Material culture forms a relational system of distributed reality – a thingworld. But how do we get beyond simply saying that all material culture is meaningful and entangled to understanding the internal structure of such systems? Is it a flat terrain among co-equal things? Or are some objects more important than others, as we might intuitively suppose? And if so, why? This article presents an initial discussion of the problem. Using vignettes from two thingworlds – one from early modern Iceland, one from Neolithic Europe– the authors discuss what were the central material things in each, and for what reasons. This suggests that objects may be systemically central in different ways, for instance things which connect and mediate relationships of different kinds, things which are non-substitutable, and things which span multiple roles and contexts.

物质文化形成了分布式现实的关系系统–事物世界。但是，除了简单地说所有物质文化都是有意义的并且纠结于理解这种系统的内部结构之外，我们又如何呢？在平等的事物之间是平坦的地形吗？还是我们可以凭直觉推测出某些对象比其他对象更重要？如果是这样，为什么呢？本文提出了对该问题的初步讨论。作者使用来自两个事物世界的小插曲-一个来自近代早期的冰岛，一个来自新石器时代的欧洲-讨论了每个事物中的核心物质是什么，以及原因为何。这表明对象可能以不同的方式在系统上处于中心位置，例如，连接和调解不同种类关系的事物，不可替代的事物以及跨越多个角色和上下文的事物。