PaperDue

Essay Topic Hub

Artifact
Essays

222+ paper examples, study guides & outlines

222 papers

UG & Grad levels

Free to browse

What is Artifact?

An artifact, in its broadest academic sense, is any object, text, or cultural product created or shaped by human hands that carries historical, social, or symbolic significance. Historians, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars treat artifacts as primary evidence for understanding how societies functioned, what people valued, and how meaning was constructed across time and place. The topic appears across disciplines including history, rhetoric, education, and cultural studies, making it a versatile subject that invites students to think critically about the relationship between material objects and the societies that produced them.

The papers collected here reflect a wide range of approaches. Some focus on cultural analysis, examining artifacts tied to specific traditions such as African cultural objects and what they reveal about identity and community life. Others take a rhetorical angle, treating media products as artifacts worthy of close interpretive reading. Educational frameworks also appear, with students exploring portfolio artifacts and the rationales behind selecting them. Historical interpretation is another prominent thread, with writers working through how to read physical or documentary objects as evidence of past knowledge and practice.

A strong essay on artifacts grounds its thesis in a specific object or category and connects its physical or formal qualities to broader social or historical context. Evidence drawn from close observation of the artifact itself, combined with relevant cultural or historical background, tends to carry the most weight. One common pitfall is treating an artifact as self-explanatory — strong analysis always explains not just what an artifact is, but what it does, what it meant to its original context, and why that meaning matters now.

222 papers

Sort by:

Paper Undergraduate

A Roman altar's representation of military religion and cultural tolerance

¶ … wonderful thing about art and architecture today is that, as a society, we have been exposed to a rich history spanning thousands of years. Many, many cultures have been exposed as a result of archaeological…

Paper Undergraduate

Patagonia's organizational culture and radical humanist approach

Patagonia has grown from a small back-yard boot-strapped operation to a multinational organization with far-reaching environmental influence. The culture of Patagonia has—as all organizational cultures do—evolved over the history of the organization. This analysis illustrates the efforts of the Patagonia to establish and maintain cultural congruence, and within the scope of this analysis, also highlights that an organization can exhibit many of the structural trappings of a corporation and still maintain the maverick attitude of a band of climbers and surfers. Collective action—collective corporate action—requires some constraining of individual behavior. The question to be answered in this analysis is whether behavior can be constrained for the good of the employees of an organization—and for the apparent good of the global environment—and not follow the corporate template of constraining behavior for the good of those in power. The artifacts, values and beliefs, and assumptions of Patagonia would imply that the answer to this question is a resounding affirmative—and that the critical consciousness of Choinard has carried and directed the organization on a path of cultural congruence.

Essay Doctorate

Gender oppression and self-identity in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman

Atwood illustrates the importance of adaptation and acquiescence to the dominant culture with regard to the decomposition of self-identity and the ability to retain personal choice. There is never goodness-of-fit between Marian's self-identity and the cultural and social roles that she is are required of her. Marian first loses her struggle and in the process loses her voice, her identity, and her direction—only by making an effigy of herself and consuming it is she able to bridge to a new composition of her old identity. She knows who she is even if she doesn't know quite where she wants to go. Marian figures out how to coexist in a world that will never let her be the person she is. The primary difference is that she has experienced the full thrust of the cultural violence that is the milieu in which she exists—and she knows the danger she creates for herself when she struggles against the current. The cost of not conforming is real and salient. The conscientization that Marian developed before her engagement to Peter is clouded, but the nebulous shapes have discernable form. The tyranny of consumerism and cultural dominance are no longer strangers to Marian—she can play the game on their field, if she must.

Paper Doctorate

Archaeological artifacts repatriation: legal and symbolic implications

Repatriation of cultural objects involves mainly returning historical artifacts to their original culture that obtained and owned by museums and institutions that collect culture materials. This term repatriation was originally created for the Native Americans who wished to restore their cultural object from modern museums. This term was later broadened to a wider range that fits the global repatriation actions. (William, 2008) It is generally known that great museums collect great treasures of foreign arts, and cultural objects.

Paper Doctorate

Deconstructivism and the fall of human civilization in Frankenstein

Deconstructivism in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

Paper Undergraduate

Psychological distress and functional somatic symptoms: An electronic diary study

Functional Symptoms and Psychological States: An Electronic Diary Study by Burton, C., Weller, D. And Sharpe, M.

Paper Undergraduate

Ariel and Goodwill Stores donation campaign advertisement analysis

The advertisement used here (attached) is of a mermaid called Ariel from the famous 'The Little mermaid' who is depicted as a fan of collecting the valuables that humans lose or leave by mistake in the waters.

Essay Undergraduate

Colonial encounter and performance in Wertenbaker and McLeod

Approaching the complexities of the colonial or post-colonial situation has been a major theme in drama for as long as colonialism has existed: Shakespeare wrote his Tempest on the heels of the very first English…

Centralizing quality management across Hartman Industries manufacturing sites

Hartman Industries LLC is a leader in the plastic injection molding industry. Many of the products we produce require precision manufacturing and are used in the medical industry. Hartman offers state-of-the-art…

Research Paper Masters

Garbology: analyzing artifacts in a family's trash

This paper undertakes a study in garbology. The essay's analysis focuses on six main questions: who produces trash, what behaviors produce trash, how many people produce trash, how long this production takes, whether there is anything to say about the individuals who produce the trash, whether inferred or otherwise, and whether there are any indications of class.

← Prev 1 2 3 … 18 23 Next →