The Significance of the Artifact

N artifact, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a thing made by art, and the word art connotes skill. An object made with skill, that is, through knowledge and practice could be a poem, ax, or a house. In 1834, Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the term in the following sentence: lump of sugar or lead lies among other artefacts on the shelf of a collector.' An early usage then is to restrict the meaning of the term to something that a collector might keep in a gallery or a museum. That thing could not be as large as a house, nor could it be a poem unless it takes material form, engraved on a clay tablet or at least in print. A modem dictionary of anthropology defines artifact as an object of any type made by human hands. Tools, weapons, and sculptured and engraved objects are representative artifacts.2 This definition seems to exclude deliberately mental objects such as legends and myths and to include only objects that are made by human hands, that can survive the erosion of time, and that can be accommodated in a museum. Although the narrow, and now generally accepted, definition serves a useful purpose in technical literature, much of the significance of the artifact would be lost unless we retain also its broad sense as a humanly constructed object, material or mental.