Through Iron and Time: Discovering Our Past via Artifacts

The weight shocked you.
Cold iron in your small hands, while your teacher painted the sounds of screams, explosions, and shattered walls. You thought it was just a harmless relic, a souvenir of long-ended wars—something dulled by time and distance. But some of these “souvenirs” are still alive inside, still armed, still waiting in basements, attics, and antique shops all around us.

That simple classroom moment—holding a cannonball while your teacher described thunderous blasts and broken walls—was more than a history lesson. It was a quiet invitation to confront how deeply violence and ingenuity are woven together in our past. Each iron sphere, once roaring from a cannon’s mouth, carried the power to redraw borders, sink ships, level towns, and decide whose stories would be remembered and whose would be buried.

Time has softened their appearance, coating them in rust and reverence. Today, these same cannonballs sit behind glass or rest on mantels, admired for their age, weight, and patina. Collectors prize them. Museums catalogue them. Children stare in awe, imagining smoke-filled battlefields without fully grasping the cost. What looks inert can still be unstable—some remain dangerously volatile, silent reminders that war does not always end when the fighting stops.

To handle them safely is to acknowledge that history is not just something we study, but something we inherit. In learning how to preserve these objects responsibly, we also preserve the lessons they carry—about ambition and brutality, about human creativity turned toward destruction, and about the fragile line between progress and ruin. Even in stillness, they ask us to remember that the past is heavier than it looks.