The Oxford Handbook of Museum Archaeology 9780198847526, 0198847521

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

M U SE UM A RC HA E OL O G Y

The Oxford Handbook of

MUSEUM ARCHAEOLOGY Edited by

ALICE STEVENSON

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2022 The moral rights of the author‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022905074 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​884752–​6 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements

The production of this volume coincided with the pandemic of the early 2020s. For many contributors, access to libraries, time to develop thinking, and positive space to complete writing was severely diminished. Caring responsibilities, personal losses, and the anxiety of uncertain situations all took their toll. For all of these reasons I would like to extend my appreciation for everyone’s efforts that have been involved at any stage in this volume, whether published here or not. The chapter on dis/Ability and archaeology was originally to be authored by Theresa O’Mahony, founder of Enabled Archaeology, but she sadly passed away before she was able to develop her chapter. Nevertheless, the legacy of her activism and scholarship are fully evident in Chapter 7, and I am grateful to Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen for taking her work forward, and to Erik De’Scathebury and Sarah O’Mahony for their support. In the development of the book I am grateful to several colleagues for their advice, including Manuel Arroyo-​Kalin, John Baines, Megan Gooch, Sudeshna Guha, Koji Mizoguchi, Christina Riggs, Suzie Thomas, and Kevin Macdonald. In helping with some of the more complex referencing in the volume I would like to thank Paige Brevick and Yijie Zhuang. Finally, I would like to thank OUP’s Charlotte Loveridge, Jenny King, and Karen Raith for their assistance throughout production.

Contents

Contributors 

xvii

Introduction: Museum archaeology  Alice Stevenson

1

A .   C OL L E C T I N G , C AT E G OR I Z I N G , A N D C HA L L E N G I N G H I S TOR I E S 1. Recovering the history of archaeology in museums  Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger 2. Emotion, affective practice, and the taking of Indigenous ancestral remains  Cressida Fforde, Jilda Andrews, Edward Halealoha Ayau, Madalyn Grant, Laurajane Smith, and Paul Turnbull

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45

3. Emotion and the return of ancestors: Repatriation as affective practice  65 Cressida Fforde, Jilda Andrews, Edward Halealoha Ayau, Laurajane Smith, and Paul Turnbull

B.   C ON T E M P OR A RY AG E N C I E S OF C U R AT ION A N D C OM M U N I T I E S OF P R AC T IC E 4. Museums and the market: Passive facilitation of the illicit trade in antiquities  Donna Yates and Emiline Smith

87

5. Affective museums: The practice of collecting archaeological artefacts in the Brazilian Amazon  Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira

98

6. De-​centring museums in Indigenous community engagement: Contemporary Maya art, thought, and archaeological collections  Laura Osorio Sunnucks

115

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7. Enabled Archaeology in the field, in museums, and the visitor experience  Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen

136

8. Conservation after conflict: Rebuilding a heritage community in Iraq  Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione

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C .   L O C AT I N G M U SE UM S A N D C OL L E C T ION S 9. Site museums and archaeology  Georgios Papaioannou

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10. Contested heritage and absent objects: Archaeological representation at Ghana’s forts and castles  Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann

197

11. Finding space to store archaeological collections: Challenges and progress in the United States  S. Terry Childs

221

12. Victims or victors: Universal museums and the debate on return and restitution, Africa’s perspective  George Okello Abungu

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D.   A LT E R NAT I V E M AT E R IA L I T I E S : B E YON D F I N D S 13. Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives  Gail Boyle 14. Museum replicas: Recovering the work of making plaster casts of pre-​Columbian art  Jennifer Reynolds-​Kaye

271

289

15. Photographic practices in museum archaeology  Stefanie Klamm

307

16. Listening to archaeology museums  John Kannenberg

328

Contents   ix

E .   F I E L DWOR K I N T H E M U SE UM : T R A N SF OR M AT I V E P R AC T IC E 17. Recreating context for museum collections using digital technologies as a form of curation  Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps 18. Ethnographic collections and archaeological research  James L. Flexner 19. Scientific investigation of museum objects: Planning, analysis, and wider impact  Patrick Sean Quinn 20. Conservation and the care of human remains in museums  Barbara Wills

353 374

387 402

F.   E X H I B I T IONA RY C U LT U R E S 21. Museums and archaeological exhibitions: History, institution, and reality in China  Siyu Wang and Kan Hang

423

22. Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum: An Ancient Middle East gallery for the twenty-​first century?  Paul Collins

435

23. The Archaeology of Qatar Gallery at the National Museum of Qatar  457 Karen Exell 24. Representing field practices in display: The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük  Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin

475

25. Archaeology displays in universities: The role of museums and archaeology displays in Ghana  Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-​Dzidzienyo

489

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G .   E X PA N DI N G A N D T R A N S C E N DI N G T H E M U SE UM : S O C IA L I S SU E S A N D DIG I TA L F RON T I E R S 26. Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum through archaeological collections  Paolo Del Vesco

503

27. Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum: Digital pivot, digital by default, digital transformation  526 Daniel Pett 28. Cooperative platforms for curating and managing digitally recorded finds data: Metal-​detecting and FindSampo in Finland  548 Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen Index

569

Figures

1.1 Museo Civico Archeologico Etnologico di Modena. The archaeological section renovated in 2007 reproduces the exhibition displays of the nineteenth century. Picture: Elisabetta Cova. Rights reserved.

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1.2 Neues Museum Berlin renovated in 2009. The painted decor dating back to the nineteenth century appears in the new museography project as traces of the past and testimony of the history of archaeological practice. Picture: Aleksander Zykov, Wikimedia Commons. License: cc-​by-​sa-​2.0.

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1.3 In the reconstructed interior of a ruined flat, Émotions patrimoniales at the Laténium was displaying collected photographs showing persons posing in front of archaeological monuments and ruins, as well as interviews talking about the emotional relationship people share with heritage. Scenography: Elissa Bier Picture: Laténium, Marc Juillard. Rights reserved.

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9.1 The Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth, Jordan. Copyright Georgios Papaioannou.

183

9.2 Archaeological sites at the Ghor as-​Safi, Jordan.

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10.1 Cape Coast Castle, Ghana. Courtesy of author.

198

10.2 A fridge magnet of a condemned cell at Elmina Castle sold at the site. Courtesy of author.

207

10.3 Cannon excavation and removal assisted by local fishermen. Courtesy of author.

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10.4 Condemned Cell, Elmina Castle, Ghana. Courtesy of author.

214

14.1 Unknown Aztec artist(s), Coatlicue, 1300–​1500, andesite, 350 x 130 x 45 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City (photo: El Comandante, CC BY-​SA 3.0).

293

14.2 Pierre Petit, Xochicalco Pyramid, photograph, 19 x 24 cm, in Album du Parc, Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris. Documents iconographiques, p. 77. Arch. nat., F/​12/​11872/​2. Archives nationales (photo: Cliché Service photographique des Archives nationales).

295

14.3 Alfred Maudslay, Photograph of Palenque taken by A.P. Maudslay, glass negative, 25.4 x 30.6 cm, Asset number: 893231001; Registration Number: Am,Maud,B14.11, The British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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xii   Figures 14.4 Installation shot of Désiré Charnay’s casts, Antiquities Exhibit in the US National Museum, ca. 1880. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 42, Folder 13, Image No. SIA_​000095_​B42_​F13_​003.

301

14.5 Eufémio Abadiano, Cast—​Serpent’s Head. 25 June 1885. A77217-​0, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution.

302

15.1 Fragment of the Artemision’s western frieze from Magnesia on the Maeander river, photographed by Carl Humann, 1891, albumin paper on cardboard, 20.2 × 11.3 cm (photo). Photo archive of the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, FA-​Mag04-​0001, scan: V. Kant, 2015.

312

15.2 Retouched negative of a sculpture of a reclining woman and subsequent print from Magnesia on the Maeander river, photographed probably by Carl Humann, 1892; left: print, collodion paper on cardboard, 7.6 × 16.5 cm (photo), 1930s, FA-​Mag14-​0007; right: negative, gelatin dry plate, 13 × 18 cm, No. PM 1390. Photo archive of the Antikensammlung Berlin, exhibition view, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photo: D. Katz, 2018.

314

15.3 Archaic bronze figures from Olympia, photographed by Brothers Rhomaïdis, 1879, collotype, plate from: Ernst Curtius, Friedrich Adler and Georg Treu, eds., Die Ausgrabungen zu Olympia IV: Übersicht der Arbeiten und Funde vom Winter und Frühjahr 1878–​1879, vol. 4 (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1880), pl. 22.

315

15.4 Aeginetes Hall of the Kgl. Abguss-​Sammlung Dresden, photographed by Hermann Krone, from: photo album of the Dresden plaster cast collection, 1891, albumin paper on cardboard, 12.2 × 17.3 cm (photo), Archive of the Skulpturensammlung Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, detail.

317

15.5 Pergamon—​Bergama, unidentified photographer, after 1900, albumin paper on cardboard, 10.6 × 17.2 cm (photo), Photo archive of the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, FA-​Perg115a-​0001, scan: V. Kant.

320

15.6 ‘The little Turk’ and Herr Kern—​Magnesia on the Maeander river, ‘Brunnenhaus’ at the Agora, photographed by Carl Humann, 1891, albumin paper on cardboard, 11.2 × 19.5 cm (photo). Photo archive of the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, FA-​Mag09-​0002, scan: V. Kant.

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16.1 Waveform of the sound of MOPS Archaeology Gallery Object 1.

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16.2 Waveform of the sound of MOPS Archaeology Gallery Object 4.

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16.3 Waveform of the sound of MOPS Archaeology Gallery Object 5.

343

17.1 Location of the Fayum and Kom W within it, along with other places discussed in-​text. Satellite image ESRI World Imagery, ArcGIS 10.6.

356

Figures   xiii 17.2 Kom W and excavation areas of Caton-​Thompson and Wendorf and Schild, and the sampling squares of recent excavations. The exact location of the sampling square of Kozlowski and Ginter is unknown but was in the vicinity of strip E.

360

17.3 Example of spatial-​hierarchical schema used to structure data from the Fayum (Project area). Within the POI representing the extent of the area investigated, an AOI (survey transect) represents an area of intensive survey. Mapping and analysis of individual objects (shown as a stone artefact) and features (shown as a partially exposed hearth) occurred within each AOI. Details in Holdaway and Wendrich (2017). Satellite images ESRI World Imagery, ArcGIS 10.6.

365

19.1 Sample formats used for the scientific analysis of archaeological ceramics. Thin section (A), SEM mount (B), polished block (C), milled powder for INAA, XRD, FT-​IR (D), XRF pressed pellet (E) and fused bead (F), digested solution for ICP-​MS/​extracted residue for GC-​MS (G). Archaeological ceramic specimen with visible evidence of invasive sampling for compositional analysis (H). Reproduced from Quinn (2018: fig. 1, 44).

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19.2 Examples of some scientific apparatus used to analyse archaeological ceramics. Petrographic microscope with stepping stage and digital camera (A), scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive X-​ray spectroscopy (SEM-​EDS) (B).

389

19.3 Exhibited museum object being analysed non-​invasively in situ without sampling or handling. Geochemical characterization of ceramic statue of Emperor Qin Shuang’s Terracotta Army in Pit 1 of the mausoleum museum near Xi’an, China via portable x-​ray fluorescence (pXRF). Gently cleaning spot on surface of statue before analysis (A). Analysing statue with pXRF in tripod (B).

390

19.4 Sub-​sampling objects for invasive scientific analysis in museum storeroom. Small pieces of archaeological pottery are being clipped/​cut with carpenter’s pliers and a portable rotating diamond-​tipped tool and bagged for thin section preparation elsewhere. Volos Museum, Greece.

395

20.1 Gebelein mummy EA32753 in original tray prior to conservation.

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20.2 Verena Kotonski at the beginning of the conservation process of Gebelein individual EA32755. The gridded full-​size photographic image alongside allows detached parts to be positioned.

414

20.3 A tray made to contain disassociated parts of Gebelein individual EA32753. 416 20.4 Gebelein individual EA32753 after treatment.

416

22.1 Floor plan of the Ancient Near East gallery at the Ashmolean Museum (2009–​2021).

443

xiv   Figures 22.2 Floor plan of the Ancient Middle East gallery at the Ashmolean Museum (2021).

448

23.1 The National Museum of Qatar © Iwan Baan.

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23.2 The Archaeology of Qatar gallery at the National Museum of Qatar showing the ‘core chronology’ with the film by Jananne Al Ani © Sylvie van Roey.

461

23.3 The Archaeology of Qatar gallery at the National Museum of Qatar showing the Al Jassassiya petroglyph replicas and exhibits in Qatar’s past and contemporary archaeology © Sylvie van Roey.

462

23.4 The Al Zubarah exhibit in the Life on the Coast Gallery © Sylvie van Roey.

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24.1 3D Printed Model of Çatalhöyük.

480

24.2 Finds Library at the ‘Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ exhibition.

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24.3 Visitor experiencing VR at the ‘Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ exhibition.

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24.4 Çatalhöyük Research Project Archive by Refik Anadol.

484

25.1 The Museum of Archaeology Gallery at the University of Ghana. Photo by author.

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28.1 Views of the FindSampo portal and its faceted search tool visualizing archaeological data (Hassanzadeh et al. 2020).

552

28.2 A fragment of a silver equal-​armed brooch (KM41977:1) with a goat figure (KM42457:1). The fragment of the brooch and the goat figure were found in the same field at Ojanto in Nousiainen, but on different occasions and by different metal detectorists. The parts fit together perfectly. This type of silver brooch dating from the Viking Age has not been found previously in Finland. Photo: Ilari Järvinen, Finnish Heritage Agency.

554

28.3 The number of archaeological finds made by the public delivered to the archaeological collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency in 2014–​2019. The collections of finds are the numbers of entities of individual finds delivered by different finders from various find locations. The numbers for 2019 describe the change that took place in the first year of using the Ilppari digital reporting service. The number of individual finds remained close to those of previous years while the number of collections of finds has more than doubled. This reflects the active use of Ilppari and the more convenient manner of carrying out the find reporting promptly right after discovering items.

556

Tables

23.1 World Heritage Sites in the Gulf as of May 2020 27.1 Applying the R factors to museum digital facets

466 534

Contributors

George Okello Abungu is a Cambridge-​trained archaeologist and Emeritus Director-​ General of the National Museums of Kenya. He has been a guest scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute and visiting professor in numerous universities worldwide. He is a recipient of the Ife Prize in Museology 2007; Distinction of Passeur du Patrimone 2009; Lifetime Achievement in Defense of Art 2012, ARCA; Chevalier de l’Order de Arts et des Lettres 2012, France; AWHF Award 2016; and Ordre National Du Lion Chevalier 2018, Senegal. He has published in archaeology, heritage management, illicit trafficking in heritage, restitution, museology, and heritage and sustainable development. He is a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Stellenbosch, was Elizabeth Eddy Professor of Applied Anthropology, University of Florida, and founding Professor of Heritage Studies, University of Mauritius. He serves as Special Advisor to the Director General of ICCROM, Rome. Jilda Andrews is an Indigenous cultural practitioner and museum anthropologist based in Canberra, Australia. Currently a Research Fellow with the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia, Jilda draws from her Yuwaalaraay heritage to investigate networks of relationships in museum collections. Her approach pushes the definition of custodianship in museums, from one which is focused on maintaining collections, to one which strives to recognize connections between objects and the systems which produce them. Recent publications include ‘String ecologies: Indigenous country and pastoral empires’ in Ancestors, Artefacts, Empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish museums (British Museum Press, 2021). Marcia Bezerra is a professor at the Universidade Federal do Pará, in the Amazon, where she teaches archaeology to the Undergraduate Program in Museology/​FAV/​ICA and the MA/​DSc Program in Anthropology/​PPGA. She holds a BA in Archaeology (FINES/​RJ), MA in Ancient and Medieval History (UFRJ), and DSc in Archaeology (USP). She is the former president (2013–​2016) of the Society of Brazilian Archaeology (SAB) and Southern America Representative of the World Archaeological Congress/​ WAC (2008–​2016). She has conducted research in the Brazilian Amazon since 2008. Her interests include material culture studies, collecting practices, ethnography of heritage, Amazonian archaeology, archaeological representations, museum archaeology, heritage education, and the teaching of archaeology. Gail Boyle has been a successful museum archaeologist for more than 30 years. As Chair of the Society for Museum Archaeology (2012–​2018) she developed and directed

xviii   Contributors its strategic role at a national level as well as co-​authoring guidance on best practice. She is a Fellow of the Museums Association and a Treasure Valuation Committee member: she sits on several national advisory boards, including the Portable Antiquities Advisory Group and Historic England’s Archaeological Archives Advisory Panel, and is also Vice-​Chair of Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society Council and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. She has long-​standing collaborative and teaching relationships with both the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England. Şeyda Çetin is a curator and cultural manager. She holds her BA in economics and received her MA in cultural management from UIC Barcelona. In 2012, she was the coordinator of the annual conference of ICOM’s International Committee of Modern Art Museums and Collections (CIMAM) held in Istanbul. Between 2013 and 2019, she worked at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) as gallery curator, where she coordinated exhibitions such as The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük and took an active role in preparing exhibition publications and events. She is currently working as a curator at the Vehbi Koç Foundation’s exhibition space Meşher in Istanbul. S. Terry Childs retired as the manager of the Department of the Interior Museum Program in 2018. She has advocated for attention to archaeological collections preservation, management, and use through many publications and professional activities since she began working for the National Park Service’s Archeology Program in 1993. Her most recent publication is a volume edited with Mark Warner, ‘Using and Curating Archaeological Collections’. She was the principal author of the proposed federal regulation in 36 CFR 79 on deaccessioning. Her primary research interests are the anthropology of technology and archaeometallurgy, particularly in East and Central Africa. Paul Collins is Jaleh Hearn Curator of Ancient Near East in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum and holds a Hugh Price Fellowship at Jesus College and a supernumerary Fellowship at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He has worked previously as a curator in the Middle East Department of the British Museum and the Ancient Near Eastern Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He received his PhD from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and a PGCE from London University’s Institute of Education. Géraldine Delley is an archaeologist and historian of science. She completed her studies at the universities of Neuchâtel, Paris-​1 and later UCL. Her work focuses on the history of interdisciplinarity in archaeology, on the trajectories of objects in museum collections and on the reception of archaeology by the public. Since 2017, she is deputy director of the Laténium museum in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where she develops exhibition projects that combine the history of science, epistemology, and archaeology. She teaches at the University of Neuchâtel on material culture in the historical sciences and on heritage in museums. Her publications include Au-​delà des chronologies. Des origines

Contributors   xix du radiocarbone et de la dendrochronologie à leur intégration dans les recherches lacustres suisses (2015) and L’exposition ‘Émotions patrimoniales’ au Laténium (2020). Joshua Emmitt is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has conducted archaeological investigations in Egypt, Australia, and New Zealand working on projects that incorporate museum and legacy data with contemporary studies. Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann is a critical heritage scholar and practitioner. She is an Associate Professor and Director of the Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project (CAHP) at Christiansborg/​Osu Castle in Ghana (www.christiansborgarchaeologicalh eritageproject.org). Her research and teaching interests include the historical and contemporary forms of the African experience, such as archaeological ethnography, critical heritage, material culture, museums, West African Islam, the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and colonial photography. She is particularly interested in decolonizing approaches to heritage. Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-​Dzidzienyo is a lecturer at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, School of Arts, College of Humanities at the University of Ghana, Legon. She holds a PhD, an MPhil, and a B.A. in Archaeology from the University of Ghana. She teaches museum studies at the undergraduate and graduate level. She is also the curator of the Museum of Archaeology. Her research interests are in gender studies, museum exhibition and education, and heritage issues. Karen Exell is Museums Senior Development Director at Diriyah Gate Development Authority, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. From 2015 to 2019 she led the delivery of the National Museum of Qatar which opened in March 2019. Prior to joining Qatar Museums, from 2011 to 2015, she directed the MA in Museum and Gallery Practice at UCL Qatar, after teaching museums studies and holding curatorial positions in university museums in the UK for a decade. She retains an Honorary Research position with UCL Qatar and is finalizing a three-​year research project funded by the Qatar National Research Fund exploring the concept of national identity in relation to the new National Museum of Qatar. Luzia Gomes Ferreira is a poet, black feminist, and professor at the undergraduate program in Museology/​FAV/​ICA at the Universidade Federal do Pará, in Amazon. She holds a BA in Museology/​UFPA, MA in Anthropology/​UFPA, and DSc in Museology/​ ULHT-​Portugal. She is the creator and editor of the blog Etnografias Poéticas de Mim. She published articles in Brazilian and Portuguese journals and books, in Museology, Literature, and Arts. She took part in several archaeological projects in the Amazon. Her interests include museology theory in intersection with gender and race, museums and black representations and representativities, African and Afrodiasporic literature, African and Afrodiasporic memories, and black feminism. Cressida Fforde is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at The Australian National University. Since 1991, she has undertaken research

xx   Contributors within the repatriation field for Indigenous communities and institutions internationally, particularly in the location and identification of Ancestral Remains through archival research. She is recognized internationally for the knowledge she brings to repatriation practice and the analysis of the history of the removal and return of Indigenous Ancestral Remains. Since 2014, she has been the lead chief investigator for four Australian Research Council funded projects which undertake applied and scholarly research in repatriation. She is primary editor of the 2020 Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew. James L. Flexner is Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology and Heritage at the University of Sydney. His current research projects focus on the archaeology of island and coastal environments in the South Pacific and eastern Australia. His research on ethnographic collections has explored collections of objects from the western Pacific now held in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, and Austria. Madalyn Grant is an early career scholar having recently completed her honours thesis on emotions and repatriation at the Australian National University’s School of History. The thesis examined the return of the Murray Black collection, Kow Swamp and Mungo Lady remains from Canberra, and the emotional valence of those returns and the surrounding debates. She is a cultural institution professional currently working in Collections Access at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra. Madalyn also works for the AIATSIS project team on the Return, Reconcile, Renew Digital Archive. Her research interests are emotions as they interact with repatriation, collecting histories, and ethnography. Edward Halealoha Ayau is of ‘Oiwi (Hawaiian) ancestry. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Redlands, a law degree from the University of Colorado, clerked for the Native American Rights Fund, worked as an attorney for the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, and served on the staff of US Senator Daniel Inouye. Halealoha served as executive director of Hui Malama I Na Kupuna O Hawaii Nei. From 1990, to its dissolution in 2015, Hui Malama repatriated approximately 6,000 iwi kupuna (Ancestral Hawaiian Remains) and moepu (funerary possessions) from institutions in Hawaii, the continental United States, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Halealoha continues to work on international repatriation cases as a volunteer for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Kan Hang is Director of the Yungang Research Institution, Professor in School of Archaeology and Museology in Peking University. He majored in Song and Yuan dynasty archaeology, museum management, and heritage studies. Simon J. Holdaway is Professor of Archaeology and Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Auckland. He is interested in material culture, low-​level food producers, and time theory. He has conducted fieldwork in New Zealand, Egypt, and Australia. His recent books include The Desert Fayum Reinvestigated and A Geoarchaeology of Aboriginal Landscapes in Semi-​arid Australia.

Contributors   xxi Abigail Hunt is Associate Professor of Heritage and Identity at the University of Lincoln and Director of the Enabled Archaeology Foundation. Her interests are in the representation of the past in written and object-​based narratives and the creation of relative histories and in increasing accessibility and inclusivity in archaeology. She is an Advance HE Principal Fellow (PFHEA) and Associate Member of the Museums Association (AMA). Jessica S. Johnson is an objects conservator and the Head of Conservation for the Museum Conservation Institute (MCI) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Previously she worked for the University of Delaware’s Institute for Global Studies, as Academic Director for the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage (IICAH) in Erbil, Iraq. She helped to found the Iraqi Institute beginning in 2009, first serving as the Program Director for Collections Care and Conservation and later as the Academic Director. From 2000 to 2009 she was Senior Objects Conservator for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and Conservator for the US National Park Service Museum Management Program 1997–​2000. John Kannenberg is a multimedia artist, experimental curator, writer, and researcher whose work investigates sounds as cultural objects; the frontiers of digital heritage; the multisensory geography of museums; the nexus between parody, authenticity, and the absurd; the phenomenology of time; and the importance of listening as a cultural, political, and empathic act. More information about his work can be found at johnkannenberg.com. Thomas Kitchen is a Lecturer in Events and Tourism Management and a PGR student studying for a PhD in Cultural Heritage Management at the University of Lincoln. His interests are heavily focused around understanding the dynamics of visitor interaction and experience within cultural environments. Stefanie Klamm is coordinator for the university collections at the University Library, Freie Universität Berlin. She was an academic researcher in the cooperative project Photo-​Objects. Photographs as (Research-​)Objects in Archaeology, Ethnology and Art History at the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—​Preußischer Kulturbesitz and completed a dissertation on the history of archaeological visualization at the Institute of Art History and Visual Studies, Humboldt-​ Universität zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Her research centres on the history of archaeological practice, museums, and heritage studies as well as on the material culture and visual media of the sciences and humanities; she is particularly interested in photographic materiality and photo archives. Jutta Kuitunen is the Chief Intendant of the Library, Archives, and Archaeological Collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency. She is the project leader of the Finnish Heritage Agency’s part of the SuALT project (Subproject III). Brian Michael Lione is the International Cultural Heritage Protection Program Manager at the Smithsonian’s MCI, where he leads the implementation of several projects in Iraq,

xxii   Contributors including those at the IICAH in Erbil and on site in Mosul and Nimrud. Prior to coming to MCI, he helped to found the IICAH and worked as Director and Executive Director of that organization from 2009 to 2017. He spent the first decade of his professional career managing heritage sites and policy for the Department of Defense (DoD), culminating in his position as the DoD’s first Deputy Federal Preservation Officer from 2005 to 2008. He is an Army intelligence veteran, having served in active and reserve capacities in the US and throughout the Middle East from 1993 to 2001. Laura Osorio Sunnucks is Head of the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at the British Museum. Previously she was Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow for Latin America at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), University of British Columbia, where she curated the exhibition ‘Arts of Resistance; Politics and the Past in Latin America.’ She has also worked on the Indigenous and Minority Fellowship Programme at UNESCO Paris and in Anglophone education at the Louvre Museum. She holds a PhD in Mesoamerican heritage from Leiden University. Georgios Papaioannou is an Associate Professor in Museology and the Director of the Museology Research Laboratory at the Ionian University, Greece. He has lectured extensively and led international research projects in the Mediterranean and the Arab World. His research interests and published work lie on museum archaeology, museology, and digital cultural heritage. His teaching and research work has received international excellence awards. He is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), the Secretary General of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies, an ICOM member and a member of the Pool of Experts of the European Museum Academy. Daniel Pett is Head of Digital and IT/​Senior Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. He was previously Digital Humanities lead at the British Museum, where he designed and implemented digital innovation connecting humanities research, museum practice, and the creative industries with a focus on Citizen Science and 3D technologies. He is an honorary Professor at Stirling University, Research Affiliate of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London and the Royal Geographical Society; was an RHSA Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Digital Humanities Research, Australian National University (2019); and is a member of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Rebecca Phillipps is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Auckland. She is interested in stone artefact analysis, collections research, and archaeological theory. She has also worked extensively in Egypt, particularly in the Fayum region on mid-​Holocene archaeology with work recently published in The Desert Fayum Reinvestigated. Patrick Sean Quinn is Principal Research Fellow in Ceramic Petrography and is an archaeological scientist specializing in the analysis and interpretation of ceramics, plaster, and stone. He trained as a geologist and micropalaeontologist, before applying his skills to archaeometry and ancient ceramics. Patrick utilizes the compositional and

Contributors   xxiii microstructural signatures of ceramics from pre-​contact California, the Bronze Age Aegean, Qin period China, and prehistoric and Roman Britain to tackle a variety of archaeological themes including trade and exchange, migration, cultural interaction, craft technology, organization of production, tradition, and identity. He is a leading analyst in the versatile geoarchaeological technique of thin section ceramic petrography and has authored a key textbook on the approach. Jennifer Reynolds-​Kaye is the Director of University Relations for the Momental Foundation and formerly the Curator of Education and Academic Outreach at the Yale Center for British Art. Her recent research investigates the connections between pre-​Columbian art and Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on plaster casts. Her work examines the afterlife of pre-​Columbian art in modern and contemporary art, and she curated the exhibition, Small-​Great Objects: Anni and Josef Albers in the Americas at the Yale University Art Gallery. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Southern California. Ville Rohiola is a researcher in the SuALT project and the project manager of the Finnish Heritage Agency’s part of the project (Sub-​project III). He is a Curator of the Archaeological Collections in the Finnish Heritage Agency. Nathan Schlanger in an archaeologist and historian of the social sciences. Following his graduate studies in Cambridge and Oxford, he has worked at the French Institut national d’histoire de l’art, the Ecole du Louvre, and the Institut national de recherche archéologiques preventives. Since 2014, he is the professor of archaeology at the Ecole nationale des chartes. His research interests include technology and material culture studies, the history and politics of archaeology, notably on the basis of archival sources, and archaeological heritage management in comparative perspective. Among his relevant publications are: European Archaeology Abroad. Global Settings, Comparative Perspectives (2013, ed. with S. Van der Linde et al.) and Archives, Ancestors, Practices. Archaeology in the Light of its History (2008, ed. with J. Nordbladh). Emiline Smith is a Lecturer in Art Crime and Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. She is part of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and the Trafficking Culture research consortium. Her research focuses on the trafficking of cultural and natural resources, primarily in Asia. Her research interests include transnational crime, white-​collar crime, heritage crime, and cultural criminology. Laurajane Smith is Professor and Director of the Centre of Heritage and Museum Studies, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, the Australian National University. She is a fellow of the Society for the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She founded the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and has been editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies since 2009. She is co-​general editor with Gönül Bozoğlu of Routledge’s Key Issues in Cultural Heritage, author of Uses of Heritage

xxiv   Contributors (2006) and Emotional Heritage (2021). and editor with Natsuko Akagawa of Intangible Heritage (2009) and Safeguarding Intangible Heritage (2018). Alice Stevenson is Associate Professor at UCL Institute of Archaeology. She has previously held posts as Curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, and Researcher in World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. She specializes in prehistoric archaeology of Egypt, has research interests in histories and legacies of museum collecting, and is a co-​founder of the ‘100 histories of 100 worlds in 1 object’ project. She is author of Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums (2019). Duygu Tarkan is an archaeologist specialized in prehistoric ceramics. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Prehistoric Archaeology from Istanbul University and was trained in ceramic petrography at Oxford University’s Research Laboratory of Archaeology and the History of Art (RLAHA) and at the British School at Athens (BSA). She has participated several archaeological survey and excavation projects in Central Anatolia and in Near East, spending 16 years as a ceramic specialist on the Çatalhöyük Research Project, before joining Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) as a Fellowship Coordinator. In 2017, she curated the exhibition The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük prepared by ANAMED. Paul Turnbull is Professor Emeritus in digital humanities and history at the University of Tasmania and holds honorary research appointments at the University of Queensland and the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. He is known internationally for his research on colonial era theft and scientific uses of the remains of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Over the past thirty years he has assisted Indigenous representative organizations, museums, and the Australian government in repatriation processes. His publications include Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), and various essays in the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation (2020). He is currently writing a social history of craniometry and essays dealing with aspects of the plunder of Indigenous cultural heritage in Queensland. Paolo Del Vesco is a curator and archaeologist at the Egyptian Museum of Turin. After completing a PhD in Egyptian archaeology at the University of Pisa in 2008, he was a Research Associate at the University of Pisa (2008–​2010) and at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) of Leiden (2010–​2011) and Marie-​Curie Research Fellow at the UCL Institute of Archaeology (2012–​2014). Since 1995 he has excavated in Italy (Roman Period-​Middle Ages), Syria (Bronze-​Iron Age), Saudi Arabia (VII-​VI cent. BCE), Egypt (New Kingdom-​Late Period), and the Sudan (New Kingdom). He is deputy field-​director of the joint Dutch-​Italian archaeological mission at the New Kingdom necropolis of Saqqara. Siyu Wang is an Associate Professor in School of Archaeology and Museology in Peking University. He majored in new museology, museum exhibition, and heritage studies.

Contributors   xxv Barbara Wills has worked with the conservation of objects made from organic materials for most of her professional life, in London at the British Museum, in Cambridge, and on site in Africa and elsewhere. She has helped develop techniques, publishing and lecturing widely in the conservation of leather, human remains, and basketry. Her work as a Trustee of the Leather Conservation Centre, a committee member of the Archaeological Leather Group, and organizing the conference Going Green in Conservation reflects her interests. Her two-​year Clothworkers’ Foundation Conservation Research Fellowship (safeguarding a body of evidence: researching and conserving a group of exceptional naturally-​mummified Nilotic human remains) allowed time to further develop the treatment of complex human remains and help realize their potential. Donna Yates is an Associate Professor in Criminal Law and Criminology in the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on the contemporary illicit trade in antiquities, fossils, and collectable wildlife, and the ongoing social issues related to historical collection of cultural objects. Much of this research has been focused on Latin America. She is the principal investigator of the European Research Council-​funded project ‘Trafficking Transformations: Objects as Agents in Criminal Networks’ and is a founding member of the ‘Trafficking Culture’ research consortium.

Introdu c t i on Museum Archaeology Alice Stevenson

Introduction This Handbook brings together critical engagements with the legacies of, and futures for, global archaeological collections. It aims to challenge and transcend the common misconception that museum archaeology is simply a set of procedures for managing and exhibiting assemblages. Instead, through the chapters assembled here, museum archaeology emerges as a dynamic area of reflexive research and practice in dialogue with, and as an integral part of, the discipline of archaeology and public discourse. Chapters problematize and suggest new ways of thinking about historic, contemporary, and future relationships between archaeological fieldwork and museums, as well as the array of institutional and cultural paradigms through which archaeological enquiries are mediated. These concerns are grounded in the realities of a selection of institutions and case studies internationally. As such, the common sector refrain ‘best practice’ is not assumed to solely emanate from developed countries or European philosophies, but instead as emerging from, and being accommodated within, local concerns and diverse museum cultures. The question must always remain as to what might be, in any particular context, appropriate museology (Kreps 2008) in which approaches to collections are adapted to local needs and conditions. Therefore, while this volume aims to be inclusive, it cannot, and should not, claim to be comprehensive or prescriptive. Rather, the chapters serve to highlight some of the distinctive sets of skills, knowledges, and dispositions that characterize work with archaeological collections. And by collections it is not just archaeological finds themselves that are relevant. Several studies in this volume embrace a broader range of materialities in the museum than has traditionally been addressed by examining archival field notes, photographic media, archaeological samples, replicas, and intangible heritage, alongside artefacts.

2   Alice Stevenson In an environment where fieldwork in many parts of the world is increasingly problematic, impossible, or unnecessary, museum collections may become a more vital resource for future archaeological reflection. And where opportunities and justifications for excavation do remain, the museum—​as a place with existing collections, public engagement, and archaeological expertise, as well as for future care—​are a resource for consideration prior to and during, not just at the end of, fieldwork. Museum archaeology in this sense is also understood laterally as a sensibility since it concerns not just bounded institutional practice but also a set of skills and knowledge relevant to archaeological collections that might not necessarily reside with a museum setting. This means recognizing the legacies that archaeology creates. Curation needs to be considered at every stage of an archaeological project and should be as integral a part of archaeological training as excavation and survey. Throughout, questions are asked about what gets prioritized, researched, and represented in museums, by whom, how, and why. In doing so, this volume responds to broader societal anxieties and the ‘crisis of representation’ experienced in both the museum sector and the discipline of archaeology in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. In museum studies, a wider paradigm shift was recognized in the 1990s from an ‘old museology’ too focused upon methods to the ‘new museology’ that questioned the purposes of museums (Desvallées et al. 1992; Vergo 1989; but see Krstović 2020), and which has seen museums transformed from ‘collection-​driven’ organizations to ‘visitor-​ centred’ organizations (Anderson 2004; Hudson 1998: 43). That museums exist simply to collect, preserve, interpret, educate, and research is no longer a certainty. Such core practices are historically produced and socially embedded. The rift that emerged in 2019 when the International Council of Museums (ICOM) proposed a new definition of the museum exposed these ongoing pressures over how museums articulate their purposes (Mairesse 2019; see Chapter 26). With global crises and social justice agendas, from climate change to calls for decolonization, and from repatriation claims to Black Lives Matter movements, museums find themselves under constant public scrutiny. This ‘global contemporary’ is, as Knell (2019: 2) argues, a museological age. Like museum studies, archaeology has also seen calls to be more ‘politically effective . . . in the service of social justice’ (Hamilakis 2018: 518), with concerns around the production and deployment of archaeological narratives (summary in Kosiba 2019). This volume is therefore predicated upon a museum archaeology that is distinctly political, attentive to societal discourses and its intersections with class, religion, gender, sexuality, and race. Archaeologists may dig up past material, museums may preserve it for the future, but collections are always operational in the present. The seven thematic sections of this book variously take this challenge up. Some chapters provide broad theoretical synthesis of key areas, others develop their themes through case studies, with coverage of the Palaeolithic through to the more recent past. None are intended to establish scholarly canon. Rather this collection provides a broad range of departure points for the discussion of museum archaeology. This introduction first positions museum work within the discipline of archaeology in order to articulate more expansively the principles upon which this volume is built.

introduction   3

Defining and expanding museum archaeology Like the discipline of archaeology, there is a burgeoning and daunting corpus of museum studies scholarship (for overviews see Carbonell 2012; Macdonald 2006). Yet the two communities of discourse rarely intersect in a substantial or sustained way. Their most frequent meeting point is in the construction of archaeological narratives within exhibitionary media (Barker 2010; Chan 2011; Copley 2010; Levy 2006; Merriman 1999; Moser 2010; Owens 1996; Chapters 21–​25). Where collections more widely are concerned, museum archaeology is frequently characterized in terms of a vexed relationship between institutions and the discipline. Issues such as how to manage storage against the exponential influx of excavated material (e.g. Marquardt et al. 1982; Kersel 2015; Chapters 11 and 13) or how to address repatriation (Atalay 2006; Harlin 2019; Jones 2005; Chapters 3 and 12), including human remains (Squires et al 2020; Chapters 2, 3, and 20), are recurring and important quandaries. However, there are many additional ones encompassed within the field of museum archaeology that are equally deserving of attention around themes such as digital interfaces (Chapters 17, 27, and 28), the antiquities market (Chapter 4), replicas (Chapter 14), destructive analysis (Chapter 19), community engagement (Chapters 5 and 6), and contemporary art interventions (Chapters 16 and 24). In archaeology, museums and collections are often situated at the periphery of disciplinary perspectives, as a search through the indexes of a sample of widely used English-​ language introductory texts reveals (e.g. Renfrew and Bahn 2015; Urban and Schortman 2019; but see Ellis 2006). The impression gained from cursory surveys of such Anglo-​ American archaeology titles is that the museum was only significant in the early period of disciplinary development and that today it sits at the end of the archaeological project, an afterthought in dissemination, public engagement, and accountability rather than as a site of archaeological knowledge production in its own right. This marginalization of museums from current archaeological thinking is a common problem in many parts of the world, from Venezuela (Antczak et al. 2019: 59) to Serbia (Cvjetićanin 2014: 595). In archaeological theory, museums generally attract short shrift, perhaps surprisingly given that the purview of theory is why we do archaeology, the social and cultural context of archaeology, and issues of interpretation (e.g. Johnson 2020: 2). These are central issues for museums. As Chapman and Wylie (2016) argue, the transformation of material remains into archaeological evidence does not simply rely on discovery, but is mediated by theory, background knowledge, and technical skill, as well as social and institutional infrastructures. Museums do not feature in Chapman and Wylie’s (2016) index, but as complex social institutions they are a widespread and longstanding site in which material traces reside and that shape and mediate data in particular ways. Shanks and Tilley (1992) engaged in sustained theoretical critique of museum archaeology, but while they recognized the museum as ‘the main institutional connection

4   Alice Stevenson between archaeology as a profession and discipline, and wider society’ (Shanks and Tilley 1992: 68), their chapter devoted to ‘a critique of the museum as an ideological institution’ was limited to the examination of archaeological narratives within gallery spaces. As Wingfield (2017: 595) has observed, the equation of museums with archive or display ‘fails to do justice to the modes of archaeological work and knowledge production that are enabled by museum settings’. A more theoretically diverse archaeological perspective would further reveal, however, that museums can also hinder knowledge production when there is an absence of relevant collections or expertise brought to bear on them from Indigenous archaeologists (Atalay 2006), descendent communities (Battle-​Baptiste 2007; Singleton 1997), or other minoritized groups such as LGBTQIA+​ (Chantraine and Soares 2020; Voss 2008). This is not to say that collections have been entirely ignored by archaeologists. Over the years there have been voices advocating for the value of collections research (e.g. Brown 1981; Chapman 1981). And for areas of archaeology more strongly allied to art-​ history, such as Egyptology and Classics, museum work has always retained a more central status. Nevertheless, it remains a truism that ‘the pathology’ of digging (Tilley 1989: 275) epitomizes the discipline, privileged as a ‘core method’ (Edgeworth 2011: 44; see also Nilsson 2011). The potential of museum resources and processes to contribute to contemporary archaeological debates has, nonetheless, gained traction in the 2010s in a series of papers (Friberg and Huvila 2019; Friedman and Janz 2018; Harris et al. 2019; Luby et al. 2013; Voss 2012), edited volumes (Allen and Ford 2019), and journal special issues (Benden and Taft 2019; Flexner 2016), with calls to ‘dig less, catalogue more’ (King 2016), to ‘excavate existing collections’ (Schiappacasse 2019), and to ‘get out of the trench and back into the museum’ (Osborne 2015). Yet as Whitley (2016) helpfully points out, construing an antithesis between two sites of archaeological practice—​fieldwork and museum work—​is unhelpful. Knowledge is certainly created at the ‘trowel’s edge’ (Hodder 2003: 58), but fieldwork’s value can only be fully realized in dialogue with other stages in the interpretive process and in the juxtapositions with other collections of material. In higher education, ‘archaeologists typically do not learn about curatorial issues and practices in school’ (Sullivan and Childs 2003: 1; Swain 2007: 140; but see Chapter 25). In the museum sector there are specialist professional organizations, such as the UK’s Society of Museum Archaeology that do produce their own publications, but otherwise there are few books devoted specifically to museum archaeology. Much of it is produced as policy documents by the sector, ‘grey literature’, rather than through academic publication (e.g. Chapter 13). Dedicated scholarship includes older publications centred around ‘curation’ and these take a largely methodological approach to collections management (e.g. Sullivan and Childs 2003; Pearce 1990). More recent books collate pertinent and critical topics that recur throughout the otherwise scattered literature (Skeates 2017; Swain 2007). The opening line to Swain’s preface in An Introduction to Museum Archaeology directly identifies museum archaeology as ‘the discipline of archaeology as it affects museums’ (Swain 2007: xv). This implies, however, that museums have little to contribute to archaeology in return. While Swain acknowledges

introduction   5 that the relationship between museums and archaeological fieldwork, and between publics and archaeology, is not necessarily linear (Swain 2007: 12), how this is the case remains to be substantially developed. It might refer to any fieldwork an archaeologist employed in a museum actively participates in; an activity which is often perceived to be a proxy for professional archaeological identities (e.g. Biddle 1994). Navigating the interstices between collections, publics, and the discipline, however, requires a distinctive set of experiences. As a form of critical practice, museum work is conditioned by intersections of internal and external demands and constraints, as well as conflicting priorities and knowledge cultures. Internally, while the common characterization of the curator is of an individual with full autonomy over collections, in reality they are usually one member of a wider team of professionals that has an influence on practice and meaning making, including those in visitor services, IT and digital development, marketing and design, conservation, education, and management. Meanwhile, the remits of those who have responsibility over archaeological assemblages varies considerably, often being contingent on funding, stakeholders, and management, from large national institutions to small, local independent charities. In turn, the external pressures of politics and economics further shape the relationship of museums to wider archaeological practices. Rescue archaeology (as opposed to research-​led archaeology initiated largely by universities) is one case in point, with the evolution of what has variously been called contract archaeology or development led archaeology (Boyle 2019; Högberg and Fahlander 2017) impacting on storage strategies, access, and interpretive possibilities (see Chapters 11 and 13). Bearing the above in mind, the principles upon which this volume are predicated are as follows: Museum Archaeology can and should be a critical awareness of the histories, agencies, and conditions that form assemblages, a reflexive practice for ongoing archaeological documentation and analysis, and a responsive, sensitive, and community-​ engaged approach to knowledge production, interpretation, and access. In other words, it is a set of sensitivities to working with collections with a view to making their past and present uses transparent to multiple stakeholders for the future. Heritage work is not just about the past, it is future making (Harrison et al. 2020). This should concern all archaeologists, not just those working in a museum, from university lecturers with boxes of finds in their offices to research scientists requesting access to material for sampling (Chapter 19). It is an area of archaeology that is particularly attuned to the importance of facilitating, through collections, two-​way dialogues across contemporary society and the discipline. Therefore, it is much more than the dissemination of archaeological discoveries, but part of the ongoing project of interpretation and repeated contextualization of that material whether it is on display, in storage, or otherwise in use, contributing to the questions asked and the narratives constructed around assemblages. Where museum institutions are concerned, they should be recognized as a distinctive set of spaces in which archaeological knowledge has been and continues to be constructed. It is the concept of ‘archaeological context’ that provides disciplinary common ground for what lies at the heart of museum archaeology. Context as defined in archaeology often fixes the archaeological object in a singular, static space (e.g. Darvill 2008)—​the

6   Alice Stevenson find spot—​but knowledge is equally produced through movement, circulation, and change. The notion of life histories (Kopytoff 1986), cultural biographies (Gosden and Marshall 1999; Joy 2009), or itineraries of objects (Joyce and Gillespie 2015)—​which have had considerable currency in archaeological theory and method generally—​has gone some way towards identifying these processes. Often, however, these concepts are deployed as a means of interpreting past social lives of things prior to their acquisition or else artefact biographies end with the arrival of objects in the museum (e.g. Holtorf 2002). Yet knowledge production occurs beyond the field of recovery, and the archaeological object is often materially as well as interpretively emergent through ongoing disciplinary interventions within the museum. Although the concept of object biographies as adopted by museums has been criticized (Hicks 2021), its emphasis on the mutually constitutive relationship of people and things—​how they both ‘gather time, movement, and change’ (Gosden and Marshall 1999: 169)—​means that object biographies remain useful, especially for elucidating the multiple agencies involved in collection formation and for challenging individualistic narratives of accomplishment that frame most museum exhibits (see Chapters 1, 14, 15, and 19). Hodder (1986: 122) reminded the discipline of archaeology of the etymology of the word ‘context’, with a root in the Latin word contexere, meaning to connect or weave together. Rather than a discrete place, context is understood to be a process. This is the sort of work that museum archaeology entails; tacking back and forth between artefacts and their associated documentation, products of fieldwork, historical interventions and their associated communities, together with encounters in museum display, public engagement, and study. It is through these means that archaeological knowledge continues to be produced and queried. Such an ongoing process challenges the widespread characterization of the archaeological record as a ‘finite’ resource since the possibilities for connections are multiple, with the infinite promise of new insights and reinterpretations (Perry 2019). Theoretically, therefore, museum archaeology has a lot to offer a self-​ reflexive discipline. Methodologically, it requires a shift from curation of single objects to the curation of relationships among objects, archives, fieldsites, and people, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate.

Collecting, categorizing, and challenging histories What constitutes an archaeological collection? Is it comprised only of material that was formally excavated or otherwise derived from fieldwork? Where does that leave antiquarian collections? Is it related to chronological range? Definitive classification is unhelpful as the terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘museums’ operate differently throughout the world. A project aimed at identifying and characterizing the scope and significance of the world archaeology collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, for instance,

introduction   7 quickly encountered the difficulties in distinguishing ethnographic from archaeological material (Hicks 2010; see also Chapter 18). Recent collecting at the Pitt Rivers equally challenges disciplinary borders with newly excavated material registered into the collection including a USB stick (Moshenska 2014; PRM 2016.47.1) and pieces of fencing from the UK Calais border acquired as part of an exercise in landscape archaeology (Hicks and Mallet 2019; PRM 2020.25.1). Ucko (1994: 237), drawing from Zimbabwean approaches to heritage, rejected any notion that archaeology is, or should be, restricted to the study of only a ‘remote’ past and explicitly considered archaeological concerns as incorporating the ethnographic, the oral historical, the literary, as well as the archaeological past. More recently, archaeological collections have extended to those born digital, such as imagery of African rock art curated at the British Museum (Anderson et al. 2018). What is considered archaeological is ultimately contingent upon histories of collection and display, the disciplinary practices and methods through which material has been recognized, and cultural geographies of museum development, inclusive of nationalist, imperialist, and colonialist agendas. Specifically addressing then the histories of archaeology and institutions is key to untangling these issues, as well as acting as an invaluable reflection point for all archaeologists and visitors so that they confront the basic methods that have been applied to study evidence, including the very production of ‘archaeological culture’ as Chapter 1 highlights. Here, Delley and Schlanger address how the histories of archaeology are beginning to come to the fore in exhibitionary narratives, as illustrated by a range of examples from across Europe. They consider how museums have long been central to the making of archaeological knowledge, such as the form and nature of chronologies and ‘archaeological industries’. Notably, the accumulation of antiquities was not only one of the foundations of archaeology as a discipline (e.g. Lucas 2001), but also a driver for the development of fieldwork methodologies (Stevenson 2019: 32–​3). Delley and Schlanger further note that the skills of historians of archaeology have particular relevance for museum archaeology, for responding to calls for decolonization and repatriation. Chapter 1 further points to museum architecture as a powerful frame for creating meaning (see also Moser 2010), making the museum building itself in need of interpretation. It can cast its own classificatory lens and an item displayed in an art gallery will likely have its aesthetics emphasized over its archaeological history, or if placed in a cultural centre, its contemporary relevance to local communities is likely to be foregrounded. Delley and Schlanger end their contribution noting that museums provide an opportunity for raising questions and provoking reflections among visitors and scholars alike. This echoes Shanks and Tilley’s (1992) critique of the museum, which called for sensitive and critically self-​reflexive displays. It is also now common parlance within the ‘museums are not neutral’ rhetoric, decolonization movements, and social justice agendas (Sandell and Nightingale 2012). However, it is not simply a matter of addressing display. Rather, inequalities and biases suffuse all areas of museum activity, staffing, and infrastructure—​from collecting to cataloguing, storage to staffing, marketing to management—​and these areas equally need to be challenged (Emerson and Hoffman

8   Alice Stevenson 2019; Onciul 2015: 240; Turner 2019; Vawda 2019). This work is vital as it impinges upon perceptions of archaeology, the construction of archaeological narratives, and the possibilities for engagement between various archaeologists and publics. Colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism enabled and informed the nature of these collections. Decisions made in categorizing, labelling, and displaying have created silences; they have frequently elided Indigenous histories, and overlooked class, gender, and racial identities. In so doing, museums have historically been dehumanizing, ignoring the multiple dimensions of human experience, including emotion and affect. Nowhere is the confluence of colonial histories and emotions more significant than in cases of Indigenous Ancestral Remains collections, subject of Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2, Fforde et al. consider the uncomfortable history of the removal and scientific use of Indigenous Ancestral Remains, noting that narratives too often focus on the principally white men who took them and the institutions that house them. They argue that focusing only on histories of collecting as intellectual, objective, and scientific enterprises is reductive and that including evidence from the archives for emotional affects provides a deeper understanding of Indigenous grievances and calls for repatriation. Such examination, moreover, disrupts the often glib refrain that previous collecting habits were ‘of their time’ when it is clear that removals were frequently understood to be immoral and looters were cognizant of Indigenous opposition. This chapter also underscores the challenges of working with archives, their biases and silences, all of which need consideration in the construction of collecting histories. In their second contribution (Chapter 3) Fforde et al. develop this theme of emotional engagement further through a historical review of the human remains repatriation debate. This discourse has broadened from simply historical analyses that informs arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’, to ones that challenge a polarization between the assumed ‘objective’ claims of science and the ‘subjective’ cultural claims of Indigenous peoples (see also Chapters 6 and 12). A wide range of emotions is involved, as explored through Hawaiian and Australian Aboriginal examples. Museum procedures distance the meaning of human remains, but seeking commonalities and empathy, for instance, may be one means of shifting attitudes and associated practices. Recognition of the overlooked emotional aspects of repatriation, they argue, across museum professionals, archaeologists, and Indigenous claimants facilitates repatriation practices that are orientated toward healing and reconciliation.

Contemporary agencies of curation and communities of practice While part one addresses historical agencies behind archaeological collections, this next section turns to the relationships that museum staff form with a variety of contemporary groups that continue to actively shape archaeological collections, that are represented

introduction   9 by such assemblages, that look after them, and that are able to access and utilize them. There has been increasing consideration of the range of external stakeholders that collections are relevant for, as museums have made efforts to become more collaborative and inclusive. The challenge is that the communities that work with museums are highly variable, heterogenous, and intersectional (for a summary see Crooke 2010). This section presents just a few related to archaeological material: antiquities market actors (Chapter 4); communities that live on archaeological sites (Chapter 5); Indigenous groups (Chapter 6); dis/​Abled individuals (Chapter 7); and local groups in post-​conflict zones (Chapter 8). Other specialist groups, such as metal detectorists (Chapter 28) or vulnerable groups (Chapter 26) are discussed in the last section of the volume. Various different professions other than archaeologists have contributed to archaeological collections. In terms of museum acquisition, the art market has historically had a prominent role in supply. However, the establishment of the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property has impelled museums not to acquire cultural property of another state in cases where it may have been illegally removed. Following incidents in the 1990s, such as the Medici scandal and exposes of Sotheby’s dealing of illicit antiquities, archaeologists have been increasingly vocal in reprimanding institutions for purchasing objects from dealers with no secure collection history and which are likely to have been looted (Renfrew 1999). The forging of export licences and associated documentation, together with lapses in due diligence has, however, meant that looted artefacts still enter prestigious museums (MacKenzie et al. 2020). But the relationship between museums and the antiquities market is more complex still as Yates and Smith’s Chapter 4 explores. They argue that museums act not only as receivers from the illicit trade in antiquities but are also influencers upon it. Even though market actors are usually far removed from archaeological sites, recent research on illicit antiquities, such as that conducted by the Trafficking Culture Network (MacKenzie et al. 2020), has demonstrated the imperative to address demand in rich nations as an active driver of site looting. This work has also highlighted that those who live in proximity to archaeological sites and who may seek to commercialize finds as a source of basic income, individuals termed ‘subsistence diggers’, should not be demonized. In Chapter 5, Bezerra and Ferreira call on archaeologists to look beyond this category ‘subsistence diggers’ and re-​evaluate how other agents collect and store archaeological material in communities local to sites. Through an examination of collecting practices in the Brazilian Amazon, they point to the affective reasons for individuals to collect and curate materials found by their homes, attitudes that indicate people’s positive engagement with heritage which need not be seen as destructive activities. Although the creation of ‘affective museums’ in peoples’ homes can come into tension with national heritage legislation, these activities reveal other modes of thought too often ignored by archaeologists and museums, but which also produce insights into the past. Taking on board the multiple ways of knowing and engaging with the past is also central to Osorio Sunnucks’ Chapter 6 on decentring the museum in Indigenous

10   Alice Stevenson community engagement. While ethnographic museum models, such as the widely cited ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997), have found prominence as a framework for opening dialogue with source communities, archaeology faces a particular issue with ‘allochronism’, which has alienated contemporary people even further from their own histories and collections through the spectacle of exotic and distant civilizations. Osorio Sunnucks directly addresses this issue through two case studies of how contemporary ancestral knowledge and practice in Yucatan is incorporated into museums with archaeological (pre-​Columbian) Maya collections and which contributes substantially to archaeological knowledge. In so doing, she brings attention to multilingual world museologies that are often overlooked by anglophone publications. The literature on accommodating Indigenous communities’ ways of working with collections and respect for their access requirements has been growing. In contrast, there has been very little scholarship around enabling access to archaeological collections and museums by those with other variable physical needs. Hunt and Kitchen’s Chapter 7 looks at the lack of inclusion experienced by dis/​Abled people working and volunteering in, and visiting, UK archaeological sites and museums. They note that the case studies that have been published focus on what archaeology can offer dis/​Abled people, rather than what a diverse volunteer and workforce can offer archaeology. Their chapter places enabled archaeology at the intersection of the social model of disability and Crip Theory, bringing attention to the language used around access and calls for more research on museum workforces in order to advocate for greater inclusivity. In Chapter 8, Johnson and Lione consider the creation of heritage communities in post-​conflict Iraq as a key part of a humanitarian response. The importance of curating relationships rather than simply objects is evident in this context where museum work needs to be particularly accustomed to local needs and resources. For example, rather than simply importing international ideas and materials, Iraqi museum staff are supported in developing their own methodologies for evaluating the appropriateness of locally available conservation materials. Here the role of an ‘appropriate museology’ (Kreps 2008), that recognizes local knowledge of place and material which is relevant to how collections are managed and cared for, is vital. Nevertheless, these initiatives are set within a complex network of international interest and initiatives, requiring cultural, as well as heritage, diplomacy, which is a key focus of Chapter 8.

Locating museums and collections The spatial turn in the historical analysis of knowledge has emphasized the constitutive significance of place in the production and circulation of theories and practice (Livingstone 2003). Where collections are situated and where museums are sited, frame engagements with, and interpretations of, archaeological material. Some collections may not leave the site of their excavation and be retained in situ at specially built site museums. As discussed by Papaioannou in Chapter 9, defining a site

introduction   11 museum is historically complicated. Landscapes of archaeological encounter and their framing by the heritage industry define a set of overlapping concepts from open-​air museums—​which recreate life in the past based on archaeological evidence and experimental archaeology but not by necessarily displaying original archaeological materials (Paardekooper 2012)—​to ecomuseums which foreground lived community memories and histories, the intangible dimensions of heritage, as much as the tangible remains of sites, monuments, and artefacts. Papaioannou’s example of the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth in Jordan highlights a definition of site museum that emerges through the intersections of multiple stakeholder interests, balancing the needs of active archaeological site researchers, the requirements of collections storage and documentation, relevance for local communities, as well as the demands of tourists and state actors. In other cases, tourism may be the overriding motivation for archaeological representations leading to concerns over authenticity, commercialization, and trivialization. These contestations may become particularly fraught at sites of ‘negative’ or ‘dark’ heritage (Meskell 2002). Engmann (Chapter 10), for instance, invites archaeologists to rethink the role and importance of the traces of the transatlantic slave trade in narrating stories of transgenerational trauma, dislocation, and reclamation. Through discussion of heritage tourism at Ghanaian forts and castles, Engmann further draws attention to the multiple and emotive narratives that coalesce at these sites, from the local to the global, often resulting in disagreement and clashes between African diaspora publics and local Ghanaians. Engmann’s chapter is testament to the power of location and to interpretive possibilities in the absence of archaeological finds themselves, but where archaeological traces and minimal exhibitory intervention nonetheless profoundly shape visitor meaning making. In this context, Engmann notes the role of guides who form an integral part of the interpretive experience, a reminder that meaning-​making is not the sole prerogative of archaeological specialists. More commonly, artefacts are removed from archaeological sites to separate storage facilities subsequent to their excavation. The consequences of decades of this practice are clear. Fieldwork has often framed in a ‘crisis narrative’ whereby the archaeological record needs protection, rescue, or preservation lest it be lost. Yet in museums there have been decades of panic over a very different crisis; the ‘curation crisis’ in which there is simply too much archaeology and it is an issue worldwide from Japan (Barnes and Okita 1999) to Jordan (Kersel 2015). Display strategies may put singular pieces onto a pedestal, but behind the scenes the mainstays of archaeological collections are ‘bulk finds’. In the US alone this translates to billions of artefacts in storage (Chapter 11). And that includes not just objects, but associated documentation in a wide variety of formats from paper files to outdated digital media on floppy disks. As archaeological theory and practice has developed, so too has the nature of the heritage it creates. The emergence of environmental archaeology in the early twentieth century and processual archaeology in the 1960s increased the types of material collected, while the establishment of development-​ led archaeology further expanded the volume of finds sent to storage. Childs note that this long-​recognized ‘crisis’ in US archaeology is now a ‘chronic’ problem, but in her

12   Alice Stevenson contribution (Chapter 11) she also outlines positive initiatives that take more holistic approaches to developing collection use. In finding new ways of accessing stored collections, the focus is not just upon the practical issue of object management, but upon establishing more meaningful relationships between people, and between people and objects, in order to challenge lazy stereotypes of ‘dusty’, ‘hidden’ storerooms. Many repositories are well organized, albeit underused. But these tropes also reveal that storage is not just a technical issue; it is equally ideological and political (Brusius and Singh 2018). More creative solutions to provide academic and public access may include investing in visible or visitable storage, devising loan boxes or mobile museums to take collections to different audiences including schools (Jain 1994; see also Chapter 26), or proactively encouraging use through event programming, such as the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA’s) #ArchiveLottery, allowing the public to randomly request stored finds through social media (Corsini 2017). Childs (Chapter 11) and Boyle (Chapter 13) provide a range of similarly innovative projects that seek to realize the potential of collections in storage. A different order of concern surrounds objects that were removed to other countries, particularly during the colonial era when the excision of cultural materials by foreign agencies in occupied territories could be violent. The grievances and ongoing inequalities in access to, and ownership of, such material has manifested itself most clearly in calls for repatriation, restitution, and return. In Chapter 12, Abungu discusses these terms in the context of self-​proclaimed ‘universal museums’ (ICOM 2004) and African heritage. Towards the end of the 2010s, frustration with universalist claims grew, with a watershed moment emerging in the publication of the Sarr-​Savoy (2018) report commissioned by French President, Emmanuel Macron. It has had a significant impact on discourses concerning restitution from European museums to Africa, and marks a shift in views on repatriation. While rhetoric has intensified and become more widespread across Western scholarship, Abungu reminds us that the campaign for restitution is a long-​standing one voiced by previous generations of African leaders, scholars, and activists. More importantly, he underscores the fundamental differences between Western museums’ emphasis upon object preservation within museums, and the importance to some communities in Africa for objects to be allowed to return home to die and not to be confined to institutions. Where objects are situated, close to their families or to those for whom they are powerful sources of collective memory and meaning, has become one of the most pressing twenty-​first-​century museum challenges.

Alternative materialities: Beyond finds Archaeology produces, and is itself a product of, processes of documentation in the field and the museum. This section foregrounds the types of collections that are produced

introduction   13 by archaeologists themselves and which have historically ranked low in hierarchies of museum objects: archives (Chapter 13); reproductions such as casts (Chapter 14); photographs (Chapter 15); and sound (Chapter 16). Most museums possess one or several of these types of media, but they are less frequently catalogued, curated, or managed as formal parts of institutional collections. Some, such as photographs, are frequently employed in exhibitions. Others, such as samples (Chapter 19) or field notes (Chapter 13), rarely are, while other media, such as sound, have rarely been given much critical consideration in museum archaeology (Chapter 16). It is necessary to consider not just how this material is utilized in exhibitionary contexts, but also how these media are ethically and professionally documented as part of institutional and disciplinary practice. This includes the materiality of these collections, each with their own problems and possibilities for preservation, research, interpretation, and engagement. The archaeological archive is amongst the most complicated to manage given its multiplicity of forms, encompassing not just archaeological finds but all the records produced during an archaeological project, both material and those born digital. Curation here is challenging, but as Boyle (Chapter 13) demonstrates in her discussion of UK approaches, a more holistic approach is valuable not just as a means of actively encouraging archaeologists to make more use of such collections, but also for more creative engagements for the public. Better communication, she argues, is needed between producers and receivers of archives. Moreover, Boyle makes the key observation that if ‘archaeology is about revealing human stories, then the human stories of those people who created the archives are just as important as the material they contain’. These principles equally hold true when reappraising the significance of reproductions such as plaster casts, electrotypes, or synthetic resins, to name just a few of the diverse materials in which copies or replicas are produced and which populate museum collections the world over. Foster and Jones (2020) have demonstrated the ways in which archaeological replicas can themselves acquire forms of authenticity, value, and significance through networks of social relations in which an object is entangled over time. They have highlighted how these are unique resources for engaging the public and as focuses of research. In terms of the latter, casts (and moulds from which they are made) offer numerous routes for direct archaeological analysis from iconographic to material, with historic reproductions often more detailed than monuments that have eroded in the open landscape (Payne 2019). Foster and Jones (2020) advocate ‘composite biographies’, which concern the interlinked lives of historic originals and their copies. This notion of biography is central to Chapter 14 in which Reynolds-​Kaye uses the reproduction of Pre-​Columbian monuments to draw attention to how research on replicas of archaeological monuments reveals colonial histories of exploitation entangled within museum acquisitions and archaeological practices. As with archaeological finds, the narratives that these collections speak to are multiple and have considerable interpretive potential for public engagement. Such work is important, since, as Reynolds-​Kaye underscores, the scope of reproductions in museums is vast and more diverse than just the Classical casts that have dominated scholarship. With the increasing capabilities of scanning technologies (see Chapter 27) and decreasing price of

14   Alice Stevenson 3D printing, further opportunities for replica artefacts to find a meaningful role in museum activities emerges (see Chapter 26). Photography, Reynolds-​Kaye notes, was positioned as a mutually beneficial technology with casts, a point developed by Klamm in Chapter 15. Photographic collections, as Klamm surveys, are categorically different in their museum status from artefact collections since they frequently form working collections in daily museum practice. Moreover, the very processes of archaeological interpretation materially manipulate these photo-​objects, the remnants of which are visible across these collections and require as much curatorial attention as the image itself. Through a series of case studies based on German classical archaeology, Klamm explores the epistemic function of photography in archaeology, the practices evident on their surfaces, and how they are deployed within exhibitionary spaces or effaced in archival procedures such as in cataloguing and digitization efforts. Sounds too may be collected, curated, and included as integral parts of museum strategies. Museums, Kannenberg argues in Chapter 16, are not silent spaces. Sound is a key component of the construction of meaning and Kannenberg advocates a serious consideration of how visitors listen, respond to, and understand archaeology via audio. This is inclusive of reconstructions of past soundscapes, as well as capturing what archaeological practice itself sounds like. Like any other medium managed by institutions there are ethical considerations in what is museologically appropriate in any given circumstance and the modern biases that impinge on the creation and engagement with sonic resources equally require attention. To highlight these issues, Kannenberg presents the innovative concept of the Museum of Portable Sound which includes a gallery devoted to archaeology.

