As a field, the historical study of material culture is no longer new. It has its own journal (the Journal of Material Culture), its own e-mail list (H-Material Culture), its own circuit of conferences, centers devoted to the subject at several universities and museums, degree and certificate programs, and, of course, a full range of courses for students. It is also one of the most interdisciplinary ways of investigating the past, with historians comfortably in dialogue and collaboration with archaeologists, sociologists, folklorists, and anthropologists, as well as museum curators and antiquarians, among others. While some might still associate its subject matter with objects found in museums or things from the remote past, it is in fact a field that takes an interest in all conceivable objects and every historical period. Indeed, its subject matter, and especially its concern for everyday life and the material circumstances of ordinary people, place it in close proximity to social and cultural history. Many historians are students of material culture manqué. But not all historians who deal with material culture are aware of, or troubled by, the methodological problems inherent in this field of study. How dependent is the study of material culture on texts? How well can we understand objects or the material conditions of life when what we know comes only through texts? Is there a meaningful distinction between what is human and what is material? How can we appreciate people's relationship to objects in the past when those objects have not survived, or even when they have? What is gained in having meaningful, direct, “hands-on” knowledge of objects, and does this kind of intimacy or familiarity endow historians with crucial insights into the past that cannot be gained otherwise? These and other questions were the themes of the following AHR Conversation, which took place online during the fall, and which is printed here in a lightly edited version. The participants were Leora Auslander, a modern Europeanist; Amy Bentley, a historian of food; Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam; H. Otto Sibum, a historian of science; and Christopher Witmore, an archaeologist. The questions were posed by the AHR Editor.

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