Objectscapes. A manifesto for investigating the impacts of object flows on past societies

Abstract

World history is often framed in terms of flows of people: humans coming ‘out of Africa’; the spread of farmers in the Holocene; the disruptions of the ‘Sea Peoples’; colonisations by Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans. In this article we argue that world history is also about flows of objects. To do justice to the impacts of objects on past societies, we introduce the concept of the objectscape as a means to write new kinds of histories of human-thing entanglements, in which objects-in-motion have roles to play, beyond representation, in the short- and long-term.