The Lives of Objects

In 1887, clay tablets began to emerge from the ruins of Amarna, the city built by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE. Exactly how they were discovered is uncertain. Contemporary accounts are contradictory: a peasant woman or local farmers may have found them, although undocumented digging is another possibility. Later excavations recovered further fragments from an administrative complex close to the royal palace, but by then many of the original tablets had entered the antiquities market and begun their journey into collections around the world.

What survived was extraordinary. Most of the tablets were letters, written predominantly in Akkadian using cuneiform script. Egypt lay outside the region in which cuneiform had developed, but Akkadian had become a diplomatic language across much of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Kings wrote to one another about marriages, gifts and political relationships; subordinate rulers appealed to the Egyptian pharaoh for assistance and protection. Messengers carried these small clay documents over considerable distances before they were read at court and eventually stored in the royal archive.

The letters are compelling for what they say, but their survival also depends upon what they are. Words impressed into clay acquired a physical existence that spoken negotiations did not. The conversations surrounding a diplomatic marriage, the arrival of a foreign delegation, the presentation of gifts and the reading of a royal message have disappeared but the tablets remained. Even in antiquity they were more than neutral containers for words. Some appear to have been kept because their contents, promises, requests, records of gifts and tribute might need to be consulted again. Others may have served as tangible reminders of relationships between rulers separated by great distances and unlikely ever to meet. A letter was information, but it was also an object carried by a messenger, presented at court, handled, read and stored.

That distinction matters. Much of what we know about the past comes from written evidence, but writing survives unevenly and tells particular kinds of stories. Archives naturally preserve the concerns of administrations, courts, temples and those with access to literacy. Material evidence can lead elsewhere: towards cooking and clothing, tools and jewellery, pilgrimage and burial, repair, exchange and the innumerable physical routines that rarely enter written records. An ordinary object may preserve surprisingly intimate evidence. Repeated handling can polish a surface. A broken vessel repaired rather than discarded records a decision to prolong its useful life. Wear can reveal how something was held or carried; alterations may show that it was adapted for a new purpose. Such traces seldom allow us to reconstruct an individual life, and they should not be made to do more than the evidence permits. What they preserve instead are fragments of action.

The distinction is important because objects are particularly seductive when their original purpose has been lost. Around nine thousand years ago, communities living in what are now the Judean Hills and Judean Desert carved extraordinary human faces from stone. The surviving masks have deeply hollowed eyes and open mouths, with perforations around their edges. They are among the earliest known stone masks and some of the earliest surviving attempts to render the human face at this scale. Their appearance almost demands explanation. The perforations suggest that the masks could have been attached or suspended in some way, and their exaggerated faces have encouraged interpretations involving ritual, performance and the dead. Yet their precise use remains uncertain. To describe them as ancestral faces or ritual masks may be plausible; it is not the same as demonstrating that this is what they were.

The uncertainty is not a failure of archaeology. It is part of the evidence. An object can survive more successfully than the system of meanings that once surrounded it. Stone endures; gestures, words and memories usually do not. What remains can therefore be remarkably complete as a physical thing and profoundly incomplete as historical testimony. The temptation is to fill that silence with a story persuasive enough that speculation begins to resemble fact. The more enigmatic the object, the greater the temptation.

A jadeite face made by Olmec artists in ancient Mesoamerica presents a different kind of puzzle. Dating to approximately 900–400 BCE, the object now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was carved from an exceptionally hard blue-green stone. Its material probably originated in the Motagua River valley of present-day Guatemala, the only known source of jadeite exploited in ancient Mesoamerica. Working it required considerable time and skill: the stone had to be shaped through percussion and cutting before being laboriously ground and polished. The material itself mattered. Greenstones were highly valued across ancient Mesoamerica, where their colour and lustre acquired associations with water, vegetation, maize, fertility and life. The choice of jadeite was therefore not simply a technical decision or a preference for an attractive stone. Material was capable of carrying meaning. The object is usually called a mask, although its construction immediately complicates the word. A shallow depression was worked into the back, but neither the eyes nor the mouth were opened sufficiently for sight or breathing. It was not made to be worn over the face of a living person. Perforations at the ears and other details suggest that it may instead have been attached to something: perhaps incorporated into clothing or regalia, or fixed to a textile associated with a funerary bundle. Its exact use remains unknown. Here the physical object allows certain possibilities to be entertained and others to be discarded. We cannot recover its complete history, but we can examine the hardness and origin of the stone, the labour invested in its surface, the drilling and perforations, the form of its features and comparisons with related Olmec imagery. Interpretation becomes strongest when these pieces of evidence converge, and weakest when the gaps between them are concealed.

