Getting Started

Introduction

Writing History From Objects

Questions to Ask

1. What is it?

2. Where is it now and how did it get there?

3. What is its date?

4. What was the object's function? Was it unique?

5. Who made, owned or used the object?

Resources

Sample Analysis: Ice Man

Sample Analysis: Coins

Annotated Bibliography

Material Objects Online

You Be the Historian!

About the Author

Credits

Download Essay

Anthropology Collection Database
Department of Anthropology, California Academy of Sciences

This site offers a searchable database of 17,000 catalogue entries--more than 8,000 of which are accompanied by photographs--of its anthropological objects collection. The collection is especially strong in materials from the U.S. Southwest, the Pacific Islands, and basketry from California, and... [more]

Digital South Asia Library
American Institute of Indian Studies and Digital South Asia Library, University of Chicago

This site presents large collections of both primary-source images and statistics. It includes approximately 125,000 photographic images from the Varanasi slide collections of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Center for Art and Archaeology in Gurgaon, Haryana, India. The images fall... [more]

Grands Sites Archeologiques
The French Ministry of Culture and Communication

This website examines 12 topics in European prehistory and antiquity. Three are especially useful for examining European prehistory and provide interactive, in-depth explorations into prehistoric caves: Cave of... [more]

Kyoto National Museum
Kyoto National Museum

This site offers 10,000 images of roughly 2,000 objects or sets of objects from a collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art. The collection ranges in date from prehistoric times to the present and includes a wide range of art objects, including sculpture, painting, ceramics, calligraphy,... [more]

LACMA Collections Online
Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

This site presents more than 70,000 images of artwork and objects drawn from collections in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and adds images regularly. Images are organized by department, such as "African Art"; "Costume and Textiles"; and "Prints and Drawings"; and the images are easy to... [more]

Perseus Art and Archeology
Gregory Crane, Tufts University

Part of the larger Perseus Digital Library that collects and digitizes texts and artifacts from Ancient Greece and Rome, this large image collection contains more than 33,000 images of Ancient Greek and Roman art, including more than 500 coins, 1,500 vases, 1,400 sculptures, and 500 images of... [more]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collections
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This site presents 50 highlights from each of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 21 curatorial departments, and the entire holdings of the European Paintings collection (more than 2,000 works), for a total of 3,500 images. In addition to European Paintings, the departments include Ancient Near... [more]

The Stanley Collection Database
University of Iowa

This database, drawn from the Stanley Collection of African Art at the University of Iowa, contains more than 500 images of art objects from Sub-Saharan Africa. Objects include pottery, shrines, jewelry, masks, and musical instruments. The collection is strongest in art from the Congo, with 213... [more]

Thinker ImageBase
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

This image database contains more than 85,000 images, representing approximately 12,000 artists, drawn from the collections of the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The images date from the 6th century BCE to the 20th century CE and include paintings, photographs, prints,... [more]