Material Culture and Archaeological Evidence
What you must understand
You must interpret objects and sites as evidence: pottery (styles, shapes, function, provenance), sculpture (idealisation, Roman copies of Greek originals, portraiture), architecture (orders, temple and civic planning, engineering), inscriptions (honorific, funerary, legal), coins (portraiture, propaganda, economy), and burial and settlement archaeology. Know the difference between primary archaeological data and later literary description, the role of stratigraphy and context, and problems of survival, looting and the antiquities market. Key sites and monument types recur: Athenian Acropolis, Roman forum and amphitheatre, Pompeii and Herculaneum, provincial towns.
Traps in questions
Do not treat a Roman copy as a transparent window onto a lost Greek original - copies mediate. Avoid reading images as photographs of daily life; vase painting is conventional and idealising. Do not date objects by style alone without noting uncertainty. Resist assuming absence of evidence means absence of practice. Be alert to questions about reconstruction, display and museum ethics.
Rule of thumb
Interrogate every object with context, function, audience, material and date - an object without context loses much of its evidential value.
Worked example
On Pompeian wall painting, note that domestic decoration signalled the owner's cultural aspirations and shaped guests' movement through the house; it is evidence for ideology as much as for art.