ABSTRACT
When historians represent an artifact as artificial or natural, they most often focus on the production of the item in question, but not necessarily on the artifact’s value or use as habitat. Habitat is an unabashedly scientific term. It comes from the Latin habitare, meaning to inhabit or live, but it is now defined more specifically as “the locality in which a plant or animal naturally grows or lives” (“habitat, n.,” OED Online). The use of naturally as a part of the technical definition of habitat is noteworthy, because it implies that habitat cannot be artificial. Yet I would argue that an exclusion of the artificial as habitat may be misguided if we consider life from the nonhuman point of view.
