YOU lay your hands on the object, and history goes up your arm like electricity. That’s what I’d imagine would happen to me if I was allowed to handle the key to Napoleon’s prison on St Helena. Discovered in an Edinburgh attic, passed down from a British soldier deployed in the French emperor’s incarceration, the item was sold at Sotheby’s this week for £81,900.

It’s a rusted but striking object, accompanied by a verifying note from Charles Richard Fox, the soldier himself: “Key of the room in which Napoleon died and which I got there out of the door in 1822”. The bathos is obvious. The mighty, border-smashing, continent-marauding dictator, dying in a small damp property on a South Atlantic island, his privation easily securable by means of a chunk of cast metal.

As some of us mope around our interiors, slowly reconciling our pandemic selves to a less mobile and whizzy life, the objects around us begin to reappear to our senses (and sensibilities). As you fight against the gathering clutter, you are driven to focus on the items that matter most. Napoleon’s key triggers an interesting question: what objects would survive you, and in doing so, define you (and your era, too)?

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One of Glasgow and Edinburgh’s most prolific sons, the art historian and museum director Neil MacGregor, has been trying to answer that question for much of his working life. Tens of millions have downloaded the podcast of his 2010 BBC Radio Four series, A History of the World in 100 Objects. The series began with a basalt chopping tool from two million years ago, and ended with a China-made, Africa-bound solar-powered lamp and charger from the year of broadcast.

The podcast and book are still available, and they remain one of the most delightful ways to comprehend the dramas and complexities of human history. The cover of the book shows the object that exemplifies MacGregor’s method: an Aztec double-headed serpent, from 1400-1600.

The geographical variety of turquoise samples and deep-sea shells the figurine is made from bespeaks the power of the Aztec empire, its myriad trading and slaving routes. Yet it’s also likely to be a tribute object, given to Spanish invaders who tragically fulfilled the prediction that the god Quetzalcoatl would come back as a “bearded and fair skinned man”. And who, of course, eventually decimated and obliterated the Aztec population and culture.

Again, to handle or even just be near such an object fills you with both dread and hope. Dread, that grand civilisations can be reduced to glittering fragments; hope, in that we see how societies evolve, pursue art and craft, cannot repress their ingenuity.

This Christmas Day, MacGregor returned to Radio 4 with an expert panel to try and add an “Object 101” to his list. Taken from the British Museum’s current collection, what artefact might reasonably represent the last decade?

The panel, a diverse mix of backgrounds and ages, cycled through some immediate options. The cameraphone, enabling us to capture injustice as well as express our sociable and creative instincts? The face mask, shielding us from Covid and disguising protestors, richly varying in design across cultures?

They eventually settled on a runner-up and a winner. The former was a stone cairn – the “silent messengers” that Arctic wayfarers have built for hundreds of thousands of years. They often have a hole in them: look through it, and they show you where fertile resources are located (whether fish, caribou or fields for harvest). MacGregor loved it as a symbol of hope, a pointer to how we might navigate the climate crisis.

But the final choice for Object 101 was a set of sculptures by the Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj. They are a flotilla of toy boats. The hulls are hammered out of bicycle mudflaps; the passengers are represented by rows of burnt matches. In 500BC, such toys were set afloat in the Mediterranean Sea, when they bore small goddesses. In Christmas 2020, the Syrian reference is all too obvious.

“The only way out is to find any solution – any dinghy – to emigrate. Many families did not make it,” Kourbaj said of the Syrian refugee crisis when interviewed in 2017. “This tragedy should not happen in the 21st century. My duty as an artist is to draw attention to this tragedy.”

In the show, MacGregor hammers home his central point. Which is that in the last 10 years, climate crisis and technology has increasingly pulled common fates together across the planet. “This little flotilla shows that we are all in the same, fragile boat,” Neil concludes.

I wasn’t fully aware of this, but there seems to have been a “return to the material” in humanities and the arts over the last decade. This comes from an exhaustion with endlessly interpreting the ambiguity of texts and artworks, and a renewed fascination with “things” and “stuff” – the objects that bring the power relations and resources of the

world immediately and concretely into our lives. That is, if we reframe and analyse them in a detailed-enough way.

My favourite example of this new approach is the book A History of the Future in 100 Objects, by the games-maker Adrian Hon. He basically applies MacGregor’s method to the objects that might define an imagined 21st century history (or at least its remaining 80 years).

Those objects can be totally recognisable but wildly recontextualised. Adrian has a great public routine, which I’ve often borrowed. He holds up a glass of water (“here’s the first H2O that’s been mined from an asteroid”). Or a wedding ring (“here’s evidence of the first marriage between a human and an AI/android, named Amanda and Martin”). Or a smartphone’s mail app (“here’s a friend’s letter from Mars in 2057, where they’re trapped indoors by a solar storm”).

There is a reassuring continuity here, as if familiar human needs and habits will persist even into an accelerating future.

But Hon takes the chance – as you would do when writing science-fiction – to invent objects that steadily push out from the shore of where we are. He presents us with “Glyphish” (no. 16, year 2025), a new visual language based on emojis and icons, displayed in holograms and smart clothing. It even begins to enable better human-animal communication.

Or take the “Micromort Detector” (no. 39, year 2032). It’s a wristband, linked to a life insurer, that detects one-in-a-million chances of death (one burger = 0.1 micromorts). However, rather than helping them live longer and healthier, it increases people’s anxiety as they relentlessly monitor their score.

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I’m also delighted to report that Object 74, located in Portobello, in the year 2046, comes to us from “an oral storytelling project commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Scottish independence vote” (er, hold on, just a bit late Mr Hon. We’ll catch up soon).

The object is the re-opening of the Portobello Lido. Or more accurately, it’s an orbital mirror positioned right above that spot, which beams heat and light into the otherwise driech location.

This is an indy Scotland which has entered the Nordic Union because, post-indy, “the Sassenachs down south were bitter as could be, so we were in dire need of friends”. Other than the pawky S-word, you could be a bit less nippy in your prophecy there, Adrian.

I know my own favourite object I’d like to lay my hands on and feel the volts of the human dynamic passing through me. It’s those weird, spiked, three-pronged objects found in the dig at Skara Brae in Orkney.

Props for a religious ceremony? Toys for the kids? It’s never been clear. They look as old as alien fossils, and as contemporary as a PlayStation controller or Nintendo Wii nunchuk. They may well serve a similar hallucinatory end.

So as we settle into our more contemplative lifestyles in the pandemic era, we could do worse than to attend to the stuff and clutter of our object-strewn lives. Before we sweep it blindly into the landfill, out of which some future robot historian may gingerly compose their own history of the world.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects, by Adrian Hon, is on MIT Press