TWO - Facts and Building Artefacts: What Travels in Material Objects?

Summary

Introduction: Travelling Through Cultures, Travelling Through Time

Facts are often expressed as statements or verbal descriptions. But in some cases, facts – particularly facts about technology – are better recorded and transmitted via material objects. Does the nature of the vehicle that contains and expresses (and sometimes almost constitutes) the facts influence how they travel and are received? This chapter contributes to the question of how material objects carry facts from one culture to another, and through the centuries, by considering some examples from the history of construction, while at the same time keeping in mind the praxes of archaeologists, historians, conservators and museum curators. Therefore, we will be dealing with facts travelling on two different levels: facts travelling in a material object to the observer or user, as well as facts from and about buildings travelling in the realm of architectural history.

Material objects can ‘carry’ facts through different trajectories – across time, of course, but also from one cultural audience to another, which might or might not include a geographical move. Analysing a building or its components – or an archaeological excavation and the artefacts found in it – gives us ‘clues’ about those historical events and processes that directly involved and physically shaped the objects concerned: their production, the use that was made of them, possible repairs, changes and so on. The primary vehicle by which these (historical) facts travel is the material object itself, although other means must often be taken into consideration as well to get at the whole story. Following facts through these two trajectories of time and space, we ask which ‘facts’ travel, via which vehicles and what happens to them when they travel. A specific example may help to make these questions more concrete.