The feelings, emotions and behaviors of people who lived in the past don’t leave a fossil record. But cultural artifacts, such as paintings, novels, music and other art forms, do. Now, researchers are developing tools to mine these artifacts to decipher how people in past societies might have thought and felt.
Consider Hieronymus Bosch’s famous circa 1500 painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” with its fantastical creatures, a potential metaphor for exploration and discovery characteristic of the period. Or “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s impressionist 1876 painting of a Parisian dance hall depicting the emerging life of leisure and prosperity during the Belle Époque. Conversely,