A Hebridean Plough-type

Material culture studies build on primary sources, for example, in museum collections and fieldwork, and on historical data that may have been neglected in the dominant historical narrative; ‘no documents, no history’ might be said to have been a maxim of the academic teaching of history in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The growth of an academic interest in social and economic history in the second half of the twentieth century then widened the ambit of intellectual activity and encouraged
the sharing of disciplines and methodologies. So historians have tapped into explanations and
analyses of culture conventionally in the domain of the anthropologist and archaeologist. Material culture had not to the same extent earned itself the accolade of such academic labels but it can demonstrate its credentials in ‘Ethnology’ as a mix of social, economic and cultural history. Rooted in the work of European museums, it is a ‘methodology’ perhaps, rather than a discipline, while being interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary in its competencies. A shared and interdisciplinary approach has characterised European Ethnology with its strong impulses from Scandinavia and has supplied the intellectual working tools for museum studies, especially in late-twentieth century Scotland. This has been the basis on which social and technological collections have been amassed in the National Museums Scotland where the nature of the evidence and a dearth of conventional historical sources presupposed extending historical study beyond the boundaries of documentation to consideration of intrinsic form and function, cognate material, physical and social context, and language. Specialist knowledge and a critical framework evolved sui generis and, fully acclimatised to a dearth of conventional
primary sources, blazed a remarkable trail in material culture studies as scholarly dimension to
artefact collection and interpretation.