Many of Shen Kuo's contemporaries were interested in antiquarian pursuits of collecting old artworks. They were also interested in archaeological pursuits, although for rather different reasons than why Shen Kuo held an interest in archaeology. While Shen's educated Confucian contemporaries were interested in obtaining ancient relics and antiques in order to revive their use in rituals, Shen was more concerned with how items from archeological finds were originally manufactured and what their functionality would have been, based on empirical evidence. Shen Kuo criticized those in his day who reconstructed ancient ritual objects using only their imagination and not the tangible evidence from archeological digs or finds. Shen also disdained the notion of others that these objects were products of the "sages" or the aristocratic class of antiquity, rightfully crediting the items' manufacture and production to the common working people and artisans of previous eras. Fraser and Haber write that Shen Kuo "advocated the use of an interdisciplinary approach to archaeology and practiced such an approach himself through his work in metallurgy, optics, and geometry in the study of ancient measures."