On the Unexpected Persistence of Apparently Unnecessary Objects in Littoral Environments, with Special Reference to a Bent Spoon Recovered Near the Western Rushes
The littoral zone makes promises it does not keep. It presents itself as a place of continuous transformation—tide advancing and retreating, sediment shifting, the shoreline itself migrating over decades with a patience that makes geological change seem almost impatient—and then it fails to destroy things.
Objects that have no obvious reason to remain, that should by every reasonable material account have dissolved, corroded, migrated seaward, or simply ceased to be recognisable as what they once were, turn up in the rushes and the reed beds and the tideline wrack with an equanimity that defeats expectation. The littoral zone collects. It persists things. And among the things it persists, with no apparent preferential logic, it persists bent spoons.
The one in question came to light near the Western Rushes on a morning in late October, during a survey of shoreline accumulation that was not looking for spoons and did not, initially, know what to make of having found one. It lay in approximately eight centimetres of silt, angled at roughly thirty degrees from horizontal, with its bowl oriented toward the open water and its handle bent—not broken, but bent, at a point approximately one third along its length from the bowl—to an angle of perhaps one hundred and ten degrees. The bend showed no signs of the fracture patterns that would indicate impact damage. It had been worked. Someone, at some point that the object itself offered no means of establishing, had deliberately deformed it. The spoon was aluminium, which placed its manufacture no earlier than the late nineteenth century, and bore no hallmarks, maker’s marks, or other identifying features. It weighed, according to the field scales used during the survey, fourteen grams. It appeared, in every respect except its bend and its location, to be a perfectly ordinary domestic spoon. The question it immediately raised—why is this here, and why does it still exist—turns out, on examination, to be two quite different questions, each of which opens onto a different set of inquiries, and neither of which has a fully satisfying answer.
Dr Elspeth Cargill-Ndoye, whose 2011 monograph Margins and Middens: The Archaeology of Littoral Accumulation stands as the most systematic recent treatment of the problem, argues that the conventional account of shoreline environments as zones of destruction and dispersal describes a tendency rather than a rule, and that the tendency is far weaker than the popular imagination of the tide as an erasing force would suggest. “The littoral zone,” she writes, “destroys selectively, preserves accidentally, and accumulates consistently. It is less an eraser than a very inattentive filing system, one that loses things with great efficiency and keeps things with great randomness, and cannot be persuaded to account for the difference.” The randomness is the operative word. There exists no predictive model, she argues, that reliably identifies which objects will persist in a given shoreline environment and which will disappear, because the variables that determine persistence—depth of burial, sediment chemistry, tidal exposure, proximity to fresh water sources, the micro-ecology of the immediate deposit—interact in ways that produce outcomes no single variable controls. Objects that should persist disappear within a season. Objects that should long since have gone turn up in survey transects looking, as the spoon looked, as if they had arrived recently.
The question of why the spoon still exists is therefore answerable, though the answer is unsatisfying: it still exists because the conditions of its deposition happened to favour preservation, and those conditions are not reconstructable from the object itself or its immediate context. The more interesting question is the other one: why is it here, and bent?
Professor Ignacio Veltri-Sandoval, in his 2006 essay “Material Displacement and the Grammar of Loss” (Journal of Material Culture, vol. 11), proposed a taxonomy of object displacement in coastal environments that remains, despite its age, the most useful classificatory tool available for exactly this kind of puzzle. He identified four primary displacement modes: deliberate deposition, accidental loss, secondary displacement from an original site, and what he called “orphaning”—the condition of objects that arrived in their present location through processes so complex and multi-staged that no single act of human intention or inattention can account for them. Orphaned objects are, he argued, the most common class of found object in littoral surveys and the class about which the least can confidently be said. “The orphaned object,” he wrote, “has been severed from its provenance by the same processes that preserved it. The shoreline kept it; the shoreline also destroyed the record of why it came to the shoreline in the first place. One holds the object; one cannot hold the story.” The bent spoon near the Western Rushes presents the classic orphan profile: present, preserved, and entirely without recoverable context.
The bend, however, resists the orphan category, because the bend requires explanation in a way that simple presence does not. A straight spoon in a reed bed prompts the question: how did this get here? A bent spoon prompts the prior question: why did someone do this to it? These are questions of different types. The first asks about movement through space; the second asks about intention, which is a different kind of inquiry and one that material culture studies has approached with increasing sophistication over the past three decades, partly because the question proves more generative than it initially appears.
The deliberate bending of domestic implements has a longer and wider cultural history than any casual encounter with a bent spoon in a reed bed would lead one to expect. Dr Maris Tuominen-Blake, in her 2014 study Bent, Broken, and Placed: The Deliberate Deformation of Everyday Objects in Ritual and Non-Ritual Contexts, surveyed the archaeological literature on “killing”—the deliberate destruction or deformation of objects as a precondition for their deposition, present across cultures and time periods ranging from Neolithic grave goods to Iron Age votive deposits to the documented practice of “killing” coins before placing them in foundations. The logic of killing varies across contexts: sometimes it releases the object’s function, sometimes it marks the object as removed from ordinary exchange and use, sometimes it satisfies a requirement of the ritual context that the object enter in a state of transformation. Tuominen-Blake is careful to note that the presence of deformation does not confirm ritual intent—people bend spoons for all kinds of mundane reasons, and the mundane reasons are statistically far more probable in any given case—but that deformation combined with deliberate deposition creates a pattern that invites attention to the combination.
