xxii How to Evaluate Artifacts
The Saturday Night Live skit is undeniably hilarious. There are many
reasons why this is so: Walken’s deadpan assertion that he needs “more
cowbell” is so unexpected in the context of the other band members’ skepti-
cism about the instrument. For one thing, the loudness of the cowbell drowns
out the amplified instruments, from the guitars to the drums. Loud low-tech:
the cowbell is the ultimate retro instrument, barely worthy of “real” music
making.
The cowbell is an object or artifact. An object is a material or physical
thing that presents itself to the senses—an example would be a rock that a
hiker sees as he or she walks along. If our hiker picks up that rock, uses the
rock as a marker for the trail, or carries the rock away as a souvenir of the
hike, the rock-as-object becomes rock-as-artifact. Artifacts are objects
crafted by humans (the Latin root of the word, ars or arte, is where the word
“art” comes from; ars means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
skill in doing something). An object that is assigned meaning thereafter
functions as an artifact; artifacts are things crafted by humans. In this vol-
ume, the words are used interchangeably unless the distinction is pertinent
to the discussion.
The cowbell is a human-made object, an artifact with a history. It is the
result of a process of conceptualization and manufacture. Its original use is
rooted in agricultural practices; cowbells are made from tin and other sheet
metals folded and then soldered into a rectangular shape. The rectangular
tube is closed on one end and open on the other to form a bell shape, and a
metal bar is suspended in the center of the bell. The sides of the bell are usu-
ally flared, and the angle of flare and the depth of the bell control its tone.
Cowbells were hung around the neck of a cow, and as the cow walked, the
bell clanged. Structured to produce maximum noise, cowbells can be made
to resonate with different tones to distinguish, for example, a lead cow from
the rest of the herd or one farmer’s herd from another group. Cowbells were
first used in Switzerland in the 1600s, and by the 1700s cowbells were com-
mon in the United States. An American company, Bevin Bros. Manufacturing
Company of East Hampton, Connecticut, founded in 1832, is the last U.S.-
based company still manufacturing cowbells, but in the 19th century Bevin
Bros. competed with scores of other American cowbell manufacturers.
The cowbell is also the result of a process of distribution. In the United
States, cowbells were sold as farming tools in the 1890s by national retail-
ers; a Montgomery Ward & Co. catalog from 1894 lists cowbells (“The
shape of these is designed to produce the loudest sound possible,” promises
the ad copy) alongside sheep bells, sleigh bells to hang on horse halters, and
other sound makers to attach to farm animals. In the 20th century, cowbells
were used in a new way as a noisemaker at athletic events. The Mississippi
State University Bulldogs, famous for their fans’ use of the cowbell to cheer
their athletes and deeply annoy their adversaries, has archival evidence that
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