Fieldwork in the museum: Transformative practice What is the value of collections themselves for contemporary archaeological research? Most museums house ‘legacy collections’, products of previous eras of archaeological practice that rarely conform to current standards or derive from other collecting practices, from piecemeal private acquisitions to outright looting. Assemblages from a single site or fieldwork season are often split between multiple institutions or have circulated in and out of different collections. Associated documentation may be partial or absent, rendering many collections orphaned. Historical conservation treatments of objects may affect modern archaeological analyses. In short, museum assemblages are fragmentary and biased representations of what might be in the field. The chapters in this section discuss different strategies for how archaeological research can be positively undertaken in museums.

introduction   15 Engaging collections directly in conversation with ongoing fieldwork is one productive avenue (e.g. Voss 2012). In Chapter 17, Holdaway, Emmitt, and Phillipps, demonstrate the value of a combined, critical approach that assesses the historical biases in the formation of museum collections and the production of excavation reports, and innovatively combines it with new varieties of data obtained through field surveys. This sort of archaeological curation does not privilege the cataloguing of individual artefacts, as has traditionally taken place in museums, but ‘preserves sets of relationships among objects as well as among other types of data’. This is made possible through digital technologies that permit diverse data sets to be integrated. Anthropology collections also hold significant value for contemporary archaeological fieldwork, albeit with a different set of considerations for the formation of the assemblages in question, as Flexner highlights (Chapter 18). Context as process is key to archaeological research on ethnographic collection given the variety of material involved and multiple locations and temporalities. This necessarily extends to engagements with descendant or source communities as these are not resources to be exploited for archaeological self-​interest as has historically been the case. Archaeologists, Flexner argues, have a role to play in assisting museums to facilitate Indigenous-​led practice. The methodological shift that Holdaway et al. (Chapter 17) advocate toward curating relationships, has further implications and relevance here as many Indigenous groups do not perceive of artefacts in isolation, but as connections between people, their environment, and spirits; artefacts can mediate those connections. A further strategy of contemporary archaeological research with museum collections is through scientific analysis. Archaeology collections are in greater demand than ever before. Enquiries may come to curators for radiometric dating analyses, genetic studies, isotopic investigations, and petrographic preparations. Kristiansen (2014), for instance, has claimed that archaeology is experiencing a ‘third science revolution’, permitting the micro-​archaeology of material investigations to be meshed with broader theorizing of macro-​archaeological problems. Such a revolution could mean that legacy collections will have renewed relevance as primary source material given the difficulties of undertaking fieldwork in, or exported resulting finds from, many parts of the world. Despite this, as Quinn observes in Chapter 19 ‘surprisingly few specific guidelines exist for the scientific analysis of museum artefacts’. His chapter fills this lacuna, addressing the advantages and risks of analysis, the various steps involved in the analysis of curated artefacts, including the choice of scientific technique, the negotiation of permissions, sampling, analysis, dissemination, and the future of data and analytical samples. Scientific analysis, however, is contingent upon the preservation of objects. Historical interventions to stabilize or conserve artefacts, including those applied during early archaeological excavations, can significantly constrain modern analyses (Odegaard and O’Grady 2016). It is also the case that the potential and demands of modern analyses themselves are changing how material is cared for and conserved. In Chapter 20, Wills focuses on this in the context of the challenges posed by human remains, which hold a unique status in collections. She notes that the investigative potential of this material is

16   Alice Stevenson ever increasing with more sophisticated apparatus, which has created new obligations on museum professionals to employ preservation techniques that minimize interference and facilitate study in ethical ways. To this end, Wills has developed passive, non-​ interventive approaches for caring for human remains.

Exhibitionary cultures The exhibition of archaeological material has long been a primary means of communicating disciplinary knowledge. More recently, it has been emphasized that displays do not merely reflect knowledge, but also actively constitute it through a range of techniques and strategies (see Moser 2010). Traditions of display in this section are examined through a selection of historical, institutional, and national contexts in China, Qatar, UK, Turkey, and Ghana to illuminate trends in how archaeological museums communicate and shape popular and academic understandings of archaeology. The focus here is largely on permanent galleries rather than temporary exhibitions. The latter are often more responsive to contemporary trends and societal agendas, more experimental in their approach, and may be narrower in themes and narratives than permanent galleries. This is particularly clear in the case of China, as explained by Wang and Hang (Chapter 21), where the frequency and importance of temporary exhibitions has increased markedly in the last decade. Their chapter provides a long-​term perspective on the development of archaeological displays in China from the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the present day. In this context, how archaeological resources in the country are managed at the state and local level, and how museums represent them, are intimately linked. Central government initiatives have substantially shaped the nature of museums and their displays, with narratives historically informed by Marxist frameworks. In China today, two primary traditions of archaeological museum management exist, one focused on ‘unearthed cultural relics’, the other focused on archaeological sites themselves. The development of the latter has significantly increased in recent years and, due to the structure of heritage management in China, is a way for archaeologists themselves to have greater investment and influence on how material is presented to the public (see also Chapter 9). While many permanent exhibitions in China remain rooted in chronological sequencing and in the presentation of artefacts for aesthetic appreciation, elsewhere a trend in exhibition strategies is the ‘narrative turn’, whereby museums have been reconceptualized as environments for telling stories (MacLeod et al. 2012). In archaeology, this has manifested itself in a move from chronological or typological arrangements through to more emotional and sensory engagements (Christophilopoulou 2020). Collins addresses this shift (Chapter 22), where he introduces the role of storytelling as the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum’s redisplay of its ancient Near East collections. Such an approach has been equally productive in places where there has not previously been a culture of museum visiting, such

introduction   17 as is the case of the Arabian Gulf. As Exell highlights in a discussion of the National Museum of Qatar (Chapter 23), emotive engagements with archaeological material, rather than dissemination of objectified knowledge, are vital for eliciting engagement with local audiences. This trend has seen some museums include emotional, experiential narratives, that draw on poetry and fiction, inviting audiences to envision their own stories from object and information encounters in galleries (Merriman 2004: 103). A second trend in modern exhibition development is the consideration given to learning and public engagement impacts (Christophilopoulou and Burn 2020: 13). Why people go to museums, what they do there, and how they make meaning from these experiences are all relevant to the development and marketing of exhibitions (Falk and Dierking 2012). Consequently, considerable efforts are now put into audience testing of ideas prior to installation, as Collins (Chapter 22) discusses. In particular, he points out the additional need to consult with communities that have a greater stake in the stories being told, such as local diaspora groups and those in the country of origin. The central importance of evaluation to museum meaning-​making is emphasized in several other chapters throughout this volume (Chapters 16, 26, and 27), a reminder that archaeologists cannot assume audiences will receive ideas in the way intended, and that dialogue across the discipline, institutions, and publics is a crucial part of museum archaeology. Exell and Collins’ chapters also make clear the multiple agencies that are involved in curation, with narratives a product of interdisciplinary conversations around archaeology. Most recently this has extended to include digital specialists, as interactive media increasingly become integrated into exhibition design, a third key trend in the development of archaeological displays. As argued by Stobiecka (2020), this has the potential to introduce new forms of narration into archaeological galleries, although too often analogue methods of storytelling are merely transferred to the digital. Further challenges of both hardware and software longevity and sustainability mean that the lifespans of physical display and digital technologies are often out of synch (e.g. Joy and Harknett 2020: 55; Chapter 27). The latter issue is less of concern in temporary exhibitions, and it is in this context that Tarkan and Çetin (Chapter 25) present an innovative use of digital, interactive, and artistic methods to display archaeological practices and research at a field site. The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük hosted at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilization, Turkey, in 2017 represents a rare exhibition solely focused on archaeological data creation and knowledge production. The show contained no original artefacts, but instead drew extensively from archaeological archives produced over 25 years of fieldwork. In so doing, the full complexity of fieldwork and the expansive nature of the material it produces could be conveyed far more clearly than when single artefacts or selected narratives are presented. Although fieldwork has historically been overlooked in archaeology galleries, the Çatalhöyük exhibition does speak to another emerging trend in exhibitionary design for archaeology; the inclusion of not just the results of archaeology, but the processes and the theoretical frameworks of archaeological interpretation, including aspects such as the histories of archaeology (Chapter 1), documentation of fieldwork, conversations with archaeologists, as well as the presencing of surrounding landscapes and local communities.

18   Alice Stevenson The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük notably used contemporary art installations, including digital media and sound (see also Chapters 16 and 27), a feature too of the Ashmolean Museum’s designs for its Middle East galleries (Chapter 22), and Qatar’s National Museum (Chapter 23). Artist interventions have been a common activity in archaeological galleries since the 1990s (Merriman 2004: 98–​100; Mikdadi 2020). These works can form display contexts, such as at the National Museum of Scotland where pop-​ art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi was commissioned to create abstract bronze figures for the Early Peoples gallery to incorporate prehistoric personal adornments and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy was hired to create sculptures that evoked natural materials that have not survived from prehistoric Scotland (Roberts 2013). Art can also be used to provide commentary on modern heritage concerns, such as the temporary exhibition Cultures in the Crossfire: Stories from Syria and Iraq hosted by the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2018. It displayed antiquities alongside contemporary artworks by Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj responding to the refugee crisis (for an important critique see Rafii 2019). Then there are artists that have taken archaeological themes to inform contemporary installations, like Mark Dion, whose work has paralleled archaeological processes, its categorizations, and display (Renfrew 2003). Merriman (2004: 102), however, has cautioned that contemporary art interventions in archaeological displays might be seen as abandoning interpretation in favour of aesthetics, of valorizing form over context, and has argued for an ‘informed imagination’ when working with artists. Others, have pointed out that using artists merely shifts the responsibility for developing counter-​ narratives from the museum to external practitioners, undermining an institution’s resolve to address change itself (e.g. Whitehead 2009: 24). Museum displays are also created for and used by specialist audiences. Eyifa-​ Dzidzienyo’s Chapter 25 looks at the role of archaeological displays in university contexts, specifically at the University of Ghana’s Archaeological Department, which are central to teaching and training. The displays both inform, and are informed, by school children and university students who have agency in their curation. Like many places around the world, there are challenges faced by bulk archaeological finds and lack of storage. These, however, offer opportunities to extend displayed narratives through touch and direct engagement with artefacts and is a central strategy in discovery, an exhibition design consideration also explored in Collins’ chapter, and is practised through object-​based learning in the University of Ghana’s museum (see also Merriman 2004: 93–​5; Chapter 26). Importantly, Eyifa-​Dzidzienyo highlights the significance of these displays for students across the university, not just those studying archaeology.

Expanding and transcending the museum: Social Issues and digital frontiers This last section returns to the definition of the museum and some key developments that are transforming their purpose and identity. To do so, these chapters focus on how

introduction   19 collections may be a resource for other forms of intervention where archaeological interpretation might not necessarily the primary goal. It looks towards the contemporary social roles of archaeological collections in the present through creative engagement and social justice initiatives, particularly beyond the walls of the museum or storage facility, including the digital realm. In Chapter 26, Del Vesco addresses how museums are using creative initiatives to rethink museum purposes and address everything from issues of immigration, to health care and climate change. The significance of these shifts in museum purpose are at the heart of tensions over new proposals for ICOM’s definition of a museum; between those that wish to retain the central importance of education, collecting, and conservation, and those that seek an expanded, more aspirational remit including social justice and health and wellbeing initiatives. Del Vesco argues that these interests need not be mutually exclusive, and through a discussion of a diverse range of programmes at the Muzio Egizio in Turin, Italy, highlights the role of archaeological collections and knowledge in providing inspiration for social work with immigrant, prison, and hospital communities. Many of these projects fall under what can be termed ‘health and wellbeing’ agendas, which creatively use museum collections as departure points for activities beneficial to the mental wellbeing of participants, for healing and therapy (see also Kamash 2020). Yet, if these initiatives are to be more than self-​serving outreach initiatives or assumed to be inherently morally righteous activities (Fredheim 2020), structured evaluation of public value is needed to establish if the public truly are active agents or merely passive beneficiaries, and whether these can become sustainable approaches embedded within institutional missions and commitments, as Del Vesco recognizes (see also Perry 2019). In Chapter 27, Pett extends discussion to digital content from museum websites, online collections, social media, computer gaming, and virtual reality. Museums, he outlines, have various levels of ‘digital maturity’ and face challenges across the digital divide. Nevertheless, all institutions when embarking on the production of any digital project require strong institutional foundations, clear collections documentation, and critical thought as to the purposes and long-​term resourcing if quality, impactful, and meaningful experiences for the public are to be assured. This resonates with Perry’s (2019) observation that digital technology can play an important role in facilitating encounters with archaeology, but that this requires conscious design and pedagogical choices that are not inherent within the technology itself. And this should incorporate consideration for different user communities, from those who need to be enabled (Chapter 7) or Indigenous communities (Chapters 3, 6, and 18). Digital initiatives are often a means of reaching outwards, but rarely do projects allow the public to cooperate with museums more directly in how collections are understood, documented, and managed. Yet, as Rohiola and Kuitunen remind us in Chapter 28, the public have always had a role in archaeological research from finds brought into museums by citizens in the nineteenth century, through to very active hobbyist metal detecting groups in more recent decades. Hobbyists are the focus of Rohiola and Kuitunen’s chapter where they introduce the digital platform, FindSampo, developed in Sweden to not only make accessible archaeological finds, but also develop opportunities for the public to be involved more directly with collections. These sorts

20   Alice Stevenson of Citizen Science approaches seek to democratize the management of archaeological collections, encouraging more cooperative approaches between different publics and archaeologists, highlighting the shift in curatorial strategies to attending to relationships between people rather than just things through user-​centred design. Digital platforms, as Rohiola and Kuitunen outline, also have the potential for Linked Open Data, thereby interrelating multiple archaeological collections transnationally (see also Chapter 17).

Conclusion The breadth of themes, approaches, stakeholders, and contemporary issues within which archaeological collections and their institutional homes are implicated warrants sustained critical engagement from the discipline of archaeology. The history and ongoing treatment of collections shapes not just the possibilities for communication or engagement, but also research questions, methodologies, ethics, and interpretations. Across the volume are shared concerns for contemporary practice, such as the idea that collections care is not simply a technical management term, but one that is attentive to the range of emotions and affects that working with assemblages entails. This highlights the range of ways of knowing the past and understanding objects, but also of the potential uses to which the past can creatively be put. It demands a sharing of disciplinary authority and seeking partnerships with relevant communities in the process of interpretation and representation, as well as the recognition of the broader agencies that were part of archaeological and collections production often under colonial conditions. Such engagements involve a wide range of materials, not simply archaeological finds, from the monumental to the microscopic. This diversity of activity challenges archaeology as a discipline and the museum as a sector to redefine critically what constitutes best practice and who that serves, questions that demand ongoing reflection and evaluation. Ultimately, archaeology is not necessarily always the finite resource it has been characterized to be. There continues to be a profusion of material produced by fieldwork, reproductive technologies, creative re-​interpretations, shifts in interpretative positions, and the inclusion of new voices. Museum archaeology thus deserves a far more central place within archaeological theory, practice, and training in future.

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26   Alice Stevenson Whitehead, C. 2009. Museums and the Construction of Disciplines: Art and Archaeology in Nineteenth-​Century Britain. London: Duckworth. Whitley, J. 2016. ‘Discussion and Debate: Fusing the Horizons, or Why Context Matters: The Interdependence of Fieldwork and Museum Study in Mediterranean Archaeology’. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 29 (2): pp. 247–​61. Wingfield, C. 2017. ‘Collection as (Re)assemblage: Refreshing Museum Archaeology’. World Archaeology 49 (5): pp. 594–​607.

Pa rt A

C OL L E C T I N G , C AT E G OR I Z I N G , A N D C HA L L E N G I N G H I STOR I E S

Chapter 1

Rec overing th e h i story of archaeol o g y i n museums Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger

1.1  The History of archaeology and museums—​what connections? Over the past three or four decades, considerable strides have been made in the study of the history and the historiography of archaeology. These works have notably focused on the history of archaeological institutions, including research centres, university chairs and indeed museums. In the course of the nineteenth century and parts of the twentieth century, museums were a central location not only for the exercise of archaeology, but also for its affirmation as a specific form of scientific practice, equally positioned between the history of art, humanistic erudition, and the earth and life sciences (Coye 1998; Murray and Evans 2008; Schlanger and Nordbladh 2008; Schnapp 1997). Through the mediation of the archaeological collections they displayed, museums have contributed decisively to forge the public and social perceptions of the past. At the same time, these institutions took on a central role from the mid-​nineteenth century onwards in the construction and the diffusion of narratives regarding the origins and success of Western nations, and of Western civilization in general. Consequently, it is now admitted that archaeology—​much like history, ethnography, and art history—​had been deeply influenced, in both its practices and its interpretations, by nationalist and colonialist discourses. These critical approaches to the history of archaeology have subsequently oriented research towards the political uses of the past, and notably the place occupied by archaeology in the legitimation discourses of totalitarian regimes—​and, for that matter, non-​totalitarian ones as well (Arnold 1990; Díaz Andreu 2007; Härke 2000).

30    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger Since the 1980s, some broadly speaking postmodern theoretical reflections on the powers of museums, with regard to the control and display of knowledge, also came to influence this critical examination of the history and impacts of the discipline (Hooper-​Greenhill 1992; Said 1993). Among others, these works questioned just how legitimate were archaeological (and anthropological) museums to present, to represent, and indeed to talk about—​and on behalf of—​other cultures and their pasts. It was further recognized that dealing with the past was necessarily imbricated with questions of politics and power and that these contexts have impacted on the conditions of production and consumption of archaeological knowledge—​in the past of the discipline, and in its present as well (Fernández 2001; Hamilakis 2008; Kaeser 2004; Marchand 1996; Tahan 2010; Trigger 1984). Moreover, considering the biases produced by nationalism, colonialism, and all forms of imperialism on data collection and their interpretation, the necessity for archaeology museums, in particular those of Western countries, to confront themselves with the legacy of their past has become a burning issue within these last three decades. This new interest in the ‘exhibitionary complex’, as Tony Bennett (1988) has named it, encouraged museum institutions to give a historical framework to their collections and practices. In fact, it became inescapable for an ever-​increasing number of historians of science and of museums, as well as for museum practitioners themselves, that Western nations had often built large swaths of their prestige on archaeological excavations and on ethnographic and naturalist explorations, whose aims and deployment have occurred as part of a unilateral or unbalanced power relationship between Western and colonized countries. As a matter of fact, numerous archaeological projects in Africa, in the Middle East, or in the Mediterranean, alongside the foundations of the museums which still host nowadays the artefacts collected, acquired, or prised out from them, have unfolded within, and at the service of, imperialist projects (see among others, in English: Barringer and Flynn 1998; Fiskesjö 2010; Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990; Karp and Lavine 1991; Owen 2006; Stocking 1991). The question of ‘restitutions’ or ‘returns’ is a highly topical consequence or aftershock of this context (see this volume: Chapters 2, 3, and 12). Without delving at length here into this intricate issue, one aspect of the debate is worth pointing out, drawing notably on its recent French iteration spurred by President Emmanuel Macron’s commitment to return a range of objects of African cultural heritage (see Sarr and Savoy 2018). What seems to us important to emphasize about this debate, alongside its obvious political and identity dimensions, is its intrinsically historical nature, drawing on the critical study of documentary, textual, visual, and material evidence. Both the conditions and motivations surrounding the initial ‘extraction’ of objects (be it through military looting, scientific collecting, or commercial transactions), and the specific entities to which they might be returned nowadays or in the future (direct descendants, community ventures, private museums, national institutions), are questions that will require, in our view, a deep and critically informed immersion into historical sources—​deploying the kind of scholarship long practised by historians of archaeology.

Recovering the history of archaeology in museums    31

1.2  Why the history of archaeology in museums matters? Some inputs for archaeological thought and practice The longstanding and preeminent concern for artefacts and finds in archaeology has notably led to the deployment of the ‘typological method’, which consequently gave to museums and to reference collections a predominant place in the construction of the discipline. Indeed, it was in museums, galleries, and cabinets of collectors—​as much as in other sites of knowledge making such as the field, the laboratory, the library, or the lecture hall—​that the scientific affirmation of archaeology took place in the nineteenth century (Delley and Kaeser in press; Rowley-​Conwy 2007; Tarantini 2012). Moreover, the ways objects and collections have been gathered and set up in museums have crucially influenced the production of knowledge in archaeology. Classification, typology, and seriation have been used for structuring the space of the museum; as the following examples will show, they also ended up, intentionally or not, shaping our knowledge of the past. One paradigmatic example of the performative effect of such exhibitions is Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s Three Age system. As he deployed it in the 1820s at the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities in Copenhagen (later to be the National Museum of Denmark, Nationalmuseet), Thomsen divided prehistoric (pre-​Roman) times into the successive Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. In this way, he established a relative chronology of prehistory based on the comparative study of ancient artefacts and the materials of which they were made. The originality of Thomsen’s approach was to organize categories of objects with regards to their material and technological development, rather than on geographical or chronological criteria (Gräslund 1987; Rowley-​Conwy 2007). The fusion of antiquities and ethnographic collections—​another specificity of his approach—​created new possibilities for observing relations between objects beyond spatial and temporal boundaries. As a scientific approach of antiquities and ethnographic collections, Thomsen’s comparative archaeology proposed a narration for the cultural history of humankind, where the effects produced by the arrangement of objects in showcases was in some respects akin to a language (Eskildsen 2012). The ‘language of objects’ developed by Thomsen provided visitors with an account in which the earliest times were conceived in similar terms all over the world. This new perspective bypassed previous literary, philological, and mythological accounts of the beginning of human history, as notably prevailing in the Mediterranean ‘heartland’ of European civilization (Eskildsen 2012: 25). Through the mediation of objects, Thomsen’s theory developed into scientific practice, where ethnographic comparisons made possible the construction of universal scientific laws in an evolutionist perspective. This proved to

32    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger be an essential step in the affirmation of human prehistory from the nineteenth century onwards. An equally important though less well-​known episode in this prehistoric affirmation, involving this time a temporary gathering and display of artefacts rather than a permanent museum venue, took place at the 1867 Exposition universelle d’art et d’industrie in Paris. Within the broader history of Universal Exhibitions from Crystal Palace onwards (see Barth 2008; Greenhalgh 1988), the Paris 1867 event represents a particular landmark in terms of its scale, objectives, and long-​lasting impacts. Instigated by Napoléon III, the symbolic and commercial drivers of this event were channelled to celebrate ‘the triumph of industry’ and ‘the progress of labour’. A deliberately functional (rather than aesthetic) architectural space was designed to accommodate the exhibition on the Champ-​de-​Mars: an immense oval structure with concentric galleries, where products of industry were displayed by theme (e.g. machines, furniture, clothing), intersected by radial streets allocated to each of the exhibiting nations (see Wasemael 2001). Strategically placed around the central garden at the heart of the edifice was an unprecedented Musée de l’histoire du travail, dedicated to the tools and products of the past, rather than the present. Crucially, this ‘retrospective’ dimension began with the ‘earliest times’, including the ‘epochs prior to the use of metals’. Indeed, this Musée de l’histoire du travail represented the first public, popular-​minded, and furthermore systematic display of flint instruments, attesting to the most ancient Palaeolithic and ‘antediluvian’ ages of humankind. Deploying various tactics, the curators of this temporary exhibition managed to secure, even if temporarily, a wide range of stone artefacts from amateurs and extra-​Parisian collections. This gave them free hand to select and arrange these artefacts in a narrative of ‘anticipatory continuity’ with the surrounding displays of incremental progress across the galleries of the Universal Exhibition. On the one hand, the novel notions of ‘Acheulean industry’ or ‘Mousterian industry’, coined to characterize prehistoric epochs, effectively mimicked the national-​based framework of the exhibition at large, with its well-​distinguished French, Italian, Belgian (etc.) spaces. On the other hand, these notions also emulated and normalized the key concept of ‘industry’ as the triumphant epitome of Western civilization, a constitutive trait whose first seeds and indeed incremental impetus could be traced back to the crude stone implements assembled in the Musée de l’histoire du travail. There is more to say about the imbrications of national agendas and universal aspirations here (see Kaeser 2002; Müller-​Scheessel 2001; and Schlanger 2016, in press a, b), but for our present purposes this episode confirms the key role played by museum exhibitions (either permanent or temporary) as crucial cognitive spaces in which archaeological knowledge is not only displayed and transmitted but also, more fundamentally, created. The possibility of telling such edifying ‘object lessons’, be it for the nation states of the industrial revolution or the agents of Imperial expansion, was of course predicated on the reliable reading and interpretation of the objects under consideration. Most importantly, their authenticity as ‘reliable witness’ with which to ‘read the past’ had to be unambiguously secured. The issue of archaeological frauds and fakes, to which we now briefly turn, touches therefore on several aspects. To begin with, such fraudulent claims are well

Recovering the history of archaeology in museums    33 able to reveal the great diversity of actors and skills involved in archaeology. Already attested in ancient times, the practice of fake-​making notably reveals the perspectives and motivations of the perpetrators involved—​and of their audiences. These publics have long included, alongside more or less wealthy and discerning individual collectors, also a spate of museum curators keen to obtain, often at great expense and through dubious procedures, some ‘too good to miss’ proffered items, indispensable for completing their series or adorning their display cases. As highlighted by recent studies and exhibitions (see Kaeser 2011 and references there; Vayson de Pradennes 1932), the practice of fakes and forgeries, be it for reasons of pecuniary gain or for ‘anti-​establishment’ revenge, has accelerated considerably since the mid-​nineteenth century. What is instructive about these forgeries is that they gradually gave rise to a form of ‘counter-​expertise’, if only to avoid the cognitive, social, and financial embarrassments of gullibility. By now fully established, this expertise encompasses much more broadly the nature and conditions of authenticity, be they intrinsic or extrinsic to the objects in question. At the intrinsic level, the ocular examination of dubious items has developed over the decades into the full blown microscopic and physical/​chemical analysis of ancient materials and processes. Besides serving to unmask fakes (as art historians are wont to do) these skills have since provided unprecedented insights into ancient technologies, most notably regarding prevailing modes of production and of consumption in the past. Similarly, questions regarding the origin and localization of suspicious ‘treasures’ proffered to weary curators have expanded manifold. Issues of site provenience, of stratigraphic control, of assemblage integrity, and above all of context have emerged, now of obviously much broader interest for understanding ancient societies as a whole, and not just for establishing the authenticity or reliability of such or such proffered pieces. The increased attention given to questions of provenance has proved salutary in another respect. Museums are nowadays highly focused on the ‘life history’ of the items they curate (or covet), since their initial retrieval and until today, including the various hands and collections they have passed through, the eventual restorations and attributions they have undergone, the circumstances and motivations of their circulations—​and finally, as mentioned in the introduction, the political opportunities and ethical imperatives of their eventual restitution.

1.3  Showing the history of archaeology in museums—​what means to what ends? 1.3.1 Reviving—​and containing—​the past The role of the museum for making knowledge has been amply confirmed by the history of archaeology, as we have seen. Let us now inverse and complement the perspective, and turn to examine how the history of archaeology itself can be brought to serve for

34    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger public outreach and the communication aims of the museum. The comparative archaeology proposed by Thomsen and his followers gradually came to influence students of prehistory across Europe. This influence is actually still in evidence in some archaeology museums in Northern Italy, where local curators and researchers have recently taken the informed decision to make space in their museography for the history of archaeology. A case in point is provided by the museum of Reggio Emilia, founded shortly after the creation of the Italian Kingdom in 1861. Prehistoric archaeology was at that time quite a popular discipline, insofar as it promised to trace the roots of emerging European nations or nation states back to a remote past, even beyond that of classical antiquity. The fifth International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology, held in Bologna in 1871, provided the opportunity to establish two other prehistory museums, in Bologna itself and in Modena, where Bronze Age and Etruscan archaeology had been particularly flourishing. These three Italian museums exhibited prehistoric antiquities according to a chronological and geographical distribution inspired by the National Museum of Denmark. In Reggio Emilia and Modena, ethnographic objects served to complete the archaeological collections in a comparative perspective: the customs of exotic populations (as observed in the nineteenth century) served to illustrate the presumed habits of the prehistoric inhabitants of Northern Italy. By the beginnings of the twentieth century, these three museums fell into decades long disinterest and neglect. The 1970s renovation projects, when they came, granted a renewed significance to these institutions and to their collections. Interestingly, it was decided to refurbish the nineteenth-​century displays in order to inform the public regarding the archaeological theories of the time (Cova 2014). These renovation projects were guided by history of archaeology considerations, with the restoration of ancient frescoes, the recycling of ancient showcases, and the preservation of the same exhibition layout all serving to recover the first curatorial choices in terms of chronology, geography, and typology (Fig. 1.1). In the renewal projects, the reproduction of old exhibition displays amounted to the welcome inclusion of the history of archaeological practices and interpretations as an object of interest in its own right, a feature deemed well worth sharing with the wider public. The visitors are provided with proper tools for reinterpreting, in the present, the history and the identity of the renovated museums. They can understand that these places have played two important roles since the second half of the nineteenth century: that of gathering, protecting, and exhibiting the ‘collective memory’ of the region, and that of contributing to the demonstration of prehistory as a modern scientific practice (Cova 2014). In contrast to the admittedly discontinuous ‘revival’ attested in the prehistory museums of Northern Italy, the case of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford rather suggests a form of gradual and controlled ‘fossilization’. In the 1870s and 1880s, General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-​Rivers himself had been fairly clear regarding ‘the principles of classification adopted in the arrangement of his anthropological collection’ (Pitt-​Rivers 1891). Eschewing geographical or ethnic distinction, he emphasized the formal properties of universal ‘types’, gradually and incrementally evolving from simple to complex. In line with the Darwinian creed whereby Natura non facit saltus (‘nature

Recovering the history of archaeology in museums    35

Figure 1.1:  Museo Civico Archeologico Etnologico di Modena. The archaeological section renovated in 2007 reproduces the exhibition displays of the nineteenth century. Picture: Elisabetta Cova. Rights reserved.

makes no jumps’), Pitt-​Rivers’ ‘object lesson’ on display in his museum promoted an inherently conservative message. The museum curators that succeeded him did not all abide by this particular paradigm, and in fact they considerably amended and upgraded his displays. For all that, however, the Pitt-​Rivers Museum today still evokes, with its distinctive vitrines, labelling, and ordering, an alluring accumulation of bygone ideas and practices: ‘The displays that had been originally designed to show the slow evolution of technologies now are presented as showing range and variety of design’ (Petch 2011: 173). While the changing paradigms and messages may not always be sufficiently clear to the visiting public, there is no doubt that the museum’s conscious display of its nineteenth and early twentieth-​century foundations forms today a key component of its identity and its didactic success. A further case of such a ‘patrimonialization’ of institutional history, with possibly more insidious strategic consequence, is that of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The Trocadero hill, facing as it happens the site of the 1867 Universal Exhibition mentioned above, had hosted since the 1880s an ethnographic museum, whose exotic bric-​à-​brac had inspired avant-​garde artists. From 1928 onwards this museum was transformed under the leadership of Paul Rivet and Georges-​Henri Rivière into the Musée de l’Homme, embracing ethnography, prehistory, and physical anthropology. Alongside a range of museological

36    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger innovations in display and public outreach, the museum also documented the diversity of peoples and cultures, championed a militant humanistic and anti-​racist conception, and served as a major hub of anti-​Nazi resistance during the Second World War (see Blanckaert 2015; Conklin 2013; De l’Estoile 2007). Half a century later, these founding energies long-​depleted, the museum was further drained of its ethnographic collections in favour of the nearby ‘First Arts’ Museum, now officially named Musée du quai Branly—​Jacques Chirac. When the Musée de l’Homme reopened after extensive renovations in 2015, its own history came to play a strategic role in its museography. Some ten or twelve historical ‘milestones’ composed of texts and photographs were positioned across the museum space to highlight its changing architecture, its venerable collections, and indeed its scientific and political heroes. However, such a celebratory approach appears at times to release the museum from undertaking a deeper critical reflection regarding the kind of history, in the broad sense, it actually aims to display and narrate to its publics. Indeed, the story of human evolution across its vitrines rather appears as an-​historical, limited to trite and decontextualized considerations on ‘human nature’ and ‘the human condition’, proceeding on the assumption that ‘We are all unique. We are all heirs to a genetic and cultural heritage that is specific to us’. The museum’s insistent ‘patrimonialization’ of its own history may have deprived it, paradoxically, of sufficient historical reflexivity and sense of social complexity. It conveys the ‘human adventure’ in such a way that its visitors can only take for granted—​rather than notice, then question, and possibly challenge—​the inevitability of unidirectional globalization from the Stone Age to the Computer Age (see Schlanger 2016). Of different historical scope is the last example to be given here, that of a museum renovation in which the history of archaeology came to occupy an important conceptual—​and indeed material—​space. The Neues Museum, built in 1843 on the Museumsinsel in Berlin (the island on the Spree epitomizing museums as sites of knowledge and of power), was heavily damaged during the Second World War and left to its fate during the following decades. After the fall of the Berlin wall, plans were drawn for its reopening, generating long-​drawn discussions among curators and architects on how to deal with the traces and scars of its history. Rather than erasing its recent layers of destruction or neglect, the choice was made to refurbish and to highlight previous elements of architecture, including the stairwell and the mural paintings (Fig. 1.2). In the nineteenth century, when the Neues Museum was new, these architectural and decorative remains were seen as central elements, and the same features also contributed to give the Museum its renewed identity in 2009. While the architecture had suffered from the War bombings, many of the mural paintings had already been covered up by then. Drawn by famous artists of the time, these paintings were originally intended to assist the visitors in their discovery of the past, by illustrating the history of the ancient civilizations whose humble remains, sometimes difficult to fathom, were exhibited in its showcases (Bodenstein 2016: 268). These paintings had at the onset clear interpretative functions, yet they become nowadays, as nineteenth-​ century representations of ancient times, refreshed relics of the recent past and documents for the history of archaeology itself. At present, in fact, they enable the

Recovering the history of archaeology in museums    37

Figure 1.2:  Neues Museum Berlin renovated in 2009. The painted decor dating back to the nineteenth century appears in the new museography project as traces of the past and testimony of the history of archaeological practice. Picture: Aleksander Zykov, Wikimedia Commons. License: cc-​by-​sa-​2.0.

twenty-​first-​century visitor to appreciate the nineteenth-​century archaeological imagination and scenography, ranging from mythological scenes of the Nordic pantheon to the political motives which encouraged archaeologists to reconstruct patriotic antiquities (vaterländische Alterthümer) and to implement large-​scale excavation projects in Egypt and the ‘Orient’. In other words, these revived paintings shed light on the perception of the past among the museum’s founders, and highlighted the images which contributed to foster the public appreciation of antiquity from 1843 onwards. One of the challenging successes of the Neues Museum renovation project resides in its ability to foreground what is saved from the past, rather than what is lost of it—​ no matter how recent or ancient is this past (Chipperfield 2009: 11). Among their many symbolic and ideological functions (Schnapp 2020), ruins and vestiges of the past take on an additional role as palimpsests and mediators through which the history of archaeology itself is visually transmitted to the public. The surviving relics of nineteenth-​century architecture at the museum appear as if these were archaeologists who had discovered them, and tried to preserve them, as relics of some long-​vanished civilizations. The visitors thus experience a range of temporal scales, which bring them back (from the ancient Egypt on display) to the 175 years or so history of the buildings, the institutions, and the practices which accompanied the collection and interpretation of the antiquities under display.

38    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger

1.3.2 Actors and publics of history Reintroducing the history of archaeology in museums confronts its visitors with the depth of time and thus the historicity of archaeological practice. Archaeology museums have defined a multitude of perspectives to historicize archaeological practice in accordance with their own history and collections. Museums make their self-​history focusing on some specific research traditions developed by the institution or on some particular excavations or specific actors of the discipline. Historicity can also be suggested by certain architectural details, decorations, and furniture all of which give opportunities for the museums to build an image of themselves, to recall their origins and identity by situating them within the museum landscape. Such practices are not new; since the nineteenth century, they have corresponded to the perceived needs of building a unified vision of the past upon which to celebrate national ideals and heroes. Within the past generation or so, the ‘historization’ of the museum space has also contributed to underline ambivalence, choice, and diversity in the conception and appropriation of the past. A further insight into the history of archaeology can be gained—​and conveyed—​ by appreciating the diversity of actors involved in archaeological practice, in the field and beyond. This diversity spans the standing and motivations of these archaeological actors, be they part of the categories of professionals (salaried, proficient) or ‘bourgeois amateurs’, labourers, travellers, spies, missionaries, colonial administrators, wives, spouses or companions, or indeed, as we saw earlier, fraudsters of all kinds. An international or rather ‘transnational’ perspective on archaeological actors and their activities is provided by the exhibition The Great Game. Archaeology and Politics. The main aim of this exhibition, first presented in Essen in 2010, was to examine the conflicts between European empires over the control of the territories of Central Asia and the Middle East between 1860 and 1940. The exhibition focused on a range of issues—​the military, politics, economics, tourisms, national rivalries, territories control, spying, colonial administration, academics, media—​in which archaeology and archaeological figures have been involved. Altogether, this revealed how archaeology and the knowledge it brought to bear—​such as linguistics, ethnology, geology, botany, anthropology, architecture, history of religion—​have been mobilized and instrumentalized to give meaning to these struggles, and how in turn these political issues and the actors who conveyed them have guided scientific projects and shaped the production of knowledge (Trümpler 2010). At another level, several inquiries into the practice of archaeology have been concerned with the manual and intellectual aspects of archaeological labour (see Mickel 2021; Quirke 2010; Schlanger 2010). These projects have highlighted the interest of scrutinizing archaeology not only from the point of view of the major, official, and notorious figures of the discipline, but rather from that of the executants, the subalterns, and the go-​betweens. These often invisible, informal, or poorly documented actors and their achievements have rarely been shared with the public in archaeological accounts

Recovering the history of archaeology in museums    39 or in museums (see this volume: Chapters 14 and 15). Yet they illustrate, often better than other formal reports or dominant accounts, the depths and implications of the ‘operational chain’ that spans from observations and investigations in the field to laboratory analysis and restoration studios, from the more or less fortuitous or systematic uncovering of finds in remote locations to their physical removal and symbolic translocation to the centralizing museum.

1.3.3 Sharing archaeological challenges Histories of archaeology in museums are often related to one main declared aim—​that of better informing their visitors regarding the complex mechanisms of knowledge production in archaeology. Better than through abstract pronouncements, the history of archaeology with its case studies and illustrations, and indeed its whiff of adventure and controversy, can serve to drive home both the enduring solidity and the relative transience of archaeological knowledge. By showing (fading photographs are de rigueur) the practices and the perspectives of yesteryears, it becomes possible at once to strengthen and to historicize claims about the past. Together with that, the history of archaeology can provide the public with some means to appreciate the contents of the exhibitions and of archaeology in general. Over the past few decades, be it for structural, ethical, or indeed budgetary reasons, many museums have become disconnected from the experience of archaeology as it is practised in the field and in research laboratories. With of course some exceptions, museums nowadays are rarely involved in archaeological practice, except as serving as the final repositories and conservation sites for the objects unearthed (Sullivan and Childs 2003: 5). Partly as a consequence of that, the public also tends to occupy a very marginal position in archaeological museums, holding a mostly passive role as the target of entertainment and outreach projects (Kaeser 2016). This situation is made particularly delicate in archaeological museums by the fact that ‘ownership’ of the heritage under display is often said to be shared by the museum institution, the scholarly community, and society at large. Following its study and conservation, this museified heritage has in some way to be returned and made accessible to the members of the public so that they can appropriate it—​insofar as this is another challenge, that they are at all interested in any way. For some museums, however, this endorsement by the public cannot be limited to the passive consumption of knowledge produced by others. These museums seek to further involve the public by prompting it to reflect on the place of heritage in collective and personal biographies, so that this legacy becomes a shared or communal good rather than a set of precious items withheld in secure repositories or at best displayed in museum showcases. As examples of initiatives aiming to reconnect archaeological heritage and the visiting public in reflexive ways, notably resting on considerations emerging from the history of the discipline, can be mentioned the Archaeology and Me EU-​funded long-​term project (Guermandi 2016), and, specifically to Swiss museums, the exhibition Émotions patrimoniales (Delley 2020; Fig. 1.3).; By giving the history of archaeology a

40    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger

Figure 1.3: In the reconstructed interior of a ruined flat, Émotions patrimoniales at the Laténium was displaying collected photographs showing persons posing in front of archaeological monuments and ruins, as well as interviews talking about the emotional relationship people share with heritage. Scenography: Elissa Bier Picture: Laténium, Marc Juillard. Rights reserved.

place in museums, by exhibiting the ways archaeology is actually done, with its professional and amateur contributions, its methodological challenges, and its ideological uses and implications, it becomes possible to break away from the idea that archaeological practice and object collecting are obviously neutral and atemporal activities. To the contrary, the public can be reminded that the evidence and the meanings provided at any given time by science are not absolute but under constant transformation. In other words, providing the public with such reflexive tools appears to be a valuable means of sharing the issues of the discipline with a wide audience and of enabling the public to actively appropriate the archaeological contents (Delley 2019: 126–​7, 2021a and b).

1.4  Concluding thoughts It goes without saying—​so we hope—​that museums nowadays can hardly fulfil their various functions without some consciousness of their own history, and moreover that this is a history they should all actively seek to research, to document, and to make known. Museums need to recognize, and indeed to integrate into the narratives and experiences they provide to their visitors, the range of material conditions, interpretative skills, and ideological forces that have brought them into being. These are, after all, the conditions that have contributed to shape their ongoing presence over the decades

Recovering the history of archaeology in museums    41 and the centuries and also, to a considerable extent, the conditions that will provide resources and incentives for changes in the immediate or long-​term future. Such a historical consciousness could include what may be called the ‘archaeology of museums’, namely the historically documented concern for the characteristics and transformations of museum spaces, both externally and internally. ‘Externally’ refers here to the architecture and physical settings of museums, be they repurposed palaces or public buildings, such as the Louvre in Paris, or purpose-​built ‘temples of culture’ such as the British Museum or the new Humboldt-​forum, or the ephemeral steel palace of the 1867 Universal Exhibition. The internal museum space whose history becomes pertinent is the ‘archaeology of display’, the ‘material culture’ of conservation, of communication and of outreach, the changing aims, but also styles, materials (casts, dioramas, glass cases, labelling, leaflets), as well as performances, posters, and visual tools, by which museums perpetuate themselves and perform their changing functions—​including their cognitive role in the structuring of archaeological knowledge. In distinction as well as continuity with this ‘archaeology of museums’ stands the history of archaeology writ large, the one that is out there in the field, that extricates from the ground finds that end up symbolically, scientifically, and financially translocated to the museum ‘endpoint’. Just as they care for and about objects, so should museums be concerned about where these objects come from: in a spatial sense, to be sure, in their provenance and their localization, but also in a scientific and ethical sense, regarding the ways they have come to light, and then come to make the sense(s) they do. We can agree then that museums need to be conscious of their history. Should they, in addition, take into account and integrate the history of archaeology, of the inquiries into the past that have—​at the very least—​unearthed and interpreted the various items which they display? The answers suggested and documented in this chapter are clearly in the affirmative, yet our formulation here raises a couple of further considerations we would like to conclude with. Firstly, just how much is the history of archaeology to be considered as ‘additional’, and therefore separate from, the history of the museum itself, or on the contrary an ‘essential’ or seamless component of it? This is, in our view, a rather case-​by-​case question, depending to various degrees on the available evidence, on scholarly aims, and on didactic opportunities—​as to whether to hold separate, or on the contrary to merge, the history of the field and the history of the institution. This brings us to the second caveat: if the history of archaeology matters in museum, this is notably in order to reach beyond or to densify the image of archaeology as a (‘mere’) ‘purveyor’, as an upstream extraction station in the ‘supply chain’ that satisfyingly culminates within the walls of the museum—​ending up, to be more prosaic, in the left-​hand display case of room 7a of the annexe’s second floor, unless it is held in perpetuity in a joyless box in an obscure storage facility. As we have seen, there is more to it. With their enduring presence and display narratives, museums provide an opportunity for raising questions and provoking reflections among visitors and scholars alike. These questions reach (or should reach) beyond objects, labels, and showcases as such, and include also the material, ideological, and human conditions of their appropriation and of their intelligibility, as highlighted by the history of archaeology.

42    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger

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Recovering the history of archaeology in museums    43 Gathercole, P. and D. Lowenthal (Eds). 1990. The Politics of the Past. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Gräslund, B. 1987. The Birth of Prehistoric Chronology: Dating Methods and Dating Systems in Nineteenth-​Century Scandinavian Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenhalgh, P. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: A History of the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–​1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Guermandi, M.P. (Ed). 2016. Archaeology and ME. Pensare l’archeologia nell’Europa contemporanea/​Looking at Archaeology in Contemporary Europe. Bologna: Istituto per i Beni Artistici, Culturali e Naturali dellaRegione Emilia Romagna. Hamilakis, Y. 2008. ‘Decolonizing Greek Archaeology: Indigenous Archaeologies, Modernist Archaeology and the Post-​Colonial Critique’. In A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-​Century Greece, edited by D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos, pp. 273–​84. Athens: Museum Benaki. Härke, H. (Ed). 2000. Archaeology, Ideology and Society. The German Experience. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Hooper-​ Greenhill, E. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge. Kaeser, M-​A. 2002. ‘On the International Roots of Prehistory.’ Antiquity 76: pp. 170–​6. Kaeser, M-​ A. 2004. Les Lacustres: Archéologie et mythe national. Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes. Kaeser, M-​A. (dir). 2011. L’âge du Faux. L’authenticité en archéologie. Hauterive: Laténium. Kaeser, M-​A. 2016. ‘La médiation de l’archéologie. Ethique de la complaisance ou impératif épistémologique’. In Situ-​Revue des patrimoines 28: pp. 247–​64. Karp, I. and S. Lavine. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museums Display. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Marchand, S. L. 1996. Down from Olympus –​Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–​ 1970, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Mickel, A. 2021. Why Those who Shovel are Silent: The Unknown Experts of Archaeological Excavation. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Müller-​Scheessel, N. 2001. ‘Fair Prehistory: Archaeological Exhibits at French Expositions Universelles’. Antiquity 75: pp. 391–​401. Murray, T. and C. Evans. (Eds). 2008. Histories of Archaeology. A Reader in the History of Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, J. 2006. ‘Collecting Artefacts, Acquiring Empire: Exploring the Relationship between Enlightenment and Darwinist Collecting and Late-​ Nineteenth-​ Century British Imperialism’. Journal of the History of Collections 18: pp. 9–​25. Petch, A. 2011. ‘Muddying the Waters: The Pitt Rivers collection 1850–​2011.’ Museum History Journal 4 (2): pp. 161–​202. Pitt-​Rivers, A.H.L.F. 1891. ‘Typological Museums, As Exemplified by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and his Provincial Museum in Farnham, Dorset’. Journal of the Society of Arts 40: pp. 115–​22. Quirke, S. 2010. Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives 1880–​1924. London: Duckworth. Rowley-​Conwy, P. 2007. From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain, and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Said, E. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Vindus. Sarr, F. and B. Savoy. 2018. Restituer le patrimoine africain. Paris: Philippe Rey/​Editions du Seuil.

44    Géraldine Delley and Nathan Schlanger Schlanger, N. 2010. ‘Manual and Intellectual Labour in Archaeology: Past and Present in Human Resource Management’. In Unquiet Pasts. Risk Society, Lived Cultural Heritage, Re-​ designing Reflexivity, edited by S. Koerner and I. Russell, pp. 161–​7 1. London: Ashgate. Schlanger, N. 2016. ‘Back in Business. History and Evolution at the New Musée de l’Homme’. Antiquity 90: pp. 1090–​9. Schlanger, N. in press a. ‘Du Champ-​de-​mars à Saint-​Germain-​en-​Laye. Modernité de la préhistoire à l’Exposition universelle de 1867’. In Archéologie en musée et identités nationales en Europe (XIXe-XXIe siècle), edited by A. Lehoerff and C. Louboutin. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Schlanger, N. in press b. ‘Une réunion avantageuse? Prêts, collections et sélections au musée de l’histoire du travail de l’Exposition universelle de 1867’. In Histoire de prêts. Mémoires et enjeux des prêts dans les musées (actes du colloque organisé en 2017 par l’École du Louvre en collaboration avec l'IHMC-​CNRS-​ENS), edited by F.-​R. Martin, M. Passini, and N. Rowley. Paris: éditions de Ecole du Louvre. Schlanger, N. and J. Nordbladh. 2008. Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Light of its History. New York: Berghan Books. Schnapp, A. 1997. (original French 1993). The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology. London: British Museum Press. Schnapp, A. 2020. Une histoire universelle des ruines: des origines aux lumières. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Stocking, G.W. (dir.). 1991. Colonial Situations. London and Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sullivan, L.P. and T.S. Childs. 2003. Curating Archaeological Collections: From the Field to the Repository. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Tahan, L.G. 2010. ‘New Museological Ways of Seeing the World: Decolonizing Archaeology in Libanese Museums’. In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by J. Lydon and U.Z. Rizvi, pp. 295–​302. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Tarantini, M. 2012. La nascita della paletnologia in Italia (1860–​1877). Grisignano: Università degli Studi di Siena. Trigger, B. 1984. ‘Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist’. Man 19: pp. 335–​70. Trümpler, C. (Ed). 2010. Das Grosse Spiel. Archäologie und Politik zur Zeit des Kolonialismus (1860–​1940). Köln: Dumont Buchverlag. Vayson de Pradennes, A. 1932 (2008). Les fraudes en archéologie préhistorique: avec quelques exemples de comparaison en archéologie générale et sciences naturelles. Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon. Wasemael, Van P. 2001. Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-​historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798–​1851–​1970). Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

Chapter 2

E motion, af fe c t i v e pr actice, and t h e ta k i ng of Indigenous A nc e st ra l Rem ai ns Cressida Fforde, Jilda Andrews, Edward Halealoha Ayau, Madalyn Grant, Laurajane Smith, and Paul Turnbull

Warning: Readers should be aware that this chapter contains information about the history of, and language about, the treatment of Indigenous Ancestral Remains that is confronting and may be distressing.

2.1  Introduction In recent years, studies in heritage and emotion have produced new ways to conceptualize and analytically approach how humans relate to, use, and understand the past for personal and collective purposes in the present. In part, such research has sought to ‘bring emotion back’ as an undeniable and legitimate aspect of heritage and, thus, heritage enquiry, rather than reject/​denigrate its presence either as irrational and ultimately useless sentimentality/​nostalgia, or a potentially dangerous foment of nationalistic behaviour. More recent scholarship on emotions and heritage (Golańska 2015; Hoare 2020; Smith and Campbell 2016; Smith 2021; Smith et al. 2018) has sought to raise awareness and understand the importance of examining this interconnection, particularly through analysis of heritage and its meaning-​making aspect as deeply enmeshed in (and produced by) affective practice.

46   Fforde et al. Contributing to this emergence of work on the interconnection between emotion and heritage, and hoping to harness its findings to further elucidate repatriation as a cross-​ cultural phenomenon, we offer two chapters in this volume that commence an exploration into the interrelationship between emotion and the removal and repatriation of the bodily remains of Indigenous people housed in museums. Fundamentally, we are interested in how consideration of emotion in the past and present—​and how these interrelate—​can inform the work of curators and museum professionals today. The conjunction of Ancestral Remains, emotion, historical context, heritage, museums, and decolonization imperatives appear a fertile and useful ground for knowledge generation in this regard. In particular, we are interested to use knowledge about this interrelationship to inform understanding of repatriation debates and processes (whether they seek to impede or advance returns) as affective practice, and how this, in turn, can be used to inform how repatriation can be done better. In this chapter we start to explore two interconnected ways—​the history of emotions and its legacies—​in which understanding the relationship between emotion and the removal and return of Indigenous Ancestral Remains might be approached. There are likely many others. Both have a significant historical dimension, explaining why notions of legacy and inheritance are useful, and why this exercise has the potential to provide insight into the relationship between heritage and emotion more broadly. Both chapters are also cognisant of a fundamental problem in writing about the removal and scientific use of Indigenous Ancestral Remains: that while the individuals whose remains were taken are at the heart of this story, their history is largely silenced by the ease with which a narrative can instead be told about the predominantly white men who took them and the institutions that housed them. Archives and published resources document emotions experienced by people who were involved in, or witnessed, the removal of Indigenous human remains in the past. In part, such an approach serves to highlight (and is another pathway to understanding) the longevity and depth of Indigenous concern about the removal of their ancestors. It also provides a method of understanding why Ancestral Remains were taken. Collecting desires are complex, and understanding ‘collecting’ in the long nineteenth century as only an objective exercise in scientific enrichment is far too simplistic. Emotional, as well as financial and intellectual, investment was part of the collecting endeavour. In the second chapter (Chapter 3) we will explore the presence and meaning of emotions in the repatriation movement and process itself.

2.2  Emotional legacies—​history of affect Documenting emotions associated with the history of removal is not new. It has been used as evidence for Indigenous opposition to the theft of their ancestors, and collector recognition of this opposition (Fforde and Hubert 2006; Turnbull 2002). It has also been

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    47 used as a means of investigating (and disrupting), assertions that those taking remains in the past did so according to the ethics ‘of the time’ (Turnbull 2020). However, the emotions themselves have not been highlighted as an important aspect of this history, nor consideration given to the new avenues of understanding that may result if they become the analytical focus. This section provides an initial starting point. The first approach when thinking about emotional legacies carried by Ancestral Remains in the present is to consider their removal and scientific use in the context of a history of emotions. Existing in productive tension with several fields such as psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, the history of emotions serves, fundamentally, to highlight that historical emotions and their expressions are deeply enmeshed into understanding historical figures and events. To strip history of its emotional valences—​ whether that be as an attempt at objectivity or rationally—​only distorts the historical portrait and impedes understanding of the legacies of this history. A critical engagement with the history of emotions has developed since the 1980s, and offers a powerful lens through which to consider social, cultural, and political history. Initial studies into the subject of emotions by historians were couched in scepticism as historians were reluctant to ‘breathe life back’ into source material (Reddy 2001: 170). Certainly, emotion was often dismissed as irrational and thus as an inappropriate category or subject of analysis (Barbalet 2002). Peter N. Stearns, Carol. Z. Stearns (1985), William M. Reddy (1997, 2001), and Barbara Rosenwein (2006) among others did much to progress the inherent importance of the history of emotion, arguing that ‘emotions are often hidden in the texts that historians use’ (Rosenwein in Plamper 2010: 250). The analytical importance of emotions rests, as Barbalet (2002: 1) states, in the observation that ‘all actions, and indeed reason itself, require appropriate facilitating emotions if successful actions or reason at all are to be achieved’. While debates continue on how to practically investigate emotions and over the utility of different theoretical frameworks, the consensus is that the importance of the study of emotions is that it is ‘action-​oriented’ and connected to our commentaries on events. They are bound up in power relations and politics, as well as collective practices and discourses (Wetherell et al. 2018). Indeed, the concept of ‘affective practice’ refers to the socially regularized forms of emotion and affect (Wetherell 2012). Both collecting and repatriation may be understood as forms of affective practice in which certain emotions or affects frame acceptable practices and discourses (see this volume: Chapter 3). Emotions are socially constructed and their expressions (or conscious lack thereof) perform social and political tasks. Indeed, emotions are not only culturally and socially contextual, they are also historically and temporally variable (Reddy 2001; Plamper 2010). Thus, in analysing historical emotions it is important to understand the social and political context of both their expression and their consequence. Engaging with emotions also highlights and facilitates the making of personal connections between past and present. Thus, identifying the work of emotions in the history of collecting facilitates the identification of ongoing legacies and inheritances of those activities in today’s social and political practices. Though the archives and publications associated with removal are limited in utility because they are not produced by (and are thus not the voice of) the people whose

48   Fforde et al. ancestors’ remains were taken, they nonetheless allow a degree of insight into how Indigenous people experienced such transgressions and, of course, that the settler/​ collector who chronicled the event themselves knew this. There are no surprises in the range of emotions attributed by field collectors to people whose funerary sites were targeted. Fear, anger, concern, anxiety, and desire for revenge all feature, whether explicitly documented or which can be deduced from how events are described. In Australia, the fear and anger felt by Aboriginal people when witnessing or learning of the desecration of graves is documented, clearly demonstrating their concerns and opposition (e.g. Macpherson 1860: 225–​6; Turnbull 1993: 25; Wood Jones 1928: 54). Indigenous anger in seeking revenge and redress is evident, for example, in the writings of the German anatomist, anthropologist, and collector, Dr Herman Klaatsch. His 1907 publication (‘Final report on my trip to Australia in 1904–​1907’) appeared in the German academic journal Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, although, perhaps tellingly in terms of its tone, it was the product of a talk to the Berlin Anthropological Society (later translated by Stehlik 1986). In it he states: Luckily we remained unnoticed by the blacks during our grave violating enterprise. However they must have soon noticed what happened because, after we had finally stowed away our spoils on the boat and had continued with our journey, we wanted to stop at an appropriate place to pick up water; it had already got dark, when our blacks turned our attention to little flashes of light that started to appear in the thickets of the shore. These were the fire sticks in the hands of the natives who followed us. Cooper postponed the landing until the next morning, remarking dryly that he did not wish to give the blacks any ‘opportunity’ (Klaatsch 1907: 69).

Klaatsch’s description of these events is evidence of Indigenous response and agency, and the affective nature of revenge by those whose dead were stolen. It shows his awareness of Indigenous opposition. It also shows that he did not feel the need to describe his activity to the Society audience solely within a ‘bland’ framework of scientific endeavour. Instead he chooses words that signal its illicit nature (e.g. ‘grave-​violating’ and ‘spoils’) in a manner that highlights excitement and adventure, providing insight into motivation. The way in which he chose to tell his collecting ‘story’ may also be because he wished to convey how dangerous his mission was, how brave he was to undertake it (and thus his masculinity), and his high personal (even heroic) commitment to science. Similar ‘boys own’ hyperbole can be found in the writings of others who stole remains. Thus, for example, in his unpublished diary, Roger Buddle wrote of his theft of Ancestral Remains from burial sites in the Chatham Islands. He describes his secretive exploits and deceptions, the anger of Maori inhabitants, as well as the fear expressed by members of the local white population that his removal of Indigenous human remains would jeopardize local relationships (Buddle 20 Jan 1907, 5 Feb 1907: 84–​5). Emotions such as excessive pride may be identifiable in such boastful behaviour. What can be discerned in these types of ‘collecting’ accounts is the more personal emotions of the individuals involved, which inform understanding of their motivations,

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    49 and which cannot generally be seen from their more professional oriented correspondence or academic literature. In the extensive series of letters sent by Dr William Ramsay Smith in Adelaide, South Australia, to Professor Daniel Cunningham in the Anatomy Department at his alma mater, the University of Edinburgh,1 he provides information about, for example, consignments of Ancestral Remains, scholarly articles (in draft) that he was asking for assistance to publish, details of what he wanted to receive in return, his disapproval at the impost of Dr Klaatsch, and his views on the public enquiry into his taking of a famous Aboriginal man’s remains (and those of other Indigenous and non-​Indigenous people) from the Adelaide Hospital morgue and his supply of them to Edinburgh.2 The dominant tone is ‘unemotional’, professional, and businesslike. However, the following passage eludes to more personal reasons for his supply of Ancestral Remains to Edinburgh, which relate to ambition and an emotional need for legacy and recognition. It also demonstrates that he believed unequivocally that he was doing the right thing: This collection is getting so large now, beyond anything even in Australian museums, that I begin to think it might be well to keep it as a separate ‘contribution’ to the museum along with what I shall send in the future. I have done something as a collector and suffered much as an investigator and the collection might be associated with my name as testimony to the fact that nothing has stood in the way of my working in this particular field despite all persecution and opposition. (W. Ramsay Smith to D.J. Cunningham 28 April 1908, Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections: Ms 620)

A few collectors were not so sanguine about their removal of Ancestral Remains and were concerned that their actions were sacrilege. Writing of his having dug open a Wiradjuri burial in 1820, the explorer John Oxley (1785–​1828), expressed the hope that ‘. . . I shall not be considered as either wantonly disturbing the remains of the dead, or needlessly violating the religious rites of a harmless people, in having caused the tomb to be opened’ (Oxley 1820: 138). However, such examples are rare. Newspaper reporting of discoveries of Ancestral Remains (whether first hand or otherwise) are often descriptive and unemotional in tone, although there nonetheless appears a fascination regarding such ‘discoveries’, whether or not there is collecting activity occurring. Some describe Aboriginal fear and reticence about approaching burial sites, showing that this was commonly known. It is also possible that stories surrounding the supernatural power of

1  This extensive correspondence spans almost the entire period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century during which Ramsay Smith sent Edinburgh University’s Anatomy Department the remains of hundreds of First Nation Australians, in the majority Ngarrindjeri people whose traditional country includes the Coorong and inland, South Australia. 2  For history of the public enquiry into Ramsay Smith’s treatment of bodies lying in the hospital morgue see Fforde 2004. For a biography of Tommy Walker, the Ngarrindjeri man whose remains were taken see: https://​retur​nrec​onci​lere​new.info/​ohrm/​biogs/​E0018​92b.htm.

50   Fforde et al. the Indigenous dead may have produced trepidation or fear in Europeans (e.g. Brisbane Courier 5 October 1898: 7, and see Froggatt quote below). Whatever the valence, anthropological collecting of the bodily remains of the colonized has always had a capacity to provoke emotional responses from those involved. Importantly, so too have the collections created in the main by the plundering of burial places, by which anthropologists and comparative anatomists sought to acquire new knowledge of human variation, and those who viewed them when they were placed on display. While the above quotes are associated with those who took Ancestral Remains directly ‘in the field’, historical texts show that recognizing collecting as an affective practice also informs understanding of the behaviour of those who brought these remains together (sometimes in their thousands)—​whether as armchair private collectors, or curators employed by museums and other collecting institutions. This partly relates to how collections were treasured and proudly presented. It also interconnects with their powerful symbolism as memento mori3 at a time when Western colonial imaginings perceived the decimation wrought upon Indigenous peoples as an inevitable and natural outcome of progress, thus relieving them of culpability.

2.3  Emotions, aesthetics, and qualities It was argued in some early histories of the collecting and medico-​scientific uses of human remains that, once in scientific hands, their mortality became cognitively refashioned solely into ‘raw’ scientific material, sheared of their humanity (e.g. Fforde 2004). While their scientific value may have been dominant, the situation now appears more complex. As Johann Friedrich Blumenbach—​generally regarded as the founder of the comparative study of human cranial morphology—​observed of the skull of a young Georgian woman he had acquired, he could not but be struck by ‘the admirable beauty of its form’ (bewundernswerthen Schönheit seiner Bildung) (Blumenbach 1802: 51). For Blumenbach and many of those who came to share his interest in comparative craniometry, skulls were seen as preserving the aesthetic and psychological qualities and attributes of the individuals to which they belonged. Skulls could elicit unease in the case of those perceived as exhibiting relative ugliness, or they could give rise to more positive affections, such as that which Blumenbach felt towards the Georgian skull in his possession. Emotional engagement with the individuals whose remains had become subjects of study was fundamental to the unorthodox science of phrenology. Its first practitioners, Franz Josef Gall and Gaspar Friedrich Spurzheim, were anatomists; but the science that Gall invented and both men promoted was in reality a social psychology entailing 3  Memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember that you have to die’. Memento mori were created or symbolically viewed as reminders of the inevitability of death or the impermanence of life. They appear in funeral art and architecture of the medieval period in the West, and became popular in jewellery and fine art forms from the late sixteenth century onwards.

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    51 systematic observations of cranial contours and their correlation with observable behavioural traits. Hence emotional responses to skulls—​or rather what the shape of skulls were believed to disclose about the intellectual and emotional make-​up of those to whom they had belonged—​were integral to their phrenological analysis. We find for example, that Joseph Brookes (1761–​1833), the London anatomist and follower of phrenology, spoke of skulls in his collections as beautiful or giving rise to negative feelings by features in their cranial topography supposedly indicative of unattractive or repulsive emotional qualities. Brookes prominently displayed ‘human crania of various nations’ in the salon of his Great Marlborough Street anatomy school. There was an emotional theatricality to his showing these skulls off to students. One past pupil recalled: Mr. Brookes happened to come in while a fellow pupil of mine from St. Thomas’s [hospital] was handling a Caribbee skull and regarding it, as Mr. Brookes appeared to suppose, with somewhat too affectionate an eye, he said “I would not wish to interrupt you, Sir, but I always tremble when I see a gentleman unknown to me, making too familiar with my preparations. You know that among ourselves we always consider these things fair game”. He uttered these words with the utmost bon hommie, but not without an amusing dash of trepidation. I need not take pains to assert, that my friend ogled the Caribbean Lady’s cranium, without any design of committing the crime of abduction. (Gower 1833: 722)

During the course of the long nineteenth century, the collecting of Indigenous Ancestral Remains by Europeans more often than not occurred in contexts of colonial ambition. In settler colonies, the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands condemned them to live in conditions causing rapid population decline. The result was a consistent and abiding consensus in European medico-​scientific, intellectual, and political circles that Indigenous peoples were doomed to eventual extinction. This in turn gave anthropological collecting of the bodily remains of peoples suffering dispossession and colonial subjugation a new urgency. Anthropologists and comparative human anatomists encouraged the collecting of remains, and especially skulls, believing—​as Blumenbach was among the first to maintain—​that they were the most practicable means of gaining new insights into the origins and social implications of human variation, if, that is, they could be collected in numbers sufficient to allow investigators to determine what was racially typical in their form. Hence collecting motivated by the belief that settler colonialism would be at the expense of Indigenous extinction was infused with emotional responses to the supposed fate of the dispossessed. As George Bennett, one of the founders of the Australian Museum, argued in the early 1830s, naturalists in the Australian colonies had a duty to collect as best their limited resources allowed the: . . . weapons, utensils, and other specimens of the arts . . . as well as the skulls of the different tribes and accurate drawings of their peculiar cast of features . . . to create a fitting memorial to a race destined to soon be known only by name. (Bennett 1834: 1, 69)

52   Fforde et al. The remains of the Indigenous dead were simultaneously regarded as scientifically important and memento mori—​symbolically memorializing the dead. However, this form of memorializing provokes reflection not on the death of self, but rather a (false) realization that in the progress of humankind entire races were fated to disappear from the world stage of history. The emotional resonances of the display of the dead within museums could parallel the sentiments finding expression in Australian popular poetry during the last third of the nineteenth century, such as S.V. Bennett’s, ‘The Blackfellow’s Grave’ (Meredith 1989: 61–​2), the imagery of which drew on Thomas Gray’s perennially popular ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751). Of course, the dead who came to be poetically memorialized in settler poetry, or viewed as relics of a race now ‘known only by name’ neither died ‘long ago’, nor were they a ‘vanished race’. They were survived by relatives who were anxious that they lay undisturbed in the care of their ancestral country, but often could do little to prevent the theft of their remains. Tony Bennett (1995) has argued that museum displays of Aboriginal material culture and remains furnished a resource for self-​fashioning in the Foucauldian sense of rendering the liberal museum-​going public conscious of their advanced evolutionary capacity for self-​reflection and rational judgement. This is certainly true to a point. With the beginnings of the disciplinary coalescence of anthropology through the creation of anthropological societies by (generally) medically trained professionals through the 1860s in Europe’s major urban centres (e.g. the anthropological societies in Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna) the collecting, investigation, and display of human remains became characterized by the desire to rid it of the biases of subjectivity and emotion (see Boddice 2016). This can be seen in the investment in anthropometry, and particularly craniometry, employing self-​registering instrumentation. Indeed, one can see the remarkable growth in collections of human remains and research centred on comparative investigation of the structural morphology of crania as exemplifying what Daston and Galison have argued was ‘by the mid-​nineteenth century, a new epistemological project’ centring on the achievement of ‘mechanical objectivity’ (Daston and Galison 2007: 115–​ 90). What we can see in the uses to which anthropometrics were put from the 1860s until our own times reflects a desire of investigators to ‘restrain themselves from imposing the projections . . . of their own unchecked will onto nature’ (Daston and Galison 2007: 120). In other words, to purge their science of emotion. However, this quest for mechanical objectivity fell short of expectations. Anatomists and anthropologists in different European centres failed—​ironically due to emotive national chauvinism—​to adopt a common set of single and multipoint measurements of facial and cranial bones. A further, greater difficulty was that when researchers employed the same metric procedures, they found themselves recording not only a wide spectrum of geometric gradations between individuals of different racial ancestry, but also a considerable degree of variation in what, historically, were largely endogamous populations. For all its aspirations to ‘mechanical objectivity’ later nineteenth and early twentieth-​century craniometry fell short of empirically purifying the study of collections of human remains from the subjectivities of its practitioners.

