ABSTRACT
Every day we swim in a sea of images and navigate our way through a world of things, and many of the images we look at is of the things we have, want to have, or believe that we need to have. The things we buy or are given are known as 'objects' and 'artifacts' in scholarly discourse, and these objects and artifacts form what social scientists call material culture. Material culture is the world of things that people make and things that we purchase or possess, so it is part of our consumer culture. Material culture is a subject of great interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, and many other kinds of social scientists and scholars because these objects provide information about what we are like and how we live now, and how we lived in earlier times.
