![]() ![]() Lake’s definition of ‘artifacts’ is a major intervention. You are unlikely to try to buy milk with an ancient coin, use a medieval manuscript for completing your math homework, bring a rusty sword to a gunfight, or repurpose anything you find in a king’s grave. They do not have obvious use functions in the present. Their survival is an accident of time, their discovery often equally accidental. In this time, it has become integral to my thinking, informing various projects, and providing a new vocabulary:Īrtifacts are sufficiently distanced from their users both in time and space as the things buried in and by the past they enter into the present pocked with signs of this distance. Published in 2020, this book has, like the fragments gathered on my walks, sat on my desk for several months. ![]() How we think and write about these objects is the subject of Crystal Lake’s Artifacts. In passing shuttered shops, the empty cinema, and desolate cafes, I have instead looked to these small, accidentally uncovered treasures to feel out and gather together evidence of the history and character of the town, imagining them as tangible links to those who have come before and, perhaps, substitutes for the tactile encounters we are all missing.īut the distance between the past and present, and how we fill that gap with theorizations of the material culture that – often through pure happenstance – has survived decay, is complex. In a moment in which our worlds have shrunk to the size of small households, well-worn but solitary pathways and, increasingly, digital spaces, these real, material objects have provided the means to construct a narrative of the place in which I live. Each time I see one of these seemingly insignificant things, I carry it home, clean it up, and place it in a box on my desk to be contemplated later or collaged into a future mosaic. A splinter of brown medieval pot, the faded elegance of a blue and white eighteenth-century plate, the bold stripes of a 1930s teacup. On the walks that have filled the subsequent days since then, I have made similar discoveries small, broken, sometimes near-indistinguishable slivers of ceramic and glass variously buried under the feet of fellow walkers, turned up by a plough, or washed to the edge of the local river and stranded amidst the shale. Pocketing this broken and otherwise worthless object, I continued on my way. Closer inspection revealed a thick, rough red piece, broken in long, uneven fractures down either side and cut through with a black streak possibly the surviving fragment of an early modern roof tile belonging to an earlier iteration of the farm through which I had passed and now lost to the soil. Picking my way around the muddy path through its centre, churned up by livestock and setting in the sun in malleable waves, I looked down to see a shard of pottery emerging from the earth. Early on, an evening walk led me through a nearby farmstead and across one of its fields, filled with the undulating remnants of a medieval complex hidden just beneath the turf. Having moved here just after the first UK-wide lockdown, I knew little of this place, its people or its history but, in the weeks and months that followed, I soon came to know every cobbled snickelway (a Yorkshire word for alley or passageway) and winding footpath within several miles’ radius.Īn integral, though unplanned, part of this daily rhythm has since emerged. ![]() Setting off from my front door each day with my dogs, I traverse first the streets and then the fields and woods surrounding the rural North Yorkshire town in which I currently live. Like most living through the global pandemic, I have spent much of the last few months walking the same familiar routes near my house. 1 Fragments of medieval, early modern and modern ceramics alongside an iron horseshoe. ISBN: 9781421436500Īrtifacts has been nominated for the Kenshur Prize 2021. Lake, Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Objects, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020, 272 pp., 4 bw illus.
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