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    53 Indeed, the public display of the Ancestral Remains of Indigenous peoples in museums and other scientific institutions from the 1860s onwards—​which was generally done to emphasize their supposed evolutionary primitivity—​had the effect of imbuing these remains with emotional potency even though researchers sought to achieve new degrees of objectivity. While museum personnel may have sought to provide the viewing public with objective proof of their evolutionary advancement in the form of remains of peoples believed to be facing extinction, these displays were capable of eliciting emotional responses that reveal the biases, perceptions, morality, and feelings of the observer about the Indigenous people whose lands they occupied and the colonial process by which this had occurred. Consider, for example, the following description of remains displayed by the Queensland Museum circa 1869: Now, it has been shown how useful and instructive a study it is to compare the remains of a former world with this we now inhabit. In a glass case in the north-​east corner you will observe a fine specimen of the bald tribe of natives well preserved. These natives first appeared on the Warrego a few years ago. They are very savage and deceitful, and of unknown origin. Passing farther along, there are a great number of native instruments and articles of native manufacture, collected and presented to the museum by many old colonists and explorers. Some of these instruments could tell a tale of blood, and the names of some of the former owners of which even now are never mentioned except with feeling of horror and abhorrence. This collection of spears and nullas were picked up after the Hornet Bank massacre, and that very large club belonged to a well-​known savage called Bilbo –​the terror of the shepherds on the Kulebah and Goongarry; stone tomahawks from the Brown River, dillies and shields from the Cullenlaringe; finger bones and a pair of defunct blacks, found in the dillies of Jeranga gins; the spear brought from Carpentaria that finished poor Kennedy’s career of exploration with skulls of a number of the most renowned blacks who were the terror of the first colonists, with short narratives of the dark deeds which marked the early days of Queensland. (‘The Queensland Museum’. Brisbane Courier, 28 August 1869: 6)

In his highly influential A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Edmund Burke aimed to explain the sublime as a state involving the arousal of emotions by the experience of frightening things, suggesting that the sublime could be a source of delight, due to the realization that the horror experienced was fictional and painless. The horror was virtual affording a rush of pleasure. One can see something of this in the above account of the display of Ancestral Remains and various objects evoking ‘horror and abhorrence’ at ‘dark deeds’ in the history of Queensland’s early days. Collections and their displays thus produced the possibility of experiencing sublimity and its delights—​but, for the non-​Indigenous observer, in the safety of the museum. This account stands in stark contrast to the acute shock and distress felt by Indigenous people when confronted with their ancestors on display and being used to affirm the colonists’ pejorative imagining of Indigenous identity, history, and (lack of) a future.

54   Fforde et al.

2.4  Limitations and nuance Trying to recognize and understand instances of emotions in historical documents is complex, and has considerable limitations. As noted above, the corpus lacks any documentation produced directly by those whose relatives’ remains were taken, and we are reliant on the accounts of colonists to discern Indigenous reaction. In this manner the archive silences half of the voices involved in this history, despite the fact that the history is centrally concerned with their bodily remains. Further, we are limited, in general, to locating evidence of very obvious emotions, such as fear, outrage, and anger, although more composite feelings such as curiosity, fascination, revulsion, and boastfulness can also be reasonably deduced. Indeed, very prominent in the archive is an absence of documented emotion. Within the context of scientific, social, popular, institutional, and discursive prejudice towards Indigenous peoples, this can be reliably interpreted as evidence of racism, indifference, and lack of empathy, but also contempt and cruelty. It is also a signifier of an epistemology of ignorance, in which emotions play a role in maintaining the discourse. Additional limits inherent in the historical documentation result from common and gendered social mores which regulate whether (and when) it is culturally appropriate to feel and/​or express emotions. This is particularly the case in relation to emotions/​sentiments of a ‘caring’ nature which in many societies denote weakness—​particularly for male chroniclers who dominated the colonial archive in the nineteenth century. Examining unpublished diaries shows potential for revealing whether the emotions of colonists are more likely to be documented in personal archives than they are in published versions or professional correspondence with peers. What is chosen to be personal, and communicated only to intimates, may provide a more nuanced picture of the emotional repertoires associated with the removal of Ancestral Remains. Such evidence is rare and difficult to identify and interpret. One example may be found in the unpublished diary of George Fletcher Moore, a prominent settler in the Swan River settlement (which later became Perth, Western Australia) in the early nineteenth century. A significant landholder who undertook civic roles (e.g. Magistrate, legal advisor to government, member of executive and legislative councils), Moore had an interest in Indigenous customs and languages. On various occasions, Moore describes meeting Yagan, an extraordinary, highly significant and historically important Noongah leader who was shot on his traditional lands occupied by a prominent settler, Mr Bull, by two teenage brothers on the 10 April 1833.4 Moore had previously written about Yagan in admiring tones. His published diary (1884) is an edited version of the original handwritten manuscript. As Moore explained, the original journal was written over the course of his first ten years in the colony, ‘solely

4  Yagan is an extremely important Noongah leader of the early nineteenth century. Events surrounding the successful search for his skull in the UK in the early 1990s and its eventual return to Western Australia in 1997 can be found in Fforde (2002).

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    55 for the information and satisfaction of his father, brothers, sisters, and immediate friends in this country [Great Britain]’ (1884: vi). His published diary first appeared serialized in the newspaper The West Australian, being prepared by the newspaper’s editor, Sir Thomas Cockburn Campbell. Moore explains that ‘the only restriction I put upon Sir Thomas was that he should omit anything too trivial for publication, and also carefully avoid anything that could in the least degree be likely to annoy, or hurt the feelings of, any one, either in the colony or this country’ (1884: vii). From this paper serialization, the diary as a whole was published in 1884. In the accounts of the days immediately following Yagan’s murder, the published diary is different to the original unpublished account in two ways, both explainable in the context of Moore’s editorial instructions to Campbell, but both of which excise Moore’s feelings on the matter. First, the published diary does not reproduce Moore’s criticism of the lack of action by soldiers who ‘though they saw the two bodies on the ground as they passed had neither the curiosity nor humanity to take any notice of them. It is most unaccountable’. Second, the 1884 publication does not contain a passage written on Tuesday 16 July 1833, four days after Moore saw Yagan’s head on Saturday 12 July at the house of Mr Bull. The manuscript entry is annotated randomly with three small profile sketches of Yagan’s head, and one larger, more detailed sketch measuring approximately 1.5 cm x 1.5 cm. This image, on the right boundary of the page, is bordered in ink and contains a short annotation. The first three words are difficult to discern, but the remainder reads: ‘I could not get his head out of my head until I put it on paper, 16 July 1833’. Moore noting, ‘I have been in a singular mood tonight’ muses at length in the diary as to how he might, and wishes he could, turn his thoughts into musical expression to help forget ‘that face [ . . . ] so before my eyes’. The lyrical nature of his digression on music and the numerous sketches of Yagan’s head, convey a man haunted, and experiencing an emotional response to the bloody sight presented to him at the house of Mr Bull. This is despite his statement that he would have been glad to ‘get the head himself ’, which is reproduced in both published and unpublished versions. Perhaps internal emotional conflict can be deduced. Moore in his musical musings quotes the opening two lines of song by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797–​1839) titled ‘The Forsaken to the False one’, the verse completed by ‘Away! thou’rt free! oer land and sea, go rush to dangers brink! But oh, thou canst not fly from thought! thy curse will be—​TO THINK!’. The ability we are provided through this personal record to consider Moore’s emotions stands in stark contrast to the inability of archives of museums and other scientific institutions to convey the complexity of emotions experienced by those whose ancestors’ remains were taken. This evidential inequality raises the question of whether we should be trying to understand the emotional response of this prominent colonist rather than trying to make more apparent the feelings of those whose lands were occupied. The example of Moore’s treatment of Yagan in his unpublished diary is given here because it points to the need to go to primary sources for more nuanced understanding of this history of emotions, and because it places the emotions of Westerners as an object of study, reversing the usual modern focus of documenting and analysing the feelings of Indigenous peoples, rather than non-​Indigenous actors, in the reburial debate.

56   Fforde et al. The last example of emotions and the removal of Ancestral Remains is one that is particularly brutal and abhorrent. Such examples are not rare. Appearing in the Bendigo Advertiser in March 1887, the emotional load of the following account is made more confronting by the adventurous ‘boys own’ style in which it was written. From 1886, the author, William Froggatt, was employed by William Macleay who had a private museum that later became part of the University of Sydney.5 Whether or not Macleay is the ‘ethnological friend in the South’ mentioned in the text below is not clear but is reasonable to assume—​demonstrating the complicity of armchair collectors and wealthy scientific virtuosi whose desires fuelled the actions of their colleagues or employees in the field. The extract coalesces and magnifies a number of the observations made in this section. It evidences extreme, overt racism, and boastfulness by Froggatt at his exploits, which, when coupled with his collecting agenda, meant he was keen to actively seek out and consort with murderers in order to be guided to the victim’s remains to find, what he terms, ‘treasure’. He shows no qualms at writing publicly about being in the presence of men who had taken part in massacres, nor seems shocked at his or their actions, nor shows any desire to have the murderer brought to justice. It also, in the last paragraph, evidences fear by his guide (‘Mac’) at disturbing his victim’s body. Indeed, this perpetrator articulates greater concern about disturbing the resting place of the victim, than about the act of murder which he committed in the first place: Having an ethnological friend in the South who was desirous of obtaining a nigger’s skull, I made several enquiries among the settlers about as to the possibility of getting one, but though I was certain that several of them had on various occasions been present at “dispersals” of natives, none seemed anxious to display their knowledge about their private graveyards. I was about writing to my friend to say that I would have to kill a stray Chinaman on a back track to satisfy his craving for skulls, when one afternoon an old bushman, rejoicing in the brief cognomen of “Mac,” came to me and said if I was on for a walk, he thought he could find a nigger’s skeleton for me, so without further delay I slung on my revolver, as well as bag to carry the expected treasure, and was soon heading up the creek with my companion, sometimes creeping along the bank, at others splashing through the water, till after about half an hour’s walking we came to a spot where Mac stopped and said “this is the spot.” “The niggers were camped under that fig tree yonder, when we came upon them from the scrub opposite, and as they rushed up the bank, the ‘Kanaka boy’ Tom, who was leading, fired, and a big black nigger came rolling down over the stones with his thigh broken. We had to finish him with a revolver bullet after we returned from chasing the rest.” Unfortunately a large tree had fallen across the spot, and while I was raking amongst the grass and stones, Mac, who had gone ahead a little way, coo-​eed, and on going to him found him contemplating a mound of sand and stones, and wondering

5  The MacLeay Museum had a collection of Ancestral Remains but it is not known if this institution received the individual referred to in the quoted extract. Froggatt also supplied Ancestral Remains to The Australian Museum, some or all of which were from the Kimberley and have been returned.

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    57 if it were a grave. Having removed the stones, and scraped away the sand, I felt something smooth and round. “A boulder, said Mac,” “No! the treasure,” was my reply as I drew forth a ghastly, grinning skull, with a very neat little bullet hole in the forehead. While digging I noticed that Mac wore a very nervous look, and was fidgeting and looking behind him every now and again in an anxious manner, and on my rallying him on the matter, he said, “Well, I didn’t think much of shooting the beggar, but I do feel mean about digging him up, and I wouldn’t carry that skull home for a fiver.” (Froggatt, W. ‘Travels in North Qld No 2’, Bendigo Advertiser, 9 March 1887: 1)

The above extract speaks volumes about the violence perpetrated against Aboriginal people, and the manner in which such violence was seen as opportunity rather than illegal horror by collectors. The paragraph is confronting in the stark, overt, and violent prejudice of the two individuals involved, and the clear way in which this prejudice intersects with the collecting endeavour. We have included it here as an example of historical emotions but also, importantly in a chapter on emotional legacies, to provoke questions in the reader. The audience for this chapter will be primarily graduate students, museum staff, and academics in museum-​related disciplines and professions, including heritage, archaeology, and anthropology. If you are a non-​ Indigenous or Indigenous museum curator, what emotions are produced when reading such histories? What if this type of history was found in relation to an Ancestral Remain in your institution’s collection? How would such knowledge impact decision making, or relationships with claimants, and what impact does it have on you? Would you think differently about other, anonymous or provenanced, Indigenous human remains in your collections? If you are an Indigenous claimant, how do you relate to this account, what emotions (to the past, to holding institutions) does it create? How can the danger of trauma be protected against, and what role does repatriation practice play in navigating this difficult terrain? As practitioners and scholars in repatriation, how should we as authors make decisions about whether, and how, to publish such terrible accounts? The legacy of emotion in this, and other cases discussed above, and how to take care to act properly to repair its devastation, is complex, informative, and utterly necessary.

2.5  Emotional legacies—​ history embodied The second approach considers how historical evidence of removal and scientific use that is associated with the materiality of Ancestral Remains or their environment can, when combined with knowledge to interpret such evidence, evoke emotions in those who view, curate, locate, or otherwise interact with them. In turn, understanding these emotions and their context, helps advance understandings of repatriation. Such evidence includes, for example, presence of marks of trauma at time of death, or damage at point of removal, or existence of scientific paraphernalia (wiring, clips, mounts,

58   Fforde et al. measurement markings, labelling), or categorization and numbering systems, or it can include placement in boxes, plastic bags, storage areas, exhibitions and other surrounding curatorial, museum, and exhibition infrastructure. Knowledge to interpret this situation, includes that which is documented in museum and other archives about the history of acquisition/​theft and study, as well as knowledge brought independently by parties in repatriation negotiations. These two avenues both include ‘visible’ knowledge about disciplinary or colonial practices and histories, but also the less openly perceptible epistemologies, discourses, and life experiences that guide how such knowledge is drawn on, understood, and valued, and which thus also influence emotion and emotion registers. Studies in the connection between emotion and memory, and emotion and meaning (Smith and Campbell 2016) provide useful avenues of analysis, and illustrate why doing so may be informative for museum, repatriation, and heritage studies, and related management and practice—​whether engaged in by claimant or museum communities. The following quotes represent just a small portion of Indigenous testimony that describe what it feels like to be confronted with the sight of ancestors as museum collection items. For many, the taking of remains and their placement in museums was, and is, an abiding source of distress and sorrow, as Henry Atkinson, Elder of the Yorta Yorta nation has recalled: I . . . remember being with my mother on one of those very rare visits to the city for a country boy. We went to the museum and one has to be in my shoes to appreciate the pain and tears on my mother’s face when confronted with displays of her own people. There, for all to stare at, were her ancestors and artefacts with deep spiritual meaning on display. Some were things that only women should see; others were associated with men’s business. As a young boy I did not understand her pain and my parents did not want to talk about it. Now, as a man with family and grandchildren of my own, I feel my parent’s deep sorrow and wish I could have lifted some of the pain from their shoulders. Yet, all I can do is work as hard as I can to bring our people home and let their spirits roam free in their ancestral country. (Atkinson 2010: 18)

In 1987, Ida West from Tasmania, told how when she was watching television one night: I saw a Legal Aid person for my people talking to someone about what Europeans did to Aborigines, cutting off their heads and so on. He pulled out a drawer filled with Aboriginal heads all shapes and sizes, and the sight of the skulls started to turn my stomach. The second drawer was full also. By the third drawer I felt faint. The Legal Aid person said, ‘Would you like to have your grandfather’s head in there?’. (West 1987: 1–​2, quoted in Hubert 1989: 153)

An early and influential repatriation scholar, Jane Hubert, interviewed many Indigenous participants at the first World Archaeological Congress held in Southampton, UK, in 1986. She published excerpts from these interviews in her chapter on reburial in the 1989 seminal volume Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions. Thus, she quoted

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    59 Cecil Antone, a Pima man from Arizona who visited English museums on behalf of his Sacaton community. He saw the remains of his ancestors, and those of many other Native American peoples, on museum shelves: The other day I saw one of my tribe in a museum here in your country. I said to myself, why is my ancestor here, what is he doing here? They don’t belong here, this is foreign to them, they belong at home. His spirit is wandering out there, wandering out there in a limbo state, because he is not familiar with the country. He remembers when he was small, his life, the happy times he had, and the land—​his land. I thought about it at night, when I heard about the list of all the tribes that are in this country—​it’s over half the Indian nation in our country. Every tribe is in this country, just about . . . this person from my tribe—​he was probably sold three or four different times. How can a civilisation, mankind, sell human beings? These people were once human beings—​ how can you sell them? It hurts, it hurts real bad . . . (Antone in Hubert 1989: 139–​40)

In the introduction to his volume on the legislative history of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Tim McKeown describes the reaction of a Cheyenne delegation, led by William Tallbull, on a visit to the Smithsonian which was instrumental in commencing a campaign to pass repatriation legislation in the USA. Visiting the institution because it held the Sacred Pipe of Chief Tall Bull for which his grandson (William Tallbull) had been searching for ten years, the delegation had been shown into a hallway lined with drawers. Later that day they were to find out that the drawers contained the remains of thousands of Native Americans: The wooden cabinets were clearly a custom job—​fourteen drawers stacked floor to ceiling, each with a tarnished brass pull and a faded yellow label written in flowing long-​hand script, cabinet after cabinet on both sides of the dimly lit hallway. The famous anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka had designed the avocado-​green cabinets in the early part of the twentieth century to hold his expanding collection. The old Cheyenne man adjusted his glasses, stunned at the sheer magnitude of collections around him . . . The elation at having found the Tall Bull Pipe after years of searching was shattered by the stark realisation that they were standing among the remains of tens of thousands of Native American dead collected from graves and battle grounds. ‘The chiefs were quite alarmed because we had been sitting there all day with those restless spirits’, reported Clara Spotted Elk, a fellow Cheyenne and legislative assistant to the Democratic Senator John Melcher from Montana. “We really beat it out of there”. Tallbull and the other Cheyenne went immediately to Melcher’s office. “I told him of my concern, the concern of Indian people”, Tallbull recalled of his meeting with Melcher, “and he said ‘I’ll do all I can’ ”. (McKeown 2013: 1, 3)

These quotes (and so many others) illustrate how shock of discovery formed a significant component of the acute nature of the emotions felt by those seeing Ancestral Remains in museums for the first time. Such discovery is understood, and felt, within the viewers’ own knowledge and experience of the colonial context and history of oppression in

60   Fforde et al. which such collections were amassed. Personal and familial experience of the impact of this history is knowledge that few non-​Indigenous people can comprehend. Indigenous human remains housed in museum contexts are (amongst many other things) legacies of a colonial era and its modern reverberance, and a way of understanding human diversity that continues to have enduring impact. Indeed, collections of Indigenous human remains can be viewed as the material evidence of colonial violence par excellence. This evidence manifests itself in the physical trauma produced by settler/​ police/​army violence, or the presence of the bones of people who died as a result of forced removals, starvation, or disease. Collections are evidence of the mass desecration of funerary sites and the continuing cultural trauma to which this contributes, as they also are of the role of science and museums in reifying pre-​existing Western notions of racial hierarchies that caused untold damage to colonized peoples the world over. Their existence in such huge numbers and in so many institutions globally is testimony to the role of science and museums in creating and maintaining colonizing relationships. The quotes above are just one type of evidence that demonstrates this legacy. Different emotions may be invoked (and have influence) if Indigenous human remains are understood in the context of the knowledge of this history, or if, alternatively, they are understood ignorant of this past and instead interpreted solely in the context of a history of disciplinary progress, knowledge generation, or good scientific endeavour. It may not be coincidental that in the 1980s and 1990s, when UK museums were arguing that the global scientific importance of collections far outweighed the local concerns of Indigenous claimants, it was extremely difficult for claimants or their supporters to gain access to the museum archives that held information about the provenance and history of collected human remains (Fforde et al. 2015), and access to archives continues to be a hurdle in many repatriation claims. This was (and is) to do with a variety of reasons, including unwillingness to expose disorganized museum archives and the associated revelation that such institutions did not know what they housed, to not wanting Indigenous claimants or their supporters to know what collections contained because such knowledge produced and supported repatriation claims, to a reticence to have outside (and contentious) parties within a museum’s ‘private’ spaces. Uncomfortable histories of the way in which Indigenous remains were acquired and the scientific purpose for their study, so richly described within such archives countered, provoked, and collided with more familiar and comfortable ‘known’ histories and discourses of museums as good and beneficial institutions with unblemished pasts. As is seen in Chapter 3, observations which linked the activities of museum and associated professions today with those of their disciplinary antecedents produced a significant emotional response, and emotional energy was expended in asserting this was not the case.

2.6  Conclusion This initial review of the history of emotions in which the removal, study, and return of Indigenous human remains has been so intimately entangled has opened up new

Indigenous Ancestral Remains    61 avenues of insight. It has demonstrated how promising this approach is, and its potential to illuminate previously opaque or hidden areas of repatriation history. Consider, for example, its potential for illuminating aspects and affects of morality and immorality in this history and its contemporary manifestations. There is an essential relationship between emotions or feelings and perceptions of morality. Being on the receiving end of the immoral behaviour of others, or feeling that one has acted in an immoral way, produces a significant emotional response. In turn, emotions regulate how we make moral judgements, they keep our moral compass ‘straight and true’, impel us to act, and signal to us when our own behaviours are wrong. The emotional legacy that Ancestral Remains carry may thus also be centrally associated with their moral load. To act morally is intricately linked to identity and feelings of self-​worth and pride, as it is with notions of dignity and dignified behaviour. All of these aspects come into play when considering the ‘feeling world’ that surrounds affective repatriation practice and debate produced by this global movement. ‘Legacy’ is a term that has been deployed extensively throughout contemporary museum discourse (Fyfe 2006; Message and Witcomb 2013; Phillips 2011; Simpson 2012; Teslow 2007). It is often invoked in relation to problematic historical museum practices of collection and display being brought forward into a very different present. Legacy as a concept can be a device to differentiate past (usually problematic) museum practice from contemporary museum practice. With regards to repatriation this temporal differentiation can be activated at interface points between museums and Indigenous claimants, and is particularly stirred in handover ceremonies. Here, emotions are expressed as much for our past behaviour as they are reserved for ongoing funerary processes. In this chapter we have drawn on the concept of legacy quite literally, highlighting historical accounts of collecting human remains and ‘difficult’ material. The stark example of William Froggatt in 1886 was deployed to trigger an emotional response in you as a reader, as demonstrated by the questions that followed. Does ‘legacy’ and its distancing effect do justice to the individuals cited in Froggatt’s account? Perhaps the distancing that ‘legacy’ infers may have run its course, and moving closer to the problematic past might actually stride museum work more purposefully toward the realm of healing, reconciliation, and relationship building. This suggestion highlights the constraints of the familiar position that those in charge of collections who defended their retention rejected any engagement of their own, their discipline’s, or their institution’s responsibility for continuing the oppressive impact of collecting and scientific interpretations that commenced with the initial removal, retention, and study of Indigenous human remains decades previously. As Andrews (2018: 270–​271) suggests, to consider past museum practices and their products as ‘inheritances’ offers something here. A shift from legacy to inheritance is a shift from passive to active, and inserts culpability, responsibility, and obligation. To consider the material cited in the Froggatt example as an inheritance, rather than a distant legacy does something to shine a light on to our collective actions today—​what do we do about it? Are we satisfied to pass on a problematic legacy, or are we in a better position than ever to disrupt it, and formulate new legacies and inheritances to those who follow?

62   Fforde et al. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, exploring repatriation from a standpoint of emotions reveals new ways in which such legacies are reformulated. Rather than reignite concerns relating to personal culpability and its related emotions of guilt (and the emotional effort produced to subdue this), a 40-​year record in repatriation activity has achieved something important in uniting contemporary museum and Indigenous communities, developing a shared sense of humanity made possible by ‘using’ sites of emotion. Further developing this to approach and explore both the legacies and inheritances together can revolutionize museum practice away from its historical dichotomous dependencies. Opening up a new spectrum of emotions, including determination, power, and resolve powerfully mitigates emotions like guilt and shame, defensiveness, and the paralysis of the perceived enormity of the problematic historical record (and its material evidences). While there is an historical absence of Indigenous voices in the archive, today there is an increasing presence of Indigenous voices working in the museum sector and critically engaging through scholarship. Sites of emotion in the archive—​however startling—​ provide a degree of human relatability and thus potential for shared understanding. The potential for scholarly engagement to be equally a site of emotion, but one of redemption and disciplinary redress is compelling. Andrews (2018) again considers the power of the contemporary moment and her voice as an Indigenous museum ethnographer as she draws a tight focus to one very human interaction shared between anthropologists Joseph Birdsell and Norman Tindale in Andrews’s own Yuwaalaraay country in June 1938. When, after discovering a grave thought to be of significance, the pair discussed the acquisition of remains, Birdsell remarking in his field journal ‘Tinny won the toss for this fellow’ (Andrews 2018: 285). Bringing this moment out of the candid informality of Birdsell’s private journals in to contemporary anthropological and museological discourse, in this case, triples down on these sites of emotion by honing in its potential to evoke, weaving a Yuwaalaraay presence into an historical situation, and valuably contributing to a developing discipline. As will be explored in Chapter 3, the repatriation of ancestral human remains, their funerary possessions and sacred items is transformative and inherently powerful. A goal in repatriation practice is how to improve the transactional approach. This naturally begs the question of how to continually elevate the repatriation experience for the benefit of all involved. There is wisdom and opportunity in recognizing on both sides, the powerful role of emotion in the repatriation process.

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Indigenous Ancestral Remains    63 Barbalet, J. 2002. ‘Introduction: Why Emotions Are Crucial’. The Sociological Review 50 (2_​ suppl): pp. 1–​9. Bennett, G. 1834. Wanderings in New South Wales, Batavia, Pedir Coast, Singapore, and China: Being the Journal of a Naturalist in Those Countries, During 1832, 1833, and 1834. London: Richard Bentley. Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge. Blumenbach, J.F. 1802. Abbildungen Naturhistorischer Gegenstände. Göttingen: Heinrich Dieterich. Boddice, R. 2016. The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Buddle, R. 1906–​1907. ‘Unpublished diary of Roger Buddle on board “Hinemoa” December 1906–​February 1907’ Auckland War Memorial Museum MS 42. Burke, E. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell. Daston, L. and P. Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Princeton: Zone Books. Fforde, C. 2002. ‘Yagan’. In The Dead and their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice, edited by C. Fforde, J. Hubert, and P. Turnbull, pp. 229–​224. London: Routledge. Fforde, C. 2004. Collecting the Dead: Archaeology and the Reburial Issue. London: Duckworth. Fforde, C. and J. Hubert. 2006. ‘Indigenous Human Remains and Changing Museum Ideology’. In A Future for Archaeology, edited by R. Layton, S. Shennan, and P. Stone, pp. 83–​96. London: UCL Press. Fforde, C., L. Ormond-​Parker, and P. Turnbull. 2015. ‘Repatriation Research: Archives and the Recovery of History and Heritage’. In Human Remains and the Law, R. Redmond-​Cooper and N. Palmer, pp. 39–​59. London: Institute of Art and Law. Fyfe, G. 2006. ‘Sociology and the Social Aspects of Museums’. In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by S. Macdonald, pp. 33–​49. Oxford: Blackwell. Golańska, D. 2015. ‘Affective Spaces, Sensuous Engagements: In Quest of a Synaesthetic Approach to ‘Dark Memorials’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (8): 773–​90. Gower, S. 1833. ‘Joshua Brookes -​Medical Reform.’ Lancet 20 (522): pp. 722–​3. Hoare, J. 2020. ‘The Practice and Potential of Heritage Emotion Research: An Experimental Mixed-​Methods Approach to Investigating Affect and Emotion in a Historic House’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 26 (10): pp. 955–​74. Hubert, J. 1989. ‘A Proper Place for the Dead: A Critical Review of the Reburial Issue’. In Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions, edited by R. Layton, pp. 131–​64. London: Routledge. Klaatsch, H. 1907. ‘Schlussbericht uber meine Reise nach Australien in den Jahren 1904–​1907. Translated by B. Stehlik 1986: Hermann Klaatsch and the Tiwi, 1906’. Aboriginal History 10: pp. 65–​76. Macpherson, E. 1860. My Experiences in Australia: Being Recollections of a Visit to the Australian Colonies in 1856–​7. London: JF Hope. McKeown, C.T. 2013. In the Smaller Scope of Conscience: The Struggle for National Repatriation Legislation, 1986–​1990. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Meredith, J. 1989. The Last Kooradgie: Moyengully, Chief Man of the Gundungurra People. Sydney: Kangaroo Press. Message, K. and A. Witcomb. 2013. ‘Introduction: Museum Theory: An Expanded Field’. In The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, edited by K. Message and A. Witcomb. pp. xxv–​lxiii. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell.

64   Fforde et al. Moore, G.F. 1884. Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia: And Also a Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language of the Aborigines. London: M. Walbrook. Oxley, J. 1820. Journals of Two Expeditions Into the Interior of New South Wales . . . in the Years 1817–​18. London: John Murray. Phillips, R.B. 2011. Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s Press-​MQUP. Plamper, J. 2010. ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’. History and Theory 49 (2): pp. 237–​65. Reddy, W.M. 1997. ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’. Current Anthropology 38 (3): pp. 327–​51. Reddy, W.M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenwein, B.H. 2006. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Simpson, M.G. 2012. Making Representations: Museums in the Post-​ colonial Era. London: Routledge. Smith, L. 2021. Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, L. and G. Campbell. 2016. ‘The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect and Emotion’. A Companion to Heritage Studies, edited by W. Logan, M. Nic Craith, and U. Kockel, pp. 443–​ 60. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell. Smith, L., M. Wetherell, and G. Campbell (Eds). 2018. Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present. London: Routledge. Stearns, P.N. and C.Z. Stearns. 1985. ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’. The American Historical Review 90 (4): pp. 813–​36. Teslow, T. 2007. ‘A Troubled Legacy: Making and Unmaking Race in the Museums’. Museums and Social Issues 2 (1): pp. 11–​44. Turnbull, P. 1993. ‘Ancestors not Specimens: Reflections on the Controversy over the Remains of Aboriginal People in European Scientific Collections’. Contemporary Issues in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies 4: pp. 10–​35. Turnbull, P. 2002. ‘Indigenous Australian People, Their Defence of the Dead, and Native Title’. In The Dead and Their Possessions, edited by C. Fforde, J. Hubert, and P. Turnbull, pp. 63–​86. London: Routledge. Turnbull, P. 2020. ‘The Ethics of Repatriation: Reflections on the Australian Experience’. In The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew, edited by C. Fforde, C.T. McKeown, and H. Keeler, pp. 927–​39. London and New York: Routledge. West, I. 1987. Pride against prejudice: reminiscences of a Tasmanian Aborigine. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Wetherell, M. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage Publications. Wetherell, M., L. Smith, and G. Campbell, 2018. ‘Introduction: Affective Heritage Practices.’ In Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present, edited by L. Smith, M. Wetherell, and G. Campbell, pp. 1–​21. London: Routledge. Wood Jones, F. 1928. ‘Claims of the Australian Aborigine’. Report of the 18th Meeting of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science (Australia and New Zealand) Western Australian Meeting Perth August 1926, pp. 497–​519. Perth: F.W. Simpson.

Chapter 3

E motion and t h e ret u rn of ancestors Repatriation as affective practice Cressida Fforde, Jilda Andrews, Edward Halealoha Ayau, Laurajane Smith, and Paul Turnbull

One pronounced argument that effectively captures the diametric opposition of our respective worldviews is when museum officials frame their scientific approach as objective and in the pursuit of pure knowledge and our Hawaiian cultural approach as subjective and prone to emotion. Moreover, that we Hawaiians have a duty to the rest of the world to contribute to the body of knowledge by allowing physical examination and testing of Ancestral Remains. There is an inherent discrimination in this view whereby it prioritizes science over culture and incorrectly assumes that culture is devoid of science. Most importantly, it weaponizes science to overcome our humanity, our family values and beliefs with respect to the treatment of the dead. As if our family values are no longer important, effectively outweighed by objective science. This incorrectly presumes that our ancestors mated for the purpose of creating osteological material rather than to raise a loving family.—​Edward Halealoha Ayau

3.1  Introduction There is a significant amount of historical evidence that demonstrates collectors were aware of Indigenous opposition to the theft of their ancestors, and resisted when it was in

66    Fforde et al. their power to do so (Fforde 2004; Turnbull 2002, 2017). This evidence has come to light since the 1980s when Indigenous people (particularly from Australia, New Zealand, and the USA) started campaigning domestically and internationally for repatriation. Their actions prompted analysis of collection/​ing archives, associated primary sources and literature, and revealed a hitherto undocumented history about the removal of Indigenous bodily remains. Over the past thirty years, understanding this history has formed a significant component of repatriation scholarship (e.g. Bieder 1990; Fforde 1992a, b; Tapsell 2005; Turnbull 1991, 1993, 1994, 2002, 2017) in tandem with examination (and documentation) of the reburial debate itself (e.g. Fforde 2004; Fforde et al. 2015; Hubert 1989, 1992; Jenkins 2010; Layton 1989; Ormond-​Parker 1997, 2005; Smith 2004; Tapsell 2005, 2016; Turnbull 2017; Webb 1987; Zimmerman 1989). Such scholarship responded to, and informed, the development of progressively more pro-​repatriation policies and, in some cases, legislation campaigned for by Indigenous repatriation experts and their supporters. Early examples of policies include those of the World Archaeological Congress (i.e. the Vermillion Accord and WAC’s First Code of Ethics on Members Obligations to Indigenous Peoples), with landmark legislation in the USA in the form of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA 1990). Although there are some earlier exceptions (e.g. Ayau and Tengan 2002; Thornton 2002), the last ten years has seen a broadening of repatriation scholarship away from solely historical analysis and in-​depth examination of the arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’. There has, for example, been an increase in scholarship about the impact of repatriation on affected communities, and the relationship between repatriation, healing, and reconciliation (e.g. Fforde et al. 2020a; Hemming et al. 2020; Krmpotich 2014; Western Apache 2020). From the start of the repatriation movement, repatriation researchers and practitioners highlighted Western concerns for the dead and pointed to the double standards at play (e.g. Hubert 1989: 134–​8, 1992: 107–​8; Hubert and Fforde 2005: 117; Zimmerman 1989). Nonetheless, the debate over repatriation was characterized in the media and scientific press by the framing of oppositional difference, frequently expressed in a hierarchized binary that those who sought to find equitable, collaborative, solutions found to be false and unproductive. Indeed, the polarization between the assumed ‘objective’ claims of science that collected material was of ‘universal’ value against the so-​ called ‘subjective’ cultural claims of Indigenous peoples (e.g. Brothwell 2004; Mulvaney 1991; see also this volume: Chapter 12) does much to obscure the consequences of both the debate and the collection of human remains on lived experiences. However, collecting and repatriation are issues deeply entangled with matters of control and power, and structuring the debate in terms of such binaries is therefore not surprising. It is important to acknowledge the agonistic tensions (Mouffe 2013, 2019) over the hegemonic distribution of power that exists between different affective practices, the knowledge they produce, and their political and cultural consequences. This hegemonic distribution can be clearly observed in repatriation debates, claims, and counterclaims. Repatriation scholarship has also focused on the ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ responsibility of researchers and museums to return human remains (see for example Cohan 2003, 2004; Klesert and Powell 1993; Powell et al. 1993; Turner 2005; Ucko 1987; Vitelli et al. 2006;

Emotion and the return of ancestors    67 Zimmerman 1998; Zimmerman et al. 2003; amongst others). The extent of the focus on ethics tended to regard the development of ethical practice as an end in itself if not a ‘solution’ rather than broadening understanding of the political context of repatriation struggles and a critical understanding of the ongoing consequences for Indigenous communities of the systemic racism of wider collecting, museological and archaeological practices, and theory building. Emotion is an area of repatriation studies that has received only limited attention despite its centrality to the history of removal and return, and its diverse and influential manifestations in repatriation (e.g. Grant 2020; Sumner et al. 2020). These manifestations include the ways in which the presence of emotion is perceived, hidden, revealed, and criticized, its role in repatriation’s impact (its influence) as associated with, for example, learning opportunities and experiences, its social benefit in terms of healing and wellbeing, shifts in (or reaffirmations of) control and power, and how these all may come together to produce or stall processes of reconciliation. Indeed, we are interested in exploring whether approaching repatriation as an affective practice is a particularly informative way to understand (and thus encourage) its peace-​making power and potential. This lack of attention is due partly to the youth of repatriation scholarship and the relatively recent emergence of emotion and heritage as a legitimate area of enquiry. Informatively for how ‘emotion’ is valued and perceived, it is also likely due to the derisive accusations against repatriation claimants and their supporters that their motivations are emotional, as opposed to (and set in hegemonic comparison against) a privileged status given to (falsely claimed) unemotional objective rationality of those who argue for their retention. This asserted duality of White ‘rational objectivity’ and Black ‘emotional subjectivity’ will be familiar to students of nineteenth-​century race science, and those who have to live with such racial stereotyping in their everyday lives. Thus, it is both the nature of emotion in repatriation, but also the ways in which emotion itself is weaponized, that suggests it is a particularly informative topic of enquiry. In Chapter 2 we explored the emotional legacy carried by Ancestral Remains. Our shared attention to this legacy is founded in an interest in the interconnection between heritage and emotion, a desire to advance understanding of repatriation and its historical context, and a commitment to forging new ways to think about, and thus develop, best practice. Indeed, what exactly is meant by ‘best’? And by whose criteria is this composed and measured? We view best practice not only in terms of clear, transparent, smooth, and timely procedures and logistics, but in how practice may optimize social benefit and minimize risk. Fundamental to social benefit is, of course, emotion. Formations of repatriation practice within concepts and imperatives of healing, wellbeing, and peace-​building (reconciliating) are central to our approach, and this exploration of emotion and return of Ancestral Remains is undertaken accordingly. We observe that while repatriation policies commonly use terms associated with ethics—​such as respect, accountability, fairness, and transparency—​those more overtly associated with the emotional realm seem rarely employed. In a world where Black Lives Matter has highlighted a desperate need for new ways to address inequality, and where there are flickers of awareness of the presence and durability of structural and

68    Fforde et al. discursive barriers, our chapter also asks the question: would best practice in repatriation be guided productively if emotion was acknowledged and ‘brought in’, and values such as empathy, compassion, generosity, and kindness, be given greater prominence?

3.2  Emotion and affective practice Perhaps unsurprisingly, rationalist forms of understanding and knowledge production tend to dismiss emotion as irrational and of impeding ‘balanced’ and unbiased decision-​ making. Emotion, however, is integral to cognition and taking a position of ‘objective neutrality’ and adhering to a sense of ‘professionalism’ is itself an emotional position. This chapter is framed within an understanding of affect, or more generally emotion, as always and inescapably socially and culturally mediated (Leys 2011; Wetherell 2012). Contra to some theorizations of affect (such as Massumi 2002; Thrift 2008), we draw no significant distinction between affect and emotion, both are intertwined rather than conceived as sequential. We draw on Wetherell’s (2012) notion of ‘affective practice’, in which affect/​emotion is defined as integral to framing practice but also the knowledge that is created or recreated through practice. Particular practices will have their own emotional repertoires that are taken for granted and hegemonic and which work to subordinate other emotions/​affective states (Wetherell 2012, 2015). Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) idea of ‘feeling rules’ is helpful; here emotions are understood as managed by social rules or ‘conventions of feeling’ in which certain emotions and their expression are defined as legitimate or illegitimate in certain situations or practices. Affect/​emotions are thus understood as not only culturally regulated but are also managed by social structures such as class, age, gender, ethnicity, and so forth (Wetherell 2013). Ideology is another important context in understanding how emotional repertoires or feeling rules are validated or not. As Jost (2006, 2019) has demonstrated, how a person is affected or not will be influenced by political beliefs and values, as will the way an individual processes information. ‘Motivated social cognition’, argues that not only are emotions and ideology interrelated, but that the motivation to manage fear and ambiguity is pronounced in political conservatives (Jost et al. 2003; Jost 2019). Those holding conservative ideologies tend to be uncomfortable with uncertainty and anxious about change. They will thus tend to resist social change and in doing so will accept inequality to maintain the status quo (Jost et al. 2003: 351). Linking this to the idea of affective practice illustrates the role ideology plays in facilitating or impeding changes to certain forms of practice. Motivations to manage anxieties over change can facilitate the maintenance of power relations and the legitimacy afforded to different knowledge claims. This observation is pertinent in the repatriation field, which sees the norm being challenged and fundamental changes advocated and achieved across a wide spectrum of activity. Central to the conceptualization of affective practice is discourse; as Wetherell argues, ‘Feelings are not expressed in discourse so much as completed in discourse’ (2012: 24,

Emotion and the return of ancestors    69 original emphasis). Thus, the terms and narratives available in any culture work to articulate but also organize, reproduce, and legitimate affect (Wetherell 2012; Wiesse 2019). Discourse organizes and regulates practice and knowledge production. Particular words, or what Reddy (2001: 104) defines as ‘emotives’, do things in the world—​they have consequences and influence. Thus, for one community in the repatriation debate, the acquisition of Ancestral Remains is described and experienced as collecting, while for another it is described and experienced as theft and desecration. Practices, and the discourses that frame these, work to reproduce power relations (Schatzki 2008; Wetherell 2012) or, as is clear in repatriation, to also counter, upend, and reset them. Engaging with the affective qualities of discourse and practice allows a more complete understanding of the impact and consequences of social action, while allowing an opportunity for the social sciences and humanities to catch up with the ‘feeling world that unfolds around them’ (Hoggett and Thompson 2012: 2).1 Further, the role of emotion in cognition cannot be ignored (Ahmed 2004; Sayer 2011; Jost 2019). It is essential within this debate to recognize the discourse equivalencies for Indigenous people—​ the structures which frame and guide the making and remaking of knowledge in their worlds. Repatriation activities thus represent a form of intercultural discursive engagement. Indigenous scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith recognize that this interface inherently features emotion, not only because of the affective character of Indigenous epistemologies but also in that Indigenous epistemological systems are being brought in to dialogue with injustice. For Smith, exploring imperialism is a ‘significant project of the indigenous world’, and as such, requires an engagement with ‘a whole array of feelings, attitudes and values . . . words of emotion which draw attention to the thousands of ways in which indigenous languages, knowledges and cultures have been silenced of misrepresented, ridiculed or condemned in academic and popular discourses’ (Smith 1999: 20). Emotions help us make sense of the world, to facilitate and frame evaluative and moral judgements (Sayer 2005; Mercer 2010). They propel us to act and change or to remain unmoved (Jost et al. 2003), and they help us negotiate, validate, or invalidate knowledge claims (Illouz 2007; Jost 2019; Morton 2013). This literature points to the validity, potential, even necessity, of making emotion and affect a focus of enquiry in repatriation, a field, as noted above, in which one area of scholarship has focused on ethics and morality. In a context in which parties in repatriation claims may have a different (world or epistemological) view about what is a moral or ethical position, making judgements about which is the ‘correct’ one, may have more to do with feeling than is ‘comfortable’ for a rational standpoint to admit. The way in which emotion is felt at handover ceremonies, for example, is often integral to the learning outcomes experienced by participants as it also is to the relationship building that can occur between previously discordant parties.

1  Hoggett and Thompson (2012: 2) observe how bizarre it is, ‘that the determined refusal to admit the feeling world into the social and political sciences occurred in a global society characterized by eruptions of nihilistic hatred’.

70    Fforde et al. In considering repatriation as an affective practice, it is important to stress that analysis need not simply engage with the hotter emotions such as anger and joy, but also the cooler ones such as indifference or quiet satisfaction as these, as much as more pronounced emotions, do their own social and political work. Note, therefore, the presumed relationship between ‘objective’ and ‘unemotional’ and how this is deployed to denigrate Indigenous claims. It is thus useful to consider the different registers of emotional engagement as much as the emotions themselves (Smith and Campbell 2016; Smith 2021). The idea of ‘registers of engagement’ acknowledges that it is analytically useful not simply to acknowledge that a specific emotion is at play, but also to consider the intensity of it, the sincerity or otherwise of its expression, and how it is being expressed and why (Smith 2021). Thus, it is also important to make a distinction between feeling emotions and expressing emotions. What may be observed as a lack of emotion, may instead be simply its lack of expression. In cultures where revealing emotions in public is considered highly inappropriate, their presence on display at repatriation handover ceremonies is a signal of the register or intensity at play and, correspondingly, the need to take notice of this aspect as an informative phenomenon. Importantly, emotions, like values and meaning, do not reside in the essence of particular objects but are evoked by them. Neither do emotions simply ‘stick’ (contra Ahmed 2004) to material things or places. However, things and places may nonetheless become the focus of, and facilitate, emotions and meaning-​making. Human remains (Indigenous or otherwise) take on diverse meanings, values, and provoke distinctive emotional registers framed by different affective practices, in different cultural and social contexts, as people engage and interact with them. Similarly, heritage is not defined by, or simply as, a material object or place, but is rather a performative practice of meaning-​making in which the past is actively used, to help address a range of social and political problems in the present (Smith 2006). Smith (2021) has stressed the emotional aspects of this idea of heritage, identifying a range of heritage affective practices and performances that work to create, recreate, or maintain the meaning of the past for the present. The idea of emotional authenticity, or Morton’s ‘emotional truth’ (2002), observes that the veracity with which emotions are experienced helps validate individual and collective practices of remembering and forgetting and the historical narratives they affirm or challenge. Belief systems and epistemologies (Western and non-​Western) encompass complex and diverse ways in which bodily remains, in various states, hold particular meaning(s) and power, and have rituals associated accordingly. Repatriation has profound emotional power because it concerns death and those who have passed away. This power is intensified by the circumstances pertaining to the act of ‘collection’—​an intervention or disruption to the culturally prescribed journey surrounding death and passing (both in a physical and spiritual sense). It is important to understand that what is considered appropriate treatment of the dead does not solely hinge on religious or spiritual belief (or lack thereof) about the dead. Such matters are also highly influenced by cultural, social, family, and personal values, traditions and customs, as well as diverse factors that may be important for some and irrelevant for others, such as how long ago the individual

Emotion and the return of ancestors    71 lived, whether they are known, famous, or anonymous, and whether they are close kin or held particular social roles. The different ways that humans perceive Ancestral Remains may regulate, at least in part, the emotions they evoke and the affective practices that result. Similarly, prejudice (or other hierarchical arrangements) against particular people, gender, nationalities, class, races, or societies will also determine the manner in which the subaltern dead are treated. As Ruth Richardson vividly demonstrates in Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987) it was the bodies of the poor that were predominantly the target of theft for anatomy teaching in the UK. Further, desecration of (or violence and injury to) the body of the deceased enemy has been a common practice in many cultures, past and present. Exploring the legacy of emotions associated with Indigenous human remains in museum collections does not require any judgement about the veracity or otherwise of how people perceive them or why people perceive them that way. Instead it is interested in the emotions that result (see this volume: Chapter 2). However, it does require understanding that colonization (and the race paradigm and racial science in which it was entangled) was fundamentally characterized by imposition of a hegemonic relationship between Western and Indigenous belief systems and epistemologies. The ‘science’ vs ‘Indigenous beliefs’ dichotomy that is brought to the fore in the repatriation space appears to replicate this relationship in as much as it fosters the perception that the terms of debate are reason versus emotion. It also mutes the important shared human value that all cultures care for the bodily remains of their deceased. Sincere empathy—​a highly influential emotional and cognitive response—​by non-​Indigenous people for the Indigenous position does not therefore require adoption of Indigenous beliefs. Rather it draws on the similarity of emotions felt through personal experience of bereavement, funerals, and proper treatment of the funerary places of those we care about.

3.3  Emotions and repatriation: A Hawaiian perspective Indigenous peoples involved in repatriation have described myriad and mixed emotions when engaging in the claim, return, and reburial process (Fforde et al. 2020b; Hammil and Cruz 1989; Hubert 1989; Meloche et al. 2020; Turner 1989). Echoing the experiences of other First Nations peoples, in Hawaii, it starts with hope, which fuels the energy and persistence required to undertake the long hours to locate ancestors. This is followed by anguish, anxiety, and pain, or kaumaha (emotional, spiritual, and physical harm). Kaumaha stems from the realization that the ancestor and their possessions were taken, their final resting places and sacred burial ceremonies desecrated, their mana (spiritual essence; power) violated, and their humanity objectified and transformed into property. There is immense psychological harm in these realizations every time they are experienced. For Hawaiians, from the ancestor’s view, there is the anger of why it took

72    Fforde et al. so long to come to their rescue. Anguish can fuel the continued hope required to resolve challenges and hardens resolve to overcome seemingly unscalable obstacles. Invariably, a rollercoaster of emotion follows. When ancestors finally come home, emotions associated with intense relief and happiness are shared across the lāhui (Hawaiian nation; people), who also experience the ancestors’ confusion (at how much their homeland has changed) and joy at return to Papahānaumoku (Earth Mother) and family. For Hawaiian repatriation practitioners, caution is required because kaumaha has the power to completely overwhelm and debilitate, resulting in anxiety and depression. In Hawaii, ceremony, pule (prayers) and mele (songs) are used by repatriation practitioners to help navigate the abyss of emotion and protect them from the inevitable pain and anguish. Prayers function to connect people with their ancestors, to seek their forgiveness and understanding, and also to ask that they engage in their own rescue by helping to inspire, empower, and guide those involved in their return. For Hawaiians this is where philosophies of interdependence between the living and the deceased are most crucial, where each is a function of the other’s wellbeing. Through repatriation, Hawaiians seek to restore the place of the ancestors in the ‘ohana, in the family, to re-​establish their familial function once again and their role as ‘aumakua, or ancestral deities, who support living descendants. As with other Indigenous explications of the importance of repatriation (e.g. Hemming et al. 2020; Western Apache Repatriation Working Group 2020), the return of ancestors to Hawaii re-​establishes equilibrium, and key ontological structures, and this in turn is fundamental to health and wellbeing. Over the past thirty years of national and international repatriation practice, Halealoha Ayau has also experienced the range of emotions that have impacted those in museums with whom he has negotiated. In such negotiations, the Hawaiian delegation makes it a point to communicate to museum officials the level of kaumaha they experience, particularly when repatriation requests are refused. This is done in part so that museum officials understand the personal impact of their decisions. Hawaiians experience frustration at the inability of museum officials to recognize the primary responsibility of Hawaiians to repair the damage caused by the removal and continued retention of Ancestral Remains. Delegations have also witnessed the frustration of museum staff when Hawaiians were perceived as not valuing knowledge produced by science. Although witnessing these differences in emotions, through communication and negotiation, and through intentional and thoughtful development of handover ceremonies, they have also observed how repatriation practices can lead to shared understandings, shared emotions, and a peace, of sorts. In so doing, these repatriation practices can move understandings forward, reset relationships to those less constrained by the colonial hegemonic past, and open up space for new opportunities (and see Jones and Herewini 2020). Acknowledging its highly charged condition, in 1989, Jane Hubert opened her critical review of the reburial issue in the following terms, ‘The issue that is now widely referred to as the ‘reburial’ issue has grasped archaeologists in some areas of the world firmly by the throat—​and it shows no sign of letting go’ (Hubert 1989: 133). Repatriation debates characteristically had/​have high emotional charge for all involved, despite the assertion

Emotion and the return of ancestors    73 by those arguing for retention that their stance was/​is objective and, thus, implicitly, unemotional. While scientists were quick to denigrate and marginalize Indigenous claims as emotionally and politically motivated, they were unable to recognize the emotions in which their own actions were enmeshed, and the strength of the politics of identity and recognition at play. They were also invested emotionally in their position, expended emotional energy in trying to maintain the status quo, reacted with emotion when their views were not accorded primacy, and were affected emotionally by the outcome. As noted by Smith (2004: 406): ‘The issues are political ones that revolve around the politics of identity and recognition—​in which the disciplinary and individual identity of archaeologists and other scientists are as much at stake as those of Indigenous peoples’.

3.4  The Emotions of science: Rebutting Indigenous claims Between 1968 and 1972 excavations revealed the fragmentary remains of some 22 individuals near Cohuna, Murray River Valley, south-​eastern Australia. Referred to as the Kow Swamp remains, these were dated to around 10,000 BP (Thorne and Macumber 1972) and were claimed by, and returned to, the Echuca Aboriginal Community (Faulkhead and Berg 2010; Lahn 1996). Professor John Mulvaney, a leading, founding, Australian archaeologist who generally opposed reburial, published his account of the ‘destruction’ through reburial of these remains in a 1991 issue of Antiquity and the ‘vain public and behind-​the-​scenes campaign’ in which he was involved, ‘to save the collection’ (1991: 12). In this extraordinary article, Mulvaney’s emotions bubble just beneath the typeface and, today, it is fertile ground for analysis of a particular view of archaeology that was, amongst other things, supremely and unquestioningly, un-​self-​ reflexive, and morally confident. It is a prime example of how Indigenous emotion at the treatment of their ancestors was weaponized to delegitimatize their claims. Desperately concerned to ensure continued research access to the ancient and scientifically important fossilized remains uncovered at Kow Swamp, Mulvaney argued unsuccessfully for the compromise of housing them in a Keeping Place under Aboriginal control. Throughout the article, he asserts the objectivity and rationality of those who sought to retain the collection for study, while emphasizing the emotional and political content of the campaign for reburial by those he decried as radical Aboriginal activists—​ whose views he claimed were at odds with those of an emerging generation of young Aboriginal archaeologists. The appeal of emotions is blamed as an intricate part of why scientific rational reasoning was rejected, along with the lack of appreciation by local communities of the ‘future implications of reburial’ (1991: 17, but see Webb 1987). For Mulvaney, the emotionalism in the Kow Swamp campaign was framed as something that only Aboriginal people experienced or employed, and acted to cause all but a few archaeologists to be silenced. He appears unaware of the presence of his own emotions

74    Fforde et al. or, if aware, does not consider them in the same way or on the same footing. This is despite the distinctly emotional tone of the article itself, which reveals feelings of vexation, exasperation, betrayal, and disappointment, and explicitly states that, ‘for those few academics who attempted public intervention it proved a traumatic and lonely period’ (1992: 12). For Mulvaney (1991: 12), the reburial of the ancient remains removed from Kow Swamp was: ‘a triumph of bureaucracy and irrationality over prudence and positive, collaborative, race relations.’ Mulvaney’s accusations of irrationality are worth considering further, as they are characteristic of the rational and objective versus emotional and political discourse so favoured by those who defended retention. However, this discourse should not be seen as present only in the modern repatriation debate. There is a long history of those implicated in the acquisition and scientific use of the Indigenous dead responding to Indigenous opposition by labelling it as a result of irrational or superstitious beliefs. Museum archives of the late nineteenth century illustrate this, as explored in Chapter 2 of this volume. Thus, in late 1892, Henry James McCooey, a field naturalist and ethnologist who regularly collected for Sydney’s Australian Museum, warned its curator that the Gundungurra people in the Burragorang Valley of the Blue Mountains were outraged that museum staff had stolen remains from a burial. Reflecting the racialized perceptions of Aboriginal people in late nineteenth-​century settler society, McCooey ventured that in respect of the dead, ‘. . . even the most sensible or “tame” aborigines are singularly morose, superstitious, and treacherous—​more so, in fact, than Europeans’, adding that they had reported this theft of Ancestral Remains to the police magistrate at Picton. In contrast, scientists and those who assisted them in acquiring the dead for various avenues of research represented their interests and activities as inherently rational, objective, and serving a greater good for all humanity. When Indigenous people gained the resources to begin organized reburial campaigning in the early 1970s, there were instances where researchers and museum professionals who resisted these demands did so explicitly representing their efforts to retain them as a quest to defend science from irrationality and superstition. For Mulvaney, support for repatriation in the Kow Swamp case was dangerously symptomatic of an ‘anti-​intellectual creationism’ representing ‘. . . an amalgam of Dreaming beliefs and anti-​evolutionary Christian fundamentalism’ that if unchecked would deny science the possibility to produce new knowledge of profound value, ‘Both for Aboriginal people and the general world community . . .’ (Mulvaney 1991: 21). As late as 2004, Donald Brothwell (1933–​2016), a pacifist and leading British archaeologist specializing in human palaeoecology who opposed repatriation, was ready to question publicly whether Tasmanian Aboriginal people could claim to be ‘true indigenous people’ by virtue of having ‘perhaps few “tribal” genes left . . .’. (Brothwell 2004: 414–​15). Repatriation he argued was a ‘. . . casting off of established scientific fact by regional peoples, because it is not relevant to their belief systems.’ It involved ‘emotion, power politics and variable belief systems . . .’, and threatened to cast aside ‘. . . the reality established especially by physics, chemistry and biology . . . in debates with Indigenous peoples holding other views.’ Indigenous peoples, as Brothwell saw it, needed to ‘. . . be dragged -​even kicking

Emotion and the return of ancestors    75 and screaming -​into this century’, as ‘to believe that their naive philosophies of life can be kept intact is foolishness’ (Brothwell 2004: 416). For Brothwell, ‘. . . it’s not just tribal communities but local communities that are going to be demanding repatriation more and more. This is bad news for scientific investigations. We are entering a period when religious hocus-​pocus holds increasing power’ (Brothwell interviewed in Eklund et al. 2003: 33). Like Mulvaney, Brothwell speaks of the emotions and politics attached to the repatriation debate, and does not identify his own emotional or political engagement. Politics is sited (negatively) and associated with politicians, and emotions are similarly framed and sited with Indigenous peoples, the media, and non-​scientists generally. In their framing, these scientists held dear the ideals of objectivity, truth, and rationality which are (and must be) implicitly unemotional and apolitical, and are valued as such as good and moral. The repatriation issue represents a distinct threat to these values and, is thus seemingly immoral and an affront to their sense of what is good and right. The ethical value they attach to their position, and the strength of their moral stand explains the sharpness of their emotions. This is as clear when they talk about the contrary views of other archaeologists, as it is about Indigenous campaigns. Mulvaney’s 1991 article tends more to anger at his radical peers, while Brothwell (2004) tends more to condescension—​while both elicit incredulity and disappointment. Maintaining a moral stance and associated sense of self-​worth also seems identifiable here, calling in to play what views are considered worthy, or not, of respect. Hence for Brothwell: It seems to me that the archaeologists have considerable potential to contribute to the absurdities of human societies, and there is a need for the maintenance of academic dignity, while attempting to resolve these problems involving human and cultural returns. (Brothwell 2004: 415–​16 our emphasis)

Julie Lahn (1996) and Madalyn Grant (2020) analysed the events surrounding the campaign to retrieve and rebury the remains of the Kow Swamp individuals. Lahn’s informative social history in part describes the emotions that were on display, while for Grant, investigating the relationship between repatriation and emotion is the primary research question, addressed through examination of three case studies, of which Kow Swamp is one. Their work need not be repeated here, but Grant’s observations are particularly relevant to the emotional legacies that inform and contextualize contemporary repatriation affective practices. The Kow Swamp return occurred in the first period of the reburial movement in Australia, and achieved significant success both in terms of assertion of Indigenous right to control the future of their Ancestral Remains, for the growth in understanding and collaboration that it forced in the archaeological discipline, and the development of pro-​repatriation policies that curators today put in practice. As Grant notes: To divorce emotions from this analysis, as scientists of the period claimed to do, dilutes the power of the deeply personal arguments Indigenous people were making

76    Fforde et al. in the face of seemingly emotionless bureaucracy. To divorce emotions from this analysis also prevents a holistic examination of the archaeologists and anthropologists in the debate, instead rendering them emotionless and bureaucratic caricatures. Yet these two camps, despite moments of intense opposition, did not simply coalesce around the same Ancestral Remains, they coalesced around the same emotions. (Grant 2020: 14)

3.5  Discussion: Emotion and reframing the repatriation debate Emotion is not only experienced and felt in repatriation, but the presence of absence of its expression features as a point of contention. Accusations of ‘emotion’ (strongly tied to accusations of ‘subjectivity’, ‘political motivation’, and ‘inauthenticity’), have been used to denigrate the validity of Indigenous claims. Considering emotion and repatriation thus both requires understanding of where, and in what way, it is felt and expressed, but also the way its presence is used to influence outcome. However, while it is easy to characterize Kow Swamp and the other major returns of the 1980s as polarized debates, a perception fuelled by the media, the issue was not as uniformly factional as it was portrayed. Many in the archaeological and associated professions supported greater collaboration and Indigenous rights. Even in 1991, Mulvaney could only identify ‘possibly only five professional academics’ who intervened in the Kow Swamp public debate to support the Keeping Place option, and three who supported unconditional transfer (1991: 19). ‘Of more concern’ he wrote, ‘is the silent, passive majority of professionally trained archaeologists and their disciplinary kin’ (1991: 19). These quiet peers held a range of views and chose not to be involved for a number of reasons. For Mulvaney their silence was explained as trepidation to enter a ‘moral mire’ (1991: 15), and it was disturbing to detect in his colleagues ‘a failure of nerve, or an unwillingness to state unpopular truths in the face of exaggerated Aboriginal claims’ (1991: 18). However, many in the relevant professions did not hold his views and the loneliness he describes was also the result of being increasingly out of step with his own professional community. Thus, in 1989, the newly formed World Archaeological Congress (WAC) had shown that agreement between academics concerned with the study of the past and Indigenous peoples (these groups are not mutually exclusive) could be reached, as demonstrated by the Vermillion Accord and, shortly afterwards, WAC’s First Code of Ethics on Members Obligations to Indigenous peoples. We are cognizant that emotions are both a personal and collective experience but that it is rather too easy to polarize repatriation communities (and the experiences they feel) into ‘those opposed’ and ‘those for’ (or racialize them in terms of ‘white scientists/​ museum professionals’ and ‘black Indigenous claimants’) and to ascribe emotions

Emotion and the return of ancestors    77 accordingly. We push back against following and affirming this duality. Although there are obviously cultural specifics, emotions about caring for the dead are much more uniform than they are a criteria of division. However, this similarity is/​was not foregrounded in the repatriation debate. Instead the debate mainly focused on essential difference, wrongly framing it in terms of respect for Indigenous belief systems on the one hand, and the importance of scientific objectives on the other, or as ‘Ancestors’ vs ‘Specimens’. It rarely recognized that almost everyone cares that their dead are treated appropriately. Consider Brothwell, for example: While I understand that precise facts, perhaps especially as revealed by scientific research, may not fit comfortably into a belief system, it nevertheless seems essential that the reality established especially by physics, chemistry and biology, is not cast aside in debates with indigenous peoples holding other views. I sense, perhaps incorrectly, that there is some degree of acquiescence to alternative philosophies, at the expense of making clear the basic facts of life as accepted in the western world. (Brothwell 2004: 416)

Despite Brothwell and Mulvaney’s desperate call for people to listen to ‘the facts’, it is a common cultural norm that the deceased’s wishes are respected and the family has the preeminent role in how this is carried out, or makes decisions if the wishes of the deceased are not known. This is why those supportive of repatriation in the 1990s and early 2000s continued to stress the double standards at play, when, for example, commissions were set up to investigate the desecration of the deceased at Alder Hey Hospital in 1995 or after the Marchioness disaster of 1989, while concurrently British institutions largely continued to refuse to accede to repatriation claims (e.g. Hubert 1989; Fforde 2004). It is why, in the USA, repatriation trail blazer Maria Pearson had ‘had enough’ and started to take concerted action, when Native American remains dug up to make way for a road were sent to the local museum, but those of European settlers in the same cemetery were taken away to be reburied (Zimmerman 1989). Trying to understand why the debate was framed in terms of difference, rather than cultural commonalities is an interesting exercise. Partly it was to do with resistance to giving up privilege and known norms about the importance of science and authority to control research data, partly it was to do with Western constructions/​imaginings about Indigeneity, and partly it was tied up with an empathy gap (or insincere empathy). While people may not be able to accept the legitimacy of the spiritual beliefs of others, they can nonetheless look to their own experiences to empathize about caring for their own dead and the burial places of family members. For example, moving the dead closer to home is not only an Indigenous imperative. Applications to exhume human remains in order to move them closer to family (including overseas) are common. An informative question is exactly when for museum communities, human remains in collections are perceived primarily as ‘the dead’ rather than primarily scientific objects (see Fforde 2004; Pickering 2008), which then produces an environment that makes shared emotions—​and thus sincere empathy—​more possible. Indeed, an impediment

78    Fforde et al. to empathy is an inability to perceive human remains as ‘the dead’ or to sincerely recognize that others, validly, do so. Thus, for Mulvaney, it was extremely difficult to comprehend how the Echuca community could claim or care for the ancient Kow Swamp remains as ancestors and feel the associated affinity and responsibility towards them. He explained that the ‘vast time factor’ and their ‘distinctive physical differences’ made the remains ancestral to all Aboriginal people, not just the local community at Echuca, and he describes their decision to rebury as ‘vandalism’ (1991: 16). As Smith (2004) and others (e.g. Fforde 2004) explained, issues of time depth and biological descent were clear obstacles for many scientists in according legitimacy to Indigenous concerns. In the context of museum-​curated human remains, it is important to reflect here that it is likely the institutionalization, academic training, and associated disciplinary practices—​the affective practices of museology and research—​are central in producing primacy of ‘meaning’ for human remains as object, rather than the remains itself or the cultural background of the observer. Thus, in the Western context, placement and organization within an institution (with associated numbering systems, categorization, storage boxing etc.), scientific interventions (archaeological excavations/​research on curated remains), anonymity, the degree of temporal and/​or cultural ‘otherness’ of the remain, are part of the affective practices that distance their meaning as ‘the dead’, and feeling rules or permissible emotional repertoires. This distancing is less prominent when remains are named or known individuals (even Pharaonic), sited in a modern crypt or cemetery, when scientific authority identifies the remain as kin (however ancient—​see Anon 1997; Sykes 2001: 7–​8), or when the observer/​visitor has no scientific interest or agenda. Gravestones identifying occupants, and visited and tended areas make relationships to the living more visible, and signal that particular feeling rules are in play. Further, within a cemetery setting, human remains are surrounded by legislation, practice, emotions, and behaviours associated with the dead that are, generally, not simply absent in the museum context but actively excluded by museological practices and the feeling rules that underpin them. Emotion (often released/​felt at handover ceremonies) plays a key role in causing perceptions/​values about human remains as object to shift to those that understand/​appreciate the meaning of human remains as primarily ‘the dead’. Empathy can significantly ‘kick in’ at this point. The emotions felt (and shared) at handover ceremonies can enable perceptions that previously put limitations on dialogue to shift and open up new possibilities. As Mercer (2010) argues ‘feeling is believing’, and the embodiment of strong emotions can intervene to alter established attitudes and associated practices. Shifts in perception to encountering strong emotional situations are not inevitable, however. As Jost (2019) argues, emotions can be managed to deflect ideological discomforts. Cognitive dissonance can, as Smith (2016, 2021) documents, be met with imaginative empathetic shifts in perception. More often, however, particularly in the context where those from privileged positions are being asked to consider race based assumptions, the witnessed emotions of others can not only be deflected but actively reinterpreted and re-​embodied to support preconceived assumptions and maintain disregard (Smith 2021: 285f). For Indigenous claimants,

Emotion and the return of ancestors    79 there is no necessity for this shift. For many peoples, Ancestors exist in the present and indeed have agency and themselves feel emotion. Many Indigenous claimants have described museums as graveyards and jails and the pain that Ancestors feel being apart from their loved ones and traditional lands. Any potential for emotion-​ based learning is most clearly apparent when previously differing emotion responses begin to align. Handover ceremonies may enable empathy in another way also. Emotion plays a central role by which people involved in repatriation gain immediacy in understanding the colonizing experience. Time can telescope at handover ceremonies, and in a process described by Sharon Macdonald (2013) as ‘past presenting’, a profound realization of the events experienced by those in the past—​and how these impact people today—​can be understood/​felt on sometimes a very visceral level. Indigenous claimants and museum professionals and dignitaries at handover ceremonies may experience and make meaning out of this differently, but emotion is nonetheless central to the ‘meaning-​ making’ process. Curator perceptions about claimants may also shift when the reaction and behaviour of the latter are witnessed. These shared emotional experiences are also fundamental to the formation of new relationships that have occurred through the repatriation process (itself a central requirement/​aspect of reconciliating), which again points to the importance of giving proper consideration/​analysis to emotion and affective practice in repatriation. Finally, understanding repatriation and emotions also benefits from research undertaken on the reaction of visitors to displays of heritage associated with prejudice and persecution. For example, research by Smith (2010) on the impact of exhibitions for the 2007 bicentenary of Britain’s Slave Trade Act found that responses by white British visitors were dominated by ‘emotional avoidance and disengagement with the exhibition content’. Indeed, ‘so focused were many on trying to avoid discomfort or guilt, that little conceptual room or emotional energy was left to engage with the deeper issues of continuing social injustice and other legacies of the history of Britain’s exploitation of Africa and its peoples’ (Smith 2010: 193). This observation is pertinent in repatriation. Fear of guilt and responsibility is related to both a fear of engagement in the political and emotional ‘feeling world’, and hinders engagement in contemporary social justice issues that are intimately related to the history of the removal, retention, and study of Indigenous human remains. In 1991, Mulvaney expended considerable time in differentiating the unethical collecting activities of the nineteenth century from the ethical excavations of professional archaeologists, although Indigenous people saw both as grave robbing.

