Artifact Study: A Proposed Model

symbols of meaning. If a basic wonder about man is his capacity for building culture, certainly the next wonder is his astounding capacity for making things as part of his culture. In this he surpasses the animal a thousand times in cunning, power, imaginativeness, beauty, destructiveness, and grandeur. To know man we must study the things he has made-the Parthenon, the Panama Canal, Stonehenge, the computer, the Taj Mahal, the space capsule, Michelangelo's Pietti, the highway cloverleaf, the Great Pyramid, Rembrandt's self-portraits. The artifacts made and used by a people are not only a basic expression of that people; they are, like culture itself, a necessary means of man's self-fulfillment.