Swivel

We found this tiny piece of fishing gear embedded in a blacktop country road near Lake Limestone, Texas. It's a simple thing, and you see them everywhere around a popular fishing hole like this, but it occurs to me that a lot of technology and effort went into making it. Someone had to design the thing. It's brass, so tin and zinc had to be mined, then alloyed into brass, then shipped off somewhere to cast the little bead part, some of it stretched to make the wire. Then it had to be put together and packaged. The package is paper, plastic and ink, so petroleum had to be pumped, refined, and whatever else is done to make clear plastic sheets. The paper came from trees that were cut down, processed, pulped, milled into paper the right thickness and quality, then cut into cards and driven by someone to the swivel factory. The ink on the package, etc etc. It's a lot of effort, and it's just one tiny part of what's usually take on a fishing trip. The Tawokoni people who used to live here, long before there was a lake, weren't dependent on someone else's production to eat, and fished in the creeks using traps and arrows that they made themselves.

ID		130001
Object		Fishing swivel
Material		Brass
Dimensions		12mm
Provenance		Limestone County, Texas
Credit Line		The Museum of Parking Lot Junk