3.6  Conclusion In recognizing the affective practices, emotional repertoires, and feeling rules that frame repatriation we are calling attention to the complex emotional, and sometimes

80    Fforde et al. agonistic, tensions between Indigenous and museological/​archaeological knowledge claims. We have identified museological, archaeological, and other scientific practices that are framed by and adopt feeling rules that stress an emotional neutrality that presumes and emphasizes the ‘rationality’ of scientific knowledge. This is of course not the only form of affective practice that frames museological and research practices, but, as documented, it is at the heart of intense tensions between Indigenous and non-​Indigenous values about death and the dead. In this ‘scientistic’ affective practice, ambiguity and uncertainty, particularly those generated by Indigenous censure and critique, is emotionally managed in ways that tend to reinforce the primacy of disciplinary knowledge, the authority of disciplinary identity, and the legitimacy of valuing human remains as evidentiary data. Issues of guilt and shame, and thus ultimately responsibility for past and present injustices and their legacies, are sidestepped under desperate and frustrated claims for scientific neutrality. This practice, however, also sits in tension with developing or changing research practices that draw on more critical and self-​aware understandings of the emotional subjectivities of knowledge and meaning making. Our central argument is that more progressive and informed professional practices can only be facilitated by addressing and engaging with the emotional registers and repertoires of the affective practices of repatriation. Repatriation practices, their emotional repertoires and feeling rules, are diverse and will often be specific to the repatriation case in question. However, in drawing attention to the emotional complexities and the positive and negative valences of the affective practices of repatriation we are addressing the personal and wider social consequences of this practice. In engaging with the emotional repertoires and feeling rules of certain practices the structural consequences of knowledge production for social justice, cultural wellbeing, reconciliation, and peace building are identified. However, to engage with emotion is also to engage with the personal; abstract issues of power, cultural differences/​similarities, and colonial legacies are telescoped to the level of personal feelings. Engaging with emotions in these contexts can either be enlightening or terrifying. How individually or collectively we respond to the emotional repertoires around repatriation will depend on how we wish to manage change and cultural and social ambiguity. The ongoing development of more enlightened repatriation practices by museums and research professionals requires systemic change. Such change, however, can only be built upon by compassionate personal and individual decisions to change practice.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Madalyn Grant for her comments and suggestions on this chapter.

Emotion and the return of ancestors    81

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Pa rt B

C ON T E M P OR A RY AG E N C I E S OF C U R AT ION A N D C OM M U N I T I E S OF P R AC T IC E

Chapter 4

Museum s and th e ma rk et Passive facilitation of the illicit trade in antiquities Donna Yates and Emiline Smith

4.1  Introduction and background Discussion and criticism of the direct connections between museums and the illicit trade in looted antiquities have been a core component of ethical debates about ‘owning the past’ since the 1950s and is a consistent feature in decades of scholarship (to name some early examples: Bator 1982; Coggins 1969; Nafziger 1972) and investigative reporting (e.g. Felch and Frammolino 2011; Meyer 1973; Watson and Todeschini 2006) into antiquities trafficking. The need to prevent museums ‘from acquiring cultural property originating in another State Party which has been illegally exported’ is enshrined in the 1970 UNESCO Convention (UNESCO 1970: Art. 7A). As such, various codes of ethics have been put in place to deal with provenance research of museum acquisitions, and their implementation and applications have corresponded, if not correlated, with an apparent reduction in the number of very recently looted, and obviously illicit, antiquities that are accessioned into publicly funded museums. Due to increasingly limited museum budgets, publicly funded museums are not the primary buyers of antiquities on the market anymore, if they ever were. Academic discussions, as well as recent seizures and returns of objects, most often involve poor decisions museums made in the past. While it would be a bit of a stretch to say that the silver lining of museum underfunding has been that museums buy fewer illicit antiquities, it would be wrong to state that codes of ethics alone have halted museum engagement with what is ultimately a ‘grey’ antiquities market (Mackenzie and Yates 2016), namely a market in which licit and illicit objects are indistinguishable from each other. Indeed, a number of contemporary cases of publicly funded museums purchasing trafficked antiquities indicate that when museums have the funds, they are still at risk of spending it on loot, at times from dealers with prior convictions related to illicit antiquities trafficking and

88    Donna Yates and Emiline Smith sale, such as in the cases of the National Gallery of Australia in 2008 (Boland 2019) and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2012 (Katz 2017; Litt 2017). Although museums play a less active, less direct role on the antiquities market than they did in the past, the indirect and more passive contribution they make to sustaining the market is significant and has not been considered as widely and deeply as it should be. Several scholars (Brodie 2011; Mackenzie et al. 2019; Pinkerton 1998) have considered the roles that experts play in facilitating the illicit trade in antiquities, including such passive roles. These roles occupy a grey area within disciplinary ethical guidelines are part of the structure of the antiquities market: they serve to validate aspects of that market which should be critically assessed. This chapter considers the indirect roles that museums play within and in parallel to the antiquities market that support illicit trade in important ways. Specifically, it looks at museums as passive receivers of illicit antiquities and museums as influencers of the antiquities market as a whole, to consider the ways that contemporary museums help to maintain and, at times, guide the formation of structures which allow the illicit trade in looted antiquities to continue. Passively facilitating the market for antiquities is not the only option, and we urge museums to act as the public social conscience by actively working against the illicit trade in creative and dynamic ways.

4.2  Museums as receivers The antiquities market popularly considers museums to be the endpoint of the object trajectories of marketed and collected antiquities (Cuno 2008, 2009; White 2005). The ideal scenario, as projected by market actors, is that a wealthy individual curates a personal collection over the course of their lifetime and then donates that collection to a museum. Ideals, however, are not reality: antiquities are increasingly presented and marketed as financial investments (Baugh 2007; Carter 2017) and the very market actors who espouse that ideal are known to re-​market collections (Christie’s 2019; Felch and Frammolino 2011; Gross 2009), making the market to benevolent collector to museum-​ object trajectory far from the rule. That said, antiquities are often far too expensive for museums to buy and at this point, a cursory review of recent acquisitions indicates that most of the finest antiquities that enter publicly funded museum collections now do so as donations from collectors. This dependence on collector philanthropy and patronage is the reality of the modern not-​for-​profit museums and heritage sector (TEFAF 2020). Museums curate relationships with wealthy collectors over years and decades, and these collectors often donate more than just objects: they make financial gifts that institutions suffering from an erosion of public funding depend on. These collector donors finance new wings and become museum trustees. Museums which are dependent on donor relationships cannot afford to offend their benefactors. Even museums with robust policies against the accessioning of illicit antiquities and, at times, dedicated provenance research staff, may find themselves in a situation where

Museums and the market    89 to turn down the donation of a questionable antiquities collection would mean seriously offending a collector who is an important source of financial patronage. In such circumstances, objects from collector donors with poor or no provenance that the museum would perhaps not buy themselves are accessioned, provided they are not easily tied directly to illegality (i.e. the object is not in the Art Loss Register or Interpol’s Stolen Works of Art Database, and is not the subject of active litigation or known claims). Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), for example, has been accessioning objects from the ancient Latin American collection of late collector and long-​time museum trustee Landon T. Clay starting in the early 1970s and continuing into the 2000s, before his death in 2017. The objects have no provenance and are of types that are almost certain to have been looted and trafficked (Yates 2014); they are very likely stolen goods but due to the shielding nature of the trade in archaeological objects stolen from the ground this is unlikely to be proven via documentation, as such documentation does not and cannot exist (Mackenzie et al. 2019). A collection of Maya pottery that passed through Clay to the MFA in 1988 is infamously illicit (Slayman 1998; Yemma and Robinson 1997), but their more recent accessions from Clay are equally problematic. To cite one example: a Maya vessel gifted to the MFA by Landon T. Clay in 2005 (accession number 2004.2204), which on the museum’s online database has a stated provenance of ‘By 1972, sold by Lee Moore (dealer), Miami, to Landon T. Clay, Boston [see note]; 2004, year-​end gift of Landon T. Clay to the MFA. (Accession Date: February 23, 2005)’ (Museum of Fine Arts Boston, n.d.). Photographs of Moore looting a massive Maya stucco temple facade around 1968 are available (Ferri 2018; Trafficking Culture n.d.), and the vase includes the emblem hieroglyph of a Maya city, Calakmul in Mexico, where Moore is known to have left a graffito of his name at some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s (Graham 2010). Moore has been open about his looting of tombs at Calakmul and nearby sites, as well as his antiquities smuggling activities that extended, at least, into the late 1980s (e.g. see Bertelson 1987). When asked by the New York Times in 1973 if plundering Maya sites destroys the ‘scientific value’ of the objects taken, in a conversation where Moore was arguing that looting is positive, Moore responded ‘Maya burials are all basically the same–​they are not going to learn a lot more by seeing another burial’ (Reinhold 1973). One must ask, were Clay’s gifts of likely-​illicit antiquities items that the MFA simply could not afford to turn down? Such economic dependence on benefactors makes museums susceptible to donations from those willing to make use of the vulnerable position a museum is in. For example, since the 1970s, the late Douglas Latchford, a dealer and collector of Southeast Asian art, consistently made donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Berlin Museum for Asian Art. He also donated several statues to Cambodia’s National Museum in Phnom Penh, made financial contributions to improve the museum itself, and was widely recognized for his expertise and generosity (Hauser-​Schaublin 2016; Paviour 2017). However, Latchford was charged with selling looted Cambodian antiquities in 2019 as part of an elaborate antiquities trafficking network (Jacobs and Mashberg 2019; Rohrlich 2019). He died before facing those charges. His donations to renowned museums provided him with the image of reputable art

90    Donna Yates and Emiline Smith dealer and passionate collector, detracting attention from the origins of the donated objects and his alleged deep connections to illicit trade networks. In this capacity Latchford acted as a ‘Janus Figure’: like the two-​faced Roman god Janus who could see into both the past and the future, Latchford was able to see both an object’s illicit origins and public final destination, bridging the gap between traditional organized crime and the elite art world (Mackenzie and Davis 2014; Mackenzie et al. 2019). Some have posed the idea of museums as the logical home for ‘orphaned objects’ (Cuno 2008; de Montebello 2009). While this term has been used by various commentators to mean different things, in this sense ‘orphaned objects’ are objects that have had their provenance obliterated by the market and it is impossible to tell who they truly belong to (see e.g. Leventhal and Daniels 2013). In this scenario, museums are projected as serving as the home of last resort for these hopeless cases. While this proposal has some merit, particularly in cases where objects have been seized by authorities and, importantly, when potential state or community claimants do not object, applying this to accepting donations of unprovenanced antiquities from wealthy collectors has serious flaws. Working loosely from Bourdieu’s (1986) idea of capital, the collection of antiquities confers on the collector a significant amount of cultural capital. Possessing the antiquities is representative of their attainment of cultural status which leads to social and financial benefits. Museums, as important cultural institutions, give collectors cultural capital by associating with them, and the acceptance of an antiquity donation along with a ‘Gift of . . .’ notice on the label of an object on public display significantly increases the cultural capital of the collector. Instead of simply accepting orphaned antiquities as a last resort, museums that accession these objects validate the collector’s engagement with the illicit trade by continuing to provide significant social rewards for collecting unprovenanced objects. In the long run, this encourages collector demand for unprovenanced antiquities and therefore looting to meet this demand. Limited progress has been made in even acknowledging that museums validate the trade in illicit antiquities, and little is done to prevent it from happening. For example, many museums formally or informally use 1970, the year of the UNESCO Convention (UNESCO 1970), as a ‘cut-​off date’ for the acceptance of donated antiquities, meaning that if the collector/​donor has documentation that the object was out of the ground and on the market before 1970 it is considered safe to accession. This appears to be at least partially based on advice issued by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) in 2004 (AAMD 2004: Section II.D) and is used by museums as an easy provenance shortcut. However, it should not be. The 1970 UNESCO Convention did not establish a legal ‘cut-​off date’: instead, the ownership laws of the antiquities’ countries’ origins (and their dates) still apply, and an unprovenanced antiquity that was on the market before 1970 is still likely to be illegal or illicit (Yates 2018). If museums held themselves accountable for the receiving role they play within the market, examined the ethical minefield that comes with this, and put in place strict measures to prevent the accession of any object that cannot be proven to be fully legal, it would destabilize the market. Then the idea that all objects, including unprovenanced

Museums and the market    91 ones, would end up in a museum ‘no matter what’ would hold no value, and the cultural capital and social benefits for collectors that come from engagement with the illicit antiquities would be greatly diminished.

4.3  Museums as influencers Museums have social cachet and, with it, social influence. A major museum that suddenly goes on an unprovenanced antiquities buying spree would certainly be noticed by market actors, including collectors, who might model their provenance standards after the respected institution. The presence of museum representatives at major art and antiquities fairs and articles, listing what exactly museums purchase, is a staple of art market reporting (e.g. McGivern et al. 2020). Yet museum influence can play an important role in maintaining and validating the market for unprovenanced antiquities in more subtle ways than serving as a direct model for purchasing behaviour. While some of this indirect influence is impossible to avoid completely, it is rarely recognized and discussed within museums, and consequently, mitigation techniques are not developed or deployed. In effect, museums are ‘market makers’: they create both taste and value within the antiquities market, and the market depends on both. For example, there has been some discussion among scholars who study the illicit antiquities trade about the role that major blockbuster museum exhibitions play in inspiring the market. While data is limited on this connection, and is certainly an area that needs more research, what is clear is that museum exhibitions influence the market. For example, a representative of a major international auction house in Hong Kong stated in an interview: ‘We sometimes market around big exhibitions, especially the travelling ones like the Terracotta Warriors, or mummies, they always do well. People become inspired and ask for something similar’ (Smith 2019). Indeed, it is not a stretch of the imagination to picture a collector or potential collector who becomes so inspired by a well-​designed museum exhibition that they seek out those objects on the market, creating demand. Museums also act as influencers by affecting how value is determined on the market. By temporarily displaying antiquities that are still owned privately, museums lend their cultural capital to unprovenanced objects without fully accessioning them in the way discussed above. This may even be more problematic as this is clearly not an ‘orphaned object’-​museum-​endpoint scenario, and the unacquisitioned antiquity can be remarketed with the museum as part of its provenance. It is common for privately held objects, including unprovenanced objects, that have appeared in major museums to have the exhibition listed prominently in sales catalogues and marketing literature. The museum’s choice to display the object, to validate it as both authentic and worthy, may significantly increase the price that it sells for. Aside from the ethical issues associated with effectively adding value to unprovenanced antiquities, museums face more direct consequences for engaging in

92    Donna Yates and Emiline Smith such arrangements. In some recent cases museums appear to be conducting incomplete or poor provenance research on antiquities borrowed from private collections, presumably because the objects are not being accessioned and perhaps because they risk offending the patrons who lent them. This lack of due diligence may serve to negatively influence market actors, indicating to collectors that proper research is only required in some situations. Museums risk public relations issues when they are caught displaying obviously, or probably, looted antiquities that are not even theirs. An example of such conduct is the case of a 2,300-​year-​old marble sculpture of a bull that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was forced to turn over to New York authorities in 2014 after it emerged that the bull’s head was looted during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s (Mashberg 2017). The bull’s head was on loan from collector Michael Steinhardt, who had acquired it from the dealership Phoenix Ancient Art, which was selling it on behalf of collectors Lynda and William Beierwaltes, who in turn purchased the object from disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes (see e.g. Watson and Todeschini 2006). Phoenix Ancient Art, owned by Hicham Aboutaam who previously pled guilty to US federal charges related to antiquities trafficking (Meier 2004), sold the object with a succinct provenance: ‘Ex-​ American private collection, collected in the 1980’s–​1990’s’ (Felch 2017). Despite this questionable provenance, the bull’s head was subsequently put on display from 2010 until 2014, when curators at the Met raised concern of the provenance of the object and contacted Lebanese authorities. Upon finding out that Lebanon claimed the object, Steinhardt returned the object to the Beierwaltes for a refund of the price he paid (Mashberg 2017). The District Attorney’s office of New York (DANY) then seized the object, as the Beierwaltes’ refused to return it, and the bull’s head has since been repatriated to Lebanon (McDowall 2018; Moynihan 2017). Yet the museum’s role as social influencers can also be harnessed for positive outcomes, or at least to counter the two scenarios described above. One clear way to mitigate the risk that an exhibition will inspire an illicit market in a certain material is to ensure that exhibitions of poorly provenanced objects include a clear message about the negative aspects of the illicit antiquities trade, tying engagement in the market for unprovenanced antiquities to cultural destruction and significant information loss. The public should not be ‘let off easy’ with the impression that the objects in our institutions are not problematic, and the public is genuinely interested in the topic. Even if the objects on display are not individually illicit or illegal, perhaps due to them being lent for a temporary exhibition by their country or community of origin, exhibition of objects of a type that is at significant risk for looting and trafficking (which, sadly, is all antiquities at this point) should include such a message. The goal would be to make the thought of going out and buying one’s own unprovenanced antiquity seem appalling while providing interesting and important information to the public about where these objects truly come from. Discussions about how this can be accomplished in every exhibition and in every gallery are important, worthwhile, and could produce some dynamic results in fitting with the current museum discourse on true and meaningful decolonization.

Museums and the market    93 The museum as influencer could firmly refuse to display privately held objects that do not have clear provenances that stretch back to the relevant dates of legislation in the countries of origin (so not simply 1970, the date of the UNESCO convention), independently researched by museum staff. If there is no time or funding to conduct the research independently of the collector, the object would not be displayed. In other words, the museum would not display anything that they would not themselves accession, and conduct the same level of due diligence on privately held objects as the objects they are considering bringing to their own collections. This seems simple, but the issues of the power relationships with benefactors discussed above remain, and museums would need to seriously consider how they can empower curators and more junior employees to challenge pressure from above. Denying even a temporary museum place for unprovenanced antiquities, thus denying the transfer of cultural capital involved in museum display, can be an important deterrent to the market. Yet the refusal to validate potentially illicit antiquities, when transmitted through the communication pathways of market actors, no doubt makes unprovenanced objects significantly less desirable, hopefully reducing demand. To go a step further, museums who actively curate relationships with donors can choose to use the relationships they built to educate donors/​collectors about the realities of the illicit trade in antiquities, and the social and cultural risks involved in purchasing unprovenanced antiquities. Research has shown that antiquities dealers educate their clientele, influencing the development of their tastes over time (e.g. Mackenzie 2005). Museums, who have significantly more social cachet, should do the same, and some certainly do, particularly those with the financial stability and clout to say ‘no’. While this runs close to biting the hand that feeds the museum, few other entities are able to reach collectors from a position of institutional respect. Thinking seriously about this issue in relation to donor relations may result in creative and effective strategies that minimize offence and maximize the development of mutual understanding and trust.

4.4  Closing thoughts: Museums and private governance All told, these more subtle, indirect ways that museums support the market for illicit antiquities are much more nuanced than the toolkits we currently have to deal with them. Our codes of ethics at the time of writing, with their many shades of grey, do not effectively address these scenarios or empower museum employees to actively oppose such practices. Instead, accountability and reflexivity should lead the museum sector to devise structured approaches to respond to the challenges and responsibilities that come with a museum’s role in the twenty-​first century, and harness this to influence public policy. In short, they should engage in private governance.

94    Donna Yates and Emiline Smith In many industries, private entities contribute and shape public policy, and an evolving body of literature assesses the different manifestations, origins, and consequences of private governance across different sectors (see e.g. Auld 2014; Pattberg 2007; Rudder 2008). Non-​state actors, such as private organizations, industry associations, and other third party groups, play a recognized role in setting norms and standards that are seen as legitimate by other actors, including governments (Elbra 2017). The term ‘private governance’ therefore describes the diverse mechanisms that private entities use to create rules and regulations that do not only govern their own behaviour but also the behaviour of others, thereby impacting public policy, as opposed to governmental involvement in regulation and enforcement (Stringham 2015). Accordingly, private governance would allow museums to channel their societal influence to become active rule setters, both within their own sector as well as beyond, such as in the art market and collecting world. Museums should employ their legitimacy and authority to move away from their inward-​facing codes of ethics, and instead actively develop internal governance that works in an outward capacity, with a direct effect on the art market and with a great social impact. As Elbra (2017) notes, private governance regimes dictate the ‘accepted way of doing things’ within particular industries. The multitude of grey areas related to the ethics, regulation, and policy of the collection, trade, and ownership of antiquities demand a structured approach to the ‘rules of the game’, meaning the formal rules or standards that dictate what is acceptable or required behaviour (see Haufler 2001: 8), which museums could and should be formulating in line with their role as societal influencers and in line with their passive association with art market value. In this way, museums can themselves play a role in the dissemination of progressive (global) norms. We end this chapter with a call for research to better understand the market influence of museums and for discussions to take place within museums themselves about the passive role museums play in supporting the trade in unprovenanced antiquities. In a period of unending museum defunding, where institutions have to beg from a variety of sources to ‘keep the lights on’ and to pay increasingly casualized staff, it is sometimes easy to forget that museums are in a position of social influence, not just to a mistily defined ‘general public’, but to the market actors that depend on museums for social validation. If we bring these issues into the academic museum debate and, more importantly, the practical museum day-​to-​day discussions, it is possible to collectively come up with interesting and effective ways for museums to not simply passively receive problematic material and silently add value to the market for unprovenanced antiquities. Rather the cultural capital of our institutions could be used towards proactive social change in this field, thereby balancing their public accountability with private governance.

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Chapter 5

Affective mu se ums The practice of collecting archaeological artefacts in the Brazilian Amazon Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira

5.1  Introduction The discipline of archaeology and the institution of museums share a common and interconnected history from their beginnings. Both participated, and still do, in the process of research and understanding of the past, in the process of memorialization of artefacts and collections, in proposing and advancing policies of heritage management, and in creating narratives that represent the past. This close relationship includes the public perception that associates museums with archaeology and vice versa. Archaeology and museums are immersed in the world of objects and it is through them that we create the narratives of the past. Jordanova (1989: 23) affirms that museums are ‘classification exercises’ in which acts of ordering things generate narratives ‘not as an interpretation, but as a fact’ (Bolton 2003: 43). While building certain worldviews about the past, archaeology has actively participated in this task of classifying and ‘ordering the chaos’ (Ferreira 2009). However, as we know, the interpretation of the past is not the privilege of a small group of specialists; other collectives also play a key role in this process. Traditionally, public interaction with the materiality of the past in museums is restricted to tours and performed before a glass display case. In these encounters with the collections, people interpret material culture by incorporating the information provided by the museums to that of their own experiences with the things of the past. Both narratives—​museum and public—​are imbued with imagination, since ‘the “knowledge” that museums facilitate has the quality of fantasy because it is only possible via an imaginative process’ (Jordanova 1989: 23). Between the past imagined by archaeology and museums, and the public imagination, there is a vast range of human experiences and worldviews that are part of the interpretative processes. An archaeological exhibition is a place of engagement with the

Affective museums   99 past, where people confront themselves and their own perspectives of the world and its ordering. It is a space of power and conflict where prevailing regimes of knowledge prevent marginalized social groups from representing themselves with equity, especially in traditional museums. Changes in the relationships between museums and society occurred in the field of museology, between the 1970s and 1980s, and were influenced by movements that emerged from Eastern Europe and Latin America, as a result of sociopolitical inquiries about the role and social function of the museums. This included series of documents such as the Declaration of Santiago de Chile (1972), the creation of the International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) as part of the International Council of Museology (ICOM), and the International Movement for a New Museology (MINOM), were crucial for the establishment of a new theoretical framework for museology and museums (Baghli et al. 1998). Due to the mobilization and demand of social groups whose histories had been, historically, erased from the museums, these movements had a strong resonance in Latin America (Saladino 2008). In the second half of the twentieth century, this changing context fostered the development of a wider array of community museums and ecomuseums, as well as attempts to address the participation of other collectives in the museums. Since the 1970s, there have also been significant shifts in the relationships between archaeology and the public. The debates triggered by Public Archaeology (McGimsey 1972) and the discipline’s internal criticism in the 1980s, eventually led to an epistemic turn in the 1990s (Bate 1998; Gero and Conkey 1991; Hodder 1992; Shanks and Tilley 1989). These movements raised concerns about the social role of archaeology and the implications of our interpretations in the present. The advances in these two fields, museology and archaeology, have paved the way for the constitution of collaborative spaces, whether inside museums’ walls or not. These were built upon other ways of knowing and engaging with the past and its materiality. In this chapter, we discuss the engagement with the material repertoire of the past, addressing the status of the archaeological collections formed and kept by communities living in the surroundings of the sites, as well as the creation of small affective museums in their domestic spaces. We focus on local collection practices conducted in small and rural societies with face-​to-​face interactions in the Brazilian Amazon. The relationships between Amazonian Indigenous people and archaeological heritage are not considered here. They have been deeply investigated by many Indigenous and non-​Indigenous archaeologists working in the Amazon (see e.g. Cabral 2016b; Jácome and Wai Wai 2020; Munduruku 2019; Rocha 2020; Silva 2019).

5.2  Collecting the past To begin this discussion, it is necessary to define ‘collecting’ and ‘collection’. These two concepts are not unique to archaeology or museology, in fact, they play a role in our daily lives in different ways. Belk (1995: 67) states that:

100    Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira . . . collecting is the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-​ identical objects or experiences.

Collecting is an intentional act and, for the most part, preceded by some type of planning that ensures not only the success of the activity, but also the formation, growth, and/​or improvement of the collection. Things are removed from their original context of use and are classified, rearranged, and cared for in consonance with the collector’s experiences. Other meanings are constructed during this process which, according to Belk, enables the creation of a ‘new product’: the collection. The collection is a set of objects gathered because of their similar attributes and of the meanings they bring to the collectors’ life experiences. These objects can be temporarily suspended from their primary functions and are cared for so as to ensure their longevity, since they must last in order to be seen. A collection is not merely an accumulation of things that serve our daily consumption practices; and neither it is composed by the original function or effectiveness of the objects, but by their agency over the collector. Collectors, according to Pearce (1997: 48) see collected objects as ‘extensions, or even completions, of themselves’. Indeed, based on Miller’s (2010: 10) premise that things do not represent us but ‘actually create us’, the collection is more than an extension of the collector. It is constructed at the same time as the collector constructs themselves. The collection not only brings things together, but is also an embodied place where the emotions and experiences of the collector are intertwined. Because of this biographical nature, the things that compose a collection cannot be used, consumed, or damaged. On the contrary, they are removed from its use and circulation spheres, which reflects an attempt to suspend the effects of the passage of time over their materiality. Museum collections are also formed by a group of things that have been removed from their original contexts of use, or of deposition, and kept in storerooms in a way that prevents their decay. These collections are considered as ‘realms of memory’ (Nora 1984), where the past is constructed ‘in an artifice of a historical sequence’ (Shaw 2018: 164) and preserved so that it reaches future generations. Such a task implies the adoption of conservation strategies that are associated with safety and security protection measures and regulations, all of which traditionally restrict the collections’ access to an elite of specialists. But when we think about archaeological artefacts, the differences between these two categories of collection—​private and museum—​are remarkable. Issues concerning the origins and the destination of the objects, for example, affects the perception and valuation of the collections, leading to questions of whether they are (or should be) legitimated or not. For example, a classification based on the origins of the archaeological collections was constructed by Pearce (1997) who refers to a survey conducted by the Museum Association, in the 1980s, and divides the archaeological collections into six categories: 1) ‘single pieces or small groups found as chance finds . . .; 2) large groups formed as private collections . . .; 3) material from museum-​based excavations; 4) material from excavations conducted by other bodies . . .; 5) material from field working

Affective museums   101 projects . . .; 6) . . . material which has been discovered through the use of a metal detector . . .’. While reflecting on the nature of the archaeological collections, some other aspects, that go beyond the official heritage discourse, should be considered. Archaeological collections are, in general, related to two distinct and interconnected contexts: the excavation that generates the collection (and the artefact as a scientific category) in situ, and the museum that is recognized as the legal destination of the objects recovered during the fieldwork. Museums store fieldwork collections, serendipitous finds brought in by non-​archaeologists, and the collections donated by individuals or other institutions, among others. There are yet other practices that produce collections but keep them outside institutional walls. One such example is the collections of archaeological artefacts that are put together by individuals, adults or children, or groups, such as a family for different purposes (Bezerra 2012; Colwell-​Chanthaphonh 2004; Labelle 2003). These activities reveal different modes of engagement with the archaeological heritage. The choices that people make while forming these collections, as well as their longevity, depend on the objectives behind the collecting. Considering these aspects, the collections of archaeological artefacts put together by non-​archaeologists can be classified into four main categories: 1) collections that fuel international illicit trafficking (Brodie 2012). It is worth mentioning that the Brazilian Amazon is one of the regions from which archaeological heritage is looted (Bezerra and Najjar 2009); 2) collections formed for commercialization, aiming to supply basic needs of subsistence. This kind of activity has led to the creation of the category ‘subsistence diggers’ which refers to ‘a person who sells artefacts to support his traditional subsistence way of life’ (Staley 1993: 348). The activity of selling artefacts is not necessarily linked to international trade. Lima et al. (2013) observed that, in a small and rural community in the Amazon, this practice can be reduced strictly to occasional actions. In this sense, they suggest that in such contexts, these acts should not be regarded as traffic, since people are unaware of the illegality of their actions; 3) collections formed by people who define themselves as passionate guardians of local histories and heritage (Labelle 2003), and who act as ‘history makers’ of the materiality, a category Ferreira (2002: 326, own translation) suggests is associated with ‘the authors that write about the past overlooking the rules established by the academic community, or collecting oral testimonies based on the belief that individual account expresses the history in itself ’; and 4) collections formed for affective motives. In this latter case, the artefacts are collected and kept by people who live in the vicinity of the archaeological sites. They establish intimate and daily relationships with artefacts, incorporating and merging them into their personal belongings and memories (Betancourt 2020; Bezerra 2012; Colwell-​Chanthaphonh 2004; Mageste et al. 2020). The complexity of these scenarios blur, to some extent, the binary oppositions between past and present, of science and traditional knowledge. Traditionally, these phenomena have been considered in light of theoretical frameworks that emphasize issues related to the physical integrity of the archaeological heritage. This has led the collecting practices in small communities to be seen, as acts of destruction. Preserving heritage and constructing management

102    Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira strategies that prevent looting is extremely relevant. However, Matsuda (1998: 95) suggests that we redirect our attention to examine the nature of the subsistence diggers’ actions, in order to build more suitable strategies to preserve heritage. Other examples from around the world also reveal the complexities of these practices (Asensio 2019; Hollowell-​Z immer 2003; Labelle 2003; Matsuda 1998; Van Velzen 1996). We can look beyond the category ‘subsistence diggers’ and extend Matsuda’s proposal to other agents who collect and store archaeological material in small communities. The collection of artefacts practised by non-​archaeologists for affective reasons, and conducted especially on the surface, reveals modes of engagement with the past. These attitudes indicate people’s engagement with the heritage and should not be seen as destructive activities (Bezerra 2012). In this regard, Hart and Chilton (2015: 318) state that: The failure to acknowledge these artefact recovery practices as significant to heritage (not just as a threat), has led to the erasure of social acts that aim to work out social relations, identities, memories and senses of place that provide people with a sense of security and groundedness in the world.

Aiming to reflect on these sensitive acts, we now focus on the context of the Brazilian Amazon, where collecting practices give rise to small collections of archaeological artefacts, eventually, integrated into people’s mementos such as objects, photographs, and all sorts of documents. As a consequence, the collections composed by this biographic and multitemporal materiality, grow and turn into ‘affective museums’.

5.3  Affective museums in the Brazilian Amazon According to the current statutes of the International Council of Museums (ICOM 2007) approved in 2007, the museum is: ( . . . ) a non-​profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

It has been increasingly recognized that this definition, approved by the 22nd General Assembly in Vienna, in 2007, no longer contemplates the demands and the role of the museums today. Desvallées and Mairesse (2010: 58) note that this concept of museum derives from a western perspective that emphasizes its normative and capitalist nature. Such critiques suggest the importance of non-​western modes of thought as a means to decolonize the very concept of museums. The new definition of museum

Affective museums   103 presented at the 139th ICOM meeting held in Paris, in 2019 (pending approval), sheds light on this debate, since it conceives museums as ‘polyphonic spaces’ (see also this volume: Chapter 26). The proposal foregrounds a participatory model of museums and their key role in the construction of global social justice (ICOM 2019), as we see below: Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. ( . . . ) Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities ( . . . ) aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

One of the greatest challenges posed by a new definition of museum is the recognition that today there are multiple types of museums, including museums without walls, objects, or storerooms, making it more difficult to encompass all such variety into one concept. The paradigm shifts triggered by New Museology’s (Vergo 1989) debates have brought museums closer to society, yet there is a long way toward more collaborative, inclusive, and diverse museums. Many of these institutions have made efforts to decolonize the exhibitions by conducting a sensitive selection of the themes, objects, and narratives presented, and opening up hidden museological spaces to the public (Brusius and Singh 2018). As a result, there is an increasing number of open and visible storerooms in museums around the globe. These initiatives reveal museums’ commitment to deconstructing the ‘storage-​display binary’ opposition (Brusius and Singh 2018: 14). The aims of making stored collections accessible are twofold: fulfilling the demands for democratized access to heritage and promoting an invigoration of the social life of many objects that would never be seen during their ‘museological lives’ (Brusius and Singh 2018: 9; Cabral et al. 2018; LaBelle 2003; Pereira 2019). In addition, storerooms formerly accessible to museum staff and academics have been transformed into collaborative spaces opened to other collectives and knowledge, as in the case of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (MPEG) in Amazonia. Founded in the nineteenth century, the MPEG is one of the most important museums in the country. It has a pivotal role in the history of Brazilian science, as well as in the history of Amazonian archaeology. Recently, the institution has launched a new project carried out at a storeroom where artisans produce replicas of archaeological ceramics while discussing the technical and artistic processes with researchers and curators. The co-​production of knowledge has been promising for the improvement of the replicas, as well as for the archaeological investigations of ceramics traditions in the Amazon (Lima et al. 2018). New types of museums, such as archaeological site museums, have displaced the academic authority over the heritage and the narratives of the past, promoting a more inclusive, diverse, and engaged participation of other collectives (Bruno and Moraes Wichers 2014; Silverman 2006; this volume: Chapter 9). Beyond these initiatives, several museums develop educational activities outside their walls, in spaces such as parks and schools, among others.

104    Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira Over the years, museums have begun to break the walls and exercise their social role in other contexts, where groups socially excluded from the museums can engage with the collections and the activities offered by the institutions. Moreover, many of these groups which have historically been made invisible in the museums yearn for the construction of a museum based on their own perspectives and demands (Ferreira 2012; Ferreira and Bezerra 2012; Moraes 2012; Silverman 2006). Ferreira (2012) developed a project in Joanes, a rural village in the Marajó Island, in the Brazilian Amazon, to examine the local concept of museum. She concluded that, for the majority of the community, the perception of a museum is connected to an existing museum—​the Museu do Marajó—​situated in a city two hours away from Joanes. The concept of this small museum was set by Giovanni Gallo, an Italian Jesuit priest in 1972. A sensitive person, Gallo managed to bring the quotidian life of the village into the museum. The collections encompassed archaeological artefacts (associated with the known Marajoara culture, among others), as well as objects, photographs, and documents connected to recent local history and culture. The local communities are proud of this museum. This feeling resonates with the communities in Joanes that also desire to have their own museum. Pyburn (2006: 262) notes that the ‘possession of a museum is a ticket to inclusion in an important social group’. In Joanes, a museum would serve as an instrument in the political and identity-​related disputes with other villages in the island. Moraes (2012) also describes that the gathering of historical artefacts at the Capim river valley by Amazonian quilombola1 communities is part of a local effort to establish a museum. Archaeological heritage is used as a political tool in the constitution of their identity, as well as to protect their territorial rights. While waiting for a museum to be established, members of different communities engage in conversations about their imaginary museum. They activate their ‘museum’ to describe the assemblage of things that they have put together and stored during their lives. In several cases, they held archaeological artefacts amongst their biographic objects, and together they play a key role in the constitution of feelings of nostalgia, happiness, sadness, self-​esteem, and pride.

5.4  Archaeology in the home ‘So that it remains after I’m gone. To be turned into a museum’ This is the thought of T.D., an older man who lives in the vicinity of an archaeological site in Joanes, a thought shared by others in the village. He showed us his collections of objects, documents, photographs, and souvenirs, which act as reminiscing mementos for him, but simultaneously also reminders of the local history, the past, and the people

1 

Quilombolas are descendants of former enslaved African and African-​Brazilian populations who established settlements known as ‘quilombos’.

Affective museums   105 who live there. The things he has collected over the years are displayed on the walls of his house or carefully stored in cabinets and boxes. He is a passionate admirer of his own collections and prides himself on being attentive to the preservation of the village’s history. T.D. is a kind of local ‘history maker’. These attitudes toward the past are observed in several contexts in the Amazonian region. Gathering small archaeological collections at home is a common practice in the Amazon. The houses are often placed on the top of archaeological sites and in their interior, it is possible to observe funerary urns storing water or flour. The swiddens are also built on top of the sites, especially, the Amazonian dark earth sites, which are constituted by anthropogenic soils with a high level of organic elements which turns them into extremely fertile soil. Children play with pottery sherds and gather old coins for their collections (e.g. Bezerra 2012, 2017, 2018; Bianchezzi 2018; Cabral 2016a; Costa 2020; Gomes et al. 2014; Leite 2014; Lima et al. 2013, 2017; Moraes 2012; Rocha et al. 2014; Silva 2015; Troufflard 2012). These practices, which take place on the surface of the sites, constitute a ‘solid metaphor’ (Tilley 1999) of the coexistence of past and present in Amazonian life. The small gardens and swiddens cultivated on the top of sites in the backyards of the houses constitute a place where the labour, sociability, and women’s agency are enacted (Machado 2014). In this context, the sense of proximity, intimacy, and affection for what we see as archaeological artefacts is conceived. This daily proximity encourages the practice of collection. The archaeological objects that these communities deal with are incorporated into the affective mementos or discarded to prevent their evil power, as in the case of some ‘visagens’ (the Amazonian category for supernatural beings).2 Bezerra (2019) points out that archaeological sites are like an ‘inn for phantoms’ (Bachelard 1969: 63), and that ‘visagens’ are not representations, in her perspective they are tangible and sensitive copresences that structure the Amazonian daily life and, ultimately, bridge the past and the present. Accounts of the mundane uses of archaeological artefacts in the Amazon are not recent. There have been reports of children playing with fragments of pottery since the beginning of the twentieth century, and of women who used ancient vessels as cooking pots or as flower jars (Leite 2014). More recently, archaeologists have observed a ceramic vessel serving as part of a chicken coop (Santos 2015), a stoneware bottle used as a flower vase in a school at a quilombola territory (Moraes 2012), and a stone axe functioning as a door weight (Bezerra 2018). These practices are also mentioned in the classic literature on Amazonian history and culture. Dalcídio Jurandir (Jurandir [1958] 2018) was one of the most important Amazonian authors of the twentieth century (1909–​1979). By the time of his death, he had published several novels in which, through his characters, he underscores the persistent presence of archaeological materiality and its relevance in the daily lives of those populations (Bezerra 2018). The sensible entanglement between people and the archaeological heritage in the Amazon is something remarkable. It informs substantial issues about their lives, of how 2 

‘Visagem’ is a native category for the supernatural beings that inhabit the forests and the water. The word ‘visagem’ (French origin - “visage”) is used as a synonym for apparitions, ghosts and hauntings.

106    Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira these objects became intertwined with their social relationships, how these populations construct the past with the objects found in their backyards, and of how they are placed in their memorial narratives. A retired schoolteacher, D.V., from the village of Joanes assembled a collection of historic pottery fragments in her backyard as she built her house. Over the years, while caring for her granddaughter in the afternoons, she washed and restored each one of them with the little girl’s help, storing the collection in shoeboxes. She keeps the pieces and the shoeboxes together with her personal belongings such as photographs, documents from her deceased father, and other family heirlooms. All these things are stored in a hidden corner of the house but are always accessible for guests. She expresses her intentions to bequeath the collections to a prospective local museum. This is quite a common thought among local collectors. As previously mentioned, they see themselves as custodians of local heritage. The majority assert that they would donate the entire collection to a museum, though others admit that a selection will be needed since certain archaeological artefacts have become emotional biographical objects. Silva (2015: 107, own translation) describes that in the Amazonian villages where he conducts his research, people end up ‘creating real museums in their living rooms, they are like windows through which they look at the present relationships and establish connections with the past ( . . . )’. While discussing conservation practices in local museums, Smith (1997: 8) suggests that the things that are gathered in small museums, by people who live nearby, constitute ‘home-​like places’, places that resemble their houses, because people bring their personal belongings to tell their individual stories within the framework of the collective local history. These places act as an extension of each person’s own home and life. People build ‘museum-​like places’, like an imaginary museum, one that does not yet exist, but that is desired; a museum in the becoming. The small collections intertwine long-​lasting stories and connect those who have created the objects in the past with those who produce new objects based on other meanings and narratives in the present. As a result, they form small affective museums, which is a reference to the place of human experiences with individual and collective memory and time, rather than to museums as formal, permanent, and authoritative institutions. The collected things share a mnemonic/​biographical nature; thus, a ceramic sherd and a family photograph have in common the ‘emotional attributes’ that are connected to the collector’s personal memories. The meaning of a stone axe which is also known by Amazonian people as ‘corisco’, or ‘pedra de raio’ (literally ‘thunderstone’)—​a native category also used in other parts of Brazil—​goes beyond the archaeological interpretation and value. S.L., a small farmer, inherited a stone axe found by his father during swidden agriculture activities. He has kept it amongst family stuff3 and, for years, has used it to tell his children stories about the ‘visagens’ that are closely bound to his labour activities, and their ancestry. The agency of these coexistences on the daily life have been 3  Miller (2010) uses the category ‘stuff ’ to refer to all kind of things whether they are ‘transient’, ‘intangible’, or not.

Affective museums   107 recognized, and ‘taken seriously’ (Viveiros de Castro 2015) by Brazilian archaeologists (e.g. Bezerra 2015, 2017, 2019; Cabral 2016a, b; Hartemann and Moraes 2019; Leite 2014; Mageste et al. 2020; Pellini 2018) during the last decade. However, there is an incongruence between these practices and perspectives, and the heritage discourse as enacted by the State. Under the laws of the Brazilian State, the act of collecting artefacts on the surface of the sites, or in their surroundings, as well as an illegal excavation for looting purposes, are both assumed to be destructive acts.4 Aside from questions regarding ownership—​in the case of Brazil, the archaeological resources are protected by the State, regardless of whether or not they are found in private or public lands—​the ‘obsession with preservation’ (Holtorf 2012) compels institutions and specialists to the physical conservation of objects and sites. In the sacralization process of these things, handling and touching are forbidden to non-​specialists. Nevertheless, the materiality is perceived through a multisensory connection, whether by specialists or not (Pellini 2015). The tactile engagement with objects is a means of learning about the world, and that provides us with ‘a sense of reality’ (Pye 2007: 14). Archaeologists, museologists, conservators, and curators, have the privilege of touching the objects recovered from archaeological sites and stored in museums. Conversely, the communities that live near and around the sites are seen as incapable of assessing the value of such heritage as well as the proper means for its preservation. According to the patrimonial perspective, the artefacts discovered by those people must be sent to museums or other research institutions to be safely stored, conserved, preserved, and displayed. However, we all know that plenty of archaeological finds collected by locals at their own backyards fill museum storerooms and that they will never be exhibited to the public. Or to put it another way, even if a collection is safeguarded in a museum, it does not mean that it will be musealized (Ferreira 2012). It is important to make it clear that we do not support acts that destroy the archaeological heritage and that we do not encourage non-​compliance with current legislation. Nevertheless, we find that it is crucial to review the preservation policies and move towards conservation as a social practice (Pye 2007: 18), to recognize the sensitive relationships that people have established with the things from the past. Western curatorial practices used mostly by museums have, traditionally, erased stories and have the potential to harm existences that are also part of the objects’ biography. The documentation associated with the artefacts turns a ‘corisco’ into an archaeological polished stone axe, rendering invisible the narratives that also inform about the ‘creator community’ of such artefact and the meanings that they evoke. Byrne et al (2011: 8) suggest preferring the term ‘creator community’ instead of ‘source communities’ because they recognize the importance of emphasizing the active role of these communities in the formation of collections, as well as the transformation and

4  Law nº 3.924, 26 July 1961. Establishes that the Brazilian State is responsible for the archaeological heritage protection and other aspects related to the practice of archaeology in the country. Source: http://​ portal.iphan.gov.br/​uploads/​legislacao/​Lei_​3924_​de_​26_​de_​julho_​de_​1961.pdf

108    Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira creation of objects. Although the authors refer to the things produced in the present, we use the term to refer to the past societies, the creators of the objects, that we have turned into a science category, such as archaeological artefacts. We must keep in mind, as Kopytoff (1986: 68) points out, that things, like people, have many biographies that are ordered through a selection process in which parts of the histories are conserved, while others are left behind. The museological life of an object is only one moment of their biography (Appadurai and Breckenridge 2015: 174). If this is the case, why aren’t the visagens who inhabit the ‘corisco’ mentioned in the fieldwork notes, reports, labels, or catalogue entries (Bezerra 2017, 2019; Cabral et al. 2018; Pereira 2019)? Daiane Pereira (2019: 46, own translation), an archaeologist and curator of archaeological collections at a research institution located in the Amazon, describes how a woman, D. Maria, sought her institution out, as she was curious about some ‘little stones’ discovered by a team of archaeologists in her community in the past. D. Maria did not recall the name of the site or the year of the excavation. Pereira had strived to locate the ‘little stones’, which turned out to be ceramics fragments with no plastic or painted decoration, which had not been analysed at the time. Even though there was little information to be shared, D. Maria, according to Pereira, felt extremely happy. Pereira concludes that: From such experiences, I understood that as curator, I couldn’t know and safeguard only the information derived from archaeological research, provided by archaeologists, or guarantee the physical conservation of objects, without being able to meet the demands of many Donas Marias who have sought and others that will seek the museum. It was necessary to ensure that one hundred years from now, people from Dona Maria’s community, even if they did not know the year or the name of the site, having only the community’s references, would be able to access what they desire based on the documentation. (Pereira 2019: 46)

Episodes like this are common and will certainly happen again in the future. This is aligned with Smith’s (1997) discussion concerning the ‘home-​like museums’. It is as if the research institution was, in a certain way, an extension of D. Maria’s community. Camila Jácome and contributors (2020), professors and students of archaeology at an Amazonian university, discuss the processes that lead to the constitution of the collections, within the field of archaeology, and that perpetuate ethnic-​racial violence, and invite us to reflect on what they called ‘epistemic collections’. This category of collections has an inclusive and diverse nature whereby people and their stories matter to the formation and information of the Amazonian archaeological collections. While bringing together different modes of knowledge, they foreground the senses that animate the archaeological objects in the present. People who interact with the archaeological sites on a daily basis express a feeling of happiness, caring, and pride, whether they keep their collections at home, or see them displayed in museums. In this sense, the creation of local museums, with shared collections, could contribute to keeping the objects and their histories in their original contexts (Ferreira and Bezerra

Affective museums   109 2012; Lima et al. 2017). On the other hand, meeting the technical standards required for the establishment and recognition of a museum can be a difficult, if not impossible, challenge for local governments. Unless a local institution is registered with the National Register of Safeguard and Research Institutions (CNIGP), it is lawful for archaeological material to remain in the source community.5 However, in the Brazilian Amazon, 28 institutions—​museums, universities, and research centres—​already have a significant volume of locally collected archaeological collections, most of which will never be studied or displayed (Cabral et al. 2018). Voss (2012) recognizes this ‘curation crisis’ (see this volume: Chapters 11 and 13), and the challenges of solving it. Kersel (2018: 275) on the other hand, suggests what she called a ‘provocative method’ referring to ‘catch-​and-​release archaeology’, and although it appears to be a legitimate way to reduce the volume of artefacts brought to museums, she admits that it does not solve the problems associated with earlier stored collections. Both Voss and Kersel mention other possibilities of dealing with the collections, such as the sale of redundant artefacts, long-​term loans, and strict discard policies. They also emphasize how controversial these alternatives are. Most of them conflict with Brazilian legislation principles. So, how should the archaeological collections amassed by members of local communities be handled? According to Bezerra (2018) artefact collection practices in the Amazon should be approached as a form of heritage, not in the normative sense of the State, but as phenomena that must be interpreted in their own social, cultural, and political contexts. Ultimately, choosing to ignore other modes of knowledge and experiences lead to significant ‘myopia’, and represents an ‘epistemological error’ (Freire 2014: 95) that disempowers collectives and prevent the scientific practice from being inclusive, diverse, as well as reducing its interpretative potential. Likewise, Labelle (2003) reminds us that university academics are not the owners of the past and reaffirms that knowing the collectors, their relationships and attitudes toward artefacts, and collection practices is critical to the development of new management strategies. Research on the practices of collecting archaeological artefacts in the Amazon has been successful in understanding these phenomena and contributing to the transformation of archaeology in the region into a more inclusive, diverse, sensitive, and ethical practice. Archaeology in the Amazon is a ‘practice of meaning and sensing material traces of the past’ (Cabral 2016b: S5), and as such it is a contemporary phenomenon also shared by, historically, marginalized groups such as the rural riverine communities considered here.

5 

The CNIGP is organized by the Institute of National Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), which is in charge of cultural heritage preservation and protection in the country, as well as research licenses granted to Brazilian archaeologists. IPHAN was linked to the Ministry of Culture, which was dismantled by the current government in 2019. The institute has become part of the Ministry of Tourism.

110    Marcia Bezerra and Luzia Gomes Ferreira

5.5  Conclusion Our objective in this chapter has been to discuss the formation of archaeological collections in the Amazon, with a focus on collection practices carried out by members of local communities who live near the archaeological sites. Although we recognize the particularities of the Amazon region, we understand that some challenges are shared by researchers in other national and international contexts. We argued that understanding the relationships between human collectives and archaeological material culture as sociocultural phenomena allows us to establish a debate concerning the emergence of these collection practices, to recognize what they tell us about the meanings of the past and materiality for people in the present, and to further contribute to the reshaping of public policy around heritage. Drawing from our experience in the Amazon, we discussed the creation of small affective museums in which the things gathered also build the biographies of their collectors, intertwining family memories and archaeological artefacts that become personal belongings. Many senses and emotions are activated during this process. One recurring feeling is the collectors’ desire to see part of their collections displayed at a museum. An imagined museum that emerges in their own homes. There is a discrepancy between these practices, museum institutions, and heritage laws. This is the result of several factors, including the concerns about the physical conservation of archaeological resources, the antiquity of protection laws, and the concept of museum that no longer meets the demands of contexts such as the Amazon. We recognize that debates about decolonizing curatorial practices (Pereira 2019; Pye and Sully 2007; Sully 2016) and the reflections about the social role of museums have the potential to pave the way for new ways of managing archaeological collections. However, our experience in the Amazon suggests that thinking about collecting practices implies adopting sensitive research perspectives (Bezerra 2015; Cabral 2016a and b; Hartemann and Moraes 2019; Lima 2019), and a ‘heart-​centred archaeology’ as proposed by Supernant et al. (2020), which takes seriously that collecting archaeological artefacts does not always carry the intention to convert public collections into private ones; we firmly believe that these acts represent practices of affectionate engagement with the artefacts an the past. In the affective museums of the Amazon, the past and the present merge, and the familiar archaeological objects tell stories of people’s lives. Understanding the complexities and significance of these other modes of thought contributes to preventing epistemic violence against the knowledge of historically invisibilized collectives from persisting in archaeology or museums.

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6

De -​c entring m u se ums i n Indi genous c ommu ni t y engageme nt Contemporary Maya art, thought, and archaeological collections Laura Osorio Sunnucks

6.1  Introduction Anthropology and archaeology museums, with the disciplines themselves, have long been critiqued for their role in upholding colonial networks and asymmetrical power relationships. Critical museologies and Indigenous community action have, in some cases, resulted in interruptions to the dominant exhibitionary and collection management paradigm and, specifically in the case of many so-​called ethnographic collections, Indigenous Peoples have brokered new power relationships with the institutions that hold their ancestral material. This chapter introduces some of the models that have been used to frame these developments and interventions, noting in particular that multilingual world museologies and Latin American initiatives have often been overlooked. This is especially the case for archaeological material, which has frequently been alienated from contemporary Indigenous communities in museum displays. Such ‘allochronistic’ practices have alienated people from their own histories, as they are appropriated within Eurocentric narratives. How museums manipulate time and history in these ways is examined in this chapter with specific reference to the representations of Maya material culture and Maya People. Pre-​Columbian Maya civilization has been the subject of sustained international academic and public interest since the nineteenth century. Because of this interest, museums around the world hold vast amounts of both “archaeological” and “ethnographic” Maya material culture in their collections and there have also been numerous

116   Laura Osorio Sunnucks documentaries made about the Maya. However, the focus is predominantly on pre-​ Columbian Mayas, and so the contemporary Maya cultures that are represented alongside this material are included only to show continuities in the traditions of material culture production. As such, only the Maya communities that produce work that can be connected visually with pre-​Columbian material, such as Chiapanecan weaving, are generally represented in these contexts. This chapter explores the context of Yucatan, which does not have as robust a contemporary ancestral material culture tradition as other parts of the Mayan-​speaking area, although rich Maya theories and practices in the region relate strongly to ancestral culture and pre-​Columbian ‘archaeological sites.’

6.2  Museums and Indigenous communities: Museological models There is a long tradition of Anglophone literature describing and evaluating new collaborative projects between museums and the communities represented in their collections, particularly in North America and Oceania. While co-​production and co-​curation projects have been written about in museums internationally since the 1980s, many anglophone museological theories build on debates initiated by Mary Louise Pratt (1991, 1992) and James Clifford (1997), who have described museums as places, ‘contact zones’, where diverse ontologies and knowledges collide and shape each other. Later related discussions have focused on museums as postmodern sites where collaboration and dialogue are mediated, however in the context of systemic asymmetries (Lonetree 2006; Mason 2006; Message 2020; Phillips 2005, 2007) and an increasingly neoliberal, globalized, and digital world (Cameron and Kenderdine 2007; Karp et al. 2006; Shelton 2001, 2009). Robin Boast claims that while many new museologists are positive about the relevance of museums as postcolonial institutions that can champion education, engagement, and multivocality over research and connoisseurship (2011), the problem with the model of the museum as ‘contact zone’ is that it continues to be used as a means of masking asymmetries (Boast 2011; see also Ashley 2005; Bennett 1998; Mithlo 2004; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; Tuhiwai Smith 1999). Museum collaborations and consultation with Indigenous communities, for example, can move towards the sharing of resources and authority, but since the left-​over colonial competences of collecting, exhibiting, and educating have not been sufficiently destabilized, they have merely been adapted to a neo-​colonial world (Boast 2011). The decolonizing agenda in museums continues to struggle with the fact that these and other academic institutions ultimately have the power to select and develop projects as well as to disburse funds (Geismar 2008: 113). Arguably, the very fact that anglophone museological theory rarely takes multilingual world museologies (Isaac et al. 2019; Osorio Sunnucks et al. 2020) into account demonstrates the self-​referentiality and hegemony of the ‘epistemology of the north’ vs ‘epistemologies of the south’ (de Sousa Santos 2014).

De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement    117 Although less well cited in the anglophone academic sphere, Latin American museums have held pioneering co-​production and co-​curation projects with Indigenous and non-​Indigenous local communities (see for example Bonfil Batalla 1983 in Mexico; Ticio Escobar 1982, 1986, 1993 in Paraguay; and Gustavo Buntinx 2007 in Peru). These ‘participative’ and subversive museologies frame their work in terms of resistance to national narratives in which, for example, popular or ceremonial art is either aestheticized within ‘Western’ standards or ‘relegated’ to archaeology museums. Meanwhile, governments have monumentalized and made ‘temples’ of pre-​contact civilizations and historical events to promote tourism and bolster agendas that are arguably racist. These choices have ultimately served to designate heritage as the ideology of oligarchic sectors, legitimating a past that corresponds to national essence and disallowing questions about current recompositions of culture. As a result of these processes and in spite of Indigenous archaeologies (for example Gnecco and Rocabado 2010; Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2017) there have been fewer critical archaeological exhibitions.

6.3  Manipulating time and history: The Maya in museums and the academy General academic texts about the pre-​Columbian Maya argue that this civilization was based on a system of divine royalty that was dependent on agricultural production and that reached its peak approximately 1200 years ago in what is termed the Classic period (approximately 200–​900 CE). This narrative is based on the premise that the political landscape was unsustainable and ultimately broke down after a major, or various anomalous, environmental disaster(s) led to widespread famine and perhaps disease (Diamond 2011; Gill et al. 2007). This Maya ‘collapse’ has been speculated upon (Wilk 1985) and refuted (Aimers 2007), broadly on the basis that the archaeological record is more complex than the theory suggests. The era that followed these shifts in power centres (approximately 900 CE until the Spanish Conquest) is termed the ‘post-​Classic’. Maya culture has also been widely portrayed as having been swept away as a result of the Spanish Conquest (1521) and the colonial administration that was put in place across large parts of Central and Southern Mexico in the sixteenth century. Although contemporary Mayanists now always refer to Maya culture as continuing to exist over six national territories, and the validity of connecting ethnographic data to archaeological questions has been illustrated in Mayanist literature (Fitzsimmons 2009; Houston 2014; McAnany and Plank 2001; Taube 1998), expansive ethnographic studies that relate to the knowledge or philosophies about materiality and the past, rather than ethnoarchaeology about the making of the material culture itself, are not widely included in depth in contemporary archaeological literature about the Maya (notable exceptions include Hull and Carrasco 2012; Kray et al. 2017; Martínez González 2007; and Terán et al. 1998).

118   Laura Osorio Sunnucks Furthermore, public projects geared toward historical sensationalism, including exhibitions, commonly focus on the ancient Maya, making only brief allusion to the contemporary Maya Peoples and thus holding back the development of both Indigenous activist politics and critical museum practice. One recent example is the international touring Mexican exhibition project ‘Mayas; Revelation of an Endless Era’ curated by Mercedes de la Garza (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia INAH and the Universidad National Autónoma de México UNAM), which opened at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (2014–​2015) and later travelled to the World Museum in Liverpool (2015). In spite of its title, the exhibition was not developed in collaboration with Indigenous Peoples, and neither did it touch on the political manipulations of Maya cultural and archaeological heritage in Mexico and Central America. Maya ancestral knowledge was tidily historicized and contemporary Maya culture no more than cursorily acknowledged. Another, in this case European, archaeological museum venture relating to the Maya is the British Museum’s Google Maya project, curated by Claudia Zehrt and Jago Cooper. Funded by Google, this research digitized the casts, moulds, and photographs made by the British explorer Alfred P. Maudslay in collaboration with various others in Mexico and Central America at the end of the nineteenth century (see also this volume: Chapter 14) both to facilitate epigraphic research and to create virtual reality and street view reconstructions of Palenque (Mexico) and Quirigua (Guatemala) for Google users. Maudslay’s legacy at the British Museum also includes certain looted stelae and lintels, notably the lintels from Structure 23 in Yaxchilán, Mexico. Although some of the digital outputs of this project have provided a platform for contemporary Maya intellectuals, the principal stakeholders are, and will remain, the academy (which in its vast majority is non-​Maya and non-​Mexican/​Central American), sectors of global society with excellent access to digital educational outputs who have a high level of digital literacy, Google, and the British Museum. Research into Maya culture reflects a ‘Western’ approach to historical development and context, which begins with the inception of ‘Maya’ material culture in the pre-​ Classic period in approximately 1000 BCE and traces successive impactful episodes such as wars and alliances in the Classic period to contact with northern groups such as the Toltec, which have affected the Peoples and their social and cultural identity. Furthermore, in focusing on material production or practices that match the archaeological context, such as huipil weaving designs or calendrical systems, ethnoarchaeological studies reflect a search for ‘authenticity’ or at least cultural continuity in contemporary Maya communities (for example, Henrickson and McDonald 2009; Mock 1998; Tedlock 1982; Tedlock and Tedlock 1985; Thompson 1958). In this way, the present is mined to explain the past and the study of pre-​Colombian Maya cultures becomes an objective that is isolated from the current social contexts experienced by Maya Peoples. While this is not inherently problematic, one of its outcomes is the representational styles employed in including Maya cultures in museums; archaeological museums hold vast amounts of pre-​Columbian material and Maya exhibitions predominantly put this material on display. Historically, this has resulted in the alienation of contemporary Indigenous peoples from their history. The common resultant dichotomy

De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement    119 being that the ‘good’ civilizations of the past are differentiated from the ‘bad’ or ‘unprogressive’ Indigenous societies of the present. Pertinently, this allochronism, in which Indigenous Peoples are ‘othered’ by their association with a time before ‘civilization’ (see Fabian 1983: 152) has been useful for many nation-​building programmes in Latin America (Gnecco and Hernández 2010: 87–​103). Although many visible Indigenous campaigns have strategically essentialized ancestral culture and relationship to territory in order to confront racist or culturally homogenizing national narratives, one of the potential problems with this intellectual standpoint is its rejection of cultural hybridity and plural society theories that judge ethnicity as historically and socially constructed, and politically contested (Garner 2008; Wilson 2012). In the context of the broader decolonizing movement (for example, Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Reiter 2018; Sousa Santos 2014; Tuhiwai Smith 1999), allochronistic museum projects are damaging to Indigenous politics in two ways: Not only do they associate and compare contemporary Maya Peoples with material from one particular period in Maya history (approximately 250 BCE–​1200 CE), potentially historicizing their culture, they fail to mobilize this heritage politically, to include contemporary Maya politics and positions. A second result of the way Maya culture is represented in museums is the reinforcement of historically totalizing temporal narratives. Museums have been theorized, among other things, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) literary narrative as chronotopes (Binter 2019; Isaac et al. 2019). For Bakhtin, narratives are not just a sequence of events; rather, their character and force constitute distinct worldviews made up of the time–​space they evoke (1981). An interesting aspect of Bakhtin’s history of narrative literature is the relationships he draws between the shifting social reckonings of temporal experience and the development of literary styles (Bemong and Borghart 2010: 9). If we consider Paul Ricoeur’s philosophies on the categorization of time in Time and Narrative (1983), which describes objective time, phenomenological time, and (the most anthropologically contested) social time, then historical time-​consciousness requires these three types to be totalized, resulting in a Western worldview. Historical totalization can, in this way, be compared to a fictional chronotope. The struggle over the experience of time is at the core of contemporary politics (for example Fabian 1983; Osborne 1995; Rutz 1992): ‘How do the forms of the social practices in which we engage structure and produce, enable or distort different senses of time’ (Osborne 1995: 7). As such, if museums and their exhibitionary practices can be compared to literary chronotopes, it falls to contemporary research projects at these institutions (particularly when they care for cultural, archaeological, and ethnographic collections) to reflect on the political and social impact that they have on museum audiences. The discourse around cultural conceptions and representations of time is particularly poignant in areas of the world that were colonized, and where, as a result, Indigenous thought and practice were severely affected. As the following case studies will show, Maya and Mayan-​speaking people in Yucatan have dense and multilayered philosophies concerning the ‘archaeological sites’ on their land. As such, the inclusion of this form of heritage management can put critical stress on the ways in which museums manipulate time and history.

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6.4  Global dissemination and reception of the Mayas Since the late eighteenth century, a wealth of information about the Maya has been produced by people from outside the region—​in the form of accounts by explorers, government officials, missionaries, and colonists. However, the first widely publicized information on the Maya area was included in reports written by nineteenth-​century explorers of pre-​Colombian Maya ruins in the border zone between Chiapas, Mexico, and the Petén, Guatemala (Charnay 1887; Maler 1901, 1903; Maudslay and Maudslay 1899). These reports sparked a number of other visits to the region, which resulted in some detailed writings (for example, Sapper 1891). One important example of the ways in which modern Maya communities have been associated with pre-​Columbian Maya culture is shown in the context of research with the Lacandon People. Alfred Tozzer (1941) lived with the Lacandon Maya on the border between Mexico and Guatemala for more than a decade, where he conducted pioneering participative ethnographic fieldwork that was subsequently published in 1907. He attempted to link Lacandon cultural elements to pre-​Columbian Maya hieroglyphic writing and art. The ethnographic studies in the area that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s (Boremanse 1998; Davis 1978; McGee; 1983, 1990, 2002; Palka 2005; Perrera and Bruce 1985; Price and Blom 1972; Villa Rojas 1985) followed Tozzer’s approach, which suggested that, since the Lacandon peoples had not been Christianized or incorporated into colonial administrative projects, they were the direct descendants of the pre-​Columbian Maya city-​state societies. This period in Mexican history is marked by rapid changes in agrarian development, with the creation of reforms that displaced many rural agricultural communities, Maya and otherwise. As a result of these developments, ethnographers such as Robert Bruce (who lived in the Lacandon forest from the 1950s to the 1980s) emphasized the negative effects of modern Mexican (and global) politics and economics, and the significance of the loss of ancestral knowledge, not only for the peoples themselves but for the discipline of anthropology. More recent ethnographic, archival, and archaeological studies have focused on the long-​term contact between Lacandon Maya communities and hunters and traders from the region, as well as other Maya and Mayan language speaking groups, specifically from Yucatan, since the eighteenth century (Alexander 2004; Gasco et al. 1997; Palka 2005; Spores 1984). These studies show substantial cultural transformation in response to colonial and post-​Independence projects over time in the region, implying that, as with other Mesoamerican peoples, Lacandon culture changed dramatically as a result of internal and external processes following the Spanish occupation of Middle America (Palka 2005: 8). Although the quest for cultural ‘authenticity’ may no longer be fashionable in anthropological research, projects related to the more recent material culture of the Maya, particularly in the field of museums, continue to focus on objects that evoke those made by the pre-​Columbian Maya. For example, global ethnographic collections are predominantly made up of highland Guatemalan and Chiapanecan weaving, as well

De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement    121 as Lacandon material. The Smithsonian Museum, the British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, and the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen are examples of museums which all hold significantly fewer ethnographic items from Yucatan than from the highland Maya areas of Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. Contemporary material production from other Maya areas, including the Mexican states of Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo, not to mention contemporary Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, and Nicaragua, whose systems have been fractured rather than promoted by the folkloric art boom, are generally ignored by international museums.

6.5  Two case studies of southeastern Mexico in museum projects The state of Yucatan was conquered approximately twenty years after the Conquest of Mexico (1521), by Francisco de Montejo, after a series of battles with Indigenous people in the region. His son Francisco de Montejo y León built Merida (now the capital city of Yucatan) in 1542, on top of the pre-​Columbian site T’ho, and, in line with Spanish modus operandi, stones from T’ho’s buildings were used to build churches and other colonial structures. Although the Maya leader, Nachi Cocom, besieged Merida in an attempt to expel the Spanish, he was defeated, consolidating Spanish victory. Anti-​colonial tension, due to widespread and long-​term repression and violence (for example, the burning of several thousand objects and codices by Diego de Landa at Maní in 1561), resulted in the Jacinto Canek rebellion in the eighteenth century, followed by the Caste War (1847–​1901). This war began as an insurgence by the Maya of the south-​east of Yucatan and the Yucatecos (Spanish descendants) of the north-​west (Alexander 2004; Bricker 1977). There were huge losses to both sides and, although the war is said to have ended in 1901, there remains a sense of Maya sovereignty among many people in the peninsula in the present day. The Yucatan peninsula in Southeastern Mexico has historically been a bastion of Maya resistance. Following almost two centuries of colonial oppression, Jacinto Canek led a rebellion in the eighteenth century. Although the rebellion was rapidly aborted, it established underlying tensions in the area that would eventually lead to the major social upheavals of the Caste War (1847–​1901). Although this war is said to have ended in 1901 when the Mexican army occupied the city of Chan Santa Cruz, disputes between communities that did not accept Mexican control continued for another ten years. The Caste War is fresh in the oral histories of the older generations of Maya and Mayan speaking people in the region. Meanwhile, ethnographic research in Yucatan has shown that people in rural communities, cultural specialists and otherwise, hold philosophies relating to materiality and personhood that can be valuably associated with pre-​Hispanic Maya material remains (Arnold et al. 2007; Barrera-​Bassols and Toledo 2005; Martínez González 2007; Osorio 2015). The inclusion of these perspectives into the interpretation and curation of

122   Laura Osorio Sunnucks Maya archaeological material would contribute to the necessary re-​positioning of heritage management. However, for a number of reasons associated with the effects of colonial and religious administration, as well as the folkloric art market, contemporary Yucatecan art and thought are rarely included in museum collections and displays relating to the Maya. This chapter will discuss two exceptions to this in the context of contemporary Maya creative communities. It has been argued that the term ‘Maya’ as an identity marker is inaccurate (Restall 1997), and that the words commonly used to describe people from the area, such as ‘Indian’, ladino, mestizo, and ‘Indigenous’, have no equivalent meaning across the Maya area or even throughout Yucatan, which is rich in linguistic and cultural diversity. It has also been asserted that these terms constitute a ventriloquism of the subaltern; ‘Maya ethnicity’ being neither a pre-​given, substantive identity and sense of belonging, nor an artificial imposition of the state (Castañeda 2004). As Quetzil Castañeda argues in his article; ‘We are not Indigenous; An Introduction to the Maya Identity of Yucatan,’ Maya identity is a ‘. . . mediated and arbitrated ‘middle’ zone created through mutual, if also unequal accommodation and, often antagonised, negotiation of interest’ (2004: 52). However, there is substantial relatively recent literature dedicated to what is referred to as the ongoing political and cultural struggles of the ‘re-​emerging’ Maya (Demarest 2005), as well as to local Maya heritage management in the context of global Indigenous agency. Studies such as Patricia McAnany’s (2016) discuss educational projects that communicate archaeological findings with local communities in order to stimulate the connections with and knowledge of ancient Maya culture that have been lost through the processes of colonialism. Specifically in Yucatan, radio stations in Yucatec Mayan, rap groups who sing in Mayan languages, and contemporary Maya mural art that references ancestral material culture demonstrate that there is a strong Maya intellectual and creative movement in the region, which engages with global Indigenous politics. This movement will certainly play an important role in the ongoing resistance to neoliberal governmental projects planned for the area such as the ‘Maya Train.’

6.5.1 Contemporary Maya art and thought: Embroidery at the Gran Museo Maya de Merida The following two projects are examples in which contemporary ancestral knowledge and practice in Yucatan are incorporated into museums with archaeological (pre-​Columbian) Maya collections. The first is a series of figurative embroideries made by Anacleta Canul Noh and María de Jesús Canul Noh from Xocén, Martina Bacab y Candy Jiménez from Maní, and Lorenza Baas Coba from Tahmek, in collaboration with anthropologist Silvia Terán for the Gran Museo Maya de Merida in 2012. The works were made for the museum’s opening in the same year and remain on display in the permanent collection. Embroidery is the main ‘craft’ production of the Yucatan peninsula, mostly made for traditional ceremonial dresses, ternas, which are decorated with floral motifs introduced by European

De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement    123 settlers. For reasons associated with the colonial influence on these costumes, they have not been included in the ethnographic collections of the Museum to the same extent as those from other parts of the Maya area. This project sought to illustrate culturally specific Maya thought, knowledge, and practice through this traditional material medium. Some works show Yucatec Maya practices such as the hanal pixan and u jaanlil kool, the annual feeding of souls and the blessing of the maize fields, respectively, alongside the alongside Yucatec Maya Catholic ceremonies of baptism and marriage. Another embroidery, by Candy Jiménez, shows the jmeeno’ob and the traditional medicine used to treat Maya illnesses such as vientos and mal de ojo. The label that Jimenez wrote to accompany the work reads as follows: In Maya conception, health does not only mean the absence of illness, it also means being in balance with nature and supernatural forces. The ritual specialists who are the keepers of ancient Maya knowledge, called the jmeeno’ob, work in both spheres of wellness. They will treat a snake bite just as they will also treat the effects of malos vientos o mal de ojo.’ (Own translation)

Sickness caused by mal de ojo and vientos or aires malos, which can be roughly translated as evil eye and harmful air or winds, are also described in anthropological literature from the region (see Good Eshelman and Alonso Bolaños 2014; Rodríguez Balam 2005; Ruz et al. 2003; Valverde Valdés 2000). Generally, vientos and aires are known to exist or have the most impact in areas that have a connection with the past or that are outside the town or village. This non-​village space is called the kaax (in Mayan) or monte in Spanish. These phenomena are often associated with a change in temperature (Marshall 1981; Martínez González 2007: 162; Rodríguez Balam 2005: 167; Villa Rojas 1987: 381). They take a range of forms, and are described heterogeneously by people in Yucatan as well as in the literature, and they are usually associated with ancestral spaces such as archaeological sites, the monte (seen as belonging to the ancient Maya) or caves (which in Mesoamerica are entrances to other temporal and spatial worlds (Martos López 2015; Moyes and Brady 2013; Brady and Prufer 2005). For example, Maya scholar Rodríguez Balam states: ‘There is a cenote there that you shouldn’t go into. If you go in, you won’t come out’ (Rodríguez Balam 2005: 158, own translation). A common type of viento is the alux (see Boccara 2004; Osorio 2015; Redfield 1940; Smailus 1976; Villanueva Villanueva 2014; Xiu Cachón 1993). Aluxes are the ‘owners or saints that administer natural phenomena’, and are described as naked or dressed as ancient Maya people who are mischievous and, like other vientos, are protectors of the milpa and monte (Rodríguez Balam 2005: 163). According to this ontology, soil or lu’um (Canul-​Pech 1967) has been shown to have spiritual, as well as material, value (Iroshe 2002; Quintal et al. 2003). There is an emphasis placed on the struggle between the wild, unknown, and dangerous, and the ordered procedures that are implemented to combat the effects of these phenomena. These procedures are ordered temporally. Therefore, there is a three-​ dimensional opposition; it is territorial/​spatial, temporal, and symbolic (Rodríguez

124   Laura Osorio Sunnucks Balam 2005: 167). There are debates surrounding the origins of these phenomena, the details of which have surely been influenced by European colonial culture. It has also been suggested that the fear Maya people express of places with historic significance may also be a reaction to colonial and religious oppression (see Landa 1986 (1566); Lizana 1633; and Sánchez de Aguilar 1987 (1639)). While these comments are useful, they also evidence a colonial bias against ancestral Indigenous knowledge and religion. Maya people across Southern Mexico assert the existence of these animate non-​ human entities, casually but in some cases also within a framework of more complex meta-​narratives about the nature of energy and personhood (Osorio 2015: 66–​86). These esoteric narratives are a form of philosophical and functional management of local archaeological heritage and they demonstrate that contemporary Maya thought in Yucatan is relevant in the interpretations and representations of archaeological material from the region. The embroidery works mentioned above at the Gran Museo Maya de Merida are clearly relevant for the local audience. The inclusion of contemporary Maya culture, in a project that displays pre-​Columbian material, counters the invisibility of Maya People that is characteristic of many archaeological museum contexts. It is important that ‘knowledge holding and sharing’ institutions endorse and ascribe value to practices such as those depicted in the embroidery, as well as to the skill and depth of embroidery itself as a medium. However, there are aspects of the project that could be further developed. In the first place, archaeological sites or pre-​Hispanic material culture do not appear in these works, even though they are very much part of the contexts depicted. For example, many milpas are close to ‘sites’ and pre-​Columbian material, such as figurines, are often dug up there (these are frequently referred to as or associated with aluxes). The inclusion of pre-​Columbian material in contemporary works in the museum would elucidate the complexities involved in local community engagement with and relationships to their ancestral culture. The authority involved in the interpretation of pre-​Columbian material would, in this case, belong to an extent to the Museum’s contemporary Maya collaborators. In second place, while there is abundant reference to Catholicism in the works, there are no references to new denominations and sects in the area, which is interesting considering that the popularity of Pentacostalism, Jehovah’s Witness, and Evangelical churches has grown considerably over the past few decades. These were probably not included because these groups eschew what are considered to be demonic beliefs and practices such as hanal pixan and vientos, in part in order to undermine them because of their relationship with Catholicism. However, this is a complex field, in which heritage is clearly being negotiated through this new religious and social group-​making. This new form of religious missionization is also very relevant to the history of the Maya area and deserves inclusion in the project. A last question surrounding the project relates to the emergence of new artistic and economic communities. In order for these new forms of embroidery to develop into common practice that can be financially viable, other museums would have to adopt similar projects.

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6.5.2 Indigenous archaeologies: Maya Blue at the British Museum The following example of Maya-​related bilingual museum research is a self-​critique of an ongoing project entitled Maya Blue: Painting from Past in the Present at the British Museum, directed in collaboration with Lorena Ancona and Luis May in the Yucatan peninsula and Joanne Dyer at the British Museum. The clay-​dye composite, Maya Blue, was made in Mesoamerica from as early as the third century CE until shortly after the conquest of the region by Spain in the sixteenth century. Although archaeological scientists have long experimented with its fabrication, Indigenous and non-​Indigenous artists in Southern Mexico (Ancona and May) are now producing the colour using Indigenous methodologies and artistic sensibilities. This project has overturned the interpretational frameworks that have been used to study this complex pigment, using an interdisciplinary framework comprising Indigenous epistemologies, artistic experimentation, and materials science. Not only does this process elucidate aspects of the pre-​Colombian pigment that have been ignored by archaeological scientists working in laboratories, but also this politically engaged project champions multivocal and local methodologies. Archaeological scientists identified the characteristics of this pigment in the 1960s, defining it as a nanostructured material produced by heating palygorskite (a naturally occurring fibrous phyllosilicate mineral (Mg,Al)4Si8(O,OH,H2O)24.nH2O with a needle-​like structure (Grim 1968: 44–​5; Shepard 1971)) together with a pre-​Columbian species of indigo (either i.suffructicosa or i.guatalamensis, ch’oh in Yucatec Mayan). The archaeological fascination with the pigment owes in part to its chromatic properties, which deteriorate little over time and are resistant to diluted mineral acids, alkalis, solvents, oxidants, reducing agents, moderate heat, and biocorrosion (Arnold 2005; Arnold et al. 2007; Gettens 1962; Fois et al. 2003; Reyes-​Valerio 1993: 26; Sánchez del Rio et al. 2006). Archaeologists and art historians have also pointed to the complex chemistry involved in its fabrication, as well as the aesthetic qualities associated with its application, particularly in wall-​painting. Although the colour was also used in the sixteenth century to decorate Franciscan churches in Yucatan, it ceased to be produced shortly thereafter and, as such, there have been no published studies of Indigenous methods in the process of making Maya Blue. The contemporary artists affiliated to this project are currently adopting Indigenous agricultural methods to experiment with the pigment, for example by harvesting and sowing indigo during a waxing moon and the use of rainwater to extract the dye. Preliminary ethnographic research has also shown that other blue dyes, such as those extracted from lonchocarpus branches and justicia leaves, may have been employed to produce variants of Maya Blue. These species are endemic to Mesoamerica and may have been used in place of indigo in certain regions. This project analyses the molecular composition of contemporary Maya blue alongside traces of the pigment on British Museum collections to compare Maya blue made using contemporary Indigenous

126   Laura Osorio Sunnucks methods with those made in a laboratory. It is eventually hoped to show that local processes and materials more closely resemble processes and materials can be usefully compared to the blue in historical sources and pigments. These analyses may also ascertain that alternative sources of dye to indigo were employed. Aside from dispelling commonly accepted theories about the process and ingredients involved in Maya Blue production, this project follows contemporary archaeological theory to destabilize the academic identity of the pigment. Numerous Mayanist studies exist on the symbolic meanings associated with Maya Blue, which discuss ritual art in terms of civilizational complexity. For example, many authors have pointed to the more complex hue layering employed in late Classic murals at Bonampak, in contrast to the less diverse palettes of post Classic and colonial period painting (Delamare et al. 2017; Houston et al. 2009). These interpretations follow the broader archaeological trend of creating civilization arcs that mark progress, followed by a climax in complexity, and then the later deterioration and ‘collapse’ of the civilization—​the allochronistic model discussed earlier. Various previous projects have attempted to identify potential sources for pre-​ Columbian palygorskite, and deposits have been found in sak lu’um (the Yucatec Mayan term for white earth used as pottery temper) in Ticul and Sacalum, in Yucatan (Arnold 1967, 1971; Folan 1969: 53). Samples have also been found in Lake Izabal, Guatemala (Bohor 1975) as well as in railroad cuts in Yucatan (although these may have been inaccessible to the ancient Maya (Arnold 2005: 53). More recent finds have been taken from road cuts in the Guatemala City-​Tikal road in the Petén, the road from Uxmal to Santa Elena, as well as in Chapab, Yo’sah Kab and Mama, in Yucatan, and Maxcanu, in Campeche (Arnold et al. 2007: 45). Among other things, research in the region shows that potters in Northwestern Yucatan deliberately select temper that contains palygorskite and that their practical knowledge of the functional properties of sak lu’um (which contains the mineral) corresponds to its scientifically identified properties (Arnold 2005: 55). Ethnographic and ethnohistoric studies may indicate that there are semantic as well as functional reasons for the choice of these locations, suggesting that they may have a long (pre-​Columbian) history of mining for the mineral (Arnold 2005: 55–​60). Saliently, the aforementioned ethnographic and ethnohistoric research in Yucatan, which creates a cultural link between Maya People and palygorskite sources, raises the issue of the curative aspects of the mineral alongside the powerful and potentially harmful properties of the locations where it is sourced. For example, at Yo’ sah kab potters said that in the 1900s people came from Chapab to Yo’ sah kab to obtain sak lu’um for medicinal purposes (Arnold et al. 2007: 57). A range of sources reference the medicinal properties of sak lu’um (for example, Redfield and Redfield 1940: 71; Roys 1931: 80), and the mineral’s efficacy for the treatment of bacterial infections associated with diarrhoea is also mentioned in the 2004 US National Library of Medicine (Arnold 2005: 55). However, potters from Yo’ sah kab also reported that in the late 1960s the older generation strategically did not mine temper at the site because bearded snakes which blew air lived there. Those potters that did mine temper at the site left offerings of posole every Friday to placate these serpents (Arnold et al. 2007: 57). Aires or vientos which,

De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement    127 as shown above, are associated with places of importance to the ancient Maya, and the monte or kaax in Yucatec Mayan can disturb personhood and cause illness or death if left untreated by a ritual specialist, and can take the form of snakes. Considering the relationship between Maya Blue and ritual-​use material culture among the pre-​Columbian Maya, it is unsurprising that contemporary Maya philosophies and narratives reveal the religious as well as medicinal and functional importance of sak lu’um. Maya Blue: Painting from Past in the Present is a research and art production project based on three preliminary research questions. The first focused on the production of ancient Maya Blue as well as the semantic meanings associated with its use. Following earlier scientific research into palygorskite and indigo sources, this involves meaningfully engaging in archaeological questions surrounding the locations, knowledge networks, status, and ritual character of its production providing a contemporary perspective on conventional archaeological provenance studies. Tracing the chaîne opératoire with present-​day potters can provide a relevant entry point into traditional questions such as whether, historically, it was Maya Blue pigment, as a finished product, or its components (palygorskite and indigo) and the knowledge required to combine them, that moved throughout the Maya world and Mesoamerica (Arnold et al. 2007: 56). The collection of palygorskite and indigo samples, as well as wider analysis of pigments found on objects in museum collections, constitutes a significant contribution to this debate and promotes the integration and comparison of archaeological and contemporary forms of knowledge. In the process, this research supplements the knowledge and documentation of key artefacts in the British Museum’s collection that are coloured with Maya Blue, such as the Yaxchilan lintels and the Mixtec mosaic masks. The second question examined whether Indigenous or ancestral knowledge and material culture production in Southeastern Mexico could be sustainably developed in relation to the national and global art market. This entails experimentation with Maya Blue and ceramic production in the Yucatan peninsula in the context of the folkloric or ‘Indigenous’ tourist art market in Mexico, which has been profoundly shaped by governmental and international projects. Certain material culture production communities, such as the amate (bark paper) painters of the Balsas river region in Guerrero, have innovated upon their ancestral traditions to meet the demands of the folkloric art boom resulting in a highly evolving and critical artistic community. Potters in the south-​east, however, who made a range of utilitarian, service, and ritual ware before the 1970s, have since that date mainly produced tourist items which they send to nearby Cancun (Arnold et al. 2007: 48). Unlike the highland Maya weaving or amate painting traditions, whether Indigenous, ‘authentic’ or otherwise, which are substantially supported and represented nationally and internationally, material culture in Yucatan has received less attention and production communities are much smaller. This is true for a range of historical and cultural processes. Ancona and May’s work, designed in collaboration with Yucatec Maya artists, agriculturalists, and educators, constitutes an important first step towards nurturing a local Indigenous material culture production movement that derives from and builds on ancestral knowledge while engaging with the global artistic community.

128   Laura Osorio Sunnucks The final question concerns whether it is possible to integrate contemporary Maya philosophies and narratives into academic interpretations of ancient Maya civilization. In so doing such research contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities of contemporary Maya philosophy and religion with respect to their ancestral culture by placing their cultural expertise centre stage. Maya people live in close proximity to the legacies: the buildings, material culture, and landscape of their ancient societies. These are referred to as archaeological sites and archaeological artefacts by the global community. However, descendent communities are in most cases excluded from the relevant academic interpretations of this material. Furthermore, they are divorced from the direct economic benefits associated with the tourist industry that results from, for example, people coming to the region to visit the sites. Nevertheless, there is a very significant and dense oral narrative tradition, including among those who are experts in the use of palygorskite and indigo, and without which pre-​Columbian Maya culture, and hence new knowledge production, is cut off from its contemporary knowledge base. As such, source community led ethnographic research can contribute significantly to broader archaeological questions that relate to pre-​Hispanic Maya societies (see also this volume: Chapters 4 and 18). Rather than mining contemporary heritage to explain the past, this sort of project focuses on how heritage is relevant for contemporary communities. This project explicitly engages with ongoing colonial projects in the region to re-​appropriate the interpretation and mobilization of Maya heritage for its descendent People through, for example, the support of initiatives such as that described in research question two. Maya Blue: Painting from Past in the Present rethinks the role of the past and the future of cultural heritage philosophy and policy outside of academia. Critically and concretely, the process of collaborating across the peninsula to experiment with Maya Blue and clay techniques will hopefully strengthen the artistic community in the region. Museums also have the opportunity through such schemes to acquire some of the works that are made by artists, which may provide visibility for this type of material culture and incentivize other museums and collectors to acquire and support this kind of work. This is one way in which archaeological collections can be supplemented with descendent works that provide contemporary context that breaks with the traditional focus on archaeological material. It is important that these projects go beyond more traditional exhibitionary or collection documentation practices to be as, or more, relevant locally than they are for the museum. These sorts of projects do remain hampered by the fact that they are chosen, fostered, and funded by colonial institutions, however their strength lies in the fact that they are initiated because of contemporary heritage interests in the relevant region, rather than on the basis of traditional curatorial activities. Another problem with such endeavours is that they do not reflect the sociocultural and political activism that is currently taking place in the Maya area. Rap music and street art have been more avidly appropriated creatively by young people in the Maya area than more traditional ancestral practices such as the use of ceramic and natural pigments farmed in rural areas. It is not unsurprising

De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement    129 that the Maya youth is interested in engaging with practices that are globally associated with cultural and political resistance. It should perhaps be these movements, with their global digital reach, that are incorporated into the mobilization of archaeological material, both that held in museums and otherwise.

6.6  Conclusion Broadly speaking and traditionally, archaeology museums have used objects to illustrate specific cultures and provide a sense of humanity and cultural pathways through time. Following Enlightenment-​derived conventions, these institutions have looked to create neutral narratives and, in so doing, they have depoliticized the cultures they seek to represent. In the case of the display of Maya archaeological collections, this process has resulted in a spectacle of an exotic and distant civilization, which ignores its contemporary descendants. The decolonizing debate has put critical stress on the role of museums in a global society that is coming to terms with its colonial legacies. In this context, Indigenous Peoples have brokered new power relationships with the institutions that hold their ancestral material and, in some cases, their ancestors. It is necessary that museums change the practices and representations styles involved in the management of Maya cultural material to consider the politics behind narratives about past societies generally and the politics of interpreting Maya materials and the places that they come from through non-​Maya heuristic frameworks.

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Chapter 7

E nabled Archa e ol o g y i n the field, in mu se ums , and the v i si tor experi e nc e Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen

7.1  Introduction One of the most freeing things I’ve realized as I’ve grown as an academic is that archaeology, as a discipline, can be radically changed into something so much better. And that, ultimately, I can’t wait for someone else to make change . . . along with like-​minded peers, we can take an active role in starting this change. (Fitzpatrick 2021)

This chapter is based on the principle that whilst culture is often held up as a panacea to the issues we see in modern society, it is in fact ‘closely related to inequality’ (Brook et al. 2020: 1). It looks at the inequalities and lack of inclusion experienced by dis/​Abled people working and volunteering in, and visiting, archaeological sites and museums (O’Mahony 2018). This is because ‘who produces culture reflects social inequality’ and the ‘workforce in cultural occupations and cultural industries is highly unequal’, and it has been identified that the numbers of dis/​Abled people engaging with culture are far fewer than those not reporting a dis/​Ability (Brook et al. 2020: 2). The core argument of the chapter is that if archaeology and museum workforces are not enabled and organizations fail to ensure that their workforces include dis/​Abled people it is highly likely that archaeological sites open to the public and museums will not meet the needs of all their visitors regardless of dis/​Ability (Kajda et al. 2015).

Enabled archaeology     137 It is apparent that although research has been published around dis/​Ability, as well as field and museum archaeology, there is a significant gap in the literature and professional practice considering the argument presented here. This chapter provides a broad theoretical framework that can act as a foundation for more specific future research projects that draw together the work and visitor experience dimensions. It brings together two theoretical frameworks to examine existing literature: the Social Model of dis/Ability and Crip Theory. Whilst both theories are well established and applied in academic fields, they are brought together in this chapter for the first time and their point of intersection is where Enabled Archaeology should be situated. This intersection is the space where empowerment, driven by a focus on an individual’s ability, exists (Fraser 2007; Kirton and O’Mahony, n.d.; O’Mahony 2015; Phillips and Gilchrist 2012; University of Reading and University of Bournemouth 2006). It is where barriers created by society for dis/​Abled people are removed to allow accessibility, equality, and inclusivity, and everyone is made to feel welcome to, and part of, the world of archaeology (Council for British Archaeology 2012; Klehm et al. 2021; O’Mahony 2015; Phillips and Creighton 2010). Arguably, all of these elements currently exist in field and museum archaeology, but the research conducted for this chapter would suggest that there is a significant gap in considering the positive impact an enabled volunteer or workforce can have on visitors’ engagement with archaeology in both contexts. The literature on field archaeology shows logical development in terms of ways in which equality, diversity, and inclusivity can be embraced in archaeology (Colaninno et al. 2020; Fitzpatrick 2019; Klehm et al. 2021; O’Mahony 2018; Rocks-​Macqueen 2014; Tucker and Horton 2019), but it does not appear to explain why Enabled Archaeology is important or discuss the contributions dis/Abled archaeologists can make to new or established archaeological or historical narratives to enhance the public’s engagement with the past (Hunt 2013; Shanks and Hodder 1995). Fraser posed an interesting possibility as to why this phenomenon exits; that it could be linked to a focus on object-​based output rather than a user, or people based, one. (Fraser 2007). The literature around museums and the visitor experience sits in a noticeably separate space from archaeological fieldwork. In the former there is deep consideration given to access and inclusion for dis/​Abled visitors through multisensory experiences (Christidou and Pierroux 2019; Errichiello et al. 2019; Weisen 2007), and most notably in recent literature regarding digital technology (Vaz et al. 2020). However, the fact that dis/​Abled people are underrepresented in the archaeological and museum workforces is only just being recognized (Aitchison et al. 2020; Arts Council England 2018; Goudas 2020; Pring 2019) and, as in field archaeology, no consideration is being given to how a more diverse workforce that is representative of dis/​Abled groups in today’s society could enhance and offer new ideas and approaches to interpretative narratives within museums (Hunt 2013). Although the literature around interpretation and the visitor experience indicates the sector is progressive and committed to providing a meaningful experience for dis/​Abled visitors (Murphy 2015; Stephens 2020), the most significant barriers faced appear to be around dis/​Abled visitors being provided with excellent

138    Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen customer service due to a lack of training (Argyopoylos and Kanari 2015; Lisney et al. 2013; McMillen and Alter 2017; Mesquita and Carneiro 2016) and representation in the employee population (Goudas 2020; Pring 2019). This chapter therefore focuses primarily on access to museums and their workforces by dis/​Abled individuals rather than on the representation of dis/Ability in museums displays (for which see Sandell et al. 2005).

7.2  Language and the social model of dis/​Ability When writing about topics such as dis/​Ability (O’Mahony 2018) it is imperative that research is communicated inclusively through the use of appropriate language so as not to perpetuate stereotyping, legitimize language that is considered offensive at the time of writing (Clarke and Marsh 2002), or to exclude and disempower, whether by accident or not (D’Clark 2019). The power of language and how we use it should not be underestimated in this context as it is dynamic, value and identity laden, politically charged, and a driver of individual and group behaviours (Clarke and Marsh 2002; SPECTRUM Centre for Independent Living 2018). The language selected for use in any piece of writing about dis/​Ability, then, needs clear selection, explanation, and justification, and authors must ‘remember [that] words matter’ (D’Clark 2019; Taylor 2016). The language used should also seek to include and empower people, for example the decision to use dis/​Abled and dis/​Ability in this chapter is based on the terminology developed by O’Mahony with contributions from Kirton and O’Mahony (n.d.) for the Enabled Archaeology Foundation, where ‘/​A’ is used in a bid to emphasize the term ability and reduce the focus on the negative ‘dis’ within the words. The chapter also uses Kirton and O’Mahony’s (n.d.) term ‘enabled archaeology’ to reinforce ‘equality, attitudinal and social acceptance for all dis/​Abled people who prospectively or do participate in any area of archaeology’ and ‘to equip and empower dis/​Abled people to overcome the obstacles towards their inclusion in many areas of archaeology’. O’Mahony also usefully developed a new understanding of the term enabled in this context as meaning ‘using coping strategies or tools to do our best work and live our daily lives’ (O’Mahony 2018: 216). The terminology around dis/​Ability originated and developed within the medical, social care, and religious professions (Clarke and Marsh 2002; Fraser 2007), resulting in language that is ‘patriarchal in nature’, evokes ‘the notion that disabled people need looking after’ and is offensive (Clarke and Marsh 2002: npn). The impact of the development and use of language in this way has resulted in the society focusing on dis/​Ability as being something that is negative (Kirton and O’Mahony n.d.). Both D’Clark (2019) and Clarke and Marsh (2002) argue that the language derived from these professions has dominated until relatively recently, and that whilst traditional terminology persists

Enabled archaeology     139 and ‘denies the social construction of disability’ (Clarke and Marsh 2002: npn) there is a now a ‘social model of disability language within the public domain [that] offers the opportunity to engender the flourishing of an ecology of language that is predicated on equality and inclusion’ (D’Clark 2019). However, there is evidence from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS 2021) to suggest that that the medical profession in the UK is aware of how important it is to approach the language around dis/​Ability sensitively, use appropriate and current language, and to keep abreast of the evolutionary nature of language. The language associated with the social model of dis/​Ability emerged from the dis/​ Ability movement in the 1970s and 1980s and has developed as a ‘political tool’ in an ongoing fight for civil rights and inclusion (SPECTRUM Centre for Independent Living 2018: 5). This chapter is informed by the social dis/​Ability model and the idea that ‘people have impairments, they do not have disabilities’, that dis/​Ability ‘is caused by society’s inability or unwillingness to meet the needs of people with impairments’, and that ‘people with impairments . . . are disabled by socially constructed barriers’ (SPECTRUM Centre for Independent Living 2018: 5). This notion means that language is a significant consideration in writing about dis/​Ability because the language that people use is a reflection of their view of the world and in turn their views of other people (Clarke and Marsh 2002: npn). As Taylor (2016) wrote: terminology is important, because words reflect our attitudes and beliefs. However, some of the terms we tend to use may not reflect how some [dis/​Abled] people see themselves. Using the right words matters.

Furthermore, language can influence our approaches to people and situations we encounter in everyday life, giving it the power to easily create and maintain barriers for dis/​Abled people (Clarke and Marsh 2002). The social model of dis/​Ability was criticized at the turn of the twenty-​first century (Shakespeare and Watson 2001) and is acknowledged as causing ‘conflict and tensions in disability studies, sociology and the sociology of the body’ (Owens 2014: 385; see also Fraser 2007). At the same time the model has been ‘used successfully for political activism’ (Owens 2014: 385; SPECTRUM Centre for Independent Living 2018). It is also recognized from lived experience of discrimination and prejudice in both field and museum archaeology shared by O’Mahony that the sector may have not yet moved away from the ‘medical model of dis/​Ability to the Social Model of dis/​Ability’ (O’Mahony 2018: 217). Therefore, as this chapter is a call for field and museum archaeology to become truly enabled, using the language of the social dis/​Ability model was deemed appropriate and required. In line with the ideas presented here the authors of this chapter have researched current good practice in terms of terminology and language use from a range of academic and professional sources and made informed decisions about the terms selected and used in this piece of work. It is acknowledged that these terms may not be uniformly accepted and may be challenged at the time of writing, that they may fall out of use or be

140    Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen considered unacceptable in the future, and therefore require reflective critical analysis and discussion in light of the contemporary and future context (Everett et al. 2020).

7.3  Crip theory The consideration of language extends to the theoretical framework selected for this chapter. The word ‘crip’ within everyday settings is recognized as a derogatory slur used to describe physically dis/​Abled people. However, in the context of Crip Theory, the word has become reworked used as a term for empowerment (Sandahl 2003). Articulated this way, crip becomes a fluid and inclusive expression, embracing an extensive spectrum of dis/​Abilities, (i.e. physical, mental, psychological, or emotional) offered as a way to build commonality among dis/​Abled people, ultimately serving as a counter-​signifier to non-​dis/​Abledness (Gahman 2017). By criticizing the standards that maintain the boundaries and survival of the non-​dis/​Abled, Crip Theory repudiates the normal by uncovering, exposing, and celebrating the strengths and capabilities of dis/​ Abled people (Levy and Young 2020; McRuer 2006). It is about envisioning the ambition of an alternative, not yet achieved, world of ‘imagined futures’ and ‘inclusive spaces’ where human society praises individuals for what they can do, rather than devalue them for what they cannot (Fletcher and Primack 2017; Kafer 2013). To be dis/​Abled, then, is often to have experienced sustained derisive attention through medical and social labelling. Classification has functioned as the immaterial apparatus of societal regulation, allowing for the comparative measurement of arbitrarily constructed norms of abled mind and body, against that of physical and mental dis/​Ability (Gahman 2017; Kafer 2003). Where traditional approaches have framed dis/​Ability as medical or scientific in nature debasing as it locates ‘dysfunction’ in individuals, social and political stances have caused an issue of ‘handicapping’, forming oppressive social division or dis/​Ablism, acutely ostracizing dis/​Abled people through disparaging stereotypes, tactless efforts at humour, or omissions from culture altogether (Gahman 2017; Park et al. 1998; Thompson 1998). At the cultural level, oppressions are made manifest by non-​dis/​Abled people in the face of those they deem to be dis/​Abled, whilst on the personal level oppressions can take the form of sympathy, irritation, discomfort, and annoyance (Gahman 2017). Privileged normative and ableist reasoning has long been seen as an inadequate explanation for the barriers and charges placed on dis/​Abled people (Barnes 1992; Jenks 2019). The feebleness of dis/​Abled stigma is further emphasized when, much like the absence of a coherent dis/​Abled identity, or even an identifiable dis/​Ability identity, the idea of non-​dis/​Abledness is also fractious, unidentifiable, and a social construct that can never be fully achieved (Jenks 2019). The idea that a perfect and effective body is superior and more desirable than another raises a weighty argument, that is, on what account does being ‘able’ gift one with the power of deciding what being ‘normal’ denotes? (Gahman 2017; Löfgren-​Mårtenson 2013; McRuer 2006). It is for this reason

Enabled archaeology     141 that Crip Theory has become a valuable position of constant opposition, intent on refuting, unsettling, and contesting idealistic expectations of non-​dis/​Abledness, and which serves to redefine meanings for those who are displaced by normativity (Fletcher and Primack 2017; Levy and Young 2020). Levy and Young (2020: 69) argued that the ‘narrative around the use of “normal” in Crip Theory is dualistic and hierarchical; normal exists as the antithesis of abnormal, they are interdependent, but one is privileged over the other’. This privilege is founded on an assertive desire of generalization, but Crip Theory works towards abolishing the marginalizing logic of acceptance in support of a more thorough challenge to systems of social norms (Sandahl 2003). Originally this theoretical framework was applied to the field of sports and sporting events, and has been widely used to examine the intersectionality between queerness, gender, and dis/​ Ability (Kattari and Beltram 2019). Exploratory investigations for this work indicate that Crip theory has not yet been applied to archaeological literature, suggesting a gap in the current literature and application of an appropriate theory around dis/​Ability and field and museum archaeology. It is applied here to the working environments of field and museum archaeology as a radical framework of empowerment and inclusivity that has the potential to change the future of archaeology (Oxford Reference 2021).

7.4  Enabled Archaeology in the field If it is accepted that archaeological field work, including digging, recording, and processing finds (both in the field and the museum context), is integral to the archaeological process (Cobb et al. 2012; Galeazzi and Richards-​Rissetto 2018), and that it is core to the ‘identity, culture and history of ’ archaeology, just as it is in similar disciplines (Tucker and Horton 2019: 84), then there is no question that it should be accessible to, and inclusive of, all, including dis/​Abled people wanting to participate as Enabled Archaeologists. But, it is clear from the literature on dis/​Ability and fieldwork, and personal experiences captured within it, that archaeology is still seen as the ‘preserve of young, fit, and healthy people’ (Phillips and Gilchrist 2012: 674), that ‘toxic masculinity and ableism [are] inherent in the way we view archaeological labour’ (Fitzpatrick 2016: npn, 2020), and that many archaeological sites are not ‘suitable nor welcoming to [dis/​Abled]’ (O’Mahony 2018; Phillips and Gilchrist 2012: 674). The Profiling the Profession report demonstrated that there are still real issues in terms of poor representation of dis/​Abled professionals in the archaeology sector, with only 11% of respondents to their national survey identifying as dis/​Abled (Aitchison et al. 2020). Over the last twenty or so years, a significant body of academic and professional literature examining dis/​Ability and archaeology in the UK has been created, with several key themes and authors dominating. There is a logical, and not unexpected, progression through the themes. The first of which is the need to meet the requirements of legislation, in the UK this means the Disability Discrimination Act, which originally came into being in 1995 (Clarke and Phillips 2012; Phillips and Creighton 2010; Phillips

142    Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen and Gilchrist 2012; Rocks-​Macqueen 2014; University of Reading and University of Bournemouth 2006). Advice offered on reasonable adjustments and good practice in removing barriers and therefore making fieldwork accessible and inclusive followed the discussion on legislation (Council for British Archaeology 2012; Klehm et al. 2021; Phillips and Creighton 2010; O’Mahony 2015). These two themes are perhaps the most basic as they are essential at a baseline level in terms of understanding the minimum requirements of making archaeological fieldwork accessible and inclusive in relation to the law, and offering some practical guidance on how to achieve this. A further theme is a call to move from focusing on dis/​Ability to ability and therefore from disempowerment to empowerment that develops with the longevity of the literature (Fraser 2007; O’Mahony n.d., 2015; Phillips and Gilchrist 2008; University of Reading and University of Bournemouth 2006). This theme is perhaps the most positive as it links to the notions of empowerment that are central to the Social Model of dis/Ability (SPECTRUM Centre for Independent Living 2018) and Crip Theory (Gahman 2017; McRuer 2006), which offer the potential for a change in attitudes towards dis/​Abled people. It also shows that there is the potential for archaeological fieldwork to be a space of empowerment and inclusivity (Collings 2012 in Fletcher and Primack 2017; Kafer 2013). More recently, there has been a growing body of work around archaeology as a form of occupational therapy for dis/​Abled people, particularly for former armed services personnel (Darvill et al. 2019; Dobat et al. 2020; Everill et al. 2020; Finnegan 2016; Rocks-​ Macqueen 2016; Winterton 2014). Interestingly, the language used is inextricably linked to medical profession and therefore perpetuates the medical perspective of dis/​Ability rather than the Social Model and arguably pushes the discussions back in time to before the dis/​Abled Civil Rights Movement (Klehm et al. 2021; O’Mahony 2018; Thompson 1998). Of equal concern is the focus on what archaeology can offer dis/​Abled people, and a lack of consideration of what individuals within a diverse volunteer and workforce can offer archaeology. This may be due to the fact that projects have only emerged in the last decade and are relatively young within the practice of archaeology, meaning that this area of archaeological fieldwork has not had the time to mature and to be examined from different viewpoints, but it could also be linked to the demographic profiles of the people writing the articles (Fitzpatrick 2016; Phillips and Gilchrist 2012). Work by O’Mahony and The Enabled Archaeology Foundation (EAF) also suggests that there are current pockets of good practice in UK field and museum archaeology, including projects by The Thames Discovery Programme, Bamburgh Research Project, Operation Nightingale, and the West Kent College Vocational Archaeology Research Group (VARG). Following on from O’Mahony’s groundbreaking work, further academic projects are now coming to fruition. For example, important inclusive work is being carried out by the West Kent College Vocational Archaeology Research Group (VARG), led by Emily Stammitti. VARG embraces a vocational approach to archaeology within full-​time education and builds on a pilot programme run in 2019–​2020, which showed an approximate 30 to 60% improvement in participants’ self-​assessed

Enabled archaeology     143 feelings of wellbeing. The project allows students and participants to engage in a range of archaeological experiences from fieldwork, geophysical investigation, survey, desk-​ based assessment, 3D modelling, archiving, and community engagement. Students from a range of disciplines from across the college are involved in the project, including Foundation (SEN), Functional Skills, Equine and Animal Management, A Levels and Access to Higher Education. Tentative sites include Otford Palace, an Iron Age settlement, a WWII anti-​aircraft battery and a Roman villa/​settlement, all based in the south-​east of England. The Project is also working with the Enabled Archaeology Foundation (EAF) as a partner to be able to offer free places to enabled archaeologists. It is anticipated that 20% of participants will self-​identify as being dis/​Abled and will apply through a process managed by the EAF and West Kent College (Stammitti 2021). It would appear from the literature and these projects that archaeology has become much more accessible and inclusive regarding dis/​Abled people. Despite this handful of projects, good practice is not widespread or consistent (O’Mahony 2016; Stammitti 2021) and empirical findings suggest that more academic and practical work is needed to be done to facilitate changes to make archaeology more accessible to, and inclusive for dis/​Abled people (O’Mahony 2018). Moreover, there is a growing concurrent body of work that draws on the personal, and often negative and discriminatory, experiences of dis/Abled Archaeologists in the field (Colaninno et al. 2020; Fitzpatrick 2016, 2020; Fraser 2007; Klehm et al. 2021; O’Mahony 2018; Rocks-​Macqueen 2014; Tucker and Horton 2019). This material suggests that accessibility and inclusivity is not uniform across the sector, and that discrimination and ableism are still rife (Barnes 1992; Fitzpatrick 2016, 2020; Jenks 2019). However, more positively it does show that dis/Abled Archaeologists feel empowered enough to speak and write about their experiences and in being activists for change in the sector. It also demonstrates that archaeology focused academic journals and personal blogs have become a space of empowerment and activism (Collings 2012 in Fletcher and Primack 2017; Kafer 2013). What is apparent is that, at the time of writing, there is virtually no consideration given to why it is important to include dis/​Abled people in their volunteer or workforces and how this might impact on the visitor experience within the archaeological process. There are well-​established rationales in the business context for ensuring teams are diverse, not least the fact that ‘diversity means diversity of minds, ideas, and approaches’ (Lyons 2019). This concept is easily transferable to field archaeology, which relies on interpretation of objects and the sites themselves at the time of excavation (Lucas 2014), and of course in the writing; another core activity within the archaeological process (Cobb et al. 2012). It is well established that archaeological interpretation, particularly in the post processual context, is subjective in nature (Shanks and Hodder 1995) and the narratives created are shaped by the interpreter’s background, beliefs, values, education, and experiences (Hunt 2013). Arguably, by including dis/Abled Archaeologists in the fieldwork process a more diverse range of interpretations and narratives can be created through a ‘multivocal’ approach to the past in field and museum archaeology (Hunt 2013; Shanks and Hodder 1995: 4).

144    Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen

7.5  Dis/​Ability and museums The literature around dis/​Ability and museums tends to be general and cover a range of contexts rather than archaeology collections and museums. Indeed, there is much literature on access and inclusion in museums (the findings for which are transferable to the more specific context being considered here) but it is challenging to find examples of specific good practice for archaeology, more so than in the literature on fieldwork. A small cluster of projects is notable in Italy, for example, the Lombardy Archaeowiki project, recognized that, along with other marginalized groups, their dis/​Abled ‘audience is not really involved in museum activities as should be taken into consideration in designing paths and educational projects’ in order to engage dis/​Abled audiences (Antonini et al. 2014: 297). And the Archaeological Heritage Office for Trento, which includes a laboratory, library, and two museums, runs inclusive workshops and guided visits for dis/​Abled people as well as schoolchildren and teachers, families, and elderly people (Nicolis 2020). It is also worth noting how separate the writing on the dis/​Ability in the field and the museum are. Allowing for a more inclusive landscape through Enabled Archaeology is just one of the many steps needed to transition archaeology overall into a more diverse and representative environment for dis/​Abled people. Currently there are several steps that necessitate attention, including the way in which interpretation and communication is considered for dis/​Abled people within the museum setting. Interpretation as explained by Tilden (1977) is an educational activity which aims to reveal meaning and relationship through the use of original objects, by first-​hand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information. Since the late 1950s, interpretation has become a popular and widely used activity, broadly employed for the purpose of strengthening the relationship between visitors and the environment at various cultural sites and attractions (Pan et al. 2020). This is because interpretation acts as a vital component towards the augmentation of customer interest, participation, and experience, while often being acknowledged as a key factor in satisfaction and repeat visits (Brusatte 2017; Erricheillo et al. 2019; Preko et al. 2020). In particular, the task of interpreting involves capitalizing on curiosity by presenting information to customers through an array of communicative channels that are focused towards stimulating interest whilst enriching knowledge around an object, site, or event (Continenza et al. 2017; Interpret Europe 2020; Tilden 1977). Across the cultural industries interpretation is found as a wide range of media including, but not limited to, guided tours, text labels, traditional panels and booklets, interactive exhibits, GPS-​ controlled smartphones, audio visual (AV), and digital devices (Interpret Europe 2020). But while traditional interpretation still serves a purpose, increased requests for variety have seen museums serving as vital platforms for interpretative innovations, most recently adapting to and capitalizing on the digital movement (Navarrete 2019). Overall, the approach to interpretation within the

Enabled archaeology     145 museum environment has led to improved engagement through more robust and relevant materials, providing scope for further lucid and three-​dimensional advances. The result has been the augmentation of provocation and a more relevant application of interpretative materials to cater for a more diverse audience experience. The proliferation of interactive interpretation, for instance, has moved on from the primitive ‘press button, activate light’ scenario to a characteristically adaptable and inclusive learning experience, engaging audience interest and participation with an expanse of multisensory communication tools based around touch, sound, movement, weight, visual elements, and other qualities (Christidou and Pierroux 2019; Errichiello et al. 2019; Weisen 2007). In the setting of the digitally proficient museum, the advent of digital hermeneutics, haptic devices, somatic impulse, 3D technology, augmented reality, touch screen, gesture-​based interactive reliefs, self-​guided tours, artificial intelligence, multiple user virtual environments, immersive displays, and holographic displays (Navarrete 2019; Roussou 2007; Vaz et al. 2020) have exemplified and established interpretative media into a twenty-​first-​century context. However, where the advances may be notable, it is important to ask to what extent the multiplicity of interpretative content across a breadth of multimedia applications is truly accessible to, and inclusive for, dis/​ Abled visitors? Navarrete (2019) and Vaz et al. (2020) underline that interpretation has increased in complexity with digital technology now serving as a vital tool in repositioning museums within the heritage tourism market. In certain circumstances, this shift in focus has become favourable to dis/​Abled visitors (Vaz et al. 2020). However, it is important to ask how much of this increased involvedness and upsurge in multimedia and multisensory interpretation mediums—​and subsequently a more comprehensive experience—​has been strategized, designed, and implemented, from the onset, with consideration for dis/​Abled visitors in mind. If the answer is that involvement was limited, then this could impact on both the focus on ability and empowerment (Collings 2012 in Fletcher and Primack 2017; Kafer 2013). According to Sandell and Ingram (2019) there is questionable consideration, and an explicit absence, of experiential and service considerations for dis/​Abled people as visitors to museums. Therefore, the escalation of interpretative offering is more closely connected to museums as innovative, creative, experimental testbeds (Ashby 2017; MacDonald and Ashby 2011; Nelson and MacDonald 2012), reacting to the demands of an experience driven society (Lee et al. 2020; Pine and Gilmore 1999; Radder and Han 2015). Whilst a more integrated system of museum interpretation is not a particularly erroneous decision as aspiring for inclusivity helps with accessibility for all (Lisney et al. 2013), Walters (2009) highlights that accessibility is often ineffective as museums often regulate and describe themselves as ‘accessible’ when in fact their understanding is restricted. For instance, Vaz et al. (2020) detail that most accessibility solutions do not always offer cognitive, physical, or sensory access for dis/​Abled people. Furthermore, they highlight concerns found with the lack of hands-​on opportunities to engage in interpretative activities, especially for those with visual impairment. Tatic (2015) explains

146    Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen ‘how a blind person’s right is violated if there is no description of exhibits in a museum or a gallery in accessible audio, electronic format or in braille print’ (Tatic 2015: 11). Poria et al. (2009) and Sandell and Ingram (2019), on the other hand, indicate how exhibits presented in staircases and corridors limit opportunity for interaction, whereas poorly placed interpretation, inaccessible exhibition heights, broken lifts, and crowding can withhold the full effect of a museum’s interpretative efforts for dis/​Abled visitors. Of course, the advent of vivid and holistic interpretative experiences within the museum environment are factors of change caused by the need to present a more appealing offering to the modern museum visitor. And while these changes have opened up more opportunities for accessible museum experiences, and the reinforcement of anti-​ discrimination laws in the UK have generally proved effective in ‘ensuring that disabled people can, in one way or another, gain entry to cultural institutions’ (Sandell and Ingram 2019: 26), the fragility and infancy of the aforementioned dis/​Abled measures underlines that there are significant obstructions at play. To tackle these barriers requires the effort for change around a more pertinent challenge, the representation of dis/​Ability within a museum context. However, dis/​Abled museum employees make up a very small minority of museum employees (Goudas 2020; Pring 2019), and research has revealed that dis/​Abled participants have ‘described barriers to accessing employment which they felt were linked to their disability’ (Arts Council England 2018: 5). This raises the question that if employees feel there are a range of barriers for them, how can interpretation be truly accessible and inclusive across the sector? This also suggests that museums are not currently spaces of empowerment for dis/​Abled employees, and it could be further suggested that this impacts on the effectiveness of them as spaces of empowerment for visitors.

7.6  The Visitor experience Experience is a term in which the lexical category is undefined. This is because the English word has a dualistic meaning. For instance, as a noun we may understand experience as implying knowledge acquisition, getting involved, or being exposed. While on the other hand referring to the term as a verb implies experience as the encounter (Erlich 2003). It is also important to consider that the term ‘experience’ not only contains two lexical entities of fundamentally different kinds, but also the dynamics of subjective and objective assessment. There is then the myriad of experiential shades including contradictory experiences, fields of experience, experience of the self, absorbing, immersive and escapist experiences, aesthetic, educational, entertaining, and participatory experiences, through to the real, imaginary, and symbolic, as well as effable and ineffable experiences (Erlich 2003; Foucault in Tirkkonen 2019; Pine and Gilmore 1998). What this information denotes is that experiences are convoluted, expansive, and abstract, and perhaps, this is exactly how experiences should be recognized. Yet, experience within the circumstance of contemporary culture has become a loose-​fitting, crude, and

Enabled archaeology     147 haphazardly applied term somewhat considered as a commodified economic offering (Pine and Gilmore 1998, 1999). Principally, the present one-​size-​fits-​all dissemination of experience has arguably led to the vacancy of true meaning, and a precondition of non-​ specificity (Mehmetoglu and Engen 2011) which does not fit dis/​Abled visitors, who are of course, individuals, rather than a homogenous group. Within the museum environment important steps have been made to improve the visitor experience for dis/​Abled visitors (Lisney et al. 2013; McMillen and Alter 2017; National Museums of Scotland 2002; Sandell and Ingram 2019). Whether this enhancement is predicated on legitimate considerations and active management decisions or is reactive to legislative mandates and other external political, cultural, and social shifts is not always clear. Nevertheless, whatever the underlying reasons for change may be, the point in focus is that this shift signifies that progress is being made to UK heritage sites and museums to make them more accommodating and inclusive (Murphy 2015; Stephens 2020). For instance, alongside the multiplicity of interpretative materials now available, guidance has helped museums better configure their sites for wheelchair and mobility scooter access (Earnscliffe 2019; National Museums of Scotland 2002). It is now common to see lifts, if not specific to dis/​Abled people, then large enough public elevators that cater for wheelchair and mobility scooters. Ramps remove the obstacle of stair sets (National Museums of Scotland 2002), while research (Slater and Jones 2018) has helped to inform museums around the placement and size of toilets. Moreover, the facilitating applications of braille,​which as an interpretative medium has declined, but is still important (Wiazowski 2014), ​audio descriptions and large print, correct lighting (Dincer et al. 2019), and hearing loops have all added to the inclusivity of museums and exhibition spaces assisting in the provision of better experiences not only for dis/​Abled people, but for all (National Museums of Scotland 2002). This is in line with the concept of Universal Design, that is, we all live on a changing continuum linked to ability or dis/​Ability and that the physical environment should be constructed to reflect this (Fraser 2007). There is, then, the overall atmospheric characteristic of the museums environment which has become more holistic and multisensory through mounting emphasis on aesthetically pleasing décor, appropriate audiovisual (AV) and sonic attention (Kannenberg 2017), visitor flow, consideration of narrative, and the arrangement of exhibitions (Forrest 2013) which when coupled with the advent of assistive technology (Lisney et al. 2013) has helped to emphasize and realize a fuller visitor experience. However, while these points are notable, there are many limitations and parameters, internal and external, that go against the combined application of all mentioned factors. And even when a site has the resources, such as monetary availability, employee skills, and the opportunity to integrate a more inclusive experiential dimension into the museum space, it does not necessarily signal success (Davidson and Njabulo 2018). For instance, it is often the case that successfully realizing and actioning the items mentioned within this discussion requires a comprehensive understanding of the relevant audience and arguably a tidy bank balance. Yet in many situations, market knowledge and capital are absent. But even when audiences are understood, and budgets are available, these

148    Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen experiential offerings, now fundamental to the contemporary visitor (Shah and Ghazali 2018) are not always systematically integrated. For instance, factors of facilitation and experiential integration in certain cases are not feasible due to limitations and barriers in a site’s geography, age, and type of property, for instance, but more commonly made obsolete through a lack of context and implementation. This can render the purpose and value disconnected from its intended state. Yet, overriding all the assets invested to make museum sites inclusive, three dimensional, and appropriate to dis/​Abled users, concerns the recurrent failings of museum staff in engaging dis/​Abled customers. It can be argued that this failing is linked to the ‘. . . “woeful” under-​representation of disabled people in their workforce’ (Pring 2019), which has led to a lack of understanding in the sector of the needs of individual dis/​Abled people. Inside the museum the Front of House (FOH) team forms an integral part of the museum environment, playing an important role in shaping the visitor experience. Placed across a number of front-​facing positions, the FOH team are more often than not the first, the most visible, and unavoidably the most important points of contact for visitors. As the public face of the museum, the front of house team acts as information conduits imparting their knowledge as visitors pass through the museum. Yet, for a role where interaction with visitors is vital, it is troubling to identify that communicative problems exist when interacting with dis/​Abled visitors For instance, Dincer et al. (2019) highlight how tour guides can frequently make spatial references to objects and artefacts when engaging with visually impaired customers, whereas McMillen and Alter (2017) note how blind or visually impaired customers can be made to feel unwelcomed by staff who fear damage may be made to the collections. Argyropoulos and Kanari (2015) underline how staff attributes including lack of experience, embarrassment, apologetic feelings, and staff enforcing policy restrictions can hinder access (Gahman 2017), while Mesquita and Carneiro (2016) highlight an isolation effect caused by a substandard understanding of dis/​Abled visitors from museum staff. Correspondingly, Poria et al. (2009) highlight how museum staff can ignore the physical attributes of the environment, avoid direct communication with dis/​Abled visitors, preferring to converse with carers, and when direct interaction was required belittle dis/​Abled visitors by speaking loudly and slowly, which ties in to the outdated idea that dis/​Ability is a medical issue rather than a social one (Clarke and Marsh 2002). Considering the aforesaid points, it is clear that a gap exists in museum staff knowledge and as such a lack of proper training to engage effectively with dis/​Abled visitors has become a barrier (Argyropoulos and Kanari 2015; Lisney et al. 2013; McMillen and Alter 2017; Mesquita and Carneiro 2016). And while we cannot deny the efforts, legitimate considerations, moral responsibilities, and legislative imposing that has driven inclusivity and accessibility agendas forward, the key point to consider is that without representation of dis/​Abled people within the volunteer and workforce across the sector that goes beyond 2019’s 2.6% of dis/​Abled employees in the UK museum sector in a population where 20% of people have a dis/​Ability, museums will never truly realize inclusive and accessible goals and become spaces of empowerment (Goudas 2020; Pring 2019).

Enabled archaeology     149

7.7  Conclusions Three key related conclusions can be drawn from the review of the literature on Enabled Archaeology in archaeological fieldwork, museums, and the visitor experience. The journey between material culture being in situ and visitors at a museum engaging with it is a disjointed one and therefore the literature relating to fieldwork and museums is written in isolation. Arguably, if the point of archaeology and museum exhibitions is to engage a diverse range of people with the past for the betterment of society, then there should be more synergy between these aspects of archaeology (Chartered Institute for Archaeology, n.d.; Museums Association 2017), particularly Enabled Archaeology. This is a gap in current research and will require a new understanding of the process and the relationship between field and museum archaeology and the role of dis/Abled Archaeologists within this. Deep consideration has been given to dis/​Abled access and inclusivity in both the field and museum contexts, with ability at its core. However, this is clearly drawn from legislative requirements focused on practical advice for further accessibility and inclusiveness (Council for British Archaeology 2012; Klehm et al. 2021; O’Mahony 2015; Phillips and Creighton 2010), and either involves dis/​Abled people from a medical perspective (in the field) or in limited ways (in museums) (Clarke and Marsh 2002; O’Mahony 2018). A common issue in both contexts is that organizations are not currently considering how important dis/​Abled people are to archaeology as employees and volunteers in both the field and museums; and the value of diversity in terms of creating multivocal archaeological and historical narratives (Hunt 2013; Shanks and Hodder 1995). Field archaeology has long recognized the issue of representation and the barriers that dis/​Abled people face when trying to engage with archaeological work (Aitchison et al. 2020), but museums are just beginning to accept this (Arts Council England 2018; Goudas 2020; Pring 2019), and both areas of the sector have not yet envisaged a space beyond what archaeology can offer dis/​Abled people, which is an ableist approach (Fraser 2007). In this respect both contexts are not truly Enabled spaces that allows activists to facilitate change; powerful activists such as Rocks-​Macqueen and Fitzpatrick do exist, but they are currently only able to share their experiences and call for change rather than enacting it. O’Mahony was able to take this a step further in her lifetime, in her research, fieldwork, and the founding of the Enabled Archaeology Foundation. This is not to say that field and museum archaeology are completely un-​Enabled spaces, as several examples demonstrate, but a shift in philosophy and working practices is needed for them to become fully enabled spaces. Greater representation in volunteer and workforces coupled with a multivocal approach to interpretation could offer a way to start to address this issue (Hunt 2013; Shanks and Hodder 1995). In order to achieve the goal of being fully Enabled spaces more research spanning field and museum archaeology and the roles that volunteers and employees can play in creating narratives and forms of interpretation needs to be carried out to fill this gap in current knowledge and application.

150    Abigail Hunt and Thomas Kitchen It would appear that in both field and museum archaeology volunteers, employees, and visitors still encounter significant barriers to participation with archaeology as archaeologists and/​or visitors. Whilst practical advice has gone some way to dealing with the problems in the field and in museums it is clear that greater representation is needed in volunteer and workforces to increase accessibility and the extent to which dis/​Abled people are made to feel welcome and part of the archaeological community in each context. Research has demonstrated an awareness of the barriers and how they can be reduced, and there are calls for greater representation, including dis/​Abled people in both areas of archaeology. But these are very recent and will take time to be actioned. This finding suggests that future research might also focus on how dis/​Abled people can be better represented in field and museum archaeology volunteer and workforces, with a focus on the clear benefits there are to having dis/​Abled people working in field and museum archaeology, particularly around the visitor experience. This would start to address the gap in this area of study and create new knowledge to change current practice.

Acknowledgement by David Connolly Theresa O’Mahony was the founder of the Enabled Archaeology Foundation (EAF). Her aim was to create an organization that could support, empower, equip, and enable all people with or without dis/​Abilities to take part in every area of archaeology as they choose, and to combat people’s negative and/​or prejudicial attitudes to dis/​Abled and enabled involvement in contemporary archaeology. She succeeded, and although sadly is now no longer with us, her strength of character, determination, and open good humour is within everything that has arisen from her strong belief in equality. This article, completed after her passing, is testament to her legacy, and, as the first Chair of the Enabled Archaeology Foundation, I am so proud to be one of those carrying her dream forward.

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Chapter 8

C onservation a ft e r c onfli c t Rebuilding a heritage community in Iraq Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione

8.1  Introduction The 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad is well known, and has been documented, analysed, and discussed in numerous fora. Less well known is the earlier looting of a number of Iraqi provincial museums in the 1991 Gulf war. Destruction of cultural heritage as part of conflict in other countries (e.g. the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen) over the last few decades has brought a burgeoning international awareness of the legal and moral responsibility to protect cultural heritage when states are in conflict. The international academic community is actively developing new methodologies for documenting cultural heritage ‘at-​risk’ using satellite imagery and social media. But what happens after the war is over? What is the responsibility of the international community to help countries recover, stabilize, conserve, and protect their museums and other cultural heritage as they rebuild their lives and communities? What are effective approaches for cultural heritage professionals (such as conservators, archaeologists, architects) that bring real improvements in care of cultural heritage in a country recovering from war? What responsibilities should archaeologists interested in pursuing their own research agendas have when initiating new projects in a country recovering from crisis? What do individuals need to consider when asked to participate in a post-​crisis recovery or reconstruction project beyond what they already know about the practice of conservation? Archaeologists and other heritage professionals are increasingly examining their role in post-​conflict recovery and conservators are now regularly working on recovery and training initiatives. Heritage conservation as important to humanitarian recovery

158    Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione is increasingly being brought into discussions of practice for many post-​conflict and post-​disaster situations. Recovering and stabilizing heritage is seen as both part of the broader recovery of affected communities and also a way forward in rebuilding diplomatic ties between countries after war. This chapter looks at one case study from Iraq, the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage, an academic and training facility located in the northern city of Erbil. Initiated in 2008 as part of the US Department of State’s Iraq Cultural Heritage Program, this project, initially conceived as an 18-​month conservation training programme, has survived and expanded over 13 years and educated more than 700 Iraqis who are actively employed in the preservation of their own cultural heritage. Struggles for sustainability continue, but an understanding of educational methodologies and strategies used and adapted over a decade may inform future post-​conflict archaeology and cultural heritage programmes.

8.2  Cultural heritage recovery as part of humanitarian response and post-​war reconstruction Instead of framing cultural heritage recovery in opposition to humanitarian response (objects vs people) there are expanding ideas that acknowledge the importance of cultural heritage to individual and community recovery after disaster. The cultural heritage community is increasingly defining how stabilization and recovery of artefacts and architecture, during and after conflict or disaster, is important to protecting individual and cultural identity and to supporting longer term recovery and reconciliation (al-​Azm 2018; Matthews et al. 2020; Stanley-​Price 2007; Vrdoljak 2009). Quntar et al. (2015: 155) directly state ‘Perhaps the greatest conceptual challenge for the archaeological community is to reimagine heritage protection as one of many humanitarian actions that offer direct support to populations in crisis’. In the cultural heritage community more generally, there has been development of ‘first-​aid’ and first response methodologies to focus on rescue and recovery of cultural heritage early after crisis in coordination with more traditional humanitarian aid groups. For example, the ‘Cultural Heritage First Aid Action Framework’ developed by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (ICCROM) and partners assumes cultural heritage professionals will be on-​site soon after a crisis and will be coordinating with other rescue professionals (Tandon 2018a, b). In the US, the Heritage Emergency National Task Force (HENTF), co-​sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Smithsonian Institution, is a partnership of 60 national service organizations and federal agencies designed to coordinate better recovery of cultural heritage after disaster.

Conservation after conflict    159 Archaeologists and other cultural heritage professionals who choose to work in post-​war rescue and reconstruction projects have to take responsibility for educating themselves in the broader ethical, political, and diplomatic implications and responsibilities of their work that extend far beyond helping the local community or continuing their own academic research (Kersel and Luke 2015: 72). Individuals who have focused their education in areas such as cultural heritage, conservation, and architecture should research broadly to expand their understanding of how their expertise fits with, and is used by, broader political actors in post-​conflict situations in order to better understand inherent conflicts and hopefully work more effectively (Meskell 2015). Even when approached deliberately and cautiously, such preparations may not be sufficient to overcome what Rico (2019) describes as ‘heritage failures’, where globally defined approaches to the concepts of significance, value, and treatment of heritage do not harmonize with local expectations. A complete review of these aspects is beyond the goals of this chapter but in the Iraq context theoretical topics such as post-​colonialism, neo-​liberalism, and cultural heritage, and the evolving understanding of the power dynamics of ‘stakeholder’ interactions (Coombe and Weiss 2015; Abu-​Khafajah and Miqdadi 2019; Rico 2017) all play a role in the active, on-​the-​ground work. There are a growing number of international capacity building programmes where western-​based cultural institutions have carried out significant conservation and heritage training initiatives for heritage practitioners after crisis (e.g. Kurin 2011; Odegaard et al. 2014; Stark and Piphil 2018; Stein et al. 2017). Other western programmes have been designed to give local communities training in the long-​term care of their cultural heritage (e.g. Roby et al. 2008; Hamdan et al. 2008). The international heritage community has also begun defining principles to guide capacity building for heritage conservation in parts of the world that are initiating international conservation approaches to saving their cultural heritage (e.g. Aslan 2014; ICOMOS International Training Committee 2013). Barakat (2007) provides a useful review of how cultural heritage recovery fits within (and often supports) post-​war reconstruction and recovery. He laid out critical lessons as requirements for effective recovery of cultural heritage during post-​war reconstruction that can serve as a useful framework in developing future projects. These include: a shared vision of recovery; the integration of cultural heritage into the wider physical, economic and social responses; sustained political and financial support; the capacity development of local people and institutions; the active participation of indigenous actors in the design and implementation of recovery; the recognition of the complementary relationship between replacement and conservation approaches; the prioritization of quality over speed of recovery; more practical ways to implement conservation codes and legislation; and finally, the appreciation of belief and religion within postwar societies. (Barakat 2007: 27)

160    Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione Through initial planning, happenstance, and trial and error, the current Iraqi Institute programmes have incorporated many of these lessons into the way we work now. The examples described here may be of help in developing future capacity building and recovery projects in other places.

8.3  Cultural diplomacy and heritage diplomacy Archaeology and collection of archaeological artefacts have always been a part of western diplomatic efforts in Iraq. For example, Austen Henry Layard’s 1845 excavations at Nimrud were part of the broader British diplomatic initiatives of the mid-​nineteenth century in the Middle East (Malley 2008), building on work that the French political mission in Mosul began at Nineveh earlier that century (Layard 1849). Individuals and institutions looking to work in heritage and archaeology post-​ crises today need to consider how their work fits within the larger world of diplomacy both state to state and between the mixed bag of governments, NGO’s, and academic researchers who arrive after disaster or conflict. Cultural diplomacy is used in the diplomatic arena as a way of developing longer, deeper ties between countries (Kersel and Luke 2015). The support for the educational initiatives that became the Iraqi Institute fit squarely within the US cultural diplomacy initiatives of the US Department of State (Luke and Kersel 2013; Schneider 2009: 264; The White House 2011) after the 2003 Gulf War. While understanding that US governmental support initiated the Iraqi Institute, the organization of projects carried out under the purview of the institution can also be set with a much wider domain sometimes termed ‘Heritage Diplomacy’. Heritage diplomacy is defined by Winter (2015: 1007) as ‘a set of processes whereby cultural and natural pasts shared between and across nations become subject to exchanges, collaborations and forms of cooperative governance’. Smithsonian projects are only one part of a much larger constellation of governmental, non-​governmental (UNESCO, World Monuments Fund), and academic institutions negotiating for funding, access, and the ability to carry out projects in Iraq. For example, following the ejection of ISIS from Mosul in 2018, UNESCO tried to frame the broader recovery under its ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ campaign. In reality, these projects initially developed mostly independently following the interests and abilities of the international players negotiating with provincial and national authorities. While the Smithsonian educational programmes may not have as much obvious impact as large reconstruction projects included in developmental aid packages, nevertheless, over time, the methodology used to develop projects has found ways to move beyond outside intervention and reconstruction to a more collaborative/​cooperative approach to recovery and reconstruction projects on the ground.

Conservation after conflict    161

8.4  Archaeological museums and conservation in Iraq Iraq has a long history of archaeological excavation and archaeological museums. Storied excavations by foreign scholars at famous sites such as Nimrud, Nineveh, and Babylon dispersed antiquities to many of the world’s museums (e.g., Crawford et al. 1980; Moorey 1978; Russell 1997; Zettler and Horne 1998). The Iraq Museum in Baghdad was established in 1923 with an Iraqi Director, Abdul Qadir al-​Pachachi, by Gertrude Bell in her role as the first director of the Iraqi Antiquities Departments (Al-​Gailani Werr 2008). Over decades it was filled with archaeological remains recovered from foreign and Iraqi sponsored excavations at famous sites and came to be a renowned museum showing unique ancient items such as the Mask of Warka, Assyrian lamassu from Nimrud, and sculptures from the Parthian site of Hatra (Basmachi 1975). The conservation laboratory at the museum was established in 19321 with conservators responsible for projects such as the on-​site restoration of the neo-​Assyrian statues on site at Nimrud (al-​Qaissi 2008; Shukri 1956) and treatment of thousands of artefacts recovered from excavations (al-​Naqshbandi 1973). The current purpose-​built museum was opened in 1966. Less well known are the provincial archaeological museums, established under Saddam Hussein’s rule, illustrating the ancient wealth and strength of Mesopotamia for citizens far beyond the capital. These archaeological museums all employed a standardized approach, wherein each province told the same story of Iraq’s past using similar artefacts and objects centrally collected in Baghdad and redistributed. Lacking in this approach was an opportunity for the museums to provide opportunities for visitors to obtain a local or even personal perspective on the past. Conflict in Iraq over the last three decades has damaged or destroyed many of the museums with their objects looted and lost. Nine of the thirteen provincial archaeology museums were looted in 1991 during the first Gulf War (Gibson and McMahon 1992; Youkhanna and Gibson 2008). The Iraq Museum was famously looted in April 2003 despite attempts to protect the museum by individuals (Youkhanna and Gibson 2008). The Mosul Cultural Museum, the second largest archaeology museum in Iraq, had the majority of its portable items transferred to Baghdad before the 2003 war, but what remained was decimated by ISIS in performative acts of violence that were filmed and broadcast around the world (Harmanşah 2015). The archaeological academic and professional community was also decimated in the years Iraq was under UN sanctions and the later Gulf war. Al-​Hussainy and Matthews (2008) bluntly state ‘With international collaborations reduced to a minimum the

1  In comparison, the British Museum conservation lab was set up in 1920 and the Smithsonian’s first laboratory was set up at the Freer Gallery in the early 1950’s.

