The museum of ordinary things

Museums are full of gold and weapons because gold and weapons survive. Wooden tools rot, cloth decays, food leaves nothing. What ends up in a display case is not what mattered most to people; it is what lasted.

This quietly distorts how we picture the past. A visitor walks through a gallery of ceremonial objects and comes away with an impression of a society obsessed with ceremony, when in fact almost everybody spent almost all of their time on things that have left no trace: cooking, carrying water, repairing a roof, minding children.

Archaeologists have become creative about this. Rubbish pits turn out to be more informative than palaces, because people throw away what they actually used. Chemical traces inside a cooking pot reveal a diet that no written record mentions. Patterns of wear on a floor show where people stood. The marks on a skeleton's teeth can indicate whether a person spent years holding thread between them, which tells you about work that nobody thought worth writing down.

A small number of museums now build displays around this idea, putting a broken bowl or a worn step beside the ceremonial objects and explaining why the bowl may be the more honest witness.

It is a useful habit for reading any account of the past. Ask not only what the evidence shows, but what kind of evidence had a chance of surviving to be shown at all.