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from the distant past. In many cases, the oldest organic artefacts we have are those collected by the first European visitors: two of the objects in this book, for example, were gathered by the expeditions of Captain Cook – the Australian aboriginal bark shield already mentioned (Chapter 89) and the Hawaiian feather helmet (Chapter 87) – in each case acquired at the very first moment of contact between these societies and Europeans. Of course both Hawaii and south-east Australia had complex societies, producing elaborate artefacts, long before then. But virtually none of these earlier artefacts made from wood, plants or feathers has survived, so the early stories of those cultures are now hard to tell. A rare exception is the 2500-year-old textile fragment from mummies in Paracas (Chapter 24), preserved by the exceptionally dry conditions in the deserts of Peru.

Things do not, however, need to survive intact to yield enormous amounts of information. In 1948, dozens of small pottery fragments were found by an alert beach-comber at the bottom of a cliff at Kilwa in Tanzania (Chapter 60). They were, quite literally, rubbish: broken bits of crockery thrown away and of no use to anyone. But as he gathered them together he came to realise that in these pot sherds lay the story of East Africa a thousand years ago. Indeed, examination of their variety reveals a whole history of the Indian Ocean, because once we look at them closely, it is clear that these fragments come from widely different places. A green sherd and a blue-and-white one are clearly fragments of porcelain manufactured in huge quantities in China for export. Other pieces bear Islamic decoration and are from Persia and the Gulf. Still others derive from indigenous East African earthenware.

These ceramics – all used, we think, by the same people, all broken and thrown on the rubbish dump at roughly the same time – demonstrate what was for long beyond the view of Europe: that between AD 1000 and 1500, the East African coast was in contact with the whole of the Indian Ocean. There was regular trade between China, Indonesia, India, the Gulf and East Africa, and raw materials and finished commodities were circulating widely. This was possible because in contrast to the Atlantic, where the winds are very disobliging, the winds in the Indian Ocean blow kindly from the south-east for six months of the year and from the north-west for the other six, allowing sailors to set out over huge distances and be reasonably certain of getting home. The Kilwa fragments demonstrate that the Indian Ocean is in effect an enormous lake across which cultures have been communicating for millennia, where traders bring not only things but ideas, and the communities around whose shores are every bit as connected as those around the Mediterranean. One of the things this object history makes clear is that the very word ‘Mediterranean’ – ‘the sea at the centre of the earth’ – is misconceived. It is not at the centre of the Earth, and is just one among many marine cultures. We shan’t of course find another word for it, but perhaps we should.

The Biographies of Things

This book might perhaps have been more accurately titled A History of Objects Through Many Different Worlds, for one of the characteristics of things is that they so often change – or are changed – long after they have been created, taking on meanings that could never have been imagined at the outset.

A startlingly large number of our objects bear on them the marks of later events. Sometimes this is merely the damage that comes with time, like the broken headdress on the Huastec goddess, or from clumsy excavation or forceful removal. But frequently, later interventions were designed deliberately to change meaning or to reflect the pride or pleasures of new ownership. The object becomes a document not just of the world for which it was made, but of the later periods which altered it. The Jomon pot (Chapter 10), for example, speaks of the precocious Japanese achievement in ceramics and the origins of stews and soups many thousands