162    Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione academic standards and language capabilities of staff within the State Board (of Antiquities and Heritage) steadily declined’. Provincial offices were minimally staffed with trained archaeologists (Al-​Hussainy and Matthews 2008: 96). The loss of both professional and academic archaeological expertise, along with the closing of many museums across the country created a huge need for capacity-​building and practical support to rebuild. Since the 2003 Gulf war and the fall of Saddam Hussein the provincial archaeological museums have begun to reopen and renovate alongside other museum initiatives outside of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) structure. These initiatives often are supported by international entities, but often include a more local perspective on important cultural heritage. A new SBAH museum in Basra in September 2016 opened with the support of British military, governmental, and NGO support (Robson 2016). UNESCO support led to the 2013 renovation of a gallery at the Suleymania museum. ‘In Writing: Objects from the collections of the Sulaymaniyah Museum’ displayed archaeological collections in a non-​chronological fashion rare in other Iraq museums (UNESCO office for Iraq 2013). This expanding museum community has been influenced by opportunities given to higher level governmental managers and dignitaries by foreign governments and some academic archaeologists, to travel abroad and visit museums and archaeological programmes, in order to improve diplomatic relations with individuals who have responsibility and control access for archaeology in Iraq. In this recovering and expanding museum environment, there is a need for staff with expanded skills to support development and maintain collections and promote museums in new ways (Matthews et al. 2020: 135). Other non-​archaeological museums with support from foreign and other Iraqi religious, governmental, and private support have also been opening and expanding. In the city of Erbil alone the privately-​owned collection of the Kurdish Textile Museum was able to conserve its collections and later renovate its home in an historic house on the Erbil citadel (Dessier and Sipan 2012). The Syriac Heritage Museum expanded from a local house into a purpose-​built structure in the traditionally Christian town of Ainkawa on the outskirts of Erbil. There is even a project with well-​known museum architect Daniel Libeskind working with the Kurdistan Regional Government to design and build a Kurdistan National Museum (Gintoff 2016). However, a lack of resources and expertise continue to hinder efforts and change is uneven across the country.

8.5  Origins of the Iraqi Institute The Iraq Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage was initiated in 2008 as a small part of the US Department of State (DOS) sponsored Iraq Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP) (Luke and Kersel 2013: 87–​90). Its inception and general history are documented in earlier publications (Johnson et al. 2014, 2016, 2020; Pearlstein and Johnson 2020). The Iraq Institute is located in the northern city of Erbil inside the

Conservation after conflict    163 Kurdistan Region of Iraq, an autonomous region controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Early in 2009, the Prime Minister of the KRG, after learning about the project from DOS diplomats and advisors, donated a building (the previous Erbil public library) and costs for renovation and furnishing of laboratories, classrooms, and dormitories. This facility became the home to what has been over a decade of related programming in conservation of artefacts, archaeological sites, and historic buildings. Between 2009 and 2014 a series of educational courses in museum collections care and conservation, archaeological site management, and architectural conservation were developed and expanded along with other shorter workshops and programmes designed to guide the development of the Institute and build toward long-​term sustainability under Iraqi control. From the beginning, the approach to teaching was tailored and adapted to Iraqi needs but taught at a level that met international standards. Longer form training programmes have avoided the pitfalls of disjointed short courses and promoted communication and critical thinking skills. Iraq in 2009 still suffered from decades of isolation started by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s. Basic laboratory supplies and equipment of quality were difficult to procure; and specialized materials for conservation were nonexistent in the marketplace. Importing the ‘right’ supplies was an option for the project but not for our Iraqi colleagues, since most antiquities offices across the country had little or no budget (this problem persists). Additionally, infrastructure challenges—​inconsistent electricity, lack of equipment, and unreliable internet chief among them—​meant that some conservation approaches and materials needed to be reevaluated and adapted taking local realities into account (see Ravaiola 2020; Roby et al. 2020). In 2011, the University of Delaware, an early advisor to the ICHP programme, agreed to take over management of the academic programmes at the Institute. At the same time, a management structure with an international Advisory Council and an Iraqi Directory Board was put into place and continues to this day. The Advisory Council is made up of international archaeology and conservation experts (mostly American) and higher-​level governmental officials from the Iraqi SBAH and the KRG. The Directory Board is made up of two archaeologists from Salahaddin University (based in Erbil) and three archaeologists from SBAH. The Director is one of the archaeologists from Salahaddin University. This advisory structure has given general, continual administrative support to the Institute, even as funding has ebbed and flowed during periods of conflict and political upheaval throughout the country. Early developmental support from the KRG and consistent support from the KRG and SBAH along with funding from governmental and non-​governmental agencies has supported the Iraqi Institute through ten years of development and adaptation. The programmes at the Iraqi Institute are designed for actively practising heritage practitioners who have jobs in a governmental ministry or university and are actively working with cultural heritage in their day-​to-​day work. However, we found that these practitioners, while they often had an archaeology degree (or related, e.g. architecture, engineering, art), usually had no practical training or experience from their academic education.

164    Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione The earliest programmes designed for the Iraqi institute were dedicated to developing in-​country, long-​term education that people would take back to their home offices and use (Johnson et al. 2016). This leads to some standard approaches to all education projects to this day: • Teach both theoretical and practical skills. For example, preventive conservation and agents of deterioration are explained and then visits to a local museum allow students to identify risks and problems and come up with ideas for how to improve collections care. • Give opportunities for practice of skills at the Institute and at home offices. Courses are generally split into ‘modules’ with students returning home mid-​course with a ‘homework’ assignment they must complete in their home office. • Show international materials and ideas but teach methodologies for evaluating locally available conservation materials. For example, numerous ‘conservation-​ grade’ adhesives have been imported, but a practical methodology for evaluating adhesives from the local markets is shared. • Provide English language training to improve the participants’ abilities to connect with the international heritage conservation field. English classes are scheduled daily. Visiting lecturers who teach in the programmes must generally adapt their ideas and expectations when they first come to the Institute. All new visiting lecturers are provided with reports from previous teachers, and invited to participate in conversations on what to expect in the classroom and background information about typical Iraqi Institute students. Johnson et al. (2020) reported on the recursive methodology used to develop programmes, document how each visiting lecturer adapts their programme during teaching, and make suggestions for later lecturers. A curriculum review took place after two years of teaching in the collections care and conservation programme, leading to more adjustments and additions to the curriculum. Meeting the students, learning about their previous education and their workplaces, and coming to understand the real limitations that Iraqis resiliently adapt to every day can teach deep lessons to international cultural heritage professionals about appropriate heritage conservation. In 2015, the Smithsonian joined the coalition of partners supporting ongoing programmes with Iraq and has since taken over the on-​site management of US programmes at the Institute (Harkin 2016; al-​Quntar et al. 2015). Concurrently, DOS, and other funders interested in cultural heritage funding, shifted towards stabilization and recovery of the cultural heritage of Mosul and northern Iraq decimated by ISIS after 2014. The Smithsonian currently has two programmes supported by a partnership with the Iraqi Institute. These include a Fundamentals of Heritage Conservation Program, and the Nimrud Rescue Project. As in earlier years, other countries and institutions have also used the facilities for their own cultural heritage training programmes, including the Czech government, the Italian Carabinieri, and the World Monuments Fund.

Conservation after conflict    165 Despite setbacks, the Institute has been successful in continuing to develop in ways that support their mission ‘. . . to preserve the legacy of humanity contained in the unique cultural heritage of Iraq . . . through educating people in conservation and preservation and by inviting professionals from around the world to share expertise’ (Johnson et al. 2014: 8).

8.6 Fundamentals in heritage conservation The Fundamentals of Heritage Conservation Program, first offered by the Smithsonian in 2016, was developed in response to suggestions by previous visiting faculty members and the Iraqi Institute’s Advisory Council (Johnson et al. 2020). Through experience gained from teaching conservation programmes at the Institute from 2009 to 2014, basic gaps in knowledge had been found across the student population. Faculty felt that most students needed a broader knowledge of some basic skills and their application to heritage conservation so that the more advanced and specialized topics could be better assimilated. The goal of the current programme is to provide fundamental knowledge and skills in global heritage conservation to prepare students to protect and promote Iraqi museum collections, heritage buildings, and archaeological sites. The course is a highly practical programme which includes daily hands-​on projects to reinforce both theoretical and practical components. Information is obtained through lectures, demonstrations, brainstorming in small groups, assembling of ideas, presentation, and discussion. The teaching approach fosters team-​building and mutual understanding. At the end of the course students produce a portfolio of projects and information that can be used to share their new knowledge with others to expand the influence of the programme with others in the Iraq heritage community. At the end of this course students are expected to: • have a knowledge and understanding of the international heritage community; • know the international laws, policies, and standards that are the basis for heritage conservation; • have knowledge of basic laboratory safety; • be able to conduct documentation (written, photographic) of different types of heritage (objects, buildings, sites); • have a basic understanding of the materials found in Iraqi museum collections (e.g. pottery, stone, bone, etc.); • understand the agents of deterioration and how to use monitoring to identify problems; • understand the basic components of heritage buildings;

166    Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione • be able to complete a basic measured drawing of a heritage building; • be able to conduct a condition assessment of archaeological sites and artefacts; • have a knowledge of risk assessment and disaster preparedness, salvage, and temporary storage for collections and heritage buildings; • have better skills in project planning, team building, and monitoring projects; and • be better prepared to acquire more specialized skills in museum conservation, archaeological site management, and architectural conservation through future training opportunities. The Fundamentals of Heritage Conservation course was taught in 2016, 2018, and 2019–​ 2020 until stalled by the Covid-​19 pandemic. Future versions of the programme will be continued as funding allows.

8.7  The Nimrud Rescue Project In contrast to the more standard, generalized capacity-​ building educational programmes at the Iraqi Institute, the Nimrud Rescue Project is project-​and site-​based, incorporating educational modules into a broader project to recover damaged statuary and stabilize the ancient architecture at the ancient neo-​Assyrian site of Nimrud (Johnson et al. 2020). The project began in 2017 with an agreement between the Iraqi SBAH and the Smithsonian (Couzin-​Frankel 2017). During the first year of the project, the Smithsonian worked to establish and train the Nimrud Rescue Team (NRT), made up of staff of the Nineveh Provincial office of the SBAH. To do this, the Smithsonian worked with the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design, a project partner, to hold a series of planning and educational missions at the Iraqi Institute. These missions were designed to give the NRT the skills and tools needed for successful recovery of small and large fragments of the neo-​Assyrian statuary damaged by ISIS at Nimrud in 2015–​2016 (Johnson et al. 2020). At the end of each mission the team decided as a group what additional training and equipment was needed, and this information was used to design the next mission. This iterative process between all project partners ensured focused, directly useful information is provided to the local community. In this way 24 members of the Nimrud Rescue Team received training in the First Aid for Culture methodology of recovery (Tandon 2018a, b). They also received training in lifting and movement of large stone artefacts, and reburial methods, and practised these newly learned skills at the Iraqi Institute and in a local construction dump, where large fragments of concrete stood in for the fragmentary stone sculptures to be recovered at Nimrud. The NRT held their first recovery season at Nimrud in late 2018, and their second from October 2019 to January 2020. By the end of Season 2, the NRT had recovered over 5000 stone fragments from the site, stabilized 33 large fragments in situ and created a temporary cover for a large pile of sculptural fragments pushed together by ISIS after the

Conservation after conflict    167 destruction of the site (Ghazi Saadallah 2020; Jasem et al. 2018). Through careful rescue, stabilization, and documentation, the recovered fragments are now safe from further damage from harsh environmental conditions at the site as well as safe from potential looting.

8.8  The Future Conservation has been part of the museum archaeology community in Iraq for decades (Al-​Naqshbandi 1973). Thanks to graduates of the Iraqi Institute there are now at least four new conservation laboratories developing in provincial museums (Babil, Erbil, Mosul, and Suleimani). The Smithsonian plans to continue the partnership with the Iraqi Institute and others to continue to support the rebuilding of the cultural heritage community, museums, buildings, and sites in Iraq. This includes working with the Louvre and the SBAH on a project supported by the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH) on the recovery and renovation of the Mosul Cultural Museum, the second largest archaeological museum in Iraq. Plans are in development for a new programme to be held at the Iraqi Institute that will educate the Mosul Cultural Museum staff in current museum practice. This programme will be designed through a needs assessment review and subsequent themed missions to train the staff, like the Nimrud Rescue project. This will allow for adaptive educational workshops that teach and improve skills that museum staff can put directly into use in their newly renovated museum.

8.9  Conclusion While post-​conflict cultural heritage recovery projects have been carried out for decades, only recently is this work being framed as a theoretical and practical approach that can help support both community recovery and effective research after the war (Newson and Young 2018). There is a need for the cultural heritage community to examine the variety of post-​conflict cultural heritage conservation initiatives, so that we move beyond ad hoc projects that develop based on individual or institutional assumptions of how to help. New excavation and survey projects led by international archaeologists have been expanding in Iraq since about 2011 creating new pressures on the museums and provincial antiquities departments required to curate these collections long-​term. The archaeological academic community has a responsibility to consider its broader responsibilities to long-​term care and conservation of the burgeoning new materials rapidly being recovered and placed into the hands of struggling Iraqi antiquities departments. Iraq continues to struggle with terrorism, an unstable political system, and deep damage to

168    Jessica S. Johnson and Brian Michael Lione its academic community from previous international sanctions and war. Despite these struggles, people who care deeply for the cultural heritage of their country are constantly working to improve the care, preservation, and presentation that takes place in their museums and communities.

Acknowledgements Our thanks to Dr. Abdullah Khorsheed, Director of the Iraqi Institute since 2011 and numerous Iraqi Advisory Council members who have supported us. Dr. Katharyn Hanson has been a partner in the projects described here since 2013. Additionally, many others have supported these programmes for more than a decade including Debra Hess Norris, Lisa Huber, Lois Price, Nancy Odegaard, Vicki Cassman, John Russell, Gouhar Shemdin, Vian Rashid, Jihan Sindi, C. Brian Rose, and Jason Ur. Many colleagues at the Smithsonian support the current programmes at the Iraqi Institute and we especially thank Cori Wegener, Brian Daniels, and Liz Kirby along with Marie Morse and Liz Tunick for always finding a way to make it work. The Smithsonian’s work was supported by the Department of State under Interagency Agreement Number SIAA17ECA003-​001 and Cooperative Agreement SLMAQM17CA2055; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—​ Museum Conservation Institute’s Directorship Endowment (Grant #G-​40700657); gifts from the Getty Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund and Bank of America; and Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute Federal and Trust Funds. All Smithsonian work in Iraq takes place in partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, SBAH, and the Iraqi Institute with support from the University of Delaware.

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Pa rt C

L O C AT I N G M U SE UM S A N D C OL L E C T ION S

Chapter 9

Site m u seums a nd archaeol o g y Georgios Papaioannou

9.1  Introduction The idea and the content of the term ‘site museum’, and more specifically of an ‘archaeological site museum’, is a complex combination of the notions of ‘site’, ‘museum’, and ‘archaeology’. In Greek antiquity, ‘museums’ were sites rather than buildings: ‘μουσεῖον’ in Greek was the sanctuary to worship the Muses (the nine Greek deities of arts and letters), a whole city (Athens was the museum of Greece, according to Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, 5.187d), and an open space for philosophical discussions and ideas, with supporting premises such as a library, amphitheatres, a zoo, and a botanical garden (Coqueugniot 2013). From the Renaissance, aristocrats’ palaces and wealthy owners’ homes developed galleries for their private collections, in what have become known as either Wunderkammer, Kunstkammer, or cabinets of curiosity. In Europe, from the eighteenth century onwards, some collections became public, tools towards consolidating national and cultural identities, expanding in the context of imperialism and colonialism. In the twentieth century, new concepts emerged as the relationships between heritage and material collections were further negotiated, such as open-​air museums, ecomuseums, outdoor museums, and heritage parks. World organizations, such as the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) were involved in defining archaeological site museums, addressing characteristics and proposing management policies and strategies, stressing the importance of in situ preservation, object conservation, interpretation, narratives, and exhibition programmes. The late twentieth century’s new museology and the twenty-​first century’s digital expansion has added extra challenges for the missions, visions, and objectives of site museums. These include: relations to (and roles of) local, national, and international communities in heritage building and

176   Georgios Papaioannou memory making, connections to the natural environment, audience engagement, the effects of cultural tourism, internal and external political influences, and the demands of different stakeholders. This chapter addresses how the concept of the site museum has emerged and continues to emerge in these contexts, using the newly established Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE) in Jordan as a case study.

9.2  Defining site museums The concept of a site museum may seem self-​evident. It is frequently seen in the literature, but not always fully or clearly defined. The obvious definition is that a site museum is a museum firmly connected with (and usually placed within or in the vicinity of) an archaeological or historical site, an area of natural importance, a monument and/​or an area of archaeological/​historical discoveries and interest. Yet, addressing the characteristics of site museums and distinguishing them from open-​air museums, living history museums, or visitor centres, is not always straightforward, as discussed below. By examining and exploring the history and context of site museums, some answers and insights can be gained. It can be argued that the origin of site museums lies in the open-​air museums that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1891, Arthur Hazelius established the Skansen Open-​air Museum in Sweden (Nordenson 1992). Hazelius travelled all over Sweden to collect old buildings, which he then moved and restored in the Skansen area on the island of Djurgarden in Stockholm in a romanticized attempt to recreate a traditional village and exhibit life in Sweden in the pre-​industrial era. The Skansen operated and accepted visitors from all over the world without interruption until the COVID-​19 pandemic required its closure in November 2020. Hazelius’ example was soon followed in other places in Scandinavia, the USA, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. This worldwide diffusion of open-​air museums led the International Council of Museums (ICOM) to convene a meeting in July 1957 with experts to discuss and agree on the importance of open-​air museums (Moolman 1996: 392). Was Skansen an open-​air museum? Was Skansen a site museum? These two questions have remained a consistent point of tension for decades. Defining a site museum has a seemingly simple starting premise as a museum: ‘. . . located at the site. Its scope is the story and meaning of the site. Its exhibits have the sole purpose of interpreting the site to visitors’ (Lewis 1959: 172).

UNESCO (which was a newly established organization at the time) first attempted to define site museums in 1949, only a few years after World War Two, whose battles and bombs damaged monuments and archaeological sites around the globe. UNESCO initiated the periodical Museum and released a report addressing the profile and nature of the so-​called ‘museums of the monument’ (Lewis 1959: 184; Shafernich 1993: 43). In

Site museums and archaeology    177 1951 and 1952, the term ‘trailside museum’ appeared in the same periodical. This term referred to museums within sites of historical or natural significance in the USA, and it was translated as ‘le musée de site’ and ‘petits musées de site’ respectively in the French versions (Lewis 1959: 184–​5). A few years later, in 1955, again in UNESCO’s periodical Museum, the term ‘site museum’ in English emerged (Lewis 1959: 185). In this early phase a site museum was considered a museum building within, or in the vicinity of, a specific place, in most cases a place of historical or archaeological character and significance, that is, a historical or archaeological site. Such a museum was usually small and complemented the site. Visitors came to visit the archaeological or historical site, rather than the museum itself. The museum was there to enhance the visit, as well as to provide a building for storage, conservation, and display of archaeological objects from the site. New terms appeared soon after. In the 1960s and 1970s, many museums emerged at historical sites, in natural parks, and in places of natural and cultural significance. The terms park museum, open air museum, museum village, living history museum, open site museum, outdoor museum, heritage park, historic park, historic house, house museum, and folk museum all started to be used more frequently, and sometimes interchangeably (Atkinson and Holton 1973; Lewis 1959; Moolman 1996; Priestly 1969; Shafernich 1993). These new terms connected the museum and the site, the latter being a historical or archaeological site, a park, an old village, an old factory, or a place of cultural of natural significance. This, however, led to confusion and the notion of site museum became unclear (Atkinson and Holton 1973). It was not well defined which of the two was a site museum, was it: (1) the museum building attached to the historical or archaeological site for interpretation, storage, preservation, and artefact exhibition purposes; or (2) the open-​air museum including the site itself, its features, and the museum building? In the early 1970s, the theoretical landscape was complicated further as ecomuseums emerged in France as a new concept. These were analysed and theorized by Georges Henri Rivière (Weis 1989), who stressed their social aspects. The ecomuseum is ‘a community and an objective: the development of this community’ (Hugues de Varine, Director of ICOM from 1964 to 1974, cited by Hertzog 2004: 133–​4). Ecomuseums are spaces with elements of natural and cultural heritage, evolving together with individuals and communities that live and work there. They explore a territory and its people through time as they both develop and change. Ecomuseums are not just exhibition and conservation spaces, but living and active territorial institutions (similar to schools, laboratories, and conservatories) where natural and cultural heritage evolves and progresses together and in constant exchange with the communities inhabiting them. About a decade later, in 1982, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) published a report entitled ‘Archaeological Site Museums’ which followed a generic approach and defined site museums as ‘conceived and set up in order to protect natural or cultural property, movable and immovable, on its original site, that is, preserved at the place where such property has been created or discovered’ (ICOM 1982: 3; ICAMT 2014). ICOM’s report followed Kenneth Hudson’s simpler definition

178   Georgios Papaioannou of ‘museums of history where it happened’ (Shafernich 1993: 43–​4). In this broad approach, the notions of locality and object preservation prevail. Site museums help address what needs to be done with local, original, movable, and immovable, natural and cultural elements, that is, the archaeological record and the natural elements of a given space, aiming to help decision making for the archaeological site. Very soon afterwards, the notions of documentation, research, and interpretation were added to the ones of locality and preservation (Küsel 1989), stressing museum functions and services, as well as the idea that a site museum is first a museum and then a site. On the same track is the survey of historical/​archaeological site museums by ICOM’s International Committee for Museums of Archaeology and History (ICMAH) working group, which concluded that a site museum deals with finds of different times and ages (industrial archaeology included), which it protects and exhibits in their original context (Deladelle 2001). This blending of cultural and natural elements to be preserved and museologically managed both in situ and in an adjacent museum building(s) continued to characterize site museum approaches in the 1990s. ‘A site museum must be, at least, both a significant site and a genuine museum’ (Moolman 1996: 394) to preserve and interpret cultural, historical, and natural elements in situ, including symbolic places, holy trees, ancient archaeological deposits, historic houses, sites of trauma, old towns, and cathedrals. With in situ preservation’s, and museological practice’s, significance in the heart of his approach, Moolman (1996), after studying site museums in South Africa and their contributions to interpretation and conservation (Moolman 1993a), proposed a categorization of site museums and opted for three interrelated categories: the visual, the non-​visual, and the conceptual. Visual site museums are site museums with visible remains (i.e. an archaeological site); non-​visual site museums refer to places where there are physical elements but cannot be seen (i.e. underwater archaeological sites, underground geological phenomena); conceptual site museums relate to a concept rather than a physical structure (e.g. a battlefield, a space where an important event took place, or a place of trauma). Most site museums fall into all three of Moolman’s categories, as they include visual features, non-​visual elements, and concepts and practices of the past that cannot be seen. The categories of visual and non-​visual site museums relate well with the open-​air museum approach, while the category of conceptual site museums aligns with the idea of the ecomuseum in its emphasis on the recursive relationship between people and the heritage space. The value of including the human and societal element (past and present) in the site museum concept is evident by living history experiences produced and exhibited by site museums at the end of the twentieth century. Human interaction has been recognized as a powerful option against conventional, object-​based (and therefore lifeless), and sometimes dull exhibitions (Malcom-​Davies 1990). Site museums of pre-​industrial character, for example, have employed actors to supplement building, room, and space reconstructions. Traditional costumes and role-​playing activities (Robertshaw 1990) have added to visitors’ experience by creating a human context and reconstructing

Site museums and archaeology    179 practices, behaviours, sounds, and scenes from the past. A good example is the Den Gamle, an open-​air museum in Aarhus, Denmark, which can elicit a significant impact on visitors’ feelings and emotions (El-​Ziab 2016). In the 1980s, numerous site museums in the USA successfully adopted the living history method (Shafernich 1993), although this exhibition method of living reconstructions is not new. It started with period rooms (i.e. rooms reconstructed to recreate an interior space of the past) in the nineteenth century, sometimes with actors playing roles, and was perceived as adding a sense of sincerity and authenticity (Alexander 1964: 276). More recently, human-​resembling animatronics (robotic puppets) have replaced human actors in some organizations (Papaioannou and Paschou 2015). The further growth of the tourism industry from the end of the twentieth century, together with improvements in transportation, contributed to the accessibility of existing and emerging site museums (Horne 1984; Merriman 1989; Shafernich 1993). Better, more affordable, and easier access offered people the opportunity to visit museums off the usual tourist tracks. Site museums have consequently become an integral part of the tourism business and incorporated into tour operators’ schedules, as well as to local public stakeholders for city branding and territorial marketing. Site museums themselves have invested more in their visitor facilities, such as the café and restaurant, as well as the museum shop. In parallel with the above developments are the disciplines of museology and museography which have rapidly and extensively evolved all over the world, together with the growth of heritage studies and practices, and the evolution of the spatial and topographical extensions of the notion of heritage, particularly at the legal and ethical level. UNESCO conventions and subsequent national legislation addressed the protection of monuments, as well as cultural and natural sites and landscapes. The museology of site museums has also become a topic for research and enquiry (Banerjee and Kumar 2012; Ertürk 2006; Hertzog 2004; Lu 1993; Moolman 1993b; Silverman 2006; Wu et al. 1999; Zu 2018). As heritage places, monuments, and museums have been linked to education, cultural identity, and enjoyment, site museums have gained more value in people’s lives and plans for their free time. Furthermore, museographical practices have been standardized and museum work has been professionalized, leading to both individual and globalized cultural models and museographies (Rolland and Murauskaya 2015). The latest developments relate to the new digital, online, and social networking realities, which became of utmost importance in the circumstances of the COVID-​19 pandemic resulting in museum closures in 2020 (NEMO 2020). Site museum digital presence used to be mainly for documentation, as well as serving needs before and after the visit (Gaia et al. 2020). During the COVID-​19 pandemic, site museums had to take digital initiatives (Zuanni 2020) to remain active and keep engaging their audience via their web resources and social media (Papaioannou and Sfyridou 2021). The new normalcy is expected to create a stronger digital character and identity for site museums.

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9.3  Archaeological site museums The conservation of national antiquities belongs above all to the places where they were discovered. There, above all, they have their true significance and can be used to study historical problems relating to the origins of our country. (Emperor Napoleon of France, as cited in Peigné-​Delacourt 1867: 769)

This nineteenth-​century Emperor of France was passionate about the archaeology of Gaul and sites related to Julius Caesar. He created the National Archaeological Museum of St Germain en Laye, as well as several provincial archaeological site museums, such as the museum in Compiègne in the area of Oise, northern France. This approach of the necessity of in situ preservation and the significance of archaeological finds for the history and identity of a country has characterized archaeological site museum approaches and standpoints. Archaeological site museums evolved because of excavation projects and techniques. They preserve and exhibit recovered antiquities in situ and manage collections of archaeological finds discovered from the site (Banerjee and Kumar 2012; López-​Menchero Bendicho 2011). An archaeological site museum centres upon the archaeological museum building that hosts and exhibits the archaeological record from the archaeological site(s) in the vicinity. It is ‘not just a storehouse for finds . . . [but also] a place for both research and education’ (Banerjee and Kumar 2015: 27); it is a meeting place for archaeology, museology, and conservation. It seems that the notion of archaeological site museum puts emphasis on the building that serves the archaeology and the community of a specific area, which includes one or more archaeological sites. This, to an extent, reflects the distinction between museums on one hand, and sites and monuments on the other. This distinction can be seen in the early years of ICOM and the establishment of ICOM’s initial seven international committees. One of them was the ‘Museums of Archaeology and History and Historical Sites’, which were collection-​oriented entities, another was the ‘National Parks and Forests and Nature Reserves and Trailside Museums’, which related more to open outdoor spaces of natural significance. With the establishment of ICOMOS in 1965, the fields of cultural and natural significance were separate, something that Boyland (1996) characterized as a ‘schism’. Archaeological site museums as buildings come to bridge this schism by acting as a point for reference and a hub of all needs and outcomes of archaeological and heritage research. Archaeological site museums can have a variety of functions, profiles, and competences, as is clear from case studies from China (Wu et al. 1999; Zu 2018), Latin America (Silverman 2006), India (Banerjee and Kumar 2015), Morocco (Terrisse 2011), and South Africa (Moolman 1993a), offering the views of contributing authors with extended theoretical and practical experience of the concept, the construction, and the

Site museums and archaeology    181 development of these archaeological site museums. In these analyses, the social, cultural, and financial realities, mechanisms and infrastructures of archaeological site museums become clear, as does how these archaeological site museums have affected the local and global community. In such studies, the importance of choice of architects and museographies becomes evident, as well as the political and social contexts within which decisions were taken towards creating, reforming, and/​or reopening (or not) an archaeological site museum. These studies are also useful tools for those interested in the questions ‘what not to’, ‘how to do it’, and ‘what to expect’ in a context of archaeological site museums. These questions have also been addressed by ICOMOS’ chapters for the protection and management of archaeological heritage (ICOMOS 1990) and interpretation and presentation of cultural heritage sites (ICOMOS 2008). Although the term ‘site museum’ does not appear in these chapters, we can see models that fit the purpose of addressing archaeological site museums. For instance, the chapter for the interpretation and presentation of cultural heritage sites (ICOMOS 2008) proposes seven principles: (1) Access and Understanding, (2) Information Sources, (3) Attention to Setting and Context, (4) Preservation of Authenticity, (5) Planning for Sustainability, (6) Concern for Inclusiveness, and (7) Importance of Research, Training, and Evaluation. In terms of specifically categorizing archaeological site museums, are the general four categories of Kowalski (2009), further developed by Paardekooper (2020). These four categories address characteristics and challenges that archaeological site museums face in the twenty-​first century. The first concerns cultural tourism and vandalism. Cultural tourism is strongly connected to archaeological site museums and local development (Mckercher and Du Cros 2002), as it offers strong motivation for international travel, and as education since it provides visitors with experiences, knowledge, and satisfaction of curiosity of past and present societies. One challenge of cultural tourism is vandalism and this needs to be addressed efficiently via preventive measures such as security and surveillance measures, education, and training. The second category is financial stability and sustainability, which relates to state funding, private funding, entrance fees, income from the cafeteria and the museum shop, tourism and business, new jobs, and local development. The third, context and interpretation, involves narratives addressing the archaeological site(s) and discoveries, and the overall interpretive approach for visitors. Finally, is the issue of conservation and maintenance, referring to in situ preservation, object conservation, and site maintenance and sustainability. Paardekooper (2020) also added issues of romanticism, nationalism, science and experiment, audience diversity, and reconstructions. The character of site museums as it emerges through these discussions further relates to the notion of the integrated museum introduced by Boyland (1996): ‘the concept of the integrated museum concerned with the whole of its natural, cultural and social territory and setting’. It is with these points in mind that the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth in Jordan can be understood.

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9.4  The Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth, Dead Sea, Jordan: A Local archaeological site museum with global appeal The area where the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth is situated is called Ghor as-​Sāfī in Arabic and is located at the southeastern end of the Dead Sea in Jordan. It is the lowest place on the Earth’s surface as elevation descends at 400 metres below sea level. Biblically it is known as Zoar in the Old Testament (Genesis 19) and was one of the ‘cities of the plain’ that survived fire and brimstone. In terms of the archaeological record and finds, there is evidence for a substantial settlement and extensive cemetery during the Early Bronze Age (c. 3000 BC), more limited Middle Bronze Age sites (c. 1750 BC), and an extensive Iron Age occupation (c. 900 BC). In the Nabataean period (c. 100 BC–​100 AD) are several cemeteries with thousands of tombs, small forts, and a major citadel. The name Zoara appears in Roman documents (the Babatha Archive, the Notitia Dignitatum), referring to a rich agricultural district with a cavalry unit. On the famous early Byzantine mosaic map at Madaba, Zoora is depicted as a walled city among date palms, and was the Seat of a bishop who regularly attended the Nicaean Councils. During this period, an early Christian-​Byzantine monastery dedicated to St Lot was built, which has been fully excavated (basilica church, domestic quarters, cistern). During the subsequent Medieval Islamic periods, it is known as Segor and/​ or Zughar, a major market for sugar and indigo as mentioned in historical sources (Yakut, Al-​Maqdisi, Foulcher of Chartres). The architectural remains of a sugar factory from this period have been discovered and restored. In modern times, the city is known as as-​Safi (or just Safi) and sugar plantations have been replaced by tomato fields today. The Lowest Place on Earth gained special religious significance in the Byzantine period, since it is related to the biblical figure and the story of Lot, a man described as the only good person in the sinful city of Sodom, one of the five ‘Cities of the Plain’. He and his family were saved from its destruction and escaped to live in a cave. Lot’s wife, looking back in sympathy of the sinful people, was turned into a pillar of salt. This story is mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible and in the Holy Qur’an. Lot is a prophet in the Holy Qur’an. In the sixth century, people built a monastery incorporating what they believed was Lot’s Cave. This monastery was well known in the sixth century, since it is depicted on the famous Madaba mosaic map. The remains of Lot’s Monastery have been under excavation since 1988, they are just above the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth, and they are in the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List (for a detailed overview on the heritage of the Ghor as-​Safi, see Politis 2020b).

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9.5  The museum concept: Origin, mission, stakeholders The Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE) was built ex-​nihilo just off the northern part of modern Safi, Dead Sea, Jordan (Fig. 9.1). It was inaugurated on International Museum Day 2012 (18 May 2012). The MuLPE is the culmination of intensive archaeological and heritage work over four decades (Papaioannou and Politis, in prep.). The decision to create the MuLPE centred on the need to support pilgrims and visitors (mostly foreigners and international) to the archaeological and religious site of St Lot Cave and Monastery. The area today is one of the less developed areas in the Near East. It is a poor, rural, and marginalized area, but rich in terms of evidence from past and present cultures. As this is the first museum ever in the area, it has had a distinct impact. In terms of legal status, the MuLPE is a state museum under the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Jordan (MoTA). The MoTA is also responsible for all archaeological work in Jordan, providing all relevant permissions. The mission and vision of the

Figure 9.1: The Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth, Jordan. Copyright Georgios Papaioannou.

184   Georgios Papaioannou MuLPE relates to supporting research and hosting exhibitions on the history, archaeology, and the heritages of the area’s past and present. The MuLPE serves as a space for local communities and individuals to express and disseminate local heritages and perceptions to local communities and the world. Moreover, it comprises a sustainable tourism tool in a marginal territory. This mission and vision, its aims and objectives, as well as relevant policies and strategies derive from stakeholders and are sanctioned (or not) by the MoTA. Stakeholders involve the state of Jordan, the local community, archaeologists, and heritage researchers. Archaeological excavations and the museum project were initiated and directed by foreign (non-​Jordanian) institutions and missions (Meskell 1998). The main institutions involved in the area were the British Museum in the 1980s and 1990s with the excavation of the St Lot’s Cave and Monastery (Politis 2012), the European Centre of Byzantine and Post-​Byzantine Monuments (Greece) in the 1990s, with the conservation of mosaics from the St Lot’s Cave and Monastery (Politis 2012), and, since the year 2000, the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies (HSNES). The link between all institutions that worked in the area is the archaeologist and researcher Konstantinos D. Politis who directed these works and established a close relationship with local stakeholders and communities. A team of archaeologists, conservators, and researchers (the author included) have been working in the archaeological sites of the area for the last three decades in an effort to establish long-​term relationships with the site and its people. Politis and his teams followed an approach of involving Safi and its people not only as supporting staff but also as collaborators and decision makers. To further support this collaborative approach (Mikdadi 2014), Politis and members of teams (the author included) founded the HSNES, an international NGO based in Greece. The HSNES supports research and studies of the Near East (www.hsnes.org), including the MuLPE project and recent excavation in the area (Politis 2020a), with the involvement of local communities, as it has been much easier to include them in a newly-​founded NGO rather than in a state institution or an existing institution with established policies and ways of doing things. The HSNES has attempted to address colonial practices (Maffi 2009) by acknowledging its foreign origin and clarifying its community engagement intentions. A key aspect to the HSNES’ approach is related to living in the area, getting involved in local problems and issues beyond archaeology, acting as a bridge between different stakeholders of the area, and becoming less a foreigner and more local. The HSNES also provided a vehicle for local people to become HSNES members and get involved in projects outside Jordan (e.g. in Oman, Syria, and Greece), an approach that strengthened the relationships between the local community and the non-​Jordanian HSNES members. The HSNES’ job in the area has included exhibition design and implementation, and museum policy making. The main characteristics of establishing mission, vision, aims, objectives, strategies, and policies are a constant source of conflict and change. Conflicts relate to stakeholders holding different views, approaches, and wishes towards issues, and may result in delays, postponements, and cancellations in decision making. Ultimately, the power for final

Site museums and archaeology    185 decisions lies with government (i.e. the MoTA), but government changes, politics, stakeholders, and new situations influence them and result in changes, and therefore can generate further conflict and new decisions. An example of conflict has been the museum’s name deriving from its geography and elevation: Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth. At first, the museum was referred to as ‘Lot’s Museum’ to stress its connection with the archaeological and religious site of St Lot’s Cave and Monastery, a practice reflecting post-​Mandate decisions in Jordanian heritage building processes, involving biblical archaeology and Jordan as a holy land (Ibrahim 1973; Maffi 2009; Sayegh 2000). After discussions and with pressure from the HSNES and Politis, whose opinions are well-​respected because of his work and status as the archaeologist of the area, the final decision was to opt for the current name due to its perceived neutrality and the marketing advantages of the geography. The status of the lowest place on Earth offered the museum a wider and global appeal, a sense of uniqueness and prime at a global level, and a strong element to be exploited by the tourism business. The chosen name more effectively presents the museum’s mission and vision, as it relates to a stable natural element encompassing archaeological sites, finds, cultures, and peoples/​communities through time, instead of emphasizing just one of its sites and historical significances, even if this was considered the most important at the time. The involvement of local communities, people, and stakeholders has been a key aspect of the archaeological, conservation, and museum work in the area. Efforts were made to involve the local communities in decision-​making processes in an attempt to overcome inherited colonial archaeological and heritage practices (Diaz-​Andreu 2007; Meskell 1998). The excavation and museum-​work teams had more Jordanians than foreigners; the choices of sites to be excavated were made after consultation with the local community and the Jordanian representatives of antiquities, which resulted in excavating the Islamic sites and the prehistoric sites of the area, rather than just the biblical, the Hellenistic/​Roman, and the Nabatean ones; the results of the works were presented to local communities via events organized in situ involving local stakeholders, followed by publications in the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, including MA and PhD theses in Jordanian Universities as well as published work and conference presentations co-​authored by Jordanian archaeologists and researchers. Moreover, with the 40-​year-​long presence of HSNES in the area, working with local dynamics, managing and navigating through them, dealing with difficulties related to cultural differences, approaches, and mentalities, has been a fruitful challenge with successes and failures. With its long-​term presence in the area, HSNES attempted to understand approaches and perceptions of the local community in terms of what the sites and discoveries mean to them (see Section 3.2 below). As a key priority for local people related to having better jobs and quality of life, HSNES facilitated and offered special training and opportunities: excavation workers, conservation assistants, volunteer work, topics for BA and MA theses for students of archaeology in Jordanian universities, and business training to local women to organize and run a local women-​ led business, the ‘Safi Crafts’. It is worth noting that these projects were requested by the

186   Georgios Papaioannou local community. Jordanian archaeology students have also worked for the organization, some of them becoming museum staff and local directors of antiquities. Others work as site and museum guards, while many are ready to offer their services part-​time in new heritage projects. Moreover, art classes on mosaics (an impressive archaeological find) were initiated, organized, and offered to the local community, which resulted in local art exhibitions of modern-​day Safi mosaics. Special attention was also given to endeavours organized by local stakeholders related to the lowest place on Earth, including a marathon at the lowest place on earth and a Guinness-​record all female football match on a new football pitch. A challenge that the museum faces relates to the lack of staff. Directors, curators, and managerial staff are appointed by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and are staff of the Ministry. There is an effort to appoint people from the local area or nearby cities, but this is not always successful. There is also a tendency for staff to see this position as a stepping stone towards a better position in the Ministry in Amman. Another significant challenge comes from illegal diggings and the illicit trade of antiquities (Politis 2002). Fortunately, these incidents have reduced, a result of the museum’s role and influence in the area’s cultural and economic life.

9.6  The museography of MuLPE: Location, architecture, exhibition, indoor and outdoor spaces, and functions The Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE)’s location lies just below the hill of the archaeological site of St Lot’s Cave and Monastery at the northern end of the city of as-​Safi, owned by the Jordanian Government for the purpose of creating a museum. The MuLPE’s location was decided on the basis of six parameters. The first was a practical and economic consideration given that this location provided enough space, just a kilometre off the main road connecting Jordan’s urban centres of Amman (the capital) and Aqaba (Jordan’s port in the Red Sea). The second parameter emerged when the archaeological site of Lot’s Cave and Monastery was proclaimed a holy maqåm (site of Islam) by HM the late King Hussein of Jordan in 1995 and was consequently placed under the protection of both the Ministry of Awqaf (religion) and Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. In 2000, Lot’s Cave was listed among the 20 holy sites of Jordan by the Catholic Bishop of Amman Selim Sayegh (Sayegh 2000; Maffi 2014: 90). It was therefore up to the Ministries to offer the land for the museum, and they finally did. This is an example of how archaeological work and its interpretation can influence perceptions and identities: the archaeological record indicated that a Christian Monastery was built there in the early Byzantine period, as people at the time thought that this was the

Site museums and archaeology    187 cave of St Lot and his daughters. At the end of the twentieth century, decision makers adopted a similar approach which resulted in proclaiming the space as a holy site for three religions, as St Lot is a holy figure in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The place fitted well with tourism and heritage building strategies with combined elements of biblical archaeology, Christian heritage, Islamic pilgrimage, and promotion of Jordan as a Holy Land. This decision had significant impacts, including decisions on preservation, restoration, and sheltering works on the site, but also a museum to serve increased visitors and pilgrims’ numbers. It is probably the latest example of the complexity of heritage making processes in Jordan, involving colonial, biblical, archaeological, and religious elements (Maffi 2009). A third influence on the decision on where to locate the museum was the conclusion of excavation works at site of Lot’s Cave and Monastery, with architectural remains set to be restored and sheltered (the basilica church with in situ mosaics, the cistern, the domestic quarters), so that the site could become visitable by tourists and pilgrims. Fourthly, all the archaeological sites of the area are within a maximum of seven kilometres from the museum’s chosen location, and fifthly the museum lies in the middle of a three-​hour drive between Amman and the famous and well-​ visited site of Petra in Jordan. This characteristic led to the MuLPE’s inclusion in tour operators’ strategies, as the museum offers a cultural tourism stop as well as an opportunity for a break to use the museum facilities, including the museum café and the museum shop. Finally, the museum forms part of a striking vista from the site of Lot’s Cave and Monastery, a view that encompasses the entire valley, including the Safi village, the museum, and the Dead Sea. Note that the MuLPE is an isolated building, as the next building in Safi is about three kilometres away. The museum’s architectural design was inspired by fossil Ammonite shells found in the vicinity, while the museum’s name (Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth) originated from the area’s geography and elevation. The strong links between museography and the natural environment is a key element in MuLPE’s identity as a site museum. In terms of museum space, the MuLPE has a main exhibition room and a small extra room for educational programmes and periodical exhibitions. It also has a circular courtyard and a garden, which can host outdoor activities and events throughout the year, as temperatures allow outdoor activities most of the time, excluding the very hot summer months. The main exhibition was originally designed by the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies. At the outset, the museum has 22 exhibition cases and information panels are displayed, presenting material from prehistory to the present. Thematic presentations in the museum highlight the human use of the Ghor as-​Safi over some 10,000 years through the exhibition of finds from archaeological work there. Thematic units include the geography and geomorphology of the area, the ‘First People’, the ‘First Cities’, ‘Nabataeans on the Dead Sea Shores’, the ‘Story of Lot’, ‘A Monk’s Life’, ‘Hellenism and Islam’, the ‘Story of Sugar’, ‘On-​going Excavations’, ‘Mosaic-​Making and Conservation’, ‘Rescued Antiquities’, ‘Ancient Technologies’, ‘Life in the Dead Sea today’, and ‘Modern Safi’. While most exhibits are based upon scientific interpretations of historical and archaeological findings by foreign and Jordanian experts, ‘On-​going Excavations’, ‘Life

188   Georgios Papaioannou in the Dead Sea today’, and ‘Modern Safi’ were developed by local stakeholders, had an emphasis on intangible elements, and incorporated people’s experiences, oral histories, memories, and individual stories (Al Ali 2014: 142–​5), in an attempt to offer insights into the current and ongoing perceptions of the place (Abu-​Khafajah and Rababeh 2012). As the museum’s collections and their interest have grown, the displays have been continuously updated and six more exhibition cases have been added. As the archaeological work continues, more updates and exhibition cases and displays are expected. This puts museum display and archaeological fieldwork into more direct dialogue than is often the case in museum settings far removed from fieldwork. A next step is to merge local perceptions of historical and archaeological findings, and present how the projects, the archaeological sites and the museum have affected local life. To this end, projects on social anthropology are planned, as well as exhibitions and events conceived and organized by local schools and communities. Although the MuLPE’s strength lies in its local relationships, beyond the physical confines of the territory its reach has been more limited as it has no official presence online, no official website and no presence in social media. Visitors upload pictures and comments on TripAdvisor and their own social media accounts. This is the museum’s next and very important step, in order to use it as an information and marketing tool, and engage with pandemic measures. In terms of onsite digital presence, there are currently no digital applications within the museum spaces, apart from two films playing in the multimedia room. This is expected to change, as there is now internet and Wi-​Fi in the museum space, something that has been visitors’ main complaint and constant request. The museum also has other spaces serving multiple functions: offices for museum administration, a small library and archive, a multimedia room, a café, a museum shop run by a local women business called ‘Safi Crafts’, a conservation laboratory, storage rooms for archaeological finds, a museum garden, parking, a small building for the tourist police in charge of the museum’s safety and security, and a hostel facility. Staffing and developing these services with the participation of the locals, together with the arrival of tourists, help towards economic development. The MuLPE acts as the excavation house for archaeological projects in the archaeological sites of the area. The MuLPE’s hostel facility (kitchen, common room, and six spacious double bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms) is ideal for teams and individuals doing excavations or other research work in the area. The museum’s multimedia, archive, and library rooms help towards this. It is a space for research and living. The MuLPE is also the storage place of archaeological finds. The conservation lab offers secure and safe storage as well as preventive and remedial conservation of objects. Safety and security are also enhanced by the tourist police building, which is situated just outside the museum’s main entrance. In terms of outdoor museography, the MuLPE, in collaboration with the local Department of Antiquities office, are responsible for the architectural remains in situ in the archaeological sites of the Ghor as-​Safi. Architectural remains in archaeological sites are evidence in need of preservation as well as extensions to the museum’s main

Site museums and archaeology    189 exhibitions. After persistent calls by the local community, preservation works, fencing, and guarding the archaeological sites followed. As local people were involved and led these processes, they consequently acquired permanent jobs as workers or guards, and this has helped reduce and deal with illegal digs and illicit trade of antiquities from Safi. In the case of the MuLPE and Safi, local communities asked for fences as protective mechanisms towards the architectural job-​offering ancient remains, rather than local communities feeling alienated and excluded by them as attested elsewhere (Alrawaibah 2014).

9.7  MuLPE’s cultural, natural, and social territories and settings The MuLPE is an archaeological site museum serving the following archaeological sites of Ghor as-​Safi (Fig. 9.2):

• • • • •

The Neolithic sites of Wadi Hamarash—​Sweif. The Early Bronze Age and Early Byzantine cemeteries at An Naq’. The Middle Bronze Age cairn tombs. The Iron Age agricultural settlement of Tuleilat Qasr Musa Hamid. The Nabataean cemetery of Khirbet Qazone.

Ancient stepped road

Road-side fort & masjid mosque

1992 aerial photoraph of the Ghor es-Safi

(courtesy of Royal Jordanian Georaphic Centre, Amman) Deri ‘Ain ’Abata, Lot Sanctuary

Pass PPNB site, Wadi HamarashSuweif

Wadi Sarmuj Modern al-safi village Ard RamlehGaleb cemetery

MB II cairn tombs

Khirbet eshSheikh ‘lsa Tuleilat Qasr Musa Hamid

Wadi al-Hasa

Tawahin es-Sukkar An Naq’ Hermitage

Dam & inscription

MB II cairn tomb

Wadi Abrash naqb

Umm et-Tuwabin fortress

Wadi Beeyudh

Figure 9.2:  Archaeological sites at the Ghor as-​Safi, Jordan. Copyright Georgios Papaioannou.

190   Georgios Papaioannou • The Nabataean/​Roman Fortress of Umm Tawabin and associated road network. • St Lot’s Cave and the early Byzantine monastery with the architectural remains of the basilica church with in situ mosaic floors, the domestic quarters, and the cistern. • Hermitage caves of Christian monks of the early Byzantine period. • The early Byzantine–​medieval Islamic urban centre of Khirbet esh-​Sheikh ‘Īsā. • The sugar factory complex of Masna ‘es-​Sukkar (commonly known as Tawāhīn es-​Sukkar). • The traditional parts of the modern as-​Safi village. The MuLPE offers its in situ preservation, in-​house conservation, storage, research, and exhibition services to the above archaeological sites. It acts as a point of reference to all of them, as a hub connecting them all. As noted, it comprises a unit with the St Lot’s Cave and Monastery situated just on the hill above the museum. There is a road connecting the museum and the archaeological site up the hill, which is a ten-​minute walk or a one-​minute drive. Most visitors combine the museum visit with a visit to this archaeological site, where they enjoy a panoramic view to the whole area, including the museum and the other archaeological sites. The museum, the archaeological sites, and the natural landscape meet. It is the natural site of the Ghor as-​Safi with its distinctive characteristics that shaped the museum’s approach to archaeology. The Dead Sea salty shores, the geomorphology of the land in Ghor as-​Safi, and the area’s elevation of about 400 metres below sea level have hosted the archaeology, the cultures, and the people that the museum serves and exhibits. Moving to the social dimension, sites are not just archaeological (the finds) and natural (the geographical and geomorphological features), but also places related to people and communities. Individuals and communities continuously shape the landscapes via their decisions, actions, practices, ideas, and emotions. Human activity of the past can be accessed via the archaeological record in situ and in the museum, while human activity of the present is both exhibited in, and shaped by, the museum, as evident by the MuLPE’s exhibition thematic units by local people, the involvement of local communities in decision making processes, and the changes in the local society thanks to the archaeological works and the museum (new jobs, new businesses, the tourism industry, and new opportunities). Safi has been connected with the history and cultures of the rest of Jordan and the Near/​Middle East, as evidenced by requests for archaeological objects to join the collections of the National Museum of Jordan as well as from museum objects’ loan requests for periodical exhibitions in Jordan, the Arab World, and elsewhere. Different stakeholders approach Safi in different ways, and Safi responds accordingly. At the same time, the people of Safi maintain and expand their own relationship with the museum and connect it to their lives. The museum café, for instance, is a place for important meetings to discuss matters such as a possible marriage, a political move, a business proposal, or a family issue. The museum’s courtyard is a preferred space to celebrate successes and commemorate important moments from the past. The museum

Site museums and archaeology    191 is busy before, during, and after working hours, and this continuously shapes new inhabited/​social sites.

9.8  Approaching archaeological site museums The central concern of sites and site museums, including archaeological site museums, is the human factor, which is constantly influenced by political and social perceptions, realities, control, and power dynamics. The relations of people as individuals, communities, and societies with the site and the site museums can shape how museums, sites, and their importance are viewed, and therefore shape characteristics and perceptions. This is an exercise in constant exchange, continuous conflict, and power dynamics towards decision making. The MuLPE offers good examples of the decisions on its name and location, the relationships, the dynamics, the conflicts among stakeholders towards strategy, policies, and practices, the museum’s staffing by local people, the involvement, training, and establishment of jobs for local people in excavation and museum work. Moreover, a museum can be a focal point in social life, adding to the social territories and settings. Another important element, related to approaching archaeological site museums, is the museum concept as attested by its origins, mission and vision, aims and objectives, stakeholders, and audiences. Addressing the what, the why, and the how of the above can provide a good understanding of the archaeological site museum’s character and roles. It can also compare current importance and focal points to past ones, for example to pose and work on the question whether and why in situ preservation is still in the centre of an archaeological site museum mission and practices, as it has extensively been stressed by the bibliography of the past (see Section 9.1). Archaeological site museums facilitate understanding of the heritage of the area. An insight into the different cultures of past and present, the archaeological record, and the archaeological sites in the area that the museum serves can reveal the museum’s inclusiveness and foci. The MuLPE, under the proposed but not successful name of ‘Lot’s Museum’ would have given the impression of serving just one of the archaeological sites in the area, and would require a change of the museographical approach to justify the choice of name. Archaeologists and researchers can help towards understanding heritage elements and sites. The natural landscape and its characteristics as shaped by human activity and perceptions encompass another point of approach. The discussion on open-​air museums, natural parks, sites, and monuments is relevant here. Natural elements shaped the architecture of the museum as well as the museum’s identity, and can offer a global appeal. The museum as an active agent in another important point for exploration. Museum operations and services, and their characteristics and outcomes, can be approached

192   Georgios Papaioannou here. Questions in this part reflect the museology and the critical heritage approaches of the archaeological site museum, and address relations, interactions, and outcomes as parts of the relationship among the museum and its cultural, natural, and social territories. This part offers endless possibilities for museological research and inquiry. The list of topics to be studied is long and involves (among others) the following: multi-​ levelled management and marketing; memory making and heritage building processes; community engagement; educational programmes and initiatives; tourism-​ related initiatives and services; research support (including in situ preservation, conservation, and archaeological work); museum assessment and evaluation; and connections with other museums and heritage institutions (i.e. extroversion). Critical approaches can also relate to contextualization among the museum and the sites, heritage conceptualizations, democratization, and universalization via audience’s inclusivity and diversity, transculturation among thematic units and narratives. The digital aspect has gained even more importance following the 2020–​2021 pandemic. In the twenty-​first century, an archaeological site museum (and possible every museum) needs to have and maintain a digital self to complement its physical presence but also to explore communication, exhibition, and interaction capabilities (see this volume: Chapter 27). In the information, networking, and Industry 4.0 age (Orea-​Giner et al. 2021), this is an aspect of utmost importance. The challenge for archaeological site museums is to digitize and digitally present not just collections, but additionally site elements and information.

9.9  Conclusions Notions of site museums and archaeological site museums have evolved from the late nineteenth century to today, where they can be understood as part of the cultural, natural, and social territories and settings within a particular area. The cultural part relates to the archaeological record, which is in situ in the archaeological sites and ex situ in the museum premises and exhibitions. The natural territory encompasses elements and formation of the natural environment within the area. The social aspect refers to the people that lived there in the past, but mostly to individuals and communities that shape and are shaped by the area’s complex and diverse dynamics of the past and the present. These include the archaeological site museum’s contributions, influences, and inputs. The Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE) in Jordan was the outcome of forty years of archaeological research in the area and serves more than ten archaeological sites. It is a case study revealing roles and realities in archaeological site museums. In the MuLPE, decision making relates to constant conflict and change, with different stakeholders involved; the MuLPE helps towards in situ preservation and the storage and conservation of archaeological finds; it exhibits the area’s past and present via interpretation schemes and activities; it supports archaeological and other research; it is a tourist

Site museums and archaeology    193 and pilgrims hotspot; and it has had a social impact in the area, as it has influenced the area’s economy, development, tourism, everyday life, and power dynamics.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to my colleague, close collaborator, and friend Konstantinos D. Politis, the archaeologist who has directed archaeological and heritage work in the area for over 35 years. Also, I am grateful to Anne Hertzog, a geographer and researcher, for her help and support towards locating, accessing, and addressing the French contributions on site museums, as well as for our fruitful and enlightening discussions. Finally, I would like to thank the editor of this handbook Alice Stevenson for her guidance, professionalism, and patience.

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Chapter 10

C ontested h e ri tag e and absent obj e c ts Archaeological representation at Ghana’s forts and castles Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann

10.1  Introduction Scholarly, museological, and popular interest in heritage associated with the transatlantic slave trade and slavery has grown exponentially over the past few decades both in Africa (Benson and McCaskie 2004; Brichet 2018; DeCorse 2001; Essien 2016) and within the African diaspora (Araujo 2009, 2012, 2014; Deetz 1996; Eichstedt and Small 2002; Ferguson 1992; Gable et al. 1991; LaRoche and Blakey 1997; McDavid 2007; Odewale et al. 2017; Smith et al. 2011). In West Africa, Ghana has become a focal point of this growing interest in the histories and legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery (Shumway and Getz 2017; Stahl 2008). From c.1650 to 1800, approximately one million captive Africans were trafficked from Ghana out of the African continent. Approximately 80 to 100 lodges, forts, and castles used to incarcerate captive Africans prior to transport across the Atlantic, dating as far back as the fifteenth century, were established along the Guinea/​Gold Coast in present-​day Ghana (Anquandah 1999; Engmann 2021a; Ephson 1970; Lawrence 1963; Osei-​Tutu 2018; Osei-​Tutu and Smith 2017; Van Danzig 1980). In fact, more fortifications related to the transatlantic slave trade existed along the Ghanaian coast than in all West African regions combined, or indeed, the Atlantic world (DeCorse 2010). Reflecting the historical significance of the forts and castles, an image of Christiansborg Castle is depicted in the Ghanaian Coat of Arms. The forts and castles comprise heritage produced for consumption by Africans and African descendants in the diaspora. For the heritage tourists and/​or pilgrims who

198    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann visit these sites each year, Ghana’s forts and castles—​as places where captive Africans were incarcerated and deported from the African continent—​form part of a collective memory of capture, detainment, forced migration, and enslavement. For many, visiting these sites today marks a symbolic return to an ancestral homeland. As ‘difficult’, ‘negative’, ‘dissonant’, and ‘atrocity’ heritage (Burström and Gelderblom 2011; Logan and Reeves 2009; Macdonald 2009; Meskell 2002; Samuels 2015; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996), Ghana’s forts and castles act as the symbolic and material embodiment of the violence and brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery on both sides of the Atlantic (Angelou 1986; Eshun 2005; Morrison 1990; Wright 1954) (Fig. 10.1). Various communities of connection contest the representations, interpretations, and narratives told at sites, monuments, and museums associated with the capture, sale, containment, deportation, enslavement, resistance, and abolition of captive and enslaved Africans associated with the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. They also contest the meanings behind the sites, monuments, and objects as material testaments to the financial wealth and political power amassed by legislators, financiers, traders, owners, and others who profited from the Atlantic slave system (Dresser 2007; Olusoga 2020; Van Hensbergen 2020). Collectively, these contestations divulge the complex, nuanced politics of inclusion, exclusion, representation, remembrance, and commemoration surrounding the transatlantic slave trade, and indeed enslavement more broadly (Daniel 2018; Landrieu 2018). As contested heritage sites, Ghana’s forts and castles speak

Figure 10.1:  Cape Coast Castle, Ghana. Courtesy of author.

Contested heritage and absent objects     199 to the multiple communities, interests and agendas associated with the histories and afterlives of not only the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, but also of memory and identity (Bruner 1996; Hasty 2002; Holsey 2008; Pierre 2012; Richards 2002, 2003; Teye and Dallen 2004). This chapter explores archaeological representation of the transatlantic slave trade at Ghana’s forts and castles. It is grounded in the view that a site, monument, or edifice can be conceptualized as an ‘object’, rather than solely as a museum or repository that contains meaningful object collections. Recognizing the power and import of the material world and its attendant materialities, archaeologists demonstrate the ways in which they are affective (Chadha 2006). They also stand committed to the notion that memories are not only made but materialized. Landscapes, sites, monuments, objects, social, and material practice illustrate memory’s material embodiment, acting as complex mnemonic devices amenable to the ways in which memories are conveyed from the past and sustained into the present. Yet, this chapter asks: What happens where there are few or no objects to exhibit or display? What does this mean for memory (and amnesia)? This chapter invites us to rethink the role and importance of transatlantic slave trade materialities in telling stories of transgenerational trauma, dislocation, and reclamation. The chapter begins with the history and afterlives of Ghana’s forts and castles, and the transatlantic slave trade more broadly. It then examines archaeological representation at these heritage sites, followed by introducing archaeological research and fieldwork at Christiansborg Castle in Accra. Finally, it concludes with a discussion on the ‘power’ of objects, and the presence of absent objects.

10.2  Material histories and afterlives Between 1482 and 1787, the Portuguese, Swedes, Dutch, English, Danish, French, and Brandenburg-​Prussians established lodges, forts, and castles along a 300-​mile coastline, between Keta and Beyin in present-​day Ghana. Fortifications were constructed at African rulers’ invitation and permission according to treaties that stipulated terms of agreement.1 Initially, Europeans built small trading lodges that were temporary structures consisting of adobe mud and thatched roof. Once commerce proved successful, these lodges were converted into larger and more permanent forts, and in some cases expanded into castles, such as Elmina, Cape Coast, and Christiansborg Castles. Over their lifetime, fortifications frequently changed hands as rivals were eliminated by purchase, force, and/​or negotiation. Architecturally, the forts and castles drew inspiration from their counterparts in Europe. Fortification designs along the West African coast were similar since they served an identical function: namely, to secure a coastal foothold in order to facilitate, protect,

1 

With the only exception at Keta.

200    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann and expand trade. Minor differences existed according to national preference and the frequent changes in ownership. Constructed of stone, lime, and timber, fortifications were, for the most part, rectangular or square in form. Walls were whitewashed with lime which ensured a certain aesthetic as well as assisting with conservation. Curtain walls contained gun slits through which soldiers inside could shoot enemies as they approached. Cannons that ranged from four to 24 pounds were mounted on roofs and outside these structures; these were directed both inland and out to sea, underscoring the dual functions of the fortifications. Bastions deflected enemy cannonballs. A tower served as a surveillance point from which European nations flew their national flag so that ships at sea could identify specific forts and castles. Some possessed moats and were accessible only by drawbridges. Fortifications contained one, two, and three storied buildings with residential and storage rooms that surrounded a central courtyard. The storerooms were vital to keep safe goods and commodities ready for import and export, as well as the supplies necessary for daily operations. Residential rooms were habitually small and poorly ventilated, with the exception of the governor and senior residents’ accommodations that had large windows that caught the sea breezes. A cistern, below ground, held rainwater for staff and for slave ships that called on the fort and needed resupply. Some fortifications had additional features such as chapels, gardens, and towards the latter eighteenth century, schools for the mixed race children of European men and local women. At first, fortifications did not contain specific facilities to hold captive Africans: storerooms, situated on the ground and underground, and originally designed to stock merchandise, were converted into slave cells. Some fortifications were too small to hold large numbers of captives, so they were detained in heavily guarded enclosures in town. Yet as the volume of the transatlantic slave trade accelerated throughout the eighteenth century, fortifications underwent repeated reconstructions, modifications, and expansions to meet the demand for additional residences, storage, and protection. Most notably, as the transatlantic slave trade increased, so too did the need to provide and expand dedicated space to detain captives. Europeans, Africans, and Eurafricans lived, worked, and slaved at the forts and castles. At the outset of the transatlantic trade, European royal and national companies, as well as private merchants, traded in gold and ivory, but this was replaced by the trade in captive Africans. African traders from the hinterlands brought goods and commodities down to the littoral. Coastal Africans and Eurafricans acted as middlemen and cultural brokers, economically, culturally, and politically, as well as translators, having mastered the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Danish languages. Commercial activity at the fortifications varied; sometimes it took place on a daily basis; other times there were long periods when no commerce occurred at all. The exchange of goods took place most frequently in the central courtyards using a multiple currency system. This entailed the exchange of a combination of various goods and commodities such as gold and cowrie shells, as well as mundane and luxury goods that included firearms, ammunition, iron bars (to manufacture slave fetters, chains, padlocks, and branding irons), liquor, tobacco, beads, cloth, household, personal, and other miscellaneous items. When

Contested heritage and absent objects     201 merchandise was not suited to Africans’ desires or needs, prices were reduced, or items remained in storage until often no longer suitable for sale or returned by ship to Europe. Europeans obtained captive Africans from the coast and interior through wars and conflict, slave raiding, kidnapping, and purchase at slave markets. Captives were often convicted criminals (sometimes destined for execution), society’s ‘undesirables’ (committed thefts and adultery), and pawns as a result of unpaid debts. Africans sold other Africans. Now and then, they pawned their own family members and intermittently, themselves. Men, women, and children were conscripted in various conditions; some were young and healthy, others were children (or even babies), and others still were very elderly or had little time left to live. Captives frequently became ill as a result of the long and arduous journey from the northern hinterlands and interior to the coast with little food and water, walking tied together by rope. Some died en route. Other captives were ready for death when they reached the coast. Upon arrival at a fort or castle, an individual’s price was dependent on their gender, age, and health, with reductions for visible ailments and/​or disfigurement. A captive African’s economic value varied over time; prices rose during the height of the transatlantic slave trade and in the period immediately prior to abolition. Since African traders did not want to be left with captives that they had brought down from the interior to the coast, the old, injured, and impaired were often sold at a reduced price, even if they believed their value to be higher. Those individuals that still could not be sold into slavery in the Americas were sold as ‘refuse slaves’ and remained as ‘castle slaves’ at the coastal fortifications. Captive Africans were incarcerated, divided by gender, in cells. Men, women, and children were restrained by iron neck and ankle collars, and chained to heavy wooden or iron blocks to hinder movement. During the daytime, captives were sometimes brought out into the central courtyard, though this was not always the case. A number of captive Africans died prior to the slave ships’ arrival and departure. More died during times of famine and when plagues and sickness erupted. Babies, small children, and invalids suffered the most. In addition, captives died due to the harsh physical punishments inflicted by slave traders and others who worked at the fortifications. Those captives who did survive the journey to the coast and captivity on the coast were eventually sold to European traders and carried by canoes, typically manned by ‘castle slaves’, to be loaded on to slave ships at sea. During the transatlantic slave trade, approximately 12 to 15 million African men, women, and children were transported to the Americas in this way. With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade a handful of forts and castles fell into disuse. Others served several functions, such as schools, libraries, post office, community centres, guest houses, hospital, prisons, and seat of government during the colonial and postcolonial period. In 1972, the government of Ghana listed 25 extant forts and castles as national monuments. In 1979, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) collectively inscribed the fortifications as World Heritage Sites. In 1994, they became some of the first sites included in UNESCO’s Slave Route Project, a highly ambitious project that attempts to address the study, management,

202    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann preservation, conservation, and development of educational materials associated with the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Today, the fortifications are in the custody and management of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, and its antiquity body, the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB). Together with the Tourism Authority these bodies promote the forts and castles as heritage sites. The forts and castles currently lie in various stages of detritus and decay due to the effects of time, environment (coastal salt air and encroaching sea), intrusive commercial development, and inadequate heritage management, preservation, and conservation. Approximately a third of the original fortifications constructed during the transatlantic slave trade still remain in some form. Some survive in reasonably good condition, such as Elmina, Cape Coast, and Christiansborg Castles, and Forts Apollonia, St. Anthony, Gross Friedricksburg, Orange, and Sebastian. Countless lie in ruins, for instance, Forts Dorothea, Batenstein, Nassau, and Amsterdam. More than a few are traces of former fortifications, for example, Forts Fredricksburg and Augustaburg. A great number have been looted or are submerged under water or lie buried, without any visible evidence they ever existed. The number of extant fortifications risks continued decline since investment into heritage, in terms of funding, management, preservation, and conservation expertise is limited. Archaeological research, though it contributes towards current understandings, is mostly confined to short-​term projects, largely, reconnaissance surveys and small-​scale archaeological investigations (Anquandah 1993a, b, 1997; Boachie-​Ansah 2008; Calvocoressi 1977; Gyam 2008; Hyland 1979, 1992; Kirkdale 1991; Miles 2006–​2007; Simmonds 1973; except Biveridge 2014, 2020). Therefore, the majority of the fortifications remain archaeologically unexplored. Extensive research and fieldwork is desperately needed at these sites in order to gain a fuller understanding of the history of the life at the forts and castles through the archaeological record. African descendants from the diaspora travel to Ghana to visit the forts and castles. Certainly, constructions of Africa have always been central to the African diasporic imaginary (Mudimbe 1988). Mostly middle class, and travelling as part of an organized tour group, African descendants often frame their trip as a ‘return’ to Ghana (Reed 2015). Others see their trip as ‘cultural heritage tourism’ or ‘roots tourism’ (visits to these sites have also been described as ‘dark tourism’ and ‘thanotourism’ as sites of death and suffering (Mowatt and Chancellor 2011)). For others the trip is a ‘pilgrimage’, which blurs the boundaries between travel, tourism, and spiritual journey (Burns 1999; Graburn 1983; Smith 1989). Inspired by Alex Haley’s popular novel and television series, Roots, the first large wave of African American tourists dates back to the 1990s. In addition to the visits to the heritage sites, in 1992 the Pan African Historical Theatre Festival, commonly known as Panafest, a biennial arts festival aimed at attracting the diaspora, and in 1998, Emancipation Day, that commemorates the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (1883–​1884), both under former President Jerry John Rawlings, were initiated to attract tourists/​pilgrims (Engmann 2020). A collective social practice inextricably entangled within the ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, the return to the forts and castles as a rite of passage is a journey of self-​discovery, self-​actualization, and consolidation of the Self, fundamental to the act of witnessing, reclaiming, healing,

Contested heritage and absent objects     203 and giving thanks. ‘The return’ does not implicate just any homeland; it is a secular pilgrimage to an ancestral homeland associated with transgenerational trauma. It is a response to the notion of a ‘non history’ that fills in the blank spaces of history and heritage (Hartman 2007). In 2018, Ghana secured 40 million US dollars from the World Bank to develop heritage tourism, with the goal of bringing economic development. In 2019, the Ghanaian government initiative ‘The Year of the Return’ was promoted as a chance to unite Africans on the continent with their ‘brothers and sisters in the diaspora’. The year 2019 was chosen to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans’ arrival in Jamestown in the United States. The purpose of ‘The Year of the Return’ was to promote Ghana as a tourist destination and investment opportunity. This initiative was launched with events attended by African diasporan celebrities and involved a year-​long series of activities. These included visits to the forts and castles, as well as other heritage sites, healing ceremonies, theatrical and musical performances, lectures, investment forums and conferences designed to attract diasporans ‘back’ to Ghana. Well-​known visitors came to Ghana for many of these events, including The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and members of the United States Congress also visited. Ghana was also listed on CNN Travel’s 19 best places to visit in 2019. Yet despite the publicity and revenue generated by ‘The Year of the Return’, critics of the initiative noted the near exclusive focus on the transatlantic slave trade and how events catered overwhelmingly to the interests of African Americans. This prioritization meant overlooking the history and legacies of other forms of slavery and bondage in Africa, other African descendant peoples in the diaspora, and important stories about the diverse ways in which resistance to enslavement was enacted. Critics also highlighted that commemoration activities were mostly confined to southern Ghana, in particular the nation’s capital, Accra (Agyare-​Yeboah 2019), even though much enslavement took place in the northern part of the country (Kankpeyeng 2009), for example at the Salaga Market and the Pikoworo slave camp. Unlike earlier programs, ‘The Year of the Return’ was led primarily by the private sector, and high-​priced events underscored how the main driver of the initiative was profit and economic development. In 2020, the government of Ghana launched the ‘Beyond the Return: A Decade of African Renaissance’, a 10-​year initiative involving heritage activities, festivals, community engagement, and investment opportunities designed to build on momentum generated by ‘The Year of the Return’. The commercialization of the ‘return’ is deeply entrenched within a capitalist culture that engages with a complex set of practices, discourses, and meanings (Ebron 1999) that requires the transatlantic slave trade be packaged and made ‘sellable’ to the African diaspora. Two factors further contribute to this. The first is widespread interest in the United States in commercially-​marketed ancestry searching television series, for instance Henry Louis Gates’ ‘African American Roots’ (Public Broadcasting Service) and Lisa Kudrow’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ (National Broadcasting Company). The second is the growth of tracing family histories, genealogies, ancestry, and origins into a national pastime through for-​profit genealogy companies such as AncestryDNA and

204    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann Myheritage. Amongst African descendants in the diaspora, the loss of intergenerational heritage knowledge due to the experience of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery has rendered DNA tests particularly popular, despite their fraught nature. Among other things, this trend reflects a shift from oral histories to ‘science’ as a form of credible knowledge (Nelson 2016). Yet, herein lies the painful irony: in today’s global economy, ‘making heritage pay’ (in other words, the production and consumption of a heritage that brings in economic rewards)2 requires the commodification of heritage through heritage tourism/​pilgrimage directed at African diasporans (Agyei-​Mensah 2006; Konadu-​Agyemang 2001; Osei-​ Tutu 2002). Contemporary heritage tourism/​pilgrimage is based on a global capitalist system that, in previous centuries, commodified people themselves through the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Descendants of enslaved peoples in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries are the heritage tourists/​pilgrims in the present (Engmann 2019b).3

10.3  Contested claims Indeed, there are countless ways to present information about—​and interpretations of—​ the past. History, memory, and material residues from the past involve selective erosion, invention, and oblivion (Lowenthal 1985). Certain aspects are emphasized, whilst others are marginalized and/​or silenced (Trouillot 1995). Consequently, conflict and contestation over inclusion, representation, remembrance, and commemoration are inevitable (Silverman 2011). Most visitors frequent Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, although, since Christiansborg Castle was opened to the public a few years ago, it has attracted many people. Public engagement at the forts and castles occurs through tours, exhibitions, and displays. Historically, tours provided little information about the history and culture of the area, or the relationship between the Europeans in the castle and the people of the adjacent towns (Singleton 1999). Africans were frequently presented as victims and Europeans as oppressors, with no mention of African involvement in the capture and sale of Africans, or of African and Eurafrican actors who facilitated the transatlantic slave trade (Engmann 2021). The possibility that the ancestor of a Ghanaian sold an ancestor of an African diasporan remained unspoken (Macgonagle 2006). Instead, the concept of a ‘shared heritage’ was, and continues to be disseminated. Over the years, the stories told at the forts and castles centre around the fortifications’ architecture and physical space (Jordan 2007). Notably, associated artefacts are minimal 2 

Income-seeking national governments often focus on economics, but they need to pay more attention to the - difficult to measure - social and cultural costs. 3  Importantly, it is not only African descendants of the formerly enslaved who travel to the forts and castles. Continental Africans and Europeans visit. Increasingly, Ghanaians (in particular, schoolchildren) also visit these sites.

