History in My Hand—Making Artifact Kits in the Intermediate Grades
ost social studies textbooks M devote at least a few pages of text and pictures to the art, architecture, and other forms of material culture that characterize a civilization. No picture, however, can substitute for the experience of handling an object or viewing it in three dimensions. Tangible artifacts and primary source documents, or copies of same, can help students understand the political, social, and cultural nature of a time period and the ideas, assumptions, and attitudes of the people who fabricated them. Whether one examines song lyrics, house construction or furnishings, changing types of agricultural and household implements, styles of clothing, personal grooming aids, recipes, keepsakes, personal letters, or mementos, artifacts reflect cognition. As James Deetz has persuasively argued, “Material culture systems represent the minds of the people who put them together” (Metcalf and Downey