Within the places of our buildings are not just lives, but also things, the everyday objects that we have with us to make our lives easier, the small (or big) luxuries that give us pleasure in their look or feel, and the many useless things that bring us unidentified joy to see. Trinkets tell us more about the person who has them in their possession than we might care to admit: the Star Wars duvet cover, your grandmother’s quilt or the sparkly unicorn statuette are a part of how we display who we are as a person. These things do not exist alone in a place or a space, but they are a start of how to view the presentation of the people within the places and spaces. Objects pining in the dark are often what is left for us to deal with when thinking about people in particular places in the past, though they are certainly not alone as clues to how we can view how people presented themselves in the past.

One way to view things in the past in addition to the materiality of artefacts is to view them through written sources as well as the physical. Many times these sources give us an opportunity to ‘view’ the things that, archaeologically speaking, generally do not survive due to their own particularities of materiality. Textiles and wood, for example, are vulnerable objects that only survive in the best of very particular archaeological conditions. But their lack of material remains does not mean that they didn't exist. Certainly, they did, and all scholars are happy to say this. The lack of material survival is no reason not to consider their use, impact, and role in the creation of personae or identities in the past. The trick, as always, is knowing how to ‘see’ these lost objects.

The corpus of Anglo-Saxon wills is one way not only to view these objects pining in the dark, but to relate them to specific people at specific points in their life, particularly when they are considering their own place in the mortal coil and what would remain of them when they have shuffled it off.