated laser printers now in any office. Yet the middle-realm of words, half concept, half object, allows the historian to indulge only on the first part, relegating the past to a virtual world of ideas.
However, the world is concrete, and despite our theorization of it, real objects, the ones that you and me touch and use, are the actual heritage from the past. The historian often does not deal with this past at all, and even when it happens, the result is a book, and again the theory.
Reading David Pye and his analysis on the workmanship of risk and workmanship of certainty (human-made and machine-made in a nutshell) and Morozov’s article in the New Yorker on the Maker Movement the question on the connection between historians and the making process pops out clearly in my mind.

What is the meaning of life? Can I surf the gravitational waves? (sorry, not related, but I like Monty Python)

Or better:

Do the historians understand how the objects are made? If not, would it change the perspective that they choose in writing about the past?

Do the historians understand how the objects are made? If not, would it change the perspective that they choose in writing about the past?

Yes. Because I say so.
And because to understand how an object was made gives evidence on how the object was imagined, projected and the ideas that led to the object itself. There is a very good documentary on Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press with Stephen Fry . 

(HERE, highly suggested).

There is obviously no footnote, no index and shame of shames, no bibliography, yet you see the making of the press, you understand the difficulties, the different steps that led from the idea to the printing of the first books, the environment that seeded in Gutenberg the project for the object that definitely changed the world.
Talking about printing, how was my dear newspaper of 1916 made? Words, surely, but also paper, inks (it is colored!), and machinery. Will I be able to find out? I am almost as interested in this answer as to solution of what is the meaning of life.

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David Pye, “The Workmanship of Certainty and the Workmanship of Risk,” in The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

Evgeny Morozov, “Making It: Pick Up a Spot Welder and Join the Revolution,” The New Yorker (January 13, 2014) 

C’mon Indiana, no gold this time.

Let’s start with the end: “It is terribly important that the ‘small thing forgotten’ be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured.”[p. 259]

From the title of James Deetz’s book, In Small Things Forgotten, it would seem that the focus for good history — archeology to be precise — is the small objects that are dug up from the layers of the past. In one sense it is, both because an archeologist passes most of his time in the field sifting through the dirt to find any small piece of pottery or any other material that had been manipulated by man, and because throughout the book Deetz masterly immerses the reader in the fascinating and sometimes even touching world of the people that lived and experienced their lives around these objects.

Yet Deetz in analyzing these objects takes serious care to highlight patterns. Anything coming from the past has the dual nature of evidence and narrative. From the smoke pipe to the house, but in a bigger sense also events, writings, ideas and, as reported in the book, music, all constitute the language that a world long gone uses to talk about itself; as with words, objects possess a meaning by themselves, but together they don’t just describe to an acute observer what they were meant for and how they were used, but they paint a picture of the society around them, its culture and religion.

Deetz in almost a romantic way dwells in the cemeteries, were his dialogue with Shakespeare’s Yorik does not bring an existential question on the human life — a question on which, at least for compassion, any historian should indulge in sometimes — but a very interesting description on the stylistic changes of the decoration on the gravestones. Deetz handles the dangerous argument with the efficient toolbox of archeology, double-checking and cross-referencing, using statistics and analyzing the properties of the materials.

The patterns pop out clearly from the carefully assembled investigation. From the single objects, even the single fragment of pottery, comes out the whole image. Clearly the past is lost, it is a memory with blurred contours: something is lost forever, like the burned-down house were Cato Howe, a freed slave that fought in the Revolution, lived from 1792 until his death in 1823. Cato is now only a name, even his face is lost, yet this somewhat depressing thought is counterbalanced by the present: we, the present, are his heritage, and we can reconstruct the past thanks to his actions, such as the structure of the foundations of the house that he built, the legal documents that attest that the community granted him some land, and the meager list of things that he left behind after his departure.

Two lessons are clear from In Small Things Forgotten: the power of the connection of objects, its “Aura” —if we want to steal from Benjamin’s theories from the last week—, and the strength of evidence, which comes only from research and accumulation of data.

Nothing new perhaps, but reading such a pleasant work renews again the passion for the lost little things of the past for us little Indiana Jones: he was an archeologist too! The newspaper is perhaps not as “valuable” as the Sacred Grail, but I bet that Indiana thrived for the action, not for the money.

Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: [an Archaeology of Early American Life]. Expanded and rev. ed. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.

“What a fitting end to your life's pursuits. You're about to become a permanent addition to this archaeological find. Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

Let's not dig in the wrong place though.