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Humans draw on their previous experience of all kinds of structures, events and processes when they attempt to conceptualize different aspects of the world. While lots of research has focused on the mechanisms and products of this ability, particularly in the last few decades, there have been few attempts to study it in a diachronic/ longitudinal/ historical (call it what you like) perspective. Taking on the most diachronic of diachronic perspectives, this talk tries to illustrate some of the issues that such perspectives raise – by way of examples from the world history of one of the great icons/clichés of human technology: the wheel.