One simple way of approaching our subject is to adapt the work of the American art historian Bernard Herman, a leading pioneer in the field of material culture studies. Herman has suggested that the study of things, broadly speaking, can be allocated to two distinct but overlapping approaches (Herman, 1992). In the first instance, he speaks of an ‘object-centred’ approach to the subject, one in which the focus of study is on the object itself. Here, we need to pay attention to the specific physical attributes of the object. The ability to describe the object – to engage, that is, with a list of descriptive criteria – is at the forefront of this approach. A typical checklist of the kinds of questions we might ask about an object include:One simple way of approaching our subject is to adapt the work of the American art historian Bernard Herman, a leading pioneer in the field of material culture studies. Herman has suggested that the study of things, broadly speaking, can be allocated to two distinct but overlapping approaches (Herman, 1992). In the first instance, he speaks of an ‘object-centred’ approach to the subject, one in which the focus of study is on the object itself. Here, we need to pay attention to the specific physical attributes of the object. The ability to describe the object – to engage, that is, with a list of descriptive criteria – is at the forefront of this approach. A typical checklist of the kinds of questions we might ask about an object include: