How often do you refer to objects in the classroom? When did you last explore with your pupils the materiality of past lives? The ‘material turn’ in historical research and scholarship opens up different lines of enquiry and different kinds of history from those revealed by documentary evidence. It can lend itself to exploring history from below, and to enquiries in cultural history. Material culture also offers access to periods and places for which documentary evidence is limited.

Using material culture expands pupils’ understanding of how evidence works in historical enquiry. The fact that material objects are ‘mute until interrogated’, as Trapani points out in TH 177, or, in Dorudi’s words (TH 196) ‘carry no conscious testimony’ means that pupils simply have to interrogate the source. This helps us with common problems in pupils’ evidential thinking. As Chapman points out in TH 123, pupils are quick to make assumptions rather than to properly engage with a process of reasoning which examines those assumptions. When the source doesn’t ‘speak’ as documents do, we can shift pupils into a mindset where they must reason their way into inferences and thereby actively establish evidence for a claim...