A Field Map for Untangling the Entangled Sea

Abstract

Abstract This article is situated at the intersection of ships, the sea, humans, and the nonhuman things on board and ashore. It explores the role of objects in maintaining social relations, inspired by materiality studies, entanglement, and Actor-Network Theory. The seafarer-thing relationship is the primary focus of this study through which I argue that archaeologists must not only catalog and classify the artifacts they find but also consider their object biographies, use-lives, and the stories, which can be told in the space between human-thing and thing-thing codependencies. The visualizations model the entanglement inside the complex systems of a merchant ship, the things carried on board, the humans, and activities on the ship, using the Polyaigos shipwreck as the protagonist in our thought experiment. I introduce “field maps,” which combine network sociograms with an interpretive layer of fields (economic, social, technological, infrastructure, religious) to analyze the ways humans and things are entangled.