For eight years, I have been providing research and writing articles about artifacts in the Wine History Project’s collection. My quest has been to engage you, the reader, in appreciating the history of these material objects. One can refer to them as physical objects, material possessions, artifacts, or cultural material, but ultimately, in the hands of a historian, they are known as material culture. Material culture provides access to the past as it was experienced. Every object has stories to reveal.
As defined in a September 2025 news magazine of the American Historical Association, Perspective on History, material culture studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the relationship of people and their things, the making, history, preservation, and interpretation of objects. It draws on such disciplines as art history, archaeology, anthropology, history, historic preservation, folklore, and museum studies. The physical, tangible objects, resources, and spaces created, used, and left behind by a group of people. It includes everything that humans make or modify to adapt to and define their environment.
Collections management, along with curatorial work, is my way to engage people to learn the history of viniculture in San Luis Obispo County. From my end, there is an initial mystery to the artifacts in the collection. These objects are both remarkable and mundane. I consider the pursuit to be an above-ground archaeology. And by solving the mystery of the object, I can provide you, the reader, a historic connection to the viniculture and enology of San Luis Obispo County.
The National Endowment for the Humanities supported an American Historical Association 2021 Survey entitled “History, the Past, and Public Culture” which details the public’s engagement with history. In the survey, museums and historic sites were the most trusted sources for accurate accounts of history, and according to the American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1129-1153, in the article “The Care for Objects: Material Culture in the History Classroom,” as Dr. Sarah Jones Weicksel describes the life cycle of an object as the following points.
- Its design and production
- Its purchase and acquisition
- Its use
- Its repurposing
- Its abandonment
- Its destruction
- Its preservation
When analyzing an object, it is important to observe and document the following for an informed addition to the original provenance.
- Physical characteristics (measurements, weight, texture, and materials)
- Design and production (what materials, who was the creator, when/where created, production)
- Use and distribution (how acquired, how used, user of object, object’s significance or role in society)
- Afterlives (has the object’s use changed over time, how did it survive, how part of this collection of objects, compare to other objects of same type)
- From object to historical question (other sources that would provide additional historical context to understand the object, historical questions can be posed for this object)
Not only do these focus on the relationship of the objects with people and societies, but they are important in experimental archaeology and testing how old tools were used. Ultimately, in the case of the Wine History Project, the observations help me to care for, preserve, and display these artifacts; and that is known as museology.
Retaining information for the artifacts in the collection and documenting that information for public knowledge, I believe, makes the past seem more tangible. Why? Because people connect with objects/physical artifacts. They represent history, and they are history. As such, I continue to probe and investigate our collection’s material artifacts and report my findings because there are stories to tell.
