Ask an Artifact

Learn about strategies used to make discoveries about the past. Apply disciplinary lenses to objects from history and modern day. Explore the relationship between form, function, and technological change.

To understand what life was like in the past, we must look at various sources of information to discover clues and think critically about what they can tell us. To understand our oldest stories, such as ancient cultures, we rely on the incomplete records we find through archaeology to learn about populations of the past. Practice and compare the many lenses we can use to learn about the past while exploring the form, function, continuity and change of objects from across history.