the artifacts from a specific time and place, most often that has no written record. These physical artifacts are then used to make inferences about the ephemeral aspects of culture and history. With more recent societies, written histories, oral traditions, and direct observations may also be available to supplement the study of material culture. Beginning in the European Renaissance and the culture's fascination with classical antiquities, the study of artifacts from long-lost cultures has produced many forms of archaeological theory, such as trans-cultural diffusion, processual archaeology, and post-processual archaeology. Additionally, archaeological sub-disciplines have emerged within the field, including prehistoric archaeology, classical archaeology, historical archaeology, cognitive archaeology, and cultural ecology. Recently, a scientific methodology and approach to the analysis of pre-historic material culture has become prevalent with systematic excavation techniques producing detailed and precise results. Anthropology Anthropology is most simply defined as the study of humans across time and space. In studying a human culture, an anthropologist studies the material culture of the people in question as well as the people themselves and their interactions with others. To understand the culture in which an object is featured, an anthropologist looks at the object itself, its context, and the way that it was manufactured and used. The first anthropologist interested in studying material culture was Lewis Henry Morgan, in the mid-19th century. He is most known for his research on kinship and social structures, but he also studied the effect of material culture, specifically technology, on the evolution of a society. Later in the 19th century, Franz Boas brought the fields of anthropology and material culture studies closer together. He believed that it was crucial for an anthropologist to analyze not only the physical properties of material culture but also its meanings and uses in its indigenous context to begin to understand a society. At the same time in France, Émile Durkheim wrote about the importance of material culture in understanding a society. Durkheim saw material culture as one of the social facts that functions as a coercive force to maintain solidarity in a society. Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the 20th century, included the study of material culture in his work as an anthropologist because he believed that it could reveal a deeper level of structure and meaning unattainable by typical fieldwork. According to Lévi-Strauss, material culture can recall the mindset of a people, regardless of intervening time or space. Also in the