The bend in the Western Rushes spoon is at the handle’s junction with the bowl’s neck, which Tuominen-Blake identifies as the characteristic bend point of what she calls “functional deformation”—a bend introduced to make the spoon usable in a specific context, rather than to remove it from use. Such bends appear in the archaeological record at feeding stations, in hospital and care contexts, and in what the literature rather gingerly calls “adaptive utensil modification”: the informal bending of standard implements by their users to suit particular physical requirements or particular angles of approach to a vessel. If this is the case for the Western Rushes spoon, then the bend pre-dates and is unrelated to the deposition, and the object is an orphan after all: a modified tool, separated from the modification’s context, preserved by the random chemistry of the silt.
Cargill-Ndoye, reviewing an earlier draft of this analysis in correspondence, offered a third possibility that she described as “the most common thing that happens and the least commonly said”: the spoon may have been bent by the conditions of its deposit rather than prior to it. Compression under sediment load, contact with harder objects in the same deposit, the differential expansion and contraction of material under repeated tidal thermal cycling—all of these, she noted, can work metal over sufficient time into forms that closely resemble deliberate deformation. “The littoral zone,” she wrote, returning to her characteristic register, “produces objects that look as if someone made a decision about them when what actually happened is that no one did. The environment made the decision, and the environment’s decisions look, to the human eye trained to see intention, like intention. We add the story. The silt does not provide one.”
This observation connects to a wider argument in the philosophy of material culture that this paper need not rehearse at length but should acknowledge: the argument, associated particularly with the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) and developed in the littoral context by Veltri-Sandoval, that objects carry what Gell called “distributed intentionality”—the accumulated intentions of their makers, users, and transformers, held within the object’s form and readable, partially and imperfectly, by subsequent observers. A bent spoon carries the intentionality of whoever bent it, whether that was a person or a process, and the difficulty lies precisely in the fact that the object itself cannot distinguish between these causes. The bend looks the same whether a person made it or the silt made it. The spoon cannot testify to its own history.
What it can do—and what found objects in littoral environments consistently do, which is why littoral survey work produces a disproportionate volume of philosophical reflection relative to its methodological outputs—is raise the question of what one expects objects to do with their time when no one is watching them. The Western Rushes hold, within two hundred metres of the spoon’s findspot, the following additional items recorded during the same survey: a section of clay drainage pipe of probable Victorian date; a child’s wellington boot, left foot, size approximately five; six metres of blue polypropylene rope in varying states of degradation; one complete wine bottle (empty) and fragments of three others; an iron stake of uncertain purpose; and a ceramic tile printed with a repeating motif of small fish. None of these objects belongs in a reed bed. All of them are there. The reed bed keeps them not because it values them and not because it means anything by the keeping, but because the conditions happen not to have destroyed them yet, and because “yet” in a littoral environment covers a range of time scales that stretches from the seasonal to the geological.
Dr Nneka Obi-Marchetti, in her 2019 paper “The Patience of Sediment” (Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, vol. 228), made an observation that bears directly on the Western Rushes assemblage: “Littoral environments do not curate. They accumulate without selection, preserve without intention, and present the results to subsequent observers as if the assemblage were coherent. The observer introduces the coherence. The environment provides only the objects and the conditions. What the observer makes of this is the observer’s problem.” The observer, surveying the Western Rushes on a morning in late October, made of it a bent spoon in fourteen grams of aluminium, and several months of thinking that the spoon had not, itself, requested.
Veltri-Sandoval ends “Material Displacement and the Grammar of Loss” with a sentence that has stayed with this observer since first encountering it, and that the spoon seems to have arranged itself to illustrate: “The object in the wrong place is not evidence of disorder. It is evidence that the concept of a right place for objects is much less stable than the objects themselves, which persist with magnificent indifference to being in the wrong one.” The spoon, bent and settling in its silt, neither confirms nor denies this. It simply remains, as apparently unnecessary objects in littoral environments do, for longer than reason suggests it should.
Works cited: Elspeth Cargill-Ndoye, Margins and Middens: The Archaeology of Littoral Accumulation (Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Ignacio Veltri-Sandoval, “Material Displacement and the Grammar of Loss,” Journal of Material Culture, vol. 11, no. 2 (2006), pp. 174–198; Maris Tuominen-Blake, Bent, Broken, and Placed: The Deliberate Deformation of Everyday Objects in Ritual and Non-Ritual Contexts (Oxbow Books, 2014); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford University Press, 1998); Nneka Obi-Marchetti, “The Patience of Sediment: On Accumulation and the Refusal of Selection in Estuarine Environments,” Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, vol. 228 (2019), pp. 44–51.
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