Scattered among these things are reminders that sound once existed: a metronome, a drumming pad, a guitar pick, a trumpet mouthpiece, a music stand, a tuning fork, a block of rosin…The older instruments bear the...

In high school pottery class, I never made a whole vase. Instead I made fragments that I tried to sell as historical artifacts. The effort earned me an F in pottery, and an A in...

The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’renot the first to die.