From the introduction, this actually seems like a very interesting book. The basic premise is that discovering History requires both historical texts as well as historical objects.
Objects are particularly important to history because they can tell us so much. They can tell us who used them, what they were used for, where they were made, when they were made, and so on. By knowing these bits of information, we can extrapolate further to discover a very large quantity of information about a culture or group of people. Although written texts can do some of this, they cannot help us with the deeper histories of civilizations. Written documentation is relatively recent, and so objects enable us to learn about those civilizations that did not have a written language. So long as we have an imagination, we can always continue to learn more about history through objects.
In the past few weeks, this course has really taught me to appreciate objects, and I certainly look at them in a very different light. After reading this Introduction from a historian’s point of view, I can really understand just how much you can learn from an object. The examples given in the text really illuminate the abundance of information hidden within a singular object. Each individual object is not only a piece of history, but also a clue towards understanding so much more.
Reading this made me very eager to start the project of the history of New Paltz. If every object has a story to tell, then we can discover so much about our community as well as the history it has to share with us. As a class, we can all learn the value of an object; discover the individual stories each object has to tell us, and work together to create a detailed history of our lovely community of New Paltz.
The Materials of History, Thought, and Art 
I definitely agree with what you said about individual objects telling the story of a culture/history. And going along with this idea of objects being “clues” we can also think of multiple objects “completing” a story. For example, the collection of pottery talking about in the Introduction, where each fragment clearly came from different times and places, giving us a bigger picture about the trade that happened over the Mediterranean. Although we can analyze each individual object for clues about its personal meaning, we can also look at the larger scale and see how objects work as clues in harmony with one another.