Artifacts and Memory – For Students

Artifacts

The study of material culture, or day-to-day objects, allows us to understand history on a personal level. Understanding the process objects go through as they wear can provide unique information for interpreting the past. The following links provide information about this process.

National Park Service museum conservation program.

National Archives main preservation page.

Archives Center of the National Museum of American History.

Getty Conservation Institute resources page.

Memory

Artists across cultures and throughout time have sought to incorporate the multifaceted connections between past and present in their artworks. Use the links provided here to begin an investigation of artworks that have dealt with issues of memory and the connection of the past and present.

National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution The Uses of African Art (click on "Ancestral")

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Medieval European Relics and Reliquaries

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