Creative arts

Maritime Museums and Material Culture Studies1
Garth Wilson and John Summers
Material History and Watercraft Study
In its simplest form, a material culture approach is characterized by a belief that artifacts
are important to historical study and are related to the people who produced them. While
few would now dispute this basic idea, it is nonetheless useful to establish that what the
adoption of such an approach emphasizes is the material. Moreover, a material historian
would assume that each artifact has a history, a maker and a place of origin; was made
from some material(s); was made in a specific way; looks the way it does as a
consequence of intentional choices by its maker; and has an intended use or uses. It is
further assumed that each of these factors generates social and historical meanings which
are capable of recovery and worthy of study. These meanings are both inherent and
accreted, made through both creation and use.
In earlier days, there was a sharply polemical edge to material culture study, as
its proponents waged divisive and arbitrary battles with the rest of the historical
community over whether texts or artifacts should have primacy in historical understanding. With its acceptance as a method of study and its adoption by the museum community
as an important methodology, the rhetorical fires have cooled somewhat. Nonetheless,
material culture-based approaches still tend towards explicit methodological structures and
a schematic quality, owing in part to the movement’s origins in anthropology and
structuralism. This can be seen clearly in Robert Elliot’s influential and oft-quoted article
which grew from a graduate seminar that proposed, evaluated and revised various methods
of approaching artifacts.2
One of the benefits of material culture methods and models is that they make
explicit and formalize what are often idiosyncratic and intuitive research processes, and
ensure that when a number of artifacts are under consideration the same questions are
directed toward each. Although the model proposed by Elliot is by no means the only or
the best in the field, it is useful in prompting the researcher to pose certain questions; in
so doing it forces an evaluation, which is to some extent free from the researcher’s
preconceptions, of the artifact’s intrinsic qualities (see table 1).
The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du nord, IV, No. 2 (April 1994), 31-39.
31
32 The Northern Mariner
Figure 1: Souvenir Figurine of a Mariner.
Source: Private Collection.
Elliot’s method seeks three kinds of data about a given artifact: observable data,
determined through direct physical and sensory contact; comparative date, resulting from
comparisons with similar things of a similar time and/or construction; and supplementary
data, including written or printed sources, oral evidence, photographs, paintings, and
drawings. These three classes of information move progressively further from the artifact,
beginning with a restricted view and gradually re-establishing it in a broader context. The
value of the material culture method derives mainly from the first two steps, which might
otherwise be omitted, and which necessitate direct physical and personal contact with the
artifact, precluding this use only of a photograph, illustration or written description.
These three kinds of evidence form the left-hand side of a table which is
gradually completed as analysis proceeds (see table 1). Along the top are five categories
of questions — material, construction, provenance, function and value — each answered in
Maritime Museums and Material Culture Studies 33
turn through one of the three kinds of data. If the method is to produce useful results, a
certain rigour in the application of the categories is required, together with a willingness
to exclude supplementary and comparative data from the first phase of examination.
Table 1
The Material Culture Research Matrix
Data Material Construction Function Provenance Value
Observable
Data
Comparative
Data
Supplementary
Data
Conclusions
Source: Derived from Robert S. Elliot, “Research Report: Towards a Material Culture
Methodology,” Material History Bulletin, XIV (1985), 31-40.
When this method is presented to students, there is often a degree of skepticism
about its utility, particularly when it comes to asking obvious questions, such as “what is
it made of (for the purposes of demonstration, a ubiquitous classroom chair was selected
as the first artifact). The obvious answer “wood” and the laughter that may follow gives
way eventually to a more productive discussion as students realize that the enumeration
of the basic properties and materials of even so common an item is a detailed task. This
is particularly true when it comes to function, with its discussion of the artifact’s intended
job, how well it met the requirements, and the choices that might have affected its design.
Once this preliminary introduction is completed, students are introduced to a more
specifically maritime application through a consideration of the role of historic small craft
in maritime heritage preservation. The point has been made elsewhere that small
watercraft (usually defined as those less than forty feet LOA) occupy a central role in
maritime heritage.3
Their small size, low capital and maintenance costs, and potential for
interactive programming make them ideal for communicating maritime heritage, as a
number of museums and related institutions have discovered.4
In order to make use of historic small craft, museums require accurate and
detailed research. There is already a considerable literature relating to small craft history,
a good deal of which has been written from a perspective outwardly similar to that of
material culture studies, as can be seen in well-known works by Howard Chapelle,
Kenneth and Helen Durant, John Gardner and Douglas Philips-Birt. 5
Students of
watercraft have often employed the material historian’s characteristic concerns for the
material, construction, function, provenance and value of their objects of study. In
34 The Northern Mariner
particular cases, they have also used this information to link the artifact to the society that
produced it. Yet very little of the work to date has explicitly identified itself with the
theories and methods of material culture, particularly in dealing with an entire boat rather
than smaller maritime artifacts, such as tools and personal effects. Gregg Finley has
focused discussion on a caulking mallet used by shipbuilders rather than the vessel it
helped to build. Despite the fact that many significant watercraft collections are held in
museums, where material culture methods are often utilized, the technique has not yet
been applied to boats.
The principal technique of small craft research involves the taking of lines. To do
this, the boat is set up plumb and level, and both its lines and construction details are
systematically measured, the method used depending on the boat’s size and position.
Lines-taking involves a close focus on the actual fabric of the boat to determine how it
was constructed. This examination can also reveal valuable details about why it might
have been made and how it was used, including repairs and modifications during its life.
In terms of the material culture paradigm, this corresponds to the first, or observable, data
phase. A material culture approach is also particularly valuable for the second, or
supplementary data phase, which builds on detailed structural observations to aid in
understanding craftsmanship, workmanship and the material production process.6
After being introduced to the principles and practices of historic small craft
preservation, students are asked to consider a boat from the material culture perspective,
just as the chair was used earlier. It is immediately apparent that the boat was an infinitely
more complex object, due in no small part to its use in a demanding and frequently
hostile environment. By exploring the multiplicity of meanings inherent in a single small
boat, students begin to see not only its rich potential as a source for maritime history but
also the ways in which it could generate an understanding of that same past. Moreover,
they can also see how such an approach can affect the view we receive of the past.
Professional historians are increasingly treating maritime history as less
specialized, drawing ever-stronger parallels with shore-based industries, workers and
patterns of capitalization, in the process breaking the traditional isolation of the maritime
world, its ships and its workers. The public, however, seems to be moving in the opposite
direction. We have just lived through a Columbus Quincentenary which saw the
expenditure of millions of dollars on replicas of dubious interpretive and historic value
while legitimate heritage vessels throughout the world are threatened with destruction.
While we are literally awash in museums celebrating the maritime past, we are terribly
short of those which analyze it in a meaningful way or which tap into the wide stream of
professional maritime research and disseminate even a small portion of it to the public.
It would appear that the romance of the sea is as popular as ever.
A material culture-based approach to maritime history would help to bridge this
gap between professional understanding and popular perceptions. By focusing on the
material structure of an artifact and its intellectual causes and consequences, it can change
the “things” of maritime heritage from dutifully-polished museum pieces into objects that
can contribute to our understanding of the maritime past