Contested heritage and absent objects     205 or absent. Though it is somewhat of an oversimplification, in broad contours there are two general perspectives on the preservation and memorialization of sites of enslavement in Ghana, and how the forts and castles should be represented. The first is the ‘African diasporan point of view’, routinely framed as the ‘African American point of view’. In this perspective, terminology is key. For example, many African diasporans suggest that the appellation ‘castle’ overlooks the centrality of the cells, and consequently their ancestors’ histories and experiences. It is said to evoke romantic notions of European architectural grandeur (Finley 2001) and an ambiance of Disneyfication (Macgonagle 2006), though, in truth, European castles also contained cells. Some also propose that the term ‘dungeon’ should replace ‘cell’ or be incorporated into official titles and literature. Regarding representation, many argue that as sacred sites, the fortifications should be presented as they were hundreds of years ago, devoid of restoration but allowed to decay, as a stark reminder of the horrors of the transatlantic slave system. African diasporans also call for specific interpretations of these sites in relation to histories of chattel slavery in the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. In this view, the significance of the forts and castles lies primarily in the experience of human bondage that it facilitated across the ocean. The second contrasting point of view is the ‘Ghanaian perspective’. Most saliently, Ghanaians point to the fortifications’ numerous functions throughout history, including but not limited to the transatlantic slave trade. For instance, Elmina Castle represents Portuguese, Dutch, and British transatlantic trade interests, and is remembered for acting as a prison, secondary school, Ghana Education Service office, District Assembly office, and a police training academy prior to becoming a museum. Cape Coast Castle was not only a slave fortification, but also the British colonial administration headquarters, until it was relocated to Christiansborg Castle. Cape Coast Castle also temporarily housed Asantehene Prempeh I, the Asante paramount chief who was detained by the British during colonial territorial expansion and seizure of Asante prior to being exiled to the Seychelle Islands in 1896. Therefore, the Castle is celebrated as the embodiment of Asante resistance to British colonialism, and is a site of significance in Asante and Ghanaian nationalist narratives. Unlike the ‘African diasporan point of view’, the ‘Ghanaian point of view’ sees monuments and their legacies in their entirety, and treats the transatlantic slave trade as one chapter of a longer story. Differences of outlook do not end there. Entrance fees at the forts and castles vary according to nationality; foreign visitors pay more than Ghanaians (a common practice at tourist sites in developing countries). At Elmina Castle, although the people of Elmina pay the same reduced entrance rates as Ghanaian nationals, some refuse to pay to enter since they claim the land belongs to them. Similarly, certain African diasporans also refuse to pay to enter, arguing that their ancestors did not ask to leave Africa. Their protestations demonstrate their offence, disappointment, and hurt at not being seen by Ghanaian officials as ‘African’, which is exacerbated by the fact that many are Pan Africanists and/​or view themselves as pilgrims and their trip to Ghana as a pilgrimage. During tours, African diasporans habitually become distressed, and angry exchanges within racially mixed tour groups over history and its interpretations are not infrequent.

206    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann Consequently, racially segregated tours are sometimes conducted, oftentimes by request. Executed unofficially, these racially separated tours are known by the Ghana government, ministries, and GMMB who recognize that it is in their interest (financial and otherwise) to avoid confrontations and conflict during tours. White visitors frequently feel discomfort during tours with African diasporans, as they report feelings of guilt and self-​consciousness, and sometimes are afraid of verbal and physical attacks. African diasporans explain that as enslaveds’ descendants, they do not want to go through the sacred experience of touring a fortification and revisiting collective trauma in the presence of the possible descendants of white slave traders and owners (though in reality, they may be touring these sites in the presence of African and Eurafrican slave traders). They also prefer to ask Ghanaian guides questions without the presence of White people. For their part, Ghanaian visitors often claim that African diasporans become ‘too emotional’ and demonstrate a propensity for ‘exaggeration’ during visits. These criticisms underscore how Ghanaians have a perception of the experience of enslavement in the Americas that is far removed from the African diasporan experience. African diasporans’ public displays of emotion and grief sometimes lead Ghanaian visitors to feel embarrassment, anxiety, and tension that can manifest itself as nervous laughter or silence, and is easily misconstrued as amusement. Ghanaians also express discomfort in the knowledge that African and Eurafrican slave traders collaborated with Europeans during the transatlantic slave trade. Ghanaians also sometimes question the lack of specificity of African diasporans who claim Ghana as their ancestral homeland. Tour guides have learnt, with experience, to become adept at discerning possible conflicts as soon as tourists arrive and swiftly managing them when they erupt. During an early Panafest Project in 1994, a blackface performance, embraced by Ghanaian culture but considered an enactment of racist representations by African Americans, was scheduled (later cancelled due to unrelated issues) (Cole 1996). One of the male dungeons at Elmina was converted into a gift shop. The GMMB opened a restaurant bar for tourists at Cape Coast Castle, but due to African diasporan objections it was closed. In general, many Ghanaians, including residents, government officials and the GMMB, desire restoration works at the forts and castles to provide good lighting and heating to present an airy, attractive, ‘modern’, and ‘international’ museum-​like experience. For many in the diaspora, whose not-​too-​distant ancestors toiled in slavery and where racial inequalities are still stark, ‘improving’ fortifications is equivalent to sanitizing or ‘whitewashing’ history (Finley 2004; Robinson 1994). Similar controversies have also occurred in the context of other fortifications. For instance, African diasporan groups attempted to lease and manage Fort Amsterdam so as to turn it into a pilgrimage site (funded by the Netherlands). Yet, after signing, disputes arose, and the agreement fell apart (Schramm 2010). Fort Good Hope was turned into a guest house that also held all night dance parties; its cells storing crates of beer (Macgonagle 2006). Other controversies have arisen around the sale of souvenirs, and what items are appropriate to commercialize. For example, according to heritage officials, some Ghanaians suggested the sale of shackles alongside the selling of t-​shirts and other tourist souvenirs. Fridge magnets of the ‘Door of No Return’ were sold (Fig. 10.2).

Figure 10.2:  A fridge magnet of a condemned cell at Elmina Castle sold at the site. Courtesy of author.

208    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann Some scholars suggest that Ghanaians do not necessarily appreciate African diasporans’ symbolic relationship to the fortifications, and the need to affirm and maintain their African heritage in order to anchor their sense of belonging in the world. They also point out that Ghanaians seek to forget about the transatlantic slave trade and its attendant horrors in order to survive and move forward to build a new identity (Finley 2001). Yet, the history of the slave trade at the forts and castles is also one chapter in the history of the forts and castles. Furthermore, the history of the transatlantic slave trade forms one aspect of the history of slavery, as well as other manifestations of bondage, servitude, dependency, and unequal power relations in Ghana. In addition, the history of the transatlantic slave trade is one episode of Ghana’s history over the longue durée. What is more, Ghanaians’ reluctance to discuss the transatlantic slave trade from the African Atlantic perspective, and the role of Africans as active historical agents, must be placed within the context of Ghanaian historiography and the project of postcolonial nation-​building. In the immediate postcolonial period in the 1960s, Ghanaian scholars (like African scholars elsewhere on the continent) tended to circumvent the topics of slave trading and slavery since they posed challenges for national cohesion by raising uncomfortable questions about African enslavers, slave traders, and the enslaved. What is more, early postcolonial Ghanaian historians, as members of Akan and Ewe ethnic groups that played significant roles as enslavers, were therefore widely viewed as beneficiaries rather than victims of the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, because of its precariously close proximity to the topic of indigenous slavery and its afterlives, the topic of the transatlantic slave trade is strictly avoided in the public sphere (Keren 2009; Perbi 2004). All told, these issues illustrate the complexities of reconciling local and global understandings of inclusion, representation, remembrance, and commemoration of the transatlantic slave trade at Ghana’s forts and castles (Engmann 2005). Despite this long history of glossing over Africans’ role and position in the transatlantic slave system, in recent years guided tours organized by the GMMB have improved, reflecting an attempt to incorporate scholarly developments in the study of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. This is a result of feedback in the visitor’s comments book that viewed interpretations of the transatlantic slave trade as lacking in nuance and complexity, notably around issues of agency, complicity, and resistance. The stories told during tours have begun to acknowledge, to a limited extent, the role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, and to complicate the oversimplified dichotomy of European oppressors and African victims. Increasing attention to nuance in also evident in the terminology and language that tour guides employ. For example, several tour guides now refer to the ‘enslaved’ as opposed to the use of the term ‘slave’ as in the past, which reflects upon the humanity of an individual and recognizes that slavery was forced upon a person, rather than an innate condition. They also refer to ‘Eurafricans’ and ‘mixed-​ race’ rather than the derogatory terms ‘mulattoes’ that derives from ‘mule’ as the offspring of a horse and a donkey or ‘half-​castes’ meaning ‘impure’ racially. Experienced guides reflect upon and interject their own personal interpretations and perspectives in line with current scholarly discourse and debates, such as slavery in the Americas and its relationship to the various forms of bondage in Africa. Visitors are also invited to

Contested heritage and absent objects     209 participate and dialogue. As a case in point, walking through the slave cells, visitors are often encouraged to articulate and/​or reenact what they think might have been African captives’ experiences. Night tours are also offered and African descendants can sleep in the female cells at Cape Coast Castle.

10.4  Exhibiting the transatlantic slave trade Archaeological representation at the numerous forts and castles is, for the most part, similar, in terms of arrangement. Most visitors frequent the two largest fortifications, Elmina and Cape Coast Castles. At Elmina Castle, the on-​site Portuguese church faces and is adjacent on three sides to the cells where captive Africans ate, drank, vomited, urinated, defecated, slept, and died. Within the courtyard is a cistern; a simple square-​ shaped opening in the ground with a wooden hatch covering. The Governor’s residence overlooks the female slave cells and is connected to a staircase that allowed access to women, some of whom were raped by Europeans stationed at the fortifications. A cell with a skull-​and-​crossbones over the door marks where the dead were dumped without ceremony. At Cape Coast Castle, captive Africans are represented through the damp and dark cells within which they were detained. A few narrow gutters acted as sewerage systems. Rusted metal grills cover the small openings that provided minimal air or through which food was passed. The floors of the Castle’s cells are several centimetres higher than when constructed, due to centuries of accumulated human excrement and filth. Within the male cells is a shrine dedicated to Nana Tabir, one of the local gods, who protected fishermen and traders (Apter 2017). The shrine is decorated with candles, wreaths, flowers, fruit, and monetary offerings contributed by locals and visitors. Standing within the cells, visitors are struck by a repellent dank stench. The cold walls stand in sharp contrast to the grandiose vistas from the castle above, of the palm trees swaying in the breeze, the blue-​green Atlantic water, golden beach, fishing boats’ brightly coloured flags, and the humid, boisterous, and bustling town surroundings. The material evidence of the transatlantic slave trade at these heritage sites is largely architectural. Features such as the offices of the governors and officers, residential quarters, and merchandise storerooms (and in certain instances, churches) represent the lives of male European administrators and merchants. No furniture, work, or personal effects are displayed. The cells symbolize captive Africans’ existence. The ‘condemned cell’ is a material reminder of the punishments meted out to ‘rebellious’ captives left to die. African merchants, traders, and rulers are largely absent in the material record. There is also scant extant evidence of the Eurafricans who worked as soldiers, merchants, and domestics, with the exception of, in a few fortifications, the remains of a ‘mulatto’ school that Eurafrican children attended. Likewise, Africans enslaved as ‘castle slaves’, artisans, canoemen, and domestics are almost non-​existent from an archaeological perspective.

210    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann Both Elmina and Cape Coast Castles highlight the exit door where captive Africans were led through to board slave ships; today they are each described on signage as the ‘Door of Return’. Elmina and Cape Coast Castles possess the most expansive permanent exhibitions of slave-​related heritage sites in Ghana. Even these, however, are modest. At Elmina Castle, a small museum is located in the former Portuguese chapel. The exhibition, ‘Images of Elmina Across the Centuries’, installed in 1996, contains texts and images displayed on panels in a relatively small and dark space. No artefacts are featured. This exhibition attempts to situate the history of the transatlantic slave trade within a larger, long-​term history of the region in order to present an African perspective of both the transatlantic slave trade and the Castle itself. At Cape Coast Castle, the ‘Crossroads of a People, Crossroads of Trade’ exhibition is a collaboration between architects, curators, historians, and archaeologists from Ghana and the United States, as well as traditional authorities such as Chiefs and Queen Mothers, as ‘stool owners’ (landowners). It was first displayed 1994 and presents a ‘top-​down’ curatorial interpretation of the past that stands in stark contrast to current curatorial approaches informed by ‘histories from below’. Namely, the exhibit tells the story of Ghana’s relationship with Europe through the transatlantic slave trade, colonial, and postcolonial periods. A section of the exhibition space was designed to represent a slave ship’s hold that consisted of an overhead grate for air, decks on which men, women, and children lay, shackles and chains, and other devices employed to restrain captive Africans. The other section shows maps of the triangular trade routes and images of captives with neck coffles journeying to the coast by foot. Imported commodities exchanged for captives—​glass beads, local pottery, alcohol bottles, and guns—​are presented through artefact collections. This exhibition too has met with controversy, as some African American expatriates wanted greater emphasis on slavery and emancipation and suggested the inclusion of artefacts from American collections, whilst Ghanaian curators chose to focus on Ghanaian history and local culture (Kreamer 2006). At Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, conservation, preservation, exhibitions, and curatorial work secured assistance from several international development organizations and agencies, such as the United Nations Development Program, United States Agency for International Development, International Council on Museums and Sites (United States’ chapter), Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities, and Smithsonian Institution. Collaborations between United States-​based individuals and Ghanaians, these activities were in accordance with the Ghana government’s Central Regional Development Corporation’s Tourism Development Plan. The smaller, less visited fortifications possess few, if any, artefacts. Most fortifications retain cannons and cannonballs, often randomly placed inside the forts or around their exteriors. For instance, Fort Prinzenstein, currently in partial ruin, retains some chains, a stone pestle, and mortar (for food preparation), together with a couple of rudimentary explanatory panels by way of maps and illustrations. Anomabo Fort also shows chains and shackles in situ. Some fortifications’ artefacts have tumbled down or been moved to other areas. Only a couple of fortifications contain small exhibition displays. A case

Contested heritage and absent objects     211 in point is Fort Apollonia that has a small wooden cabinet containing artefacts, a few modest information panels, and a wall mural. Contemporary art exhibitions at the forts and castles have received a mixed response. Several years ago, the GMMB organized a temporary installation at Ussher Fort that replicated captive Africans within a slave ship’s hold using wax models, placed at the entrance to one of the second-​floor rooms. Yet this approach proved distinctly unsuccessful since the model lacked contextualization. Visitors were immediately confronted with the display without warning, either by way of a guide or text panel, and therefore reported finding the exhibition frightening. The majority of visitors, as a result, refused to enter the room after this initial alarming encounter. A few years ago, another temporary sculpture exhibition organized by the Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-​Bamfo at Cape Coast Castle, entitled the ‘Nkyinkyim installation’, proved highly successful (Akoto-​Bamfo pers. comm.).

10.5 Autoarchaeology at Christiansborg Castle At Christiansborg Castle, new approaches to understandings of the histories and legacies of the forts and castles are emerging (Engmann 2019a, 2021b). The Castle was central to the Danish transatlantic slave trade and in 1685, became the Danish administrative headquarters in West Africa. After Danish abolition in 1793, later enforced in 1803, the Castle was handed over to the British in 1850. From 1876 onwards, the Castle became a British seat of colonial government administration and with independence in 1957, the Office of the President of the Republic of Ghana. During these times, the Castle was closed to visitors. However, Christiansborg Castle was recently opened to the public. Since then, it has hosted fashion shows, music videos, and a wedding. Many visitors come to the Castle. They are often interested in the archaeological excavations and analysis conducted on site. At Christiansborg Castle, ongoing archaeological research and fieldwork employs an approach to heritage termed ‘autoarchaeology’, which combines approaches from the disciplines of historical archaeology and archaeological ethnography, including collaboration with direct descendant communities. Autoarchaeology explicitly recognizes direct descendant of Eurafrican slave traders as knowledge producers while simultaneously underscoring the intricate, contingent narratives, and counter-​narratives that surround understandings of these heritage sites. It is a heritage practice for, with, and by descendant communities, and is concerned with access to heritage, the questions asked, the knowledge produced, and the ways in which the site is preserved, conserved, and managed. The autoarchaeology project centred on Christiansborg Castle focuses on Eurafricans who lived in and around the Castle, and whose descendants still live close the castle. Its focus on direct descendants’ stories and narratives provides nuance into the complex and contested history of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, as well as

212    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann

Figure 10.3:  Cannon excavation and removal assisted by local fishermen. Courtesy of author.

its legacies. To date, the research team has excavated an extensive settlement and artefact collection that dates back to the era of the transatlantic slave trade. This includes house foundations and a large collection of local and imported manufactured objects, including European cannons, ‘African trade beads’, Chinese and European ceramics, local pottery, various European smoking pipes, European glassware, a writing slate, faunal remains, seeds, cowries, and other shells. With the assistance of local fishermen, a canon immersed in sand that had fallen from the castle above on to the beach below was excavated (Fig. 10.3). These objects distinguished between slave traders who profited from the slave trade and those who could be enslaved by it. It is expected that this research project will contribute to the government’s plans for a museum on the site of Christiansborg Castle (Engmann 2019a, b).4

10.6  Presences and absences Archaeological representation of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery through permanent and temporary exhibitions and displays are oftentimes ‘anxious and ambiguous’ (Devenish 1997; Smith et al. 2011: 1; Webster 2009). African Diasporan heritage tourists/​ 4 

www.christiansborgarchaeologicalheritageproject.org

Contested heritage and absent objects     213 pilgrims, oftentimes more than Ghanaian visitors, tend to bring with them deep historical knowledge of Ghana’s forts and castles and their role in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. They therefore visit less to accrue factual knowledge as to gain an understanding that can only be captured by way of an intimate engagement with the site’s materiality, for this is the express purpose of the ‘return’. Objects, according to one understanding of them, are considered to authenticate the past. Clearly, authenticity is what heritage sites sell to the public (and so claims to authenticity become a point of vulnerability) (Gable and Handler 1996). The sheer number of forts and castles along the coast, many of which a visitor must pass en-​route from Accra to Elmina or Cape Coast, and a couple that lie within close proximity of each other within the capital city, powerfully illustrate the scale and intensity of the transatlantic slave trade that took place along Ghana’s coast. The few fortifications which do feature minor exhibitions with archaeological items tend to primarily display objects and commodities for which captives were traded, such as beads, smoking pipes, and alcohol bottles. Some also include commodities that were used by captive Africans, for instance, European clay smoking pipes for the smoking of tobacco, revealing not only the interrelationship between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, but the ways in which such objects functioned in the transatlantic slave trade—​as sedatives to subdue captives so that they did not cause rebellions and insurrections. Collectively, the artefacts shown speak to captive Africans’ economic value. However, such displays do not tell us anything more about their lives—​about who they were, what they looked like, and how they experienced captivity, physical hardships, and in some cases death. The fact that the majority of fortifications do not contain exhibitions or texts to contextualize the objects they display means that aside from available tour guides’ interpretations, visitors are often left to their own interpretations. Select artefacts, for example, cannons and cannonballs in situ, provide material public testimony for how they were employed during the transatlantic slave trade whilst their manufacturer’s marks simultaneously contribute towards the history of a specific fortification. Other objects, for instance cell bars, shackles, and chains perform a similar function, but also provide a material grammar for the transatlantic slave trade and slavery that extends far beyond the site itself (Fig. 10.4). Such objects are, more often than not, interpreted as a metaphor for the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Yet, these objects become imbued with extra ‘power’ situated at the forts and castles (rather than in a museum or gallery elsewhere). Yet, paradoxically, the absence of objects at the forts and castles is also seen by some visitors to bestow authenticity on the site. Stories abound of how, in the past, artefacts—​ and markedly, human remains—​were discarded and thrown over the fort and castle walls into the sea by local caretakers. Of course, this can be attributed to lack of knowledge, negligence, and/​or disregard. But equally, these acts also call attention to memory’s atrophy, the project of amnesia. Indeed, absences (and attempts at erasure) are viewed by many African diasporans as signifying the slave experience. Visitors’ imaginations are left to their own devices in order to fill in the silences in the reconstruction of the past. For instance, during tours, the stench in the cells mean that visitors turn to the senses. This odour generates a kind of olfactory torture that contributed to the utter humiliation

214    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann

Figure 10.4:  Condemned Cell, Elmina Castle, Ghana. Courtesy of author.

and dehumanization of captive Africans (Schramm 2010). In this way, fortifications devoid of artefacts from the past productively inspire a turn to speculation, conjecture, supposition, and opinion, in order to create space for multiple possibilities of what might have occurred and in so doing, provide new narratives worthy of inclusion, representation, remembrance, and commemoration in stories of the transatlantic slave trade.

10.7  Conclusion Millions of captive Africans were trafficked through Ghana’s forts and castles, out of the African continent and into enslavement in the Americas. Controversies continue

Contested heritage and absent objects     215 today over the inclusion, representation, interpretation, and commemoration at these contested heritage sites. African diasporans, as descendants of the formerly enslaved, tend to desire a focus on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of Atlantic slavery itself. Ghanaians for the most part do not define themselves in terms of the transatlantic slave trade; in fact, it is a history many would rather forget (Aidoo 1965, 1970; Akyeampong 2001; Opoku-​Agyemang 1996). Yet, at the same time, Ghanaians realize the economic potential (Yankholmes et al. 2009) of using heritage as a means to community and national development. Heritage sites such as Ghana’s forts and castles were not originally constructed to be museums. Further, since few have extant artefact collections, the forts and castles that remain standing today focus on the immaterial and experiential aspect of the imaginary through the presence of absence in order to interpret the past. Indeed, this absence is not necessarily a limitation, but can also serve as an invitation. Whilst archaeologists, museologists, tour guides, and visitors alike all testify to the power of physical objects to tell stories about the past, to install objects at the forts and castles is also to detract from the power that the absence of objects imparts. The absence itself, in other words, prompts us to rethink the importance of objects in telling stories of transgenerational trauma, dislocation, and reclamation, and in the telling of stories of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery experience from the African Atlantic perspective.

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is necessary to many people without whom the Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project would not have been possible. Special thanks to His Excellencies, the Presidents of Ghana: President John Jerry Rawlings, President John Agyekum Kufour, President John Atta Mills, President John Dramani Mahama, and President Nana Addo Akufo-​Addo. My gratitude also to Nii Okwei Kinka Dowuona VI, Nii Bonne V, Nii Dzamlodza VI, Nii Kwashie Aniefi V, Nii Ako Nortei IV, Aawon Klotey, Aawon Opobi, Naa Ashorkor Obaniehi I, Nii Kwabena Bonnie IV, Saban Atsen, Nii Sorgla, and Earl Teddy Nartey, and the Osu Traditional Council. I owe thanks to Raymond Atuguba, Zanetor Agyeman-​Rawlings, Mark Alo, Julius Debrah, Yaw Donkor, Prosper Dzakobo, Ebenezer Mantey, Larry Gbevlo-​Lartey, Nana Asante Bediatuo, Akosua Frema Osei-​Opare, Samuel Abu Jinapor, Michael Opoku, Kadijah Amoah, Fritz Baffour, Henry Wood, and Ayiku Wilson. Thanks are also due to Kofi Amekudi, William Barnor, Edward Nyarko, Daniel Kumah, Ernest Fiador, Gideon Agyare, Raymond Agbo, Anokye, and Samuel Nobah, and those who requested not to be mentioned by name. Thanks of course, to the entire team. My deepest appreciation to the people of Osu. Research was made possible thanks to grants from the Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford Anthropology Department, Joukowsky Institute, Whiting Foundation, Rappaport Foundation, Martha Joukowsky Foundation, Wenner-​ Gren Foundation, and the Clark Art Institute. Community outreach education was

216    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann made possible thanks to donations from the Wenner-​Gren Foundation, British High Commission Accra, Egality Law, Richard Appiah Otoo, Benjamin Elegba, and other anonymous donors. Thanks are due to the Danish Maritime Museum, Danish National Archives, and British National Archives for their support. Thank you to Frederick Mensah and Mark Tetteh at Elmina and Cape Coast Castles for sharing their knowledge. Thanks also to Alice Stevenson and an anonymous reviewer for feedback on this chapter.

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218    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann Finley, C. 2004. ‘Authenticating dungeons, Whitewashing Castles: The Former Sites of the Slave Trade on the Ghanaian Coast’. In Architecture and Tourism, edited by D. Medina Lasansky and B. McLaren, pp. 109–​26. Oxford: Berg. Gable, E. and R. Handler. 1996. ‘After Authenticity at an American Heritage Site’. American Anthropologist 98 (3): pp. 568–​78. Gable, E., R. Handler, and A. Lawson. 1991. ‘On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, Conjecture, and Black and White Histories at Colonial Williamsburg’. American Ethnologist 19 (40): pp. 791–​805. Graburn, N. (Ed). 1983. ‘The Anthropology of Tourism’. Annals of Tourism Research 10 (1): pp. 9–​33. Gyam, S. 2008. Historical Archaeological Investigation at Fort St. Anthony, Axim (Ghana). Unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Ghana. Hartman, S. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hasty, J. 2002. ‘Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of Culture’. Africa Today 49 (3): pp. 47–​78. Holsey, B. 2008. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Atlantic Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hyland, A. 1979. Fort St Jago, Elmina, Ghana: A Conservation Study. London. University of Newcastle. Hyland, A. 1992. Fort St Jago, Elmina Architectural and Engineering Survey Report. Central Region Development Commission. Jordan, C.A. 2007. ‘Rhizomorphics of Race and Space: Ghana’s Slave Castles and the Roots of African Diasporan Identity’. Journal of Architectural Education 60 (4): pp. 48–​59. Kankpeyeng, B.W. 2009. ‘The Slave Trade in Northern Ghana: Landmarks, Legacies and Connections’. Slavery and Abolition 30: pp. 209–​21. Keren, E. 2009. ‘The Transatlantic Slave Trade in Ghanaian Academic Historiography: History, Memory and Power’. The William and Mary Quarterly 66 (4): pp. 975–​1000. Kirkdale Archaeology. 1991. Cape Coast Castle, 1991: Archaeological Reconnaissance Survey. Unpublished Report to the Central Region Development Commission (CEDECOM), Ghana. Konadu-​Agyemang, K. 2001. ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes and the International Tourism Trade in Ghana, 1983–​99: Some Socio-​Spatial Implications’. Tourism Geographies 3 (2): pp. 187–​206. Kreamer, C. 2006. ‘Shared Heritage, Contested Terrain: Cultural Negotiation and Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle Museum Exhibit “Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade”’. In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/​Global Transformations, edited by I. Karp, L. Szwaja Kratz, and T. Ybarra-​Frausto, pp. 435–​68. Durham: Duke University Press. Landrieu, M. 2018. In the Shadows of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. New York: Viking. LaRoche, C. and M. Blakey. 1997. ‘Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground’. Historical Archaeology 31 (3): pp. 84–​106. Lawrence, A.W. 1963. Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa. London: Jonathan Cape. Logan, W. and K. Reeves. 2009. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult’ Heritage. London: Routledge. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contested heritage and absent objects     219 MacDonald, S. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Macgonagle, E. 2006. ‘From Dungeons to Dance Parties: Contested Histories of Ghana’s Slave Forts’. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 24 (2): pp. 249–​68. McDavid, C. 2007. ‘Beyond Strategy and Good Intentions: Archaeology, Race and White Privilege’. Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement, edited by B. Little and P.A. Shackel, pp. 67–​88. Lanham: Altamira. Meskell, L.M. 2002. ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology’. Anthropology Quarterly 75 (3): pp. 557–​74. Miles, D. 2006–​2007. ‘Roots to Forts: The Heritage and Archaeology of Ghana’. Current World Archaeology 20: pp. 30–​3. Morrison, T. 1990. ‘The Site of Memory’. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by R. Fergusen, pp. 299–​305. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art. Mowatt, R.A., and C.H. Chancellor. 2011. ‘Visiting Death and Life: Dark Tourism and Slave Castles’. Annals of Tourism Research 38 (4): pp. 1410–​34. Mudimbe, V.Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nelson, A. 2016. The Social Life of DNA. New York: Beacon Press. Odewale, A., H.T. Foster, and J.M. Torres. 2017. ‘In Service to a Danish King: Comparing the Material Culture of Royal Enslaved Afro-​Caribbeans and Danish Soldiers at the Christiansted National Historic Site’. Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 6 (1): pp. 19–​54. Olusoga, D. 2020. ‘The “Statue Wars” Must Not Distract Us from a Reckoning with Racism’. The Guardian Available at: https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​glo​bal/​2020/​jun/​14/​sta​tue-​wars-​ must-​not-​distr​act-​reckon​ing-​with-​rac​ism-​david-​olus​oga [Accessed 29 December 2020]. Opoku-​Agyemang, K. 1996. Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems. Accra: Afram. Osei-​Tutu, B. 2002. ‘The African American Factor in the Commodification of Ghana’s Slave Castles’. Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 6: pp. 115–​33. Osei-​Tutu, B. 2007. ‘Ghana’s ‘Slave Castles,’ Tourism, and the Social Memory of the Atlantic Slave Trade’. In Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by A. Ogundiran and T. Falola, pp. 185–​95. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Osei-​Tutu, J.K. (Ed). 2018. Forts, Castles and Society in West Africa: Gold Coast and Dahomey, 1450–​1960. Leiden: Brill. Osei-​Tutu, J.K. and V.E. Smith (Eds). 2017. Shadows of Empire: New Perspectives on European Fortifications in West Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Perbi, A.A. 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Centuries. Accra: Sub-​Saharan Press. Pierre, J. 2012. The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reed, A. 2015. Pilgrimage Tourism of Diaspora Africans to Ghana. New York: Routledge. Richards, S.L. 2002. ‘Cultural Travel to Ghana’s Slave Castles: A Commentary’. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 11 (4): pp. 372–​5. Richards, S.L. 2003. ‘What Is to Be Remembered? Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-​Dungeons’. Theatre Journal 57: pp. 617–​37. Robinson, I.V. 1994. ‘Ghana -​Don’t Whitewash the Slave Trade’. New African 324 (November): p. 4.

220    Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann Samuels, J. 2015. ‘Difficult Heritage’: Coming ‘to Terms’ with Sicily’s Fascist Past’. In Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage, edited by K.L. Samuels and T. Rico, pp. 111–​28. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Schramm, K. 2010. African Homecoming: Pan-​African Ideology and Contested Heritage. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. Shumway, R. and T.R. Getz (Eds). 2017. Slavery and its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Silverman, H. (Ed). 2011. Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure, and Exclusion in a Global World. New York: Springer. Simmonds, D. 1973. ‘A Note on the Excavation in Cape Coast Castle’. Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 14 (2): pp. 267–​9. Singleton, T. 1999. ‘The Slave Trade Remembered on the Former Gold and Slave Coasts’. Slavery and Abolition 20 (1): pp. 150–​69. Smith, L., G. Cubitt, R. Wilson, and K. Fouseki (Eds). 2011. Atrocity Materials and the Representation of Transatlantic Slavery: Problems, Strategies and Reactions. New York: Routledge. Smith, V.L. 1989. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stahl, A.B. 2008. ‘The Slave Trade as Practice and Memory: What Are the Issues for Archaeologists?’. In Invisible Citizens: Captives and their Consequences, edited by C.M. Cameron, pp. 25–​56. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Teye, V.B. and D.J. Timothy. 2004. ‘The Varied Colors of Slave Heritage in West Africa: White American Stakeholders’. Space and Culture 7 (2): pp. 145–​55. Trouillot, M-​ R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Tunbridge, J.E. and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as Resource in Conflict. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Van Danzig, Albert. 1980. Forts and Castles of Ghana. Accra: Sedco. Van Hensbergen, C. 2020. ‘Public Sculpture Expert: Why I Welcome the Decision to Throw Bristol’s Edward Colston Statue in the River’, The Conversation Available at: https://​thec​onve​ rsat​ion.com/​pub​lic-​sculpt​ure-​exp​ert-​why-​i-​welc​ome-​the-​decis​ion-​to-​throw-​brist​ols-​edw​ ard-​cols​ton-​sta​tue-​in-​the-​river-​140​285 [Accessed 3 January 2021]. Webster, J. 2009. ‘The Unredeemed Object: Displaying Abolitionist Artefacts in 2007’. Slavery and Abolition 30 (2): pp. 311–​25. Wright, R. 1954. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: HarperPerennial. Yankholmes, A.K.B., O.A Akyeampong, and L.A Dei. 2009. ‘Residents’ Perceptions of Transatlantic Slave Trade Attractions For Heritage Tourism in Danish-​Osu, Ghana’ Journal of Heritage Tourism 4 (4): pp. 315–​29.

Chapter 11

Finding spac e to store archae ol o g i c a l c ollect i ons Challenges and progress in the United States S. Terry Childs

11.1  Introduction Any discussion about archaeological collections storage should consider the agents of deterioration (e.g. climate control, pest control, security, fire protection, etc.), size and condition of the space, and the policies, procedures, and staff to curate, inventory, and make curated collections accessible. These are interrelated parts of a complex web of responsibility that involves many professionals, including those in archaeology and museum studies (Childs and Benden 2017). Problems related to the lack and management of storage space have been growing in the United States (USA) for decades, as they have been in many other countries (e.g. Kersel 2015; Kibunjia 1996; Merriman and Swain 1999; Singh 2018; Smith and Murray 2011). A ‘crisis in archaeological collections curation’ (Marquardt et al. 1982: 409) was first identified in 1982, which sent an alarm to many in the USA and worldwide. This chapter discusses how and why collections storage issues grew into a ‘curation crisis’ in the USA, the challenges caused by this ‘crisis’, and the advances being made by many stakeholders to mitigate the problems. Critical outcomes include ensuring that 1) stakeholders plan for effective storage and curation of archaeological collections before and during fieldwork so the result is irreplaceable and valuable cultural resources are preserved for future access and use, and 2) these activities are more sustainable. Many positive remedies developed in the USA are applicable internationally.

222   S. Terry Childs

11.2  A Very brief history of the ‘curation crisis’ in the United States The following is a succinct summary of the history of archaeological collections recovery, curation, and storage that led up to the ‘curation crisis’. For a detailed description, see Sullivan and Childs (2003: 2–​28). The early accumulation of archaeological collections from federal lands was first regulated with the enactment of the Antiquities Act in 1906. The primary foci of this Act are to protect the cultural and natural resources on federal land and to prevent looting of sites through procedures for permitting, conviction, and fines (McManamon 2006). The Act also considers the outcome of the recovered collections, which ‘shall be preserved in the public museum designated by the permit and shall be accessible to the public’. The Antiquities Act is notable because it recognizes the long-​term importance of archaeological collections and their preservation in repositories1 for the benefit of the public, but it does not clearly identify who owned the collections that came from federal land. Between the 1920s and 1960s, several major economic and political events occurred that stimulated an enormous increase in archaeological projects across the USA, along with the resulting collections. The government developed federal work programmes during the Great Depression that included large-​scale archaeological projects with sizeable field crews. Although massive collections were created, the majority were not processed in laboratories or analysed because the related costs were not covered under these federal relief projects (Childs and Sullivan 2004; Fagette 1996). Support for curation of some collections eventually occurred, but repositories to house them were often inadequate or nonexistent. These problems were exacerbated after World War Two when federal programmes to build dams and vast road networks resulted in large salvage projects. Several federal laws were enacted to facilitate archaeological work prior to construction, but the Historic Sites Act of 1945 does not address the preservation or disposition of any resulting collections. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 hardly addresses collections except to mandate that regulations are promulgated to ensure that significant artefacts and associated records are deposited ‘in an institution with adequate long-​term curatorial capabilities.’ The Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act of 1974 gives the Secretary of the Interior responsibility to consult on the ownership of collections recovered during federal projects and appropriate repositories to store them. Unfortunately, these laws contain so little detail that figuring out where the collections

1  Repository is defined in this chapter as ‘a range of institutions that care for collections’ and museums that also ‘educate the public through displays and programming’ are a subset of repositories (Sullivan and Childs 2003: 4).

Finding space to store archaeological collections    223 are stored and who owns them are at issue today (Ferguson and Giesen 1999; Thiessen and Roberts 2009). Significant numbers of collections accrued during these decades, largely due to the cultural resources management (CRM) industry and its growth to perform compliance fieldwork. Finally, the enactment of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 gives some legal clarity to the long-​term preservation of collections. The law states that collections recovered from public lands are the property of the USA and must be cared for in a ‘suitable’ institution. Also, the Secretary of the Interior must promulgate regulations about the exchange and final disposition of the collections. Those regulations, Curation of Federally-​Owned and Administered Archaeological Collections (36 CFR 79), were finally released in 1990. They include standards to determine if a repository can deliver satisfactory long-​term curatorial services; methods to obtain and fund curatorial services; standards for exchange, access, and use of collections; and much more. Suddenly, the curation and storage of federally owned archaeological collections had to be much more rigorous. A few repositories started charging fees for curating and storing archaeological collections owned by other entities by the 1980s (Childs and Kinsey 2003; Marquardt et al. 1982). Many states enacted similar historic preservation laws during this time, including standards for the preservation of collections recovered during archaeological projects on state lands (Carnett 1995; Lyons et al. 2006; Nepstad-​ Thornberry et al. 2002). In academia, researchers were following the New Archaeology that focused on human behaviour, culture change, and the relationship between the social and natural environments. The types of artefacts and samples collected, such as soil profiles, increased dramatically. However, most university Anthropology Departments did not have a dedicated repository to curate large collections nor a priority to do so, therefore the collections were often consigned to laboratory closets, basements, or warehouses. The enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 put additional pressures on repositories. NAGPRA provides a process to resolve the disposition of Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan human remains, as well as control and ownership of funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony held by federal agencies and federally funded repositories. If any NAGPRA-​related remains or objects are determined to exist in their collections, an agency or a federally funded repository must conduct an inventory within five years, followed by consultation with those who may have a shared group identity in order to make a cultural affiliation determination. This effort, facilitated by a legislated grant programme, helped many repositories and agencies better understand the complexity of their collections, including ties to descendant communities, but they had little time or staff to work on meeting the standards in 36 CFR 79. As a continuous and rapid stream of new collections was recovered by many CRM firms in response to the new laws, academic research and field schools continued unabated across the USA. By the mid-​1970s, Marquardt (Marquardt et al. 1982) proclaimed a curation ‘crisis’ as he and a few other archaeologists exposed the abysmal condition

224   S. Terry Childs of the existing collections and the repositories in which they were housed, while also advocating for the long-​term, inherent research value of these irreplaceable resources (Ford 1977; Lindsay and Williams-​Dean 1980; Marquardt 1977; McGimsey and Davis 1977). Several studies were cited (General Accounting Office 1987; Lindsay et al. 1979, 1980) that identified the following problems: • Overall lack of collections storage space. • Deficient security and climate controls in the repositories that existed. Native Americans voiced concerns about the treatment of their ancestors and cultural heritage due to poor repository storage conditions (McGimsey and Davis 1977: 94). • The dearth of trained personnel to care for the collections, resulting in vast backlogs of existing collections without adequate processing (i.e. cleaning and labelling), documentation (i.e. accessioning, cataloguing, and inventory), and housing (i.e. bagging, boxing, and shelving) as new collections were being created and deposited at repositories. Many of these older, existing collections are now orphaned (see Section 11.3.3). • Overall lack of access to collections for research and other uses. Serious deficiencies in the object catalogues or inventories to identify objects and records made it nearly impossible to retrieve collections. Research space at repositories was often scarce. • Extreme funding shortages to address the problems above.

11.3  More challenges caused by the ‘curation crisis’ In order to better discuss the challenges that grew from the foundational problems associated with the ‘curation crisis’ listed above, it is important to understand the number of USA repositories that house archaeological collections and the size of those collections. This is difficult to do, but not impossible. Heritage Preservation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) completed the Heritage Health Information Survey (HHIS) in 2014, a follow-​up to a previous survey completed in 2004 (Heritage Preservation 2005). The 2014 study presents data for five types of institutions caring for collections of all kinds; the approximate size of collections in some disciplines, including archaeology; and the status of collections preservation at those institution types (IMLS 2019). There were 1,714 survey respondents representing 31,290 collecting institutions in the USA (IMLS 2019: 1). The study reveals that all five types of institutions (archives, historical societies, museums, scientific collections, and libraries) have at least a small percentage of archaeological objects and associated records. Upon working with, and extrapolating from, the IMLS weighted data available online, there are approximately 4,700 repositories across the USA that

Finding space to store archaeological collections    225 reported either bulk or individually catalogued archaeological items.2 The majority are at museums and scientific collections of which 95 percent are ‘small’ institutions based on the size of the overall collection they house, budget, and/​or number of staff (Frehill and Pelczar 2019: Appendix C). Further breakdown indicates that more than half of these institutions are non-​profits (54 percent), 31 percent are government (federal, state, tribal/​local), and 15 percent are university/​college. It is likely that the percentage of federal archaeological repositories (~3 percent) is low since those at many National Park Service (NPS) units and military bases, for example, were not fully included or did not respond to the survey. Moreover, the HHIS estimated there are 1.44 billion archaeological objects in the institutions, plus 8.4 million cubic feet (IMLS 2019: Table 5). Unfortunately, the HHIS does not identify the linear feet of archaeological associated records or the terabytes of digital records, which was a new focus of the survey. Given the estimated thousands of repositories that house archaeological materials, the staggering number of archaeological objects, and the lack of specific information about the size of archaeological associated records, including digital, it is inevitable that there are many struggles to store and curate it all. The following summarizes the major challenges that evolved since the beginning of the ‘curation crisis’.

11.3.1 Costs of curation and storage The issuance of the regulations on federal archaeological collections, 36 CFR 79, the enactment of NAGPRA, and the evolution of similar rulings at many state, tribal, and local levels resulted in significant increases in the costs of curating archaeological collections (Acuff 1993; Childs 2010; Sullivan and Childs 2003). Many repositories, particularly at universities, had curated government collections for free prior to the 1980s (Sullivan and Childs 2003). The faculty, students, and local communities affiliated with these free repositories benefitted from having access to those collections for research, interpretation, and exhibits. This situation benefitted government agencies who otherwise had to find curatorial space and/​or hire curators to care for their collections, which were usually not related to their agency mission. Whereas some repositories began charging fees in the 1970s (Marquardt et al. 1982), many more began assessing fees into the 2000s (Childs et al. 2010) or sought ways to deaccession the non-​federal collections for which they were custodians (Lyons et al. 2006; Stephens 2003). Additionally, the fee rates continue to increase across the USA as repositories do a better job meeting government standards and professional staff are hired (Childs et al. 2010; Lyons and Vokes 2010).

2  Although there are 4,700 institutions that have archaeological objects in their collections, just under 3,200 are estimated to be primarily an archaeological repository from the survey. It is likely that the other 1,500 institutions identified themselves as providing additional services or functions as historical societies, historic houses/​sites, or other in another survey question.

226   S. Terry Childs There are many other expenses that are simply not covered. Many existing collections that are 30–​100 +​years old require rehabilitation. This often involves rehousing materials into archival bags and boxes, moving collections, and re-​creating or sorting through the original contextual information in order to improve access and use by researchers and others (Green and Meister 2009; King and Samford 2019; MacFarland and Vokes 2016; Marino 2004). These activities can be costly and often are not covered by the curation fees agreed to when a repository accepted a collection, if any fees were paid at all. Another cost that could not have been anticipated decades ago is the acquisition of an electronic collections management system and then the transfer of information about archaeological objects, bulk samples, and associated records from paper records into that system. These databases are used to record curatorial information about the contents of archaeological collections, including accessions, catalogue records, loans, and deaccessions. They are proving vital to facilitate collections-​based research, use by descendant communities, and public education programmes, as well as accountability of collections by the owners, but are often costly to develop and maintain (Childs and Benden 2017; Meister and Green 2011; Morehouse 2019).

11.3.2 Increased lack of storage space, along with repository closures and threats of closures As more archaeological collections are recovered primarily from compliance-​based archaeology, fewer repositories can accept new collections due to lack of space (Childs et al. 2010; Nepstad-​Thornberry et al. 2002). This is compounded by some repository closures, such as in the states of Nevada and Kansas. Threats of closures or severely reduced repository budgets and staffing, usually due to state-​level fiscal problems, have occurred in the states of Illinois and Alaska. There are many impacts from lack of space and closures, such as difficulties finding a repository to curate government collections. This may lead CRM firms and agencies to deposit collections in repositories outside the state or region in which they were found, which can then discourage collections-​based research and use. Another is that collections owners have to move their materials at great expense to another repository when a closure occurs or find temporary storage, often in a facility that does not meet government standards. In other cases, some repositories have updated their mission statements and scope of collections statements so they will not accept some types of collections, such as from historic period sites. Additionally, government agencies, CRM firms, and others are more actively altering fieldwork techniques to limit the size of the collection recovered, often to nothing when no-​collection and in-​field analysis is used during archaeological investigations (Archaeological Collections Consortium (ACC) 2019; Butler 1979).

Finding space to store archaeological collections    227

11.3.3 Ownership and orphan collections Land ownership and archaeological collections ownership in the USA is based on property and historic preservation laws. In turn, land ownership directly relates to responsibility for the long-​term care and funding of the collections from that land. The landowner, whether federal, state, tribal, local, or private, owns the recovered collections unless the title is legally transferred. However, collection ownership is often not known for various reasons: large development projects that extended over land owned by several entities; poor documentation of land boundaries associated with particular collections; changes in land ownership over time; no documentation of ownership in a repository’s collection accession record; assumption by university repository staff that if the collection was recovered and deposited by its faculty, then it is owned by that repository; and poor or no detail in federal and state laws about ownership and responsibilities for collections recovered under particular types of permits (Ferguson and Giesen 1999; Rivers Cofield 2019; Sullivan and Childs 2003; Thiessen and Roberts 2009). Unclear collection ownership generally leads to lack of support, including funding, for long-​term preservation and therefore collections become orphaned. More and more orphaned collections are being found at CRM firms, university labs, and repositories, as well as in attics of retired professors. Without any curatorial care, they slowly deteriorate and lose their long-​term value for research, interpretation, public programming, and use by descendent communities and other publics (MacFarland and Vokes 2016; Olson and Cathcart 2019; Sullivan and Childs 2003; Voss 2012).

11.3.4 Associated records, including digital Associated records are critical because of the contextual information they contain about the archaeological site or survey area, the locations of the objects and samples within those areas, and objects analyses (see also this volume: Chapter 13). A revelation of the ‘curation crisis’ was that the objects were often physically separated from the associated records of a particular collection and stored in very poor conditions (Trimble and Meyers 1991). Significant funding and staff time are required to find the associated records, rehouse and organize them to make them suitable for future uses, and physically relocate them so they are in appropriate repository spaces with or near the objects (Marino 2004; MacFarland and Vokes 2016). Simultaneously, archaeologists knew little about the basic care and handling of associated records in the field or the laboratory prior to curation (Drew 2004, 2010), or about how to make a good archival record that documents contextual information and is useable for researchers and others in the future (Schlanger et al. 2015). Another unanticipated challenge that arose is the development of digital technologies and early adoption of those technologies by archaeologists. Many different software

228   S. Terry Childs programs operating on various hardware devices are used to create digital associated records during archaeological projects. Archaeologists are not well trained to consider how their decisions about using digital technology can impact the long-​term preservation of the records they create or how they can be used in the future. Further, repository staff may not include an archivist, although they do have procedures to store and organize paper records, photographs, and oversized maps. These procedures are fundamentally different from the preservation of digital records (Eiteljorg 2004; Rivers Cofield and Majewski 2019), however, and the constant changes in technologies have hindered many repository staff from knowing and applying the best procedures and standards for the long-​term care of digital records. A lot of information has been lost on degraded or lost tapes, floppy disks, and CDs, sometimes boxed with the paper records, while a rapid surge in the quantity of digital records has occurred over the last several decades (Kintigh 2006). While many repositories charge fees to curate both the hard copy and digital associated records (Childs et al. 2010), it is unclear if any follow the standards of a trusted repository to preserve digital records long term and make them discoverable, accessible, and interoperable (Kintigh and Altschul 2010; McManamon 2014).

11.3.5 Professional standards and policies for repositories By the 1980s, a clear need to create curation standards was apparent (General Accounting Office 1987; Lindsay et al. 1979, 1980; McGimsey and Davis 1977; Marquardt 1977; Marquardt et al. 1982). Standards were finally provided through the issuance of 36 CFR 79 in 1990. However, the regulations only pertain to federal collections and do not include deadlines for compliance, particularly for repositories; a mechanism, such as accreditation, to assess and enforce compliance; or a funding source to assist compliance by repositories and agencies (Childs and Sullivan 2004).The HHIS study strongly suggests that many of the institutions that house the majority of archaeological collections still have problems with both environmental controls and cataloguing backlogs (IMLS 2019), so the standards that do exist are not being fully implemented. Many repositories lacked essential policies, including a basic collections management plan and a scope of collection statement that articulate the repository mission and what collections a repository will and will not accept. Also, information about a repository’s curation fees and collection acceptance requirements were not accessible. Although these latter documents are now more available, largely online, many CRM firms have found that cost-​effective practices are hindered because the repositories they must work with have widely different curation fees, requirements for preparing collections, and collection acceptance policies.

11.3.6  Attitudes It has been said that ‘. . . archaeologists often regard curation as a storage problem, not as a process of banking irreplaceable data, objects and documents, as a basis for research

Finding space to store archaeological collections    229 and education, and as a foundation of cultural heritage’ (Sullivan and Childs 2003: 33). On the other hand, why curate and store collections if they are rarely used? Throughout the ‘curation crisis’, many archaeologists did not think they had any long-​term responsibility for a collection they recovered. Once they analysed the objects and published a book or articles, the collection was someone else’s problem. The connections between fieldwork, lab work, long-​term curation, and the future values of a collection were not considered. Consequently, archaeologists rarely identified where the collection would be curated during project planning, unless a permit required such information, or where it was actually deposited in their project report or publication (Childs and Sullivan 2004). A major reason for the ‘curation crisis’ is that archaeologists rarely, if ever, budgeted for the long-​term storage and care of a collection they created (Childs 2010; Marquardt et al. 1982; Sullivan and Childs 2003) nor did granting institutions consider this line item to be an important part of a grant request. Longer term, research using collections was appallingly uncommon. This was often due to poor storage conditions, a lack of research space in many repositories, and an attitude within academia that collections-​based research was not an appropriate project for a thesis or dissertation as compared to fieldwork (Sullivan and Childs 2003). This was exacerbated by the fact that potential researchers could not easily find appropriate collections because there were few ways to determine what repositories housed, except through word of mouth.

11.4  From crisis to crossroads It is time to back away from using ‘crisis’ in archaeological collections storage and curation because of the positive actions taken to help alleviate it in the last two decades. However, there is no one remedy that will work for managing all archaeological collections across the USA—​there are too many objects, samples, and associated hard copy and digital records in too many repositories owned by too many different entities. The following discussion identifies the ongoing actions, many of which are occurring simultaneously.

11.4.1 Raising awareness While some voices created some awareness of the plight of archaeological collections in the mid-​1970s and early 1980s, much more effort has been needed to impact the profession of archaeology itself (King 2009). Since archaeology has always focused on new discoveries through field-​based investigations, a growth in awareness depended on demonstrating the long-​term benefits of collections care and upholding the fundamental stewardship ethic of the profession (Barker 2003; Childs 2004; Trimble and Marino 2003). A new premise emerged that stewardship responsibilities for archaeological collections begin with the archaeologist and land owner/​developer/​CRM firm

230   S. Terry Childs during project planning, not only with the repository (Sullivan and Childs 2003). Among other things, archaeologists have an obligation to budget for collections care, create a collecting strategy to use during fieldwork, identify a repository to care for the collection, and work with repository staff long before a collection arrives at the facility (Sullivan and Childs 2003; Childs and Benden 2017). Awareness of collections issues should be augmented by training. Although most USA graduate programmes in archaeology still do not include a full course on collections management, from the field to the repository, several other efforts exist. A guide for instructors on how to incorporate collections management in existing archaeology courses or how to create new courses was recently released (Benden 2019a). along with training ideas on archival methods (Bauer-​Clapp and Kirakosian 2017). Critical components of these training ideas are objects-​based learning and hands-​on experiences with collections, which promote collections-​based research and an intimate understanding of collections issues (Jamieson 2015; Benden 2019a). Also, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) offers online seminars on collections management and use, which provide certified professional development opportunities for archaeologists. Another awareness tactic has been to identify the many stakeholders that must intersect with collections so they better understand and participate in their responsibilities (Childs 2011; Childs and Benden 2017). The CRM community has recently been responding well due to better awareness of applicable laws and regulations, as well as guidance on how to better budget for collections during project planning (Majewski 2010, 2019). The professional societies, particularly SAA and the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), have curation/​collections committees that advise their Board of Directors and undertake projects to improve awareness and encourage collections-​ based research. These professional Boards are asking their committees for best practices and standards associated with collections, which are critical to improve the knowledge base of their members (Knoll at al. 2016; Knoll and Huckell 2019; SHA 1993). On the other hand, granting institutions are often still remiss in the support of archaeological collections and their long-​term uses. These institutions usually do not insist on a budget line item for collections care in fieldwork project proposals. They also do not require applicants to identify the repository where field collections will be deposited and provide a repository curation agreement in a Data Management Plan. Most granting institutions do not adequately fund collections-​based research and the rehabilitation of existing collections. Slowly, albeit continuously, there are several important issues related to collections, from the field to the repository, that are getting more attention. These are: • Field methods—​ The problematic use of no-​ collection and in-​ field analysis strategies during fieldwork, which do not recover artefacts for long-​term preservation, was known decades ago as repositories were beginning to run out of space and curation costs were notable (Butler 1979). Recent studies have shown how these strategies negatively impact analysis and interpretation of a project, as well as future research, in terms of accuracy, adequacy, and reproducibility (Crane and Heilen

Finding space to store archaeological collections    231 2019; Heilen and Altschul 2013). The Archaeological Collections Consortium (see more about the ACC in Section 11.4.2) recognized that these field strategies would continue to be used, and perhaps increase due to curation costs and lack of repository space. The ACC developed best practices for using these field-​based strategies so that some useful data is retained and curated for future research (ACC 2019). • Collections-​based research—​While several archaeologists (Cantwell et al. 1981; Lipe 1974) were early advocates for the value and potential of anthropological research collections, Nelson and Shears (1996) first documented an increase in collections-​based research for theses and dissertations in academia. These revelations inspired hope that academia would value collections research as much as fieldwork and not recover many more collections to curate; make university-​ based collections more accessible for research; and offer coursework on collections management and use. Unfortunately, a recent survey of anthropology and archaeology departments does not reveal any significant changes in these attitudes and activities within academia (E. Sonderman 2018). However, improved awareness of and actual collections-​based research is noticeably increasing based on recent publications about the rewards and discoveries of such research (Allen and Ford 2019; King 2009, 2016, 2019). There are important articles on how to research existing collections, including how to overcome the challenges that may exist (Frieman and Janz 2018; Hegemon et al. 2017; King 2016, 2019; Stone 2018). Others highlight the discoveries that can be made researching orphan collections (MacFarland and Vokes 2016; Voss 2012; Voss and Kane 2012). Additionally, archaeologists who specialize in a particular subfield of the discipline, such as climate change, are promoting the use of collections for research (St. Amand et al. 2020). • Aids to finding objects and collections appropriate to a researcher’s interest— The lack of information about repository holdings is changing as more repositories provide catalogues and finding aids online (Benden 2019b; Hansen 2019; King 2009). Some are participating in large research databases, such as the Global Registry of Scientific Collections (http://​scic​oll.org/​grscic​oll.html), although there is no such database for archaeological collections in the USA. Also, guidance to repositories on how to facilitate collections research is available (King and Samford 2019). Slowly, some archaeologists are identifying the repository that stores and curates the related collection in final reports and other publications, particularly as publishers improve submission requirements. Unfortunately, most repository databases have a unique nomenclature to describe their objects and records. This means that it may be hard to find the items a researcher is looking for. The lack of a standardized nomenclature used across all repository databases significantly limits the interoperability of data across repository systems to facilitate and promote research at this time, although awareness of the need to standardize is increasing. • Deaccessioning—​Deaccessioning, the process to permanently remove objects or collections from ownership by a repository or other owner such as a government agency, has been opposed by many archaeologists for decades, principally

232   S. Terry Childs because it undermines the stewardship ethic of archaeology (Childs 1999, 2019; R. Sonderman 1996). Reduced repository space, rising curation costs, and active support have resulted in some increased attention and use of deaccessioning non-​ federal collections following museum standards (Domeschiel and Trimble 2019; Green and Meister 2009; Kersel 2015; Lyons et al. 2006; Jamieson 2015; Praetzellis and Costello 2002). The federal government is also taking deaccessioning as a collection management tool seriously. It issued proposed deaccessioning regulations in 2014 under 36 CFR 79, based on rigorous and transparent procedures. There was extensive public comment on the proposed regulations from professional societies, Native American tribes, individuals, government agencies, and public institutions, including repositories. Very few were against deaccessioning while many had constructive suggestions to improve the process and outcomes (Childs 2019). The proposed regulations are being revised based on the public comments and the final version may be released in the near future. If this happens, state, tribal, and local government agencies may use the new regulations as a model for deaccessioning other government objects and collections. • Significance of collections—​In another attempt to deal with dwindling storage capacities of repositories and the need to prioritize inadequate funding resources, are all collections equally significant and necessary to curate for future use? Several archaeologists are pressing for this issue to be taken seriously (Childs 2011; Jamieson 2015; Warner 2019), while others have been working to develop appropriate significance criteria for historical archaeology (Schacht 2011) and archaeological collections in general (Racine et al. 2009). There are several inherent problems with this issue: obtaining agreement on suitable significance criteria by both curators and archaeologists; developing a schedule to assess significance once a collection arrives at a repository; and executing a consistent process that requires considerable staff resources and time. It is important that this issue is being discussed, however, so that increased awareness and acceptance might lead to a standardized solution in the future. If significance determinations become a uniform strategy, then deaccessioning is necessary to carry out some decisions.

11.4.2  Cooperation Success at improving the status of archaeological collections and making actions more sustainable at all phases of a collection’s management cycle (Childs and Benden 2017) is dependent on cooperation and communication among many people. This is happening in a number of ways. There are many hundreds of Native American tribes, Native Hawaiian organizations, and Alaska Native villages across the USA of which 574 are currently federally recognized. These communities have widely divergent views about archaeology and the curation and use of recovered collections (Ferguson 1996; Neller 2019). For example,

Finding space to store archaeological collections    233 the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) recently passed Resolution SD-​ 15-​025 to urge the Department of the Interior to allow Indian tribes to rebury artefacts recovered during development projects instead of curating them as required under 36 CFR 79. NCAI argues that removal of artefacts from the earth goes against the cultural and spiritual beliefs of some tribes, ‘erases the tribal footprint on the land’ and ‘promotes the mentality and practice of putting Native American cultures on display’ (NCAI 2015: 2). On the other hand, many tribes value archaeological collections as a means to make tangible connections to their history and culture (Neller 2004, 2019). The NCAI resolution, and many archaeologists, argue that insensitivities and ignorance about tribal concerns and beliefs related to archaeology and recovered collections can be minimized through earnest consultation with Native American tribes (Atalay 2006; Ferguson 1996; NCAI 2015; Neller 2019; Watkins 2005). Fortunately, cooperation is happening in several ways. Many tribes have Tribal Historic Preservation Offices, are building their own repositories and cultural centres, are hiring trained, often native, personnel to run them, and are enacting tribal laws and policies concerning archaeological projects and collections (Nason 1999; Neller 2019). Some tribal repositories are curating collections for federal and state government agencies, in a spirit of cooperation. Tribes are being collaborated with on the development of new public exhibits that result in better interpretation of objects, new avenues of research, and more informed considerations for access, use, care, and interpretation (Goff 2019; Goff et al. 2019; Teeter et al. 2021). In addition, the School for Advanced Research produced guidance on effective collaboration between museums and tribal communities grounded in long-​term relationships and trust (School for Advanced Research 2017), an endeavour that would not have been possible several decades ago. There has been a longstanding need for qualified and interested people to help with the care and documentation of archaeological collections, which is now being addressed in notable ways. There are many opportunities for student internships and non-​student volunteers to work with archaeological collections (e.g. Farris 2019). The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) solicits and pays interns to work in both federal and non-​federal repositories that house collections for DOI bureaux through the National Conference of Preservation Education (DOI 2018). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed the Veterans Curation Program to teach skills to returning veterans of the armed forces and advance their curation responsibilities (Trimble and Farmer 2018; Domeschiel and Trimble 2019). Almost 800 veterans have been trained in documentation and data entry, analysis, and photography, while approximately 1,800 cubic feet of objects and 155 linear feet of associated records have been processed to meet the requirements in 36 CFR 79 by early 2022. Additionally, as more universities offer coursework that includes object-​based learning, students are participating in the care and rehabilitation of collections, as well as new research about them (Benden 2019a; MacFarland and Vokes 2016; Schiappacasse 2019). As previously noted, professional societies, such as the SAA and SHA and the trade association for CRM firms, the American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA), are more involved with collections issues. One important action by these

234   S. Terry Childs organizations is their financial and professional support of an intersocietal organization, the Archaeological Collections Consortium (ACC). The ACC mission is to work together on collection management issues of mutual interest in order to include multiple perspectives and not duplicate efforts. To date, the ACC has published a list of collections management definitions (ACC 2016), best practices for no-​collection and in-​field analysis field strategies (ACC 2019), and an edited volume on current issues regarding using and curating archaeological collections (Childs and Warner 2019). The ACC is embarking on a project to start an organization of archaeological repositories that gives voice to and unites repositories; provides a body for other organizations such as ACRA to work on collection issues related to CRM firms; supports cooperation to find solutions to key issues shared by the members; and promotes the future of archaeology through its collections. The ACC is also supporting the SHA Collections and Curation Committee’s Archaeological Repository Map (https://​sha-​gis.maps.arc​gis.com/​ apps/​opsda​shbo​ard/​index.html#/​6186a​3f99​a004​a00b​cedb​5823​20e2​7e2). This map, with a continuously updated database behind it, allows users to identify various archaeological repositories across the country and learn about fees charged, contact information, access to collections for research, and policy and standards used.