Where an object is found can be as important as the object itself. Its position within a grave, building or deposit, the things discovered beside it and even the layers of earth surrounding it may preserve relationships that are invisible once it has been removed. Archaeological context can tell us whether objects were assembled, buried, abandoned, broken deliberately or deposited over time. When objects are looted or excavated without adequate records, much of this evidence disappears permanently. Discovery, however, is not the end of an object's history. An artefact may move through many different worlds after it leaves the one in which it was made. It can pass from an excavator to a dealer, from a private collection to a museum; it may be cleaned, repaired, restored, reattributed or displayed beside objects its maker could never have imagined. Its legal status and monetary value can change, but so can its intellectual identity. An object once understood principally through religion or ritual may later be admired as sculpture. Something collected as ethnography may subsequently be exhibited as art.

The idea that objects possess something resembling biographies has an established history in anthropology and archaeology. In his influential 1986 essay “The Cultural Biography of Things”, Igor Kopytoff proposed that things could be studied through changes in their status, use and value over time: where they came from, how they moved through society and what happened when their original usefulness ended. The approach has since become well established in archaeological and museum scholarship. Museums occupy a particularly important place in these biographies because they do more than preserve objects. They create new settings for them.

A vessel placed in an archaeological display may be encountered primarily as evidence for a particular society or period. Put the same object beneath carefully directed light in an art museum and attention may shift towards form, craftsmanship and beauty. Labels establish names and dates; cases separate objects from touch and use; neighbouring works create comparisons. None of this necessarily falsifies an object, but neither is display neutral. Every museum presentation makes choices about what part of an object's history deserves to be seen.

Those choices become still more consequential when the route into the museum is itself historically significant. Many collections were formed through colonial expansion, military occupation, archaeological division systems, missionary activity, private collecting and the international antiquities trade. These histories differ considerably and should not be collapsed into a single narrative of acquisition. They nevertheless form part of the lives of the objects concerned. Provenance (the documented history of ownership and transfer) is not information added to an object from outside. It can be essential to understanding how that object came to occupy the place in which we encounter it now.

An object's biography can consequently become very long indeed. Manufacture may be followed by use, repair and reuse; ownership by exchange or inheritance; deposition by excavation; excavation by sale, collection, conservation and display. Some stages leave physical marks on the object itself. Others survive only in inventories, excavation records, photographs or correspondence. Many disappear altogether. This is one reason museums remain such compelling places to look at the past. Objects collapse distances that written history can sometimes leave intact. Tool marks survive when the name of the person holding the tool does not. A repair preserves evidence that someone once considered a damaged thing worth keeping. An inscription may carry the words of a ruler across three thousand years while the circumstances in which another object was used have vanished almost completely.

But proximity is not the same as access. Standing in front of an ancient object does not place us directly in the presence of the past, however powerfully it may feel that way. Between us and the person who made it lie excavation and loss, scholarship and collecting, restoration and classification, together with all the accidents that determined why this particular thing survived when countless others did not. The object nevertheless remains. Its material sets limits on what can reasonably be said about it, while also opening questions that texts cannot always answer. What was it made from? How was it shaped? Where did that material originate? Was it handled, worn, broken or repaired? Where was it found, and beside what? How did it travel from there to here? Some questions will produce remarkably precise answers. Others will end in uncertainty. Both are useful. To look closely at an object is not to recover a lost world intact. It is to follow the traces that world has left behind: sometimes abundant, sometimes fragmentary, and often transformed by everything that happened to the object afterwards. Objects do not give the past back to us. They show us what survived.