Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon’s Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898

objects they describe. The stories included take the reader on a journey around the world, from the Americas and the United Kingdom and Ireland to Africa and the Middle East, Europe and the Pacific. A few stories are closer to home, including those of the editors, but overall, the book is decidedly cosmopolitan. Many of the stories also provide a virtual trip through time, as we are invited to reflect on the origins of human tool making (in the Acheulean), to ponder over Neolithic and Bronze age artefact encounters, to reconsider objects from the colonial period and dip into the nostalgia of objects from our shared contemporary pasts. A closing summary for the book is provided by Jane Lydon, who asks us to declare our feelings for objects (p.210) by embracing the various affective responses to the aesthetic and tactile qualities of materials and to carefully consider the ways in which objects are imbued with meanings of all kinds. Such an approach, she says, allows for a critical proximity (p.211) that helps to affect change through self-reflection and consideration of one’s own context and motives. Lydon also provides an excellent summary of the narratives collated, weaving together broader themes such as emotion, memory, postcolonialism, materiality and empathy. In honour of Object Stories’ appeal to archaeologists to share the intimate encounters they experience with objects, I have shared the rather ordinary story of my copy of this book. For me, Object Stories will be forever associated with the pandemic and the ways in which I struggled to ‘carry on’ with work and academic commitments in an era of astonishing global change. It will always be closely associated with the assemblage of domestic objects that circulated around me during our 2020–2021 ‘lockdown’ years. I wonder whether, if I had read Object Stories when I first received it, I would have truly appreciated the stories of travel and connection that the book details. The type of global fieldwork described here would no doubt be very difficult now. In an era where global movement has been restricted like never before (in modern times at least), our ability to connect with differing cultures, people, places and objects is woefully, greatly constrained. Now, more than ever, the storytelling in Object Stories has the power to transport the reader to other worlds and times and evokes a particular emotive response that I suspect will be familiar to most heritage practitioners (whether or not they might admit it). Object Stories is an engaging read for any archaeologist, although I am sure you do not need to be an archaeologist to enjoy it.