Customized vehicles as material culture

In 1982, Jules David Prown laid the groundwork for the study of material culture when he proposed a method of assessing an artifact that uses techniques from art history and archaeology to form theories about the culture that created it. ¹ The method of analysis Prown proposed – first describing the object, then using that data to deduce its function and finally to speculate about the society that created it – can be thought of as a rudimentary version of the Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Landscapes Survey (H.A.E.R./H.A.B.S./H.A.L.S.) documentation analysis used by the Library of Congress to catalog historic American buildings and structures since 1933. Despite its lack of formality, Prown’s process of analysis overcomes some of the shortcomings of the H.A.E.R./H.A.B.S./H.A.L.S. system and aims for a more holistic goal. Prown’s process suggests a way to use an artifact as a starting point for understanding a culture. Before beginning to perform any observation, Prown emphasized how important it is for researchers to release their own cultural perspective first in order to “recover some of the past society’s belief structure.” ² The ultimate goal of studying materials from the past, according to Prown, is not to create a list of attributes, but rather to reconstruct the beliefs, values, and emotions (in sum, the culture) of the society that originally constructed them.