11.4.3 Federal and state government activities The important efforts by tribes and tribal agencies to address archaeological collections issues are mentioned above. Government agencies at the federal and state levels are also increasingly involved in collections preservation, accountability, and use due to ownership responsibilities required by law and existing regulations. The federal agencies that own land and are responsible and accountable for the archaeological collections recovered from those lands are of particular interest since they must follow 36 CFR 79. Many agencies are still dependent on non-​federal repositories curating their collections, such as the Department of the Interior (DOI 2017), Forest Service (Mitchell and Joyner 2015), and Army Corps of Engineers (Trimble and Farmer 2018). No non-​land-​managing agency owns archaeological collections of any size, except for the Smithsonian Institution whose employees conducted archaeological research and recovered collections for many decades from federal lands and curated those large collections (Thiessen and Roberts 2009). A major requirement in federal property law is knowing and tracking what an agency owns. This is why 36 CFR 79 requires the inventory of collections on a periodic basis by or for the agency owner. Inventory also facilitates agency accountability to USA taxpayers who fund much of the fieldwork being done and collections curated. Unfortunately, item-​by-​item inventories are very labour intensive, especially for agencies whose collections number in the multiple millions and are stored and curated by many non-​ federal repositories across the country. A crude but remarkable estimate3 of the number 3 

To calculate this estimate the following large federal land-​managing agencies were contacted or online reports consulted in 2020: Department of Agriculture (Forest Service); Department of Defense

Finding space to store archaeological collections    235 of archaeological objects and associated records from federal land-​managing agencies subject to the laws and regulations discussed above is at least 64 million plus 184,000 cubic feet of objects, along with well over 75,000 linear feet of associated records since several agencies could not provide the latter information. No data is currently available on the existing quantity of federal born digital associated records. Simultaneously, inventory and object catalogues are critical for facilitating research and other uses of federal and state collections (Emerson and Hoffman 2019; Hansen 2019; MacFarland and Vokes 2016). We now know much more about federal collections than we did two decades ago, for example, and some federal bureaux, such as the NPS, are providing selective object catalogue information to the public. Another positive outcome is the ability to engage the public and demonstrate the value of government spending on archaeology and collections. This is done through online exhibits, like those of several Department of the Interior bureaux and visible storage and behind-​the-​ scenes tours of collections at national park units, such as Mesa Verde National Park, Independence National Historical Park, and Fort Vancouver National Historical Site. The costs of curation, particularly the rising fees to curate new collections and rehabilitate old ones, have pushed many federal and state agencies to develop new strategies to both recover and store collections. Deaccessioning as a collection management tool is one that is discussed above. Unfortunately for long-​term research, no-​collection and in-​field analysis procedures are now used quite extensively by many federal and state agencies to minimize the quantity of artefacts curated (Lyons et al. 2006; Sagebiel et al. 2010). On the positive side, more agencies have agreements with repositories that formalize responsibilities. They also may provide financial and staffing assistance for specific projects. Another consideration when addressing some federal legal requirements has been to use alternative and collaborative mitigation plans that make use of existing collections rather than excavating new sites (Olson and Bailey 2019). Building and staffing new repositories is usually cost-​prohibitive. When a new repository is well justified, federal agencies are erecting ecologically sustainable buildings that benefit both the environment and the collections, such as at Mesa Verde National Park. More commonly, agencies are developing strategies to consolidate their collections into fewer repositories and working more closely with existing repositories. This is effective if planning avoids moving collections too far from where they were created due to strong interests of local communities, including tribes, and ensures that adequate facilities are available for researchers, descendant communities, and other publics. The NPS also has been working on consolidating collections from many of their park units with no curatorial staff into dedicated NPS regional curation facilities. The Army Corps of Engineers is collaborating with non-​federal repositories to determine the best repository(ies) in which to consolidate their collections (Trimble and Farmer 2018). At the state level, for (Air Force, Army, Army Corps of Engineers, Marine Corps, and Navy); Department of Energy (Los Alamos National Laboratory); Department of the Interior (Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service); and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

236   S. Terry Childs example, Colorado changed permitting requirements to allow greater flexibility in the curation of collections from survey and testing projects. Four key regional facilities increasingly serve as the primary repositories for statewide permits and History Colorado functions as the fallback repository (Wilshusen 2014). Some states have undertaken productive efforts to better handle the storage and curation of archaeological collections recovered from their state lands. In order to ensure that repositories meet basic standards of security, environmental controls, and staffing, among other things, Texas instituted an accreditation programme that repositories must satisfy to manage state-​owned collections (Johnson 2003). The state of Washington has a similar programme, but it is currently voluntary. Several states have undertaken state-​ wide surveys to identify as many archaeological repositories as possible, such as in Virginia, Arizona, Washington, and California and, in some cases, to learn the contents of those collections to facilitate access and use. Colorado conducted a multi-​year condition assessment of all state collections in local and regional repositories, which resulted in much stronger submission guidelines and standards for state-​owned archaeological collections (History Colorado 2018). Additionally, some state agencies, such as Transportation Departments that repair and construct new roads, are supporting alternative mitigation strategies to rehabilitate the storage of, and research on, existing collections rather than excavate new sites (Olson and Bailey 2019; Wilshusen 2014). Finally, small grant programmes exist in a few states. The Society for California Archaeology fund projects that make orphan collections viable resources for research. Colorado’s state historic preservation grants have been awarded to evaluate, house, and report on orphan collections, and to release overdue reports on research about important collections.

11.4.4 Repository actions Repository staffs have been major players and innovators in many of the positive steps taken to curb the curation ‘crisis’, often in cooperation with CRM and academic archaeologists, government employees at all levels, tribes and other descendant communities, and national and regional professional organizations. Repositories are making other important strides to find solutions to the curation and storage issues in the USA. Two actions have been to convert immovable stack shelving to moveable compact shelving and to rehabilitate legacy collections (Marino 2004; MacFarland and Vokes 2016). Compact shelving significantly increases the total amount of storage space, while reboxing collections can also reduce the overall number of cubic feet of storage space previously used. These accomplishments occur primarily due to the fortitude and creativity of repository staffs who write grants to fund such efforts (e.g. Green and Meister 2009; Morehouse 2019). Repository staffs are often involved in the digitization of associated records, including photographs, and objects by 3D scanning and other technologies, particularly for facilitating online accessibility. This requires sizeable investments

Finding space to store archaeological collections    237 in technology and personnel to do the scanning that are usually obtained through grants (e.g. Hansen 2019). 3D scans and prints of objects have enormous potential for travelling exhibits and educational trunk programmes, as well as certain kinds of research, when properly curated (Knoll and Carver-​Kubik 2019). Unfortunately, some government managers and others think an object photo or 3D scan is a viable substitute so objects can be thrown away or deaccessioned to reduce curation costs. Clearly, the chemistry or microstructure of digital surrogates cannot be analysed (King 2009). A significant, recent development in the curation of USA archaeological collections has been a new type of repository dedicated to addressing the astonishing proliferation of digital associated records, both born digital and digitized hard copies (Benden and Taft 2019; Rivers Cofield and Majewski 2019). The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) was established in 2009 to both preserve digital records long term and make them knowable, searchable, and publicly accessible as a trusted digital repository (McManamon and Kintigh 2010). The staff at tDAR work closely with the Archaeology Data Service established in England in 1996 to provide guidelines and standards for, among others, archiving digital records and considerations in creating many different kinds of digital resources during fieldwork (https://​gui​des.arc​haeo​logy​data​serv​ice. ac.uk/​g2gp/​Conte​nts). The unique expertise required of digital curators is clear from the work at tDAR and underscores the need for a digital curator at any repository that tries to curate digital records, along with its object collections. Another important service is Open Context (https://​open​cont​ext.org), begun in 2005, which offers methods to improve the discoverability of project records, provide public access to them, and preserve records at the California Digital Library (Kansa 2012). Both efforts help users know where the artefactual collections from a project are located if the depositor provides that information. Repository staffs are better documenting the ownership of new collections, so that the issue of who is ultimately responsible for a collection is known. This documentation is done in accession or custodial records when a collection is accepted and, more often now, through curation agreements and contracts with CRM firms and government agencies (Rivers Cofield 2005). This knowledge reduces the number of orphan collections, helps with long-​term support of collections, and means that collections owners, whether the repository itself or a government agency, can be better accountable for their assets. When the first survey of repository fees was done in 1997/​1998, a shocking discovery was that most repositories had no idea of the true costs of storing and managing archaeological collections in order to determine curation fees (Childs and Kinsey 2003). Usually, repository staff called nearby repositories to learn what their fees were and assessed similar amounts. This has changed. Most repositories that charge fees know what their costs are, although fees have risen as realism set in (Childs et al. 2010). In order to be more sustainable, some repositories are using interest-​bearing accounts and creating endowments where they deposit curation fees for future use (Cordell et al. 2019; Lyons and Vokes 2010).

238   S. Terry Childs

11.5  Conclusion The ‘curation crisis’ began in the USA approximately 50 years ago, primarily due to the explosion of collections resulting from federal laws that authorized salvage archaeology prior to major development projects and the eventual recognition that the collections must be properly preserved for public benefit. Given the progress that has been made in the last 20 years, we are at a crossroads and moving from a ‘crisis’ to a chronic ‘problem’. Many aspects of collections storage and curation still need vital support and improvement, particularly from laggard academia and granting institutions. While awareness and involvement are growing among CRM firms, government agencies, and tribes, support for sustainable practices must continue to increase or we will be back in crisis mode. It is unlikely that any other country in the world has as many archaeological objects, associated records, or repositories caring for them as the USA. However, most countries are experiencing some of the same curatorial challenges discussed in this chapter due to the increase in legal mandates requiring salvage or rescue archaeology as urban and other development increases. Many of the remedies discussed should be applicable in other countries, while locally germane solutions are being developed such as rationalization of accessioned materials to produce more storage space in the United Kingdom (Baxter et al. 2018), reburial of sites in India (Singh 2018), and partage or sharing a collection among several institutions in the Middle East (Kersel 2015). The turning point from ‘crisis’ to ‘problem’ in the USA and the need to prevent a ‘crisis’ in other countries is dependent on better marketing the research, heritage, and interpretive values of archaeological collections within the discipline of archaeology and beyond (Domeschiel and Trimble 2019; Marquardt 2004). The values of collections can only be better understood through a holistic approach involving education, the promotion of collections-​based research and other uses of collections, improved access to collections, and involvement by professional societies, tribes, and the many other stakeholders involved in archaeology.

Acknowledgements Special thanks go to: Danielle Benden for critically reviewing an early draft of this chapter; Lisa Frehill, IMLS Senior Statistician, for helping me understand and work with the data in the Heritage Health Information Survey; and all the archaeologists and curators at the federal land-​managing agencies who provided information about their agency’s collections.

Finding space to store archaeological collections    239

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Chapter 12

Victims or v i c tors Universal museums and the debate on return and restitution, Africa’s perspective George Okello Abungu

12.1  Introduction: The Universal museum declaration The concept of ‘universal museums’ was first made explicit in 2002 when 19 major Western museums made a ‘declaration on the importance and value of universal museums’ (ICOM 2004a). In their statement they argued that ‘the universal admiration for the ancient civilization would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artefacts of the cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums’. The declaration goes on to state that ‘calls to repatriate objects that have belonged to museum collections for many years . . . should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but also the people of every nation’ (ICOM 2004a). In other words, while all museums hold collections of various kinds and origins, these so-​called universal museums were ‘unique’ as their collections transcended national boundaries and so were universal in nature and representation. They argued, therefore, that their institutions represented the face of all humanity, and as such belonged to the global community on whose behalf they existed (Cuno 2008; Gryseels 2004; ICOM 2004a; MacGregor 2004). However, others have argued that this declaration was nothing but a product of a few privileged Western museums that, when confronted with the realities of their past, especially of the presence of contested collections in their ownership, simply declared themselves to be universal (Abungu 2004, 2008b; Eluyemi and Akanbiemu 2004; Lewis 2004). For example, Lewis (2004: 379) noted that the real purpose of the declaration was a higher degree of immunity from claims for repatriation from their collections; it was ‘a statement of self-​interest made by a group representing some of the world’s richest

248   George Okello Abungu museums’ and the ‘presumption that a museum with universally defined objectives may be considered exempt from such demands is specious’ (Lewis 2004: 379). Universal museums are also increasingly out of step with political and professional developments and practices in the current world where the primary concern relates to the ability of people to present their cultural heritage in their own territories rather than in ‘universal museums’. Today, the nation state has priority over its cultural heritage. Both the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, as well as the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, are clear on the principle ‘that the cultural property of a nation provides an important means of expressing its cultural identity in its own territory’ (Lewis 2004: 380). All the museum signatories to the declaration were Western based (Europe and North America) with huge collections, a substantial proportion being from outside their national boundaries. Moreover, some of these collections are contested in terms of past acquisition and ownership, with pending cases of restitution and return. The more the declaration was contextualized the more it appeared as if these museums were crafting a new pedigree of institution that set themselves apart from others. The declaration was oblivious to the realities of the demands for accountability in terms of collection ownership, particularly in relation to past historical injustices, including the acquisition of the very collections they claimed to hold in trust for humanity. Yet at the same time their pretence that they were speaking on behalf of the ‘international museum community’ was quickly criticized as false and absurd (Abungu 2004). While the universal museums’ proponents were conscious of the past injustices and the controversies surrounding some of their collections, assuming that the rest of the world would consider their baptism as an obvious solution and fait accompli, was baffling. It was as if they did not anticipate the reading of their intentions, which came to be understood as a camouflage to past atrocities associated with some of their collections and of Western museum amnesia without apology or a sense of responsibility. There has been no doubt from the beginning that the whole argument was about ownership of heritage rather than provision of universal service to all humanity. The reaction to the concept was predictably swift, and furious (Curtis 2006; Fiskesjo 2010; Hicks 2020; Lewis 2004), especially from parts of the world that still felt injured by the unjust actions of colonialism and the continued denial of responsibility and contested ownership of heritage (Abungu 2004, 2008b; Eluyemi and Akanbiemu 2004; Godonou 2007; Hamilakis 2011; Singh 2009). This chapter proposes that the concept of the universal museum is a response to the pressure on the said museums and Western nations to address what is considered illegally present in their collections by avoiding the question of restitution and return, afraid that their stores will be emptied. This is despite the fact that restitution is not about emptying the vaults of the big museums but about the return of specific objects that are vital to the understanding of the history of a nation or community, and ongoing establishment of its cultural identity (Abungu 2004). Moreover, restitution as it stands today should be considered more than just the return of objects acquired under circumstances

Victims or victors    249 of inequality. It should also be a means of rectifying the mistakes of the past through open and truthful dialogue that ultimately will result in more balanced power relations between the Global North and Global South. It should be about creating new, transparent partnerships with equal voices and equal interests. It should involve a partnership that promotes equal participation in co-​research, co-​curation, co-​exhibition, and co-​conservation of objects, especially those that have found a home in the north and are now part of the heritage of such places. Only through that will the narratives of equality, respect between peoples, and the need for sharing rather than appropriating humanity’s heritage be realized (Abungu 2018a). This is not to say that the question of restitution is the preserve of the African continent. On the contrary, the majority of continents that have suffered colonialism, or some form of conquest and subjugation, have pending issues of restitution and return.

12.2  The making of a dilemma: Africa and colonialism The continent of Africa experienced conquest, colonialism, and domination by foreign powers. Africa was not only a victim of colonialism, but also of slavery and the slave trade that negatively impacted its growth and development. This trade extracted from the continent some of its most able-​bodied humans rendering many places either undeveloped or a wasteland (Abungu 2019; Hicks 2020; Vawda 2019). The colonialism that followed, with its attendant acts of exploitation, subjugation, and at times genocide, dominated labour, resources, heritage, and the human spirit (Abungu 2019; Vawda 2019). A number of European powers decided to take the continent into their possession at a meeting held in Berlin under the chairmanship of Germany’s Otto von Bismarck in 1885, which carved Africa into territorial pieces under the influence of occupying powers. With a stroke of the pen, followed by military expeditions, and the pacification by Christian missionaries, different parts of Africa became colonies and protectorates of the British, French, Germans, Belgians, Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, and others. The major powers with substantial land possessions were, however, Britain, France, and Germany. With museums beginning to thrive in Europe around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often with patronage from the aristocracy and the general ruling class, colonialism also offered opportunities for conquest, looting, and stockpiling. Heritage extraction, appropriation, and transfer were therefore carried out through well-​organized expeditions that often accompanied military ones (Hicks 2020; Sarr and Savoy 2018). Museums in the West were part of this colonial project and trained staff to join the military expeditions with the sole purpose of looting the ‘right’ things for the institutions. In the words of Michelle Leiris in a letter to his wife dated 19 September 1931: ‘We pilfer from the Africans under the pretext of teaching others how to love them

250   George Okello Abungu and get to know their culture, that is, when all is said and done, to train even more ethnographers, so they can head off to encounter them and “love and pilfer” from them as well’ (cited in Sarr and Savoy 2018: preface). Other means of collecting heritage often under the patronage of the colonial administration included missionaries and scholars in the form of archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, and engineers, who entered Africa under the guise of research missions (Abungu 2019; Apoh and Mehler 2020; Sarr and Savoy 2018). Missionaries, for example, were at the forefront of collecting, both as a form of iconoclasm as well as for their museums at home. Through their actions sacred objects were either destroyed as anti-​Christian or salvaged, packaged, and shipped abroad by European merchants (Apoh and Mehler 2020; Leijten 2015). Formal colonization of African societies after the Berlin Conference of 1884–​1885 saw well-​calculated and sustained looting of African artworks (Nkrumah 1962), with most of the objects willed, sold, or gifted to museums in Europe while others circulated on the global art market, for auction and exchange, at times ending up in private galleries. The destruction caused to sites and monuments across the continent is still vividly evident today. The pyramids of the Sudan in Meroe, for instance, are a witness to this looting and to this day bear the scars of destruction for treasures. The very best of the collections made during these expeditions and missions, whether ethnographic or archaeological, ended up in museums and universities in Europe and America, some of whom have declared themselves ‘universal museums’. Africa, moreover, continues to suffer through illegal traffic of its cultural property including archaeological heritage through illegal excavations, theft, and clandestine transfer to richer nations (Abungu 2008a, b, 2015, 2019; Charney 2015). Western museums and academic institutions were not only beneficiaries of the colonial project of illegal appropriation, they were an active part of it (Abungu 2015, 2019; Hicks 2020; Sarr and Savoy 2018). The colonial agenda also led to the colonization of the mind, body, and spirit of the colonized as the foreign powers, together with their missionary colleagues, embarked on a crusade of evangelization through what they considered ‘civilizing the uncivilized’ by introducing Western education, religion, and mannerisms. Even the concept of the museum in its Western sense was introduced during this time with the main objectives of collecting local heritage for Western museums (Arinze 1997; Mawere et al. 2015). Locally created museums acted as places to tell the European narrative of what an African was, often in a negative and derogatory way through ethnographic collections that presented communities as being static in time and space. In the early twentieth century, what came to be known as national museums in Africa were also established. They engaged primarily in collecting artefacts considered representative of the societies within the colonies, often for the pleasure and leisure of colonial expatriates. Anthropology and archaeology, the two scientific disciplines dealing directly with human culture, provided a means for European scholars to study the societies they had colonized with express view of what was considered a need to ‘civilize’ the continent. Other reasons given were that the Indigenous cultures were on the verge of disappearance and needed salvaging through anthropological studies. Underlying this larger project of siphoning Africa’s

Victims or victors    251 rich heritage was rising demand in the West, following what was considered Europe’s ‘discovery’ of African art that met Western aesthetic criteria for art. In addition to being collection points for heritage and places of ethnographizing the other, museums in Africa became bases for Western scholars and researchers with archaeological, anthropological, historical, medical, and other research interests in the colonized countries/​regions (Abungu 1997, 2002, 2019). While not all material collected from the various African countries was sent to Western museums, and neither were all the researchers unethical in their approaches to their work, a large quantity of material considered the best, including archaeological collections, was often transferred to Western museums under the pretext of further analysis never to return. Some colonial administrators and researchers within the museums did engage in unethical practices including racial and racist studies of communities in order to demonstrate differences between white and black people as well as in the digging and transfer of dead bodies to European medical facilities for what was claimed to be scientific medical experiments (Henrichsen 2020). Many museums and medical facilities in Europe still hold large numbers of human remains from across the world, including from Africa (see Gabriel and Dahl 2008; this volume: Chapters 2, 3, and 20). Since museums in the West were beneficiaries of forced and ‘voluntary’ acquisition of heritage, and were not merely passive participants, they cannot simply wish away the atrocities inflicted upon African societies by some declaration of a global representation without consultation. It is not lost on many that even today there are many pending matters to be addressed that are not only confined to material heritage in European collections. Associated with these collections are difficult historical experiences of atrocities. There was genocide, murder, looting, and invasion, such as experienced during the Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania (1905–​1907), and Benin Kingdom (1897) when British troops carted away royal bronzes that now don many museums in Europe and North America. There was the killing of political and religious leaders, as well as common people as in the Herero, Nama, and San genocide in Namibia (1904–​1908), the beheading of the resistant Nandi leader Koitalel in Kenya (1905), and the near elimination of the Khoisan people in Southern Africa, all in the name of civilization. One of the main results of such actions was the transfer of huge quantities of heritage resources and human remains by colonial powers to Western museums that today claim universal status. These scars are difficult to erase with denial, brinkmanship, or mere proclamations. The drums of the ancestors and their instruments of power, authority, and nationhood, the musical instruments of the great musicians and artists, representations of ancestors and the spirit world that were said to be works of devil worship and signs of heathens to be collected and burnt, ended up in museums in the West as prized collections. It is the presence of this contested heritage and their nature and origins that these museums want to be recognized as universal and be exempt from any responsibility emanating from their past unethical acquisition practices. These acts of appropriation, and the subsequent denial and refusal to address these past injustices, are what have led to the call for return, restitution, and even reparation. To avoid the

252   George Okello Abungu responsibility of addressing these historical injustices, hoping that time will heal the wounds of the past, the institutions currently holding these collections have from time to time responded differently. It is in this context that the concept of the universal museums and the clamour for restitution should be understood and debated.

12.3  Restitution: The Debate The terms restitution, return, and repatriation have been used interchangeably in the domain of heritage discourse regarding past acquisitions of heritage resource and present demands for their return. The terminologies are related in addressing injustices concerning heritage acquisition and retention by the West. Restitution is the term used to refer to the act of returning cultural or natural specimens, objects, works of art, or other material to claimants, often referred to as source country or source communities. Often these are materials/​objects whose acquisition in the past is contested and that are considered by the claimants as important in their lives or in the lives of their societies and people (MBow 2009). Prott and O’Keefe (1989: 832) and Carducci (2008: 128), taking a more strictly legalistic definition, state that restitution often refers to cultural material that has been removed illegally from its country of origin, with the illegality referring to the legislation in force in the country of origin at the time that the material was removed. Restitution may, however, involve the claim to return to the original claimants, material objects whose ownership is perceived to have been acquired under unjust circumstances such as war bootie, looted objects, objects obtained through theft, and the desecration of graves and ancestors for human remains. It carries with it the meaning that there is an original wrong to address and that the returning act is part of righting that wrong (recompense) and as such is social justice. ‘Restitution’ is often used more for cultural objects, while ‘repatriation’ is more frequently employed for human remains. Return on the other hand may just mean giving something back, without the recompense element, although Carducci (2008: 128) considers return broader than restitution stating that ‘return generally refers to cultural property that is to be returned to the state country of origin, without a specific judgment as to whether removal from that country was illegal or not at the time it occurred’. In the case of this chapter, however, restitution is used in its broadest sense and is inclusive of all the other terminologies. While European museums have been largely dogged by controversies emanating from collections acquired in the respective colonized territories, and the looted ones during wars such as the forceful Nazi acquisition of art works from Jewish families in Germany and occupied territories, some European and North America museums have also illicitly acquired collections from other parts of the world. In Europe, Greece, and Italy, for example, have been particularly insistent on the return of collections illegally acquired by European and North American museums. The specific discussion of the restitution of African heritage from museums in Europe and North America is not a new subject of debate and can be traced as far back as the colonial period (Apoh and

Victims or victors    253 Mehler 2020) and after independence, but the question of heritage restitution found in the museums in Europe has recently become a major topic of discussion (DeBlock 2019; Hicks 2020; Joy 2020; Tythacott and Arvanitis 2014). However, heritage practitioners, activists, historians, and politicians from the Global South and early independence African leaders have at different times raised these issues previously, considering them the unfinished agenda of colonialism (Nkrumah 1962). One of the most well-​known voices on the subject of return was Moukhtar Mbow, the first and only African Director General of UNESCO who, on 7 June 1978, during a presentation to the General Conference of State Parties to UNESCO, made a passionate appeal to the various governments and states parties to consider restituting heritage of significance and value to people who made and cherished them. In a presentation entitled ‘a plea for restitution of an irreplaceable cultural heritage to those who created it’ Mbow eloquently stated that, ‘one of the most noble incarnations of a people’s genius is its cultural heritage built over centuries’ (Mbow 2009: 30). He observed that throughout history, people have been robbed of this priceless portion of inheritance ‘in which their enduring identity finds its embodiment’ (Mbow 2009: 30). Noting that it is this heritage that perpetuates and renews the spirit of nations and that have become objects of plunder, he stated that taking this heritage does not only rob the people of their memory and greater self-​knowledge but also denies the opportunity for others to understand them better. Decrying the wanton destruction and plundering of heritage, including of archaeological sites due to traffickers and markets, Mbow was categorical that the victims were ‘the men and women of these countries [who] have the right to recover these cultural assets which are part of their being’ (2009: 30). Mbow recognized the importance of sharing heritage saying that whatever people produce does not speak to them alone. He also noted that communities are always willing to share in the knowledge of their creation and are happy to see that other people appreciate the works of their ancestor. He observed that some of the heritage that had been taken in the past had become part of the cultural landscape of their adopted homes and that it would not be appropriate to sever their symbolic links and roots. He was, however, clear on the need to return those objects that had deeper meaning and significance to communities stating that ‘these men and women who have been deprived of their cultural heritage therefore ask for the return of at least the art treasures which best represent their culture, which they feel are the most vital and whose absence causes them the most anguish’ (Mbow 2009: 30). Mbow may have been speaking as the Director General of UNESCO and therefore on behalf of the world, but his motivations also lay in a continent reckoned to have lost as much as 90% of its cultural heritage (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 3). Coming from Senegal, one of the former colonies of France and where the latter has begun the process of restituting some cultural objects, Mbow had first-​ hand experience witnessing the suffering through disempowerment of communities who have faced cultural plunder and theft. While the debate on the restitution and return of cultural material is just as old as the acts of plunder of the same, and that in the foregoing periods there have been successful restitutions, such as those of the vigango memorial posts of the Mijijekenda people of

254   George Okello Abungu Kenya (Lacey 2006; Udvardy et al. 2003), at no time has this debate gathered such a momentum and attention as it has in the twenty-​first century. The overwhelming global debate on restitution and return, that for years was wished away by the West, emerged with full force after European political leaders started weighing in on the subject in the 2010s. At last, it has dawned on the present generation that this is a problem that one cannot ignore, and which requires tangible remedial actions. These actions include the admission that colonialism was evil, led to suffering of people, and resulted in a loss of treasured heritage from the Global South to the Global North. Consequently, a healing and rectification process must take place to placate and correct the injustices of the past. If restitution and return is one of the ways of doing this so let it be; however, denial and creation of super facilities in the West in the name of universal museums or encyclopaedic museums for the purpose of maintaining the status quo is proving untenable.

12.4  The Sarr–​Savoy report and its implications The imbalance in power relations between the North and the South created by colonialism, and still in play today, cannot allow for the realization of restitution, return, repatriation, and reparation. For example, instead of looking at these requests as a means to addressing historical injustices, they have too often been seen as emanating from ‘a grumbling South’. It took until 2017, when the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, unlocked the discussion, providing debates on restitution and return with more impetus than ever before. One wonders why it needed to take more than 100 years, and the President of France, to recognize that African children deserved to see and enjoy their heritage in Africa just like French children were able to in France, for this debate to get worldwide attention. On 28 March 2017, Emmanuel Macron, while addressing students and faculty at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, stated that: I cannot accept that a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage is kept in France . . . Within five years I want the conditions to exist for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage to Africa . . . The best tribute I can pay, not only to those artists but also to those Africans and Europeans who fought to safeguard those works, is to do everything possible to bring them back. (cited in Joy 2020: 48)

He subsequently set up a commission to examine the issue and recommend appropriate action, appointing the Senegalese economist Felwin Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy to provide a report on the provenance and status of African cultural objects in French museums. Completed in November 2018, the report attracted international attention and emphasized the historical injustices of the past, and articulated

Victims or victors    255 a series of steps required that reflected what the authors called a ‘new relational ethics’ (Sarr and Savoy 2018). It recognized that the question of restitution of cultural material, be it archaeological or other, must be viewed within a wider lens of past and present global dynamics including colonialism, geopolitics, and globalization. These are the features that have shaped and defined human relations for some hundreds of years. In this arrangement Europe has elevated itself to occupy the centre while the rest of the world is perceived to be on the fringes or the periphery with North America (USA), being the exception. The centre has also been the source of conquest and disposition of others’ heritage. Classifying restitution as an act of transformative justice, Sarr and Savoy (2018) argued that restitution concerns consent by questioning the legality of displacement, harm by acknowledging the social and emotional damage of the displacement caused, and healing by recommending reintegrating the displaced objects in the countries and societies they came from. These are powerful arguments based on ethics, rights, and responsibilities irrespective of the time lapse since the injustices took place. Predictably there were those who supported and saw the report as a pioneering work that has given a body and structure to a complex subject of cultural appropriation against those—​while agreeing that injustices have taken place—​who still question the validity of its findings (see summary Lebovics 2021). The key issue here, however, is that there was an injustice and it must be corrected. The report itself introduced nothing new that had not been discussed in the public domain previously, especially in regard to colonial museum ‘collecting’, continued Western museum curatorial practices, and the culture of denial of past mistakes. The issues raised by Mbow (2009) among others are embedded in this report, but additionally it provided facts and figures on the damage caused and brought out the urgency of dealing with the challenges. The report pointed out that the use of heritage in the construction of particular narratives to define the ‘other’ creates unequal power relations, ensuring a continuous culture of dominance and privilege. It also recognized the role that some objects have in holding and guiding collective memory, without which people and communities become devoid of memory and live in anguish. One new addition is the bare-​knuckle approach that ‘African cultural heritage can no longer remain a prisoner of European Museums’ (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 1), a fact that has caused uneasiness among Western practitioners who feign amnesia or are constantly inventing solutions to avoid addressing historical injustices (Abungu 2019). The report further addresses methods of restitution while acknowledging the difficulties in place, which is better than the often-​ wholesale assertion that restitution is not an answer. While suggesting a state-​to-​state approach in the restitution of objects, it does also focus on communities and peoples as the ultimate owners. It does not champion mass repatriation that, in any case, is neither feasible nor advisable, something many have stated over the years (Abungu 2021). Due to past denials and the recent attention given to the subject, the discussion on restitution has taken its own direction and if not timely and properly managed could quickly degenerate into the unexpected. The engagement of cultural activists, as a result

256   George Okello Abungu of lukewarm reception of the report in the West, has been cause for worry. The outright refusal to engage in dialogue on the issue of restitution, such as the case of the British government and British Museum, or the delaying tactics applied by some Western governments and museums, such as through the use of the concepts of universal or encyclopaedic museums, have led to the growth of fierce proponents of restitution. Emboldened by Macron’s speech on restitution, Sarr and Savoy’s (2018) report, writings of scholars like Opoku (2019), web pages dedicated to restitution like that of Jos van Beurden in the Netherlands, and support by organizations such as George Soros’ Open Society, have amplified the commitment to heritage restitution and return, which has become a struggle inside and outside the museum arena (Lebovics 2021). On 12 June 2020, Mwazulu Diyabanza, a Congolese activist in France accompanied by four other activists, attempted to seize a nineteenth-​century funerary figure at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. He staged further protests in various museums across Europe. When asked why he had decided to stage a series of these dramatic museum protests directed at seeking reparations for the crimes perpetrated against Africa and Africans during the colonial era, he responded that: These reparations will be, for us, legal, monetary and sociocultural. It’s in that last aspect that—​because of the wrong that was done to us—​that we must recuperate our heritage. That’s why we have decided to engage in a combat to return all that was stolen from Africa. We believe that the first reparations must be sociocultural in order to allow the African people to reconcile with their past, with their history and with themselves. (Yeung 2020)

Diyabanza’s interventions have drawn the attention of the world to the long and continuing unresolved issue of restitution and the urgent necessity for Western nations and institutions to confront and tackle the illicit material appropriations perpetrated against individuals, communities, and societies in Africa, during and after the colonial era.

12.5  Restitution: Its significance in Africa Independence in Africa came at a cost and, although political leaders often raised the question of looted heritage resources, their hands were tied, as freedom from political control of nearly a hundred years of domination from the West was more urgent than haggling over cultural property. Aware of the power imbalance between the colonized and the colonizer it would be no surprise that the independence leaders could have formally or informally been asked to choose between independence and return. Restitution and return therefore remain an unsolved and unfinished agenda from colonialism. The

Victims or victors    257 ongoing discussion today can only, therefore, be considered as a natural process of decolonization. However, it is imperative that this decolonization is understood in terms that are meaningful to communities in Africa rather than decolonization as constructed by or for Western practice and philosophy. Thus, the African saying ‘if you do it for us without us, you are against us’ applies here. There is opportunity here not just for restitution or token collaboration, but also for decoloniality, which ‘is not constructed from or in opposition to European grand narratives, but rather from the philosophical, artistic and theoretical contributions that originate from the Global South’ (Muñiz-​Reed 2017: 101). Take for example Western approaches to conservation. Having extracted the very best of the cultural heritage of the African continent ‘objects’ were put through conservation processes with a view to preserving them forever in the name of ‘posterity’, irrespective of norms, traditions, and practices of their original locations. Such preservation practices have become museological standards across the world, despite traditions in many parts of Africa whereby some heritage is made to live, deteriorate, and expire in death and extinction. Such heritage is considered intertwined with human life and has spiritual elements that when their time comes must be released and left to go just as humans also live and die. A good example is the vigango of the Mijikenda people of the Kenya coast. These carved memorial posts represent the reincarnation of the dead elders and are erected within homesteads. They are exposed to the vagaries of nature and through natural attrition rot and disappear having played their role of hosting the spirits of the dead elder (Abungu 2019; Udvardy et al. 2003). They are therefore part of the society and need to live, die, and be buried within the settings of the same societies. As Western thinking and practice does not bestow in such heritage the same values but instead confines them to storage and glass cases, they turn them into ‘prisoners of Western practices’, denying them the right to live, die, and transform into the next world. In doing this, museums tie the societies that made this heritage to the unacceptable practice of holding the spiritual being/​life in perpetuity. While today museums, including archaeological museums, play crucial roles in the understanding of human origins, social and cultural developments, history and social relations, and serve as places of dialogue, learning, and reflection, the concept of permanence of objects in museums continues to create ruptures between and among societies. Archaeological collections have meanings and relevance to present day societies from where excavations take place and play roles in their lives and beliefs. Often surrounding communities, even if they do not have direct relations with archaeological sites, do appropriate and give meanings to them (see this volume: Chapter 5). In some cases, these sites become intrinsically associated with the wellbeing of society and excavations can be considered disturbances that cause fractures harmful to those societies. For example, along the Swahili coast of East Africa, where there are long periods of occupation, some archaeological sites have direct links to communities and have claimants. Doing archaeology in such areas is a sensitive exercise lest one interferes with ancestors and ancestral spirits (Abungu 1994, 1996, 2006, 2018b). Excavation and

258   George Okello Abungu extraction of material culture have also led to the exposure of ancestral skeletons, which in turn have been attributed to the evocation of bad omens and adversities, something that many archaeologists in the past, especially during the colonial times, were often quick to dismiss as superstition. These of course cause ruptures in relations between the archaeologists and the communities they work among. The appropriation of archaeological material for exhibitions into archaeological museums may similarly cause distress. It is important that archaeologists and archaeological museums take these matters into consideration in their work and presentation and avoid a Universalist approach where one size fits all. To achieve this, however, archaeologists must start to listen to the communities with whom they work. They have to start co-​creating and even co-​ exhibiting with the communities, understanding and appreciating what is acceptable and what is not. Of course, this should not lead to censoring knowledge or science but accepting that there are many sciences rather than one Western way of looking at science (Abungu et al. 2016). As the question of repatriation and return continues to be debated, one issue that is constantly raised is that of future wellbeing and survival of repatriated ‘heritages’ to their places of origin. There seems to be a failure in some parts of the museum world to imagine and construct museum concepts that are inclusive and adaptable to local situations, norms, practices, and beliefs especially those of the source communities (but see Kreps 2003; Abungu 2009). In some instances, there may be a need to accept that destruction of particular objects is the answer; in others, even the reburial of archaeological objects may be necessary. As discussion rages on the issue of restitution and return there is a need to rethink the kinds of museums needed in the African continent. This may require the disruption, deconstruction, and reconstruction of museums that reflects the reality of the continent and its people, a decolonization of a colonial institution that leads to true paradigm shift. There may be need for museums in the Global South to acknowledge and take into account the diversity of practices and beliefs, and that may be in contradiction with Western notion of collecting and retaining all material culture by any means necessary. Thus, the concept of ‘home’ for restituted materials may not be in line with the Western construct of a permanent building, laboratories, and storage, or even one that ensures permanent existence of all the collections. Home may be a forest, a space in the ground, a sacred site, or a water body where some restituted heritage may be laid to rest in peace so that their spirits can stop wandering and disturbing the living. This then questions the relevance of the concept of the so-​called universal or encyclopaedic museums to the communities of the Global South. Even the idea that they cater for the interests of the diaspora from the formerly colonized regions of the world are but a fallacy. Do diaspora communities lose their connections with their spiritual being just because they have relocated? The answer seems to be no. The conditions being placed on restitution claimants by the West, that for the objects to be returned to Africa they must subscribe to so-​called ‘Western standards’ by constructing similar museums and providing the same facilities for conservation, is irrelevant and deliberately undermines or delays the discussion on repatriation. Was heritage taken away because the standards of care were inadequate in Africa? To the

Victims or victors    259 contrary, it was organized looting of treasures for gainful means. Today, as the pressure mounts for restitution and return, the West also continues to invent new terminologies as delaying tactics. It has become common for international conferences organized and funded by the West to employ new terminologies such as ‘Shared Heritage’, ‘Heritage Circulation’, ‘Heritage Flow’, and ‘Heritage Modelling’ among others whose aim is to circumvent the discussion on restitution. Heritage is political and therefore has immense power depending on who is managing the narrative around it. For too long the West has used heritage to reinforce power imbalances between the Global South and Global North. The control of heritage and the narratives around it in many parts of the world, including in the Americas, Australia, and Africa, has led to perception of lesser people at times leading to annihilation of populations, genocide, theft of land, and appropriation of natural and heritage resources. The museums, borne at the times of conquests and colonization, have within their history and within the history of their collections deeply embedded controversies, contradictions, and contestations associated with these past atrocities. These have to be unpacked so that the pending agendas of the past can be debated, resolved, and settled. Archaeology as a discipline and practice was itself not always innocent in the early controversies. Some scholars used the discipline to infer imagined human differences and attribute any developments deemed complex in Africa to have been introduce from outside through influences by superior beings. Examples abound such as the pyramids of Egypt and Sudan, Great Zimbabwe, and the architectural achievements of the Swahili coast of East Africa. However, it is also worth noting that archaeology was also positively used to demystify these developments and ground them in local innovation giving a voice to the voiceless, a truly empowering narrative. This ‘double-​edged sword’ nature of archaeology has contributed to self-​reflection by scholars on the theory and practice of their discipline. Thus, today archaeology provides a voice of reason including for formerly marginalized and minoritized communities. Through approaches such as community archaeology, the voices of the victims of discrimination have begun to find a way into scholarly narratives and journals (Abungu et al. 2016; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016). The question, however, is whether these voices have found their way into the archaeological museums of today. Many of these museums are known to concentrate on tangible archaeological material culture at the expense of the intangible community knowledge that comes with them. For example, the archaeology of Africa is dominated by pottery studies, the presence or absence of which is often interpreted to trace particular populations and their movements across the continent. Rarely do scholars concentrate on the archaeology of innovation such as development of metallurgy, the contribution to architecture, science, and knowledge. Presenting Africans’ past in European archaeological museums is like presenting people constantly on the move, with conflicts and wars as part of their normal lives. It is crucial to critically re-​look and rethink some of these museum narratives with a view to deconstructing and decolonizing the same. It is not just enough to repatriate or return the archaeological material, but more importantly to question the presentations, interpretations, and narratives. The question of who is presenting who and how is therefore crucial to the decolonization agenda of archaeological museums, especially in the West.

260   George Okello Abungu It is clear that independence for African countries did not bring much needed tangible change, leaving the existing status quo with the imbalance in power relations between the North and the South maintained through neo-​colonialism and economic dependence of the formerly colonies on the former colonial powers. Despite the political rhetoric of human rights and equality advocated by, among others, the United Nations, the past is still the present. Institutions of research in the South still depend for their funding and patronage on the North and that comes with conditions such as inclusion of researchers from the north in any projects being carried in the Global South. Even publication platforms that validate research findings are largely all based in the West. There have been strong voices from the African continent that have championed the case of restitution as they live this experience. In Kenya, for example, the vigango or carved human figure/​grave posts of the Mijikenda peoples of the coast have been looted since colonial times but more intensively since the early 1970s. Popular as works of art among Western collectors and museums, these carved wooden figures have been the subject of return especially from the USA where universities and museums have faced criticism, widespread media coverage, and academic scrutiny (Lacey 2006; Udvardy, Giles, and Mizanze 2003). This has led to substantial numbers being returned to Kenya and to their communities (Abungu 2011; Udvardy, Giles, and Mizanze 2003). For example, in 1985, a kigango (singular) was stolen from a family in Kenya and traced by a researcher who had studied it at her university museum and subsequently brought it back. This took place after the intervention of many individuals and organizations, including the Kenyan government; the return was emotional just as it was human. It was the first to be returned after a personal intervention of the Minister of Culture of Kenya, at the time making a trip to the US in the company of senior members of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) the country’s custodians of heritage. On its return to the affected family, there was joy and bewilderment when they received back their beloved kigango, considered a member of the family. They stated that they knew he had gone for a long journey but that one day he would return back home and indeed he came back. During his absence the family befell calamities, famine, diseases, and general bad luck but, now that he was back, they had faith that these were going to be things of the past. This is the power and reality of heritage considered to be a living member of the community in Africa that directly affects the lives of the people. The West and its curators do not live this life and it is not possible for them to understand the pain and anguish families of violently robbed heritage/​spirit experience.

12.6  Benin Bronzes coming home: Catalyst for final solution or strategy for buying time? No material culture ‘in captivity’ in recent human history has held the gaze and imagination of the world like the Benin Bronzes that belonged to the Oba of Benin. These

Victims or victors    261 were looted by the British army in 1897 from the Kingdom of Benin, in present day Nigeria (Apoh and Mehler 2020; Ekpo 1997; Hicks 2020) and scattered all over the world to museums, galleries, public and private collections (Hicks 2020). For years, heritage professionals, communities, historians, activists, politicians, and governments have been seeking their return repeatedly urging the British Museum in London, the Musée du Quai Branly–​Jacques Chirac in Paris, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and the more recently founded Humboldt Forum in Berlin among others to take action (Folarin 1998; Opoku 2019; Willet 2000). But from 2019, and notably in 2021, the scrutiny and pace of action escalated significantly. For more than a century, museums in the West have managed to cling on to these bronzes despite the call for return. Many initiatives have been inventively put in place to negotiate the way forward, often avoiding direct return of looted objects, such as through the formation of the so-​called the Benin Dialogue Group or the idea of the universal museum (Gundu 2020; Hicks 2020; Opoku 2019). Initiatives to address the issues have often faltered as holding museums are adamant that they should keep their collections only giving options of short or long-​term loans to the original owners. It is worth noting that, in restitution discussions, some persons or groups have found a way to pose as intermediaries between owners of heritage and those currently holding it, especially as in the case of the Benin Bronzes where the Kingdom of Edo has identified ‘imposters’. In a sternly worded statement made to the News Agency of Nigeria from the royalty, the Oba of Benin, Oba Ewuare II, disowned two groups, which he described as ‘impostors’ fronting the return of artefacts (National Accord 2021). The statement noted that ‘the individuals and persons who parade themselves as official representatives of the “Legacy Restoration Trust” and “Legal Restoration Trust” were neither known nor authorized by the Oba of Benin.’ The statement further affirmed the Oba of Benin as the original owner of the looted artefacts and the custodian of Benin customs and tradition. Cautioning the so-​ called imposters, the authorities state ‘that anyone caught engaging in such unwholesome activities would be treated as a fraudster and perceived as an enemy working against the interest of the Benin Kingdom and the Benin people’ (National Accord 2021). Entitled ‘The renewed call for the return of looted Benin artifacts’ the statement further notes that ‘His Royal Majesty, Omo N’ Edo Uku Akpolokpolo, Oba Ewuare II, Oba of Benin remains the legitimate custodian of all insignia, symbols and such other artifacts depicting the rich cultural heritage of the Benin people’, adding that ‘the only recognised legal entities for this remained the Oba Ewuare II Foundation and the Benin Traditional Council (NAN)’. While this statement from the Kingdom notes that it is only the Oba of Benin, or his duly authorized representatives or body corporate, that could interact or have dealings with any foreign donors, missions, or any other international institutions globally in respect of the looted Benin artefacts, it is not clear what implications this has in relation to the so-​called ‘Benin Dialogue Group’. The assumption, however, has been that they are not affiliated with the imposters and that they fall under the category that the Oba or his representatives can deal with. The statement, however, demonstrates the sensitivity and importance in which this restitution is taken within Benin and the potential internal

262   George Okello Abungu conflicts that may arise between the Edo State, the Benin Kingdom, and even the federal government in terms of not only the negotiation process but the final home of the pieces. In 2020, the British Museum proposed to carry out archaeological excavation in Benin City in addition to helping put up a museum where objects retrieved would be exhibited as part of their ‘pay back’ for holding the Benin Bronzes. Again, this appears to be a tactical way of avoiding returning the original objects with the assumption that archaeological excavations will produce finds worth creating a museum exhibition. However, while the common and collective European commitment to retaining the ill-​gotten colonial heritage has been steadfast over the last 100 years, this uncompromising stance of no return, began to break under sustained attack of international criticism. Today, different European countries have been taking conflicting positions on the issue of restitution, with countries such as the Netherlands appearing to have developed liberal policies accepting restitution to their former colonies (Boffey 2020). In 2021, Germany, through their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (PSK), and the Humboldt Forum, all indicated that they would be returning the Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria. In Britain itself, where the government position is in line with the British Museum’s position of no return, small regional museums and university museums seem to be rebelling and negotiating return on their own. Jesus College, University of Cambridge, was the first to declare its intention following student activism (Okundaye 2017) in the wake of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall Movement’. It was, however, with the University of Aberdeen’s confirmation that it would repatriate a bust of an Oba, or King of Benin ‘within weeks’ in 2021 that other institutions quickly followed suit (Lister-​Fell 2021). Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, with one of the largest British collections of bronzes, said if a claim were made the expectation was that works with an 1897 provenance would be returned. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery said it was ‘open to all possibilities’ and actively working with Nigerian groups. Others included the Great North Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne and Royal Pavilions and Museum in Brighton, which began researching the origin of their bronzes with a view to making decisions. The question is whether the British Museum will stand on the tide of public opinion to return the bronzes especially in view of actions taken by other smaller museums. The change of attitude seems to come with the recognition, by some of the former colonial powers, of the need to reconcile with their past, accept their responsibilities, and move forward. It is recognized that denial, wishing away restitution and the past were not only ineffective but also opened other wounds of the colonial past such as acts of genocide, wars, subjugation, and heritage appropriation. In view of this reality the German government acknowledged in 2021 that their actions in Namibia between 1904 and 1908, where thousands of Nama and Herero people were massacred by German troops, amounted to acts of genocide against the Nama and Herero people. They in turn committed to paying 1.1 billion Euros as compensation to the Namibian government over 30 years. While this may not compensate for the historical injuries, especially for the descendants of those who were directly affected and has even been dismissed by the Nama chief, it is an act that will go a long way towards acknowledging and taking

Victims or victors    263 responsibility for historical injustices in Africa by former powers. This discussion demonstrates that the issues of decolonization and repatriation are two of today’s most significant challenges facing museums around the world.

12.7  Conclusion The foregoing discussion attempts to demonstrate that brushing aside historical scars in the name of new world order is not often feasible. To the contrary, it breeds resistance and increases demands for attention. It is therefore imperative that these past difficult relations of inequality, discrimination, and denial of rights, be dealt with in a transparent and inclusive manner, in which even divergent voices are listened to and given an equal hearing. Only then will there be a beneficial relation that promotes understanding and sustainable partnerships for the good of all. If restitution of a people’s heritage, return of their human remains, rethinking and reinterpretation of narratives that define them, and readjustment of power relations can form part of corrective measures then so be it, leading to restorative justice that brings back human spirit as well as building new bridges of cooperation. Restitution in itself cannot be the final answer to past injustices; to the contrary it must be considered part of the decolonization process that is necessary in order to acknowledge past mistakes, balance power relations, address past injustices, and develop a new relationship befitting the present and respectful of all communities of the world. Recognizing and respecting rights including heritage rights and equality of all is a fundamental necessity for a new world order. It has however to be understood that the West cannot do this for the South without the South’s full participation. The principle that ‘if you do it for me without me you are against me’ must apply here. The practice of organizing debates and conferences funded and managed from the West and passing decisions that affect others elsewhere will not work. So is the practice of terminological somersaulting by inventing terms like ‘universal museums’, ‘encyclopaedic museums’, ‘shared heritage’, ‘heritage circulation’, and ‘heritage of or for humanity’. It is not only time in the museum world to invest in studies that will promote the understanding of heritage collections, such as provenance research, but also in promoting partnerships for researchers and professionals from the North and the South to start co-​curating, co-​researching, and co-​exhibiting through the introduction of curators/​researchers/​scholars/​artists in residence programmes, as part of building bridges and forging sustainable partnerships. It is time for open and truthful discussion between source communities and institutions holding materials including on restitution matters in the spirit of the ICOM Code of Ethics, that advocates for museums to ‘work in close collaborations with communities from which their collections originate as well as those they serve’ (ICOM 2004b: 31). States must also use available legal and other instruments to negotiate and fast-​track agendas on issues of restitution and return of heritage and human remains held in the West. Only then can there be a sure

264   George Okello Abungu way of establishing a new, ethical, and transparent relationship of respect, openness, and lasting sustainable cooperation for ‘a new future’ devoid of blame and denial.

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Victims or victors    267 Vawda, S. 2019. ‘Museums and Epistemology of Injustice: From Colonialism to Decoloniality’. Museum International 71 (1–​2): pp. 72–​9. Willet, F. 2000. ‘Restitution or Recirculation: Benin, Ife and Nok’. Journal of Museum Ethnography 12: pp. 123–​35. Yeung, P. 2020. ‘Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza: “France is still a colonial country”’. Al Jazeera: 11 November. Available at: https://​www.aljaze​era.com/​featu​res/​2020/​11/​11/​emery-​mwaz​ulu-​ diyaba​nza#:~:text=​The%2041%2Dy​ear%2Dold%2C,draw%20at​tent​ion%20to%20his%20c​ all [Accessed 21 May 2021].

Pa rt D

A LT E R NAT I V E M AT E R IA L I T I E S Beyond finds

Chapter 13

Un l o cking the p ot e nt ia l of archaeol o g i c a l archiv e s Gail Boyle

13.1  Defining archives and potential ‘. . . for many years, archaeological archives have been viewed very narrowly as a resource for scholars and a storage problem for museums. There is now a recognition that their true value must depend on their far greater importance as a resource to the widest possible archaeological community from scholars to the general public.’ (Merriman and Swain 1999: 264)

Experience suggests the use of the word archive can be problematic for both curators of archaeological collections and the public. In the broadest sense, an archive is a place where public records or historic documents are kept, or a collection of documents and records. Museums hold large amounts of archival material which might fall into this broader category. These records take many forms, for example, personal correspondence, administrative papers, and oral histories (Kirakosian and Bauer-​Clapp 2017). An ‘archaeological archive’, however, has a specific definition, which, in summary describes it as all the records and materials recovered during an archaeological project which have been identified for long-​term preservation. The European standard for archives provides a full definition and also describes their primary function which is ‘to make archaeological data, information and knowledge available, stable, consistent, and accessible for present and future generations’ (Perrin et al. 2013: 11). As yet there are no directly equivalent standards in other countries whereby the same fundamental requirements for archaeological archiving are adopted nationally. Discipline specific standards do exist, for example in the USA, but these tend to apply to the practice of curation itself, although

272   Gail Boyle the Society for American Archaeology has produced guidelines relative to preparing legacy archive collections (Knoll and Huckell 2019). Although this chapter takes the situation in the UK as its focus, it nevertheless highlights the scale of the issues facing archaeologists which is replicated internationally. Archaeological archives are generally a distinct group of entities within an overall archaeological collection and form one part of a much larger archaeological and heritage related evidence base. This means their potential cannot be unlocked without consideration of the multiple interrelationships they have with each other, other museum collection disciplines and other datasets. Unlocking this potential requires an understanding of their variable qualities and shared responsibilities for production, curation, and engagement. It is easy to assume their greatest potential relates to the understanding of the archaeological record, but their significance will be of variable quality and change over time. The UK’s Society for Museum Archaeology (SMA), describes the ways significance might vary as follows:

• • • • •

Archaeologically before, during, and after excavation. Post deposition (altered by research programmes and excavation results). Relative to the overall museum collection and other collection disciplines. Relative to display, handling, community engagement, learning, or creativity. Between stakeholders. (Baxter et al. 2018)

If archaeological significance can be so variable so, therefore, can archive potential.

13.2  Standardization and quality Archaeological archives vary enormously, ranging from those consisting of a few pieces of paper, to those with thousands of finds accompanied by extensive digital and paper records (Swain 2007). Their content will be affected by the period and responsibility for production, standards at that time, research agendas, investigative techniques, and resources available. Irrespective of their qualities, any inherent potential is severely curtailed if physical and intellectual access cannot be provided. In part this will be dependent on how archives are (or were) created, stored, and managed, but also on the range of information that is made available to others. Many museums hold materials and records from sites explored before modern fieldwork techniques were developed. These do not have the characteristics of archives that result from any form of advance planning. Experience suggests this distinction is often lost on those seeking to access earlier materials who expect the same level of professionalism and standardization as we have today. This standardization came about largely in

Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives    273 response to the quantity of excavated material produced by ‘rescue excavation’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Boyle 2019; Merriman and Swain 1999; Swain 2007). In the UK, the ‘Frere Report’ (DoE 1975) recognized the need for archive standardization and the ‘Dimbleby Report’ (DoE 1978) referenced museums as both recipients and stakeholders in the process (Merriman and Swain 1999). In 2007, Duncan H. Brown’s best practice guide was produced and this enabled archives to be created ‘and curated in such a way as to make them usable in the future’ (Brown 2007: ‘Foreword’). Archive ‘usability’ is key to ensuring that archives retain their potential to be re-​examined. This does not mean all archives created since the introduction of standards are ‘usable’, or that those assembled before are of little value. This was well-​demonstrated by the results of a Museum of London archive scoping study (Grew 2017), used to inform practical guidance on the rationalization of collections (Baxter et al. 2018). Museum staff delivered a ‘quality assessment’ of documentation associated with a 10% sample of the entire archive against a set of basic criteria. The sample covered archive compilation periods between the 1950s and 2000s and it was assumed that archive value in terms of its research potential would ‘depend heavily on the quality of the field records’ although the variability of these was a known factor (Grew 2017: 26). Analysis showed that whilst the quality of records had improved over time this was not universal and that the ‘assumption that there are some archives for which the records are either non-​existent or so poor as to be useless for all archaeological enquiry, was proved to be largely false’ (Grew 2017: 37). This situation will be replicated many times over throughout other museum archive collections so this type of study should be prioritized to get a better understanding of their latent potential. Positive outcomes from the scoping process for the collection were: •  •  •  •  • 

Increased knowledge and improved documentation. Confidence to advocate its strengths. Better understanding of strategic needs. Increased ability to respond to enquiries/​researchers. Increased access. (Baxter et al. 2018: 15–​16)

Any activity achieving these outcomes would have a beneficial impact on archive management whilst releasing archive potential. Museum archaeologists should also play an active role in ensuring the quality of the archives they receive by adhering to accepted professional standards and guidance. Better communication between producers and receivers of archives is a key requirement for this to happen. This was addressed by archaeologists in South West England in 2016 who discussed what could be done from each stakeholder’s perspective as part of the ‘Seeing the Light of Day’ project (Fernie et al. 2017). In 2018, SMA initiated a review of museum archaeology standards to address some of these issues, so as to provide new guidance (Boyle and Rawden 2020). The previous guidance, produced in 1992, did not reflect best practice or the wide scale changes across the sector regarding, for example, standardization (MGC 1992). Specific guidance

274   Gail Boyle on the ‘Preparation and Transfer of Archaeological Archives’ has been provided, which emphasizes the importance of the museum archaeologist’s role from the beginning of an archaeological project. It also references new initiatives relating to selection strategies because not everything found during excavation requires preservation in perpetuity (CIfA 2020). Ensuring archive quality to maintain future potential should be a shared endeavour which starts before a spade or digger hits the ground.

13.3  Access: Scale, cost, and responsibility Inaccessible archives are invisible and may as well not exist; they have little or no potential. Archive holders will vary in size and scope, from region to region, and in the resources available to them. The responsibility for curating and providing access to them is no longer the sole preserve of museums. This is a direct consequence of the changes to the UK’s planning system in the 1990s and the lack of statutory requirement for preserving the products of development-​led archaeology (Boyle 2019; Swain 2007: 122–​7). Issues related to problems museums face concerning the quantity of material being produced and the sustainability of the process is well documented (Booth et al. 2016; Boyle 2019; Edwards 2013; Merriman and Swain 1999; Swain 1998). Most fieldwork in the UK is now carried out by commercial units funded by developers required to carry out work in advance of development as part of the planning process. The principles of ‘Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning’ (PPG16) that enabled this to happen in England and Wales, along with those of ‘Planning Policy Statement 5: Planning for the Historic Environment’ have been carried forward into the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) (DoE 1990; MCHLG 2019). NPPF requires developers to ‘record and advance understanding of the significance of any heritage assets to be lost (wholly or in part)’ and ‘to make this evidence (and any archive generated) publicly accessible’. The accompanying footnote also requires archaeological archives that result from the development process to be deposited with ‘a local museum or other public depository’. Unfortunately, there are no definitions of what ‘publicly accessible’ or what an ‘archaeological archive’ is within the NPPF or its associated guidance (Donnelly-​Symes 2019: 8). The Archaeological Investigations Project (AIP) quantified the products of the development-​led approach and showed there were more than 80,000 archaeological projects undertaken between 1990 and 2010 (Darvill et al. 2019: ‘Summary’). Research commissioned by the Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers (ALGAO:UK) 2017–​18 highlighted the continued high levels to which developer-​ led intervention takes place (Rocks-​Macqueen and Lewis 2019). It also found that development-​led commercial archaeology contributed £218 million to the economy. Sadly, little of this economic benefit trickles down to support the curatorial care of

Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives    275 its products. In 2012, the estimated cost to commercial units for storing undeposited archives was £330,000 per year (Edwards 2013) and between 2016 and 2018 only about 60% of museums were charging deposition fees to offset costs (Booth et al. 2018). More detailed research shows income from these fees to be variable and not related to full-​cost recovery (Vincent 2019). Museums and others cannot predict what will be acquired and when, since the rate of investigation on an annual basis is not uniform. Nevertheless, the data gathered for ALGAO:UK showed that over 10,000 archaeological investigations took place in England and Scotland in just one year (2017–​2018). Each will have produced an archive that has to be stored somewhere: the question of who takes responsibility for maintaining the inherent potential of these archives by providing access to them, and which mechanism should be used to foot the bill has yet to be satisfactorily answered.

13.4  Access: Storage and solutions Museums have been involved in the debate over the storage of archives for many decades (Swain 2007: 128–​32; see also this volume: Chapter 11). A national UK survey, commissioned in 1997, assessed the situation (Swain 1998) and although no survey has exactly replicated this, some of its results still broadly concur with surveys undertaken in 2012 and between 2016 and 2018 by SMA (Booth et al. 2018; Edwards 2013). Collectively the results showed:

• • • •

There are many areas of England where archives could not be deposited. Archives were remaining with commercial units in ever-​increasing numbers. There are annual decreases in the number of museums that collect archives. Budget cuts have led to staff losses and expertise.

Archives held by commercial units are not being held in publicly accessible repositories and two thirds of museums currently collecting archives reported their stores would be full in five years or less (Booth et al. 2018). Just as artefacts without context add little to the archaeological record, archives that cannot be accessed lose their potential to serve the purpose for which they were created. The potential of these archives can never be unlocked if the system that produces them continues to prove to be unsustainable. All efforts aimed at resolving these issues have a part to play in making them accessible and museum archaeologists must actively engage in this process. The solution in some areas of the UK is that archives are now being collected and managed by, for example, local authorities that have created their own archive stores. These include, for example, those managed by Cambridgeshire County Council (Boyle 2019). In 2011, the Southport Group advocated that one solution might be ‘a network of resource centres, related to existing museum structures . . .’ (Southport Group 2011: 19). This solution has not been realized. In 2018, however, SMA defined a ‘publicly accessible

276   Gail Boyle repository’ and in doing so referenced that they shared the characteristics of a resource centre (SMA 2018). SMA also articulated a fundamental requirement for public accessibility which was that archives ‘. . . should be managed by qualified staff with specialized knowledge of archaeology and archaeological archives that are well experienced in all aspects of collections management, as well as effective audience engagement and development processes’ (SMA 2018). It follows therefore that if the potential of archaeological archives is inextricably linked to their accessibility, then this is contingent on them being managed by those with expertise in doing so. Sustained long-​term investment in training is required to achieve this since SMA’s survey results also showed that the number of staff engaged in the care of archives had dropped by 29–​36% since 2010 and that only about 50% of museums employed a curator with archaeological expertise (Booth et al. 2018). In 2018, SMA sought to address this by delivering a free resource and training programme (Booth et al. 2018). However, this type of training is reliant on volunteers, external funding, and is time-​constrained by funding programme requirements. If the profession is truly determined to unlock the potential of archive collections, then funders need to be persuaded to prioritize long-​term non-​project-​based funding in support of research findings, which recognized the need for the retention of specialist collection knowledge and skills in the museum workforce (BOP Consulting et al. 2016: 1). In 2016, a ministerial report acknowledged that the ‘current situation was too burdensome for museums’ and recommended strategies should be pursued to reduce the amount of material to be kept (APPAG 2014: 11), although this ignored the fact that sector-​wide guidance on selection and retention had been in place for many years (SMA 1993). Research has since shown that retrospective rationalization of retained archives is time, cost, and resource heavy with little appreciable return on space (Baxter et al. 2018). The guidance resulting from this research also said that any rationalization project must retain the archive’s potential for re-​investigation (Baxter et al. 2018). Work to find a sustainable solution for the long-​term care of archaeological archives has gathered pace. In 2013, the Edwards report said that a national strategy should be developed (Edwards 2013: 9) which concurs with the view that ‘Archaeological archives are a distributed national collection, which forms part of the sum of our national heritage.’ (Merriman 2014: 33). In 2017, ‘The Mendoza Review’ required Historic England (HE) to work with others to produce recommendations to improve the long-​term sustainability of archaeological archives (Mendoza 2017). One result was that Arts Council England (ACE) has commissioned a feasibility study to look at models for establishing additional strategic storage capacity for archaeological archives: importantly any identifiable solutions will be tested against SMA’s definition of a publicly accessible repository (Historic England 2018: 2). If this study bears fruit, the potential of large numbers of archaeological archives will be secured, but robust data needs to be collated relevant to the continued public benefit of doing so, as the finances required to deliver it will be substantial. One view is that archives need to be seen ‘as an ex-​situ heritage resource which requires long-​term support, outside the usual project-​funding’ (Merriman 2014: 35).

Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives    277

13.5  Access: The Digital revolution Unlocking the potential of archives can only be achieved if they are well documented and for records about them to be accessible and capable of being used in multiple ways. The range of formats in which information is presented is enormous and difficult to assimilate as there is no one source that provides easy access to what exists. Sources of information include, for example, everything from standard print publication, papers in academic or local society journals (electronic or otherwise), electronic site reports, newsletters, websites, and databases held nationally or by local authorities. By the late 1990s, it was recognized that developments in digital technology had the potential to revolutionize the way that archaeological information was managed (Merriman and Swain 1999: 261). Since then a wide variety of digital applications have been used to connect museum collections, including archives, with audiences in new ways, for example, the MicroPasts project (Bonacchi et al. 2019; see this volume: Chapter 27). Experience and anecdotal evidence suggest an ever-​increasing number of enquiries about archives since information has begun to be published online. Nevertheless, digital transformation requires expertise and budget, and the fast pace of development can lead to systems being overtaken by new technologies. Significantly, digital technology is now also being used throughout the archaeological process from onsite recording through to dissemination, interpretation, and display. In terms of accessibility and potential there are two main considerations here, one of which is how people are enabled to know archives exist and the other as to how born digital data is managed and curated.

13.6  Access: Digital dissemination The dissemination of results is a fundamental aspect of Historic England’s Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment (Historic England 2015) whilst the documentation of museum collections is an essential element of their management. The two activities go hand in hand in enabling the visibility of archive content. Spectrum, which is the UK collection management standard, describes cataloguing as ‘managing the information that gives your collections meaning, not as an end in itself but to record and retrieve what is known about your objects’ (Collections Trust 2017). Recording different elements of an archive is however more complex than for a single object. SMA’s revised standards address many of the additional considerations relative to this process for archaeological material, including the need for terminology control (Boyle and Rawden 2020). Dealing with this complexity is being addressed by some museums using sophisticated multidisciplinary digital collections management systems (CMSs) such as EMu, MuseumIndex+​, and Adlib. Nevertheless, the resource to enable this is not readily available in many museums and acts as a barrier to the efficient collation

278   Gail Boyle and dissemination of information about the archives they hold and therefore reduces potential. This is especially true where no platform is available for archive information to be accessed through a web interface. Similarly, although a digital CMS often enables data to be directly imported and exported, the same cannot be said of museum online catalogues, which do not enable large amounts of archive data to be downloaded in a usable form. In addition, there is currently also no platform that enables the integration and retrieval of datasets derived from multiple museum databases in the same way as, for example, Heritage Gateway (Heritage Gateway 2012). This is a website that enables the cross-​searching of over 60 resources, relating to England’s heritage. The nearest museum equivalent would be a development of the Collections Trust’s CultureGrid or Europeana.eu. A simpler solution for most museums would be to provide archive information in spreadsheet format downloadable from an Open Data platform or through the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), which is ‘the longest serving repository for archaeological data in the world’ (Richards 2017: 1). A recent search of ADS project archive pages shows, however, that museums severely underutilize this resource, with less than a handful having a dedicated webpage that links them to the archives they hold, or which have been deposited digitally with ADS by commercial units. Over-​reliance on collections’ online search facilities, which deliver information edited by design, masks the detailed data museums hold about archives to such an extent that these systems act as gatekeepers. Museum archaeologists should be seeking ways of democratizing the data they hold to enable its full potential: this means it must be able to be downloaded, resorted, and re-​imagined. Accessing information about archives is also made more complicated because responsibility for managing data relating to them no longer lies solely with the organization in which they have been deposited. The ADS has been setting standards for data collection and management for over twenty years (Richards 2017), and works within international e-​infrastructure collaborations including ARIADNE. Unlocking the potential of this data should be a