Artifacts that derive from the material culture of the past—religious icons or paintings that add to our understanding of belief systems, a family portrait that provides insight into presentations of self in a particular time and place, a building or sculpture which reveals how power and authority were displayed in a specific empire—these kinds of evidence represent another category of primary source material that historians can use to re-create and understand the past. But such visual sources can be even more difficult to interpret than written documents. The ideas that animated the creators of particular images or artifacts are often not obvious. Nor are the understandings they conveyed to those who viewed or used them. The lovely images from the Indus River Valley civilization contained in the visual sources feature for Chapter 2, for example, remain enigmatic although still engaging to twenty-first century viewers.

Despite the difficulties of interpretation, visual sources can provide insights not offered by written documents. Various images of the Buddha shown in Chapter 4 effectively illustrate how the faith that he initiated changed as it spread beyond India to other parts of Asia. And the images deriving from World War I that are featured in the visual sources for Chapter 20 convey an immediate emotional sense about the meanings attached to that conflict that the written word can hardly match. Indeed, for pre-literate societies, such as those explored in the visual sources for Chapter 1, archeological and artistic evidence is all that remains of their history.

To use visual sources, we must try as best we can to see these pieces of evidence through the eyes of the societies that produced them and to decode the symbols and other features that imbue them with meaning. Thus, context is, if anything, even more crucial for analyzing visual evidence than it is for documents. Understanding the art of the Maya elite, featured in Chapter 6, depends heavily on some knowledge of Maya history and culture. And the images in Chapter 19 illustrating Japanese perceptions of the West in the second half of the nineteenth century require some grasp of Japan’s overall historical development and its encounter with Europe and the United States.

A set of basic questions, similar to those you would ask a written document, provides a starting point for analyzing a visual source:

Having established this basic information about the image or artifact, you may simply want to describe it, as if to someone who had never seen it before.

Finally, you will want to take a stab at more interpretive issues, making use of what you know about the context in which it was created.

Beyond analyzing particular images or objects, you will be invited to draw conclusions from sets of related visual sources that address a central theme in each chapter. What can you learn, for example, about Muslims’ perceptions of their prophet Muhammad from the images contained in the visual sources feature of Chapter 9? Or what do the images in Chapter 13 show about Aztec understanding of the Spanish conquest? Moreover, you will need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of various types of visual source for answering questions posed by historians.

Primary sources—documentary and visual alike—are the foundation for all historical accounts. To read only secondary sources, such as textbooks or articles, is to miss much of the flavor and texture of history as it was actually experienced by people in the past. It is also to miss the exciting and highly controversial process by which historical narratives and analyses are constructed from scattered and fragmentary pieces of evidence. Immersing yourself in the documents and visual sources presented here allows you to catch a glimpse of the messiness, the ambiguity, the heartaches, and the achievements of history as it was lived and of the historian’s craft. Enjoy!