There is a secluded pebble beach not far from where I live—a quiet inlet that may once have served as a resting point along the ancient Shell Route. This prehistoric trade network connected Paleolithic peoples (before 11,000 BC), the Jōmon (c. 11,000–500 BC), and the Yayoi (c. 500 BC–AD 300), linking communities from Okinawa to Hokkaido. It followed the contours of Kyushu, traced the Seto Inland Sea, and crossed the Sea of Japan, ferrying not just shells, but stories, technologies, and belief systems.
Today, the beach bears faint traces of that long passage. Flaked stone tools—kern cores and fragments—appear scattered by the tide, as if shaken loose by time and wave. Shell middens, once dense with cultural residue, have gradually dissolved, their contents dispersed across the shoreline. Walking this littoral zone, I began to collect and catalogue tool-like objects—material echoes of the past, softened and shaped by the sea.
A parallel discovery unfolded on the other side of the world, at a small harbour beach in Sydney. There, rusted iron nails—long abandoned—lay clustered in the sand, forming their own midden of sorts. Gathered together, they speak quietly of maritime lives: of boats and fishing lines, of labour and salt water, of whale paths once familiar. Both sites—though separated by oceans and centuries—evoke a shared archaeology of use and erosion, of craft and disappearance.
These gathered remnants are not simply artifacts. They are the residue of gesture, migration, and sustenance—fragments of material histories that remain, not in museums, but underfoot. The act of collecting them is both a kind of listening and a kind of remembering.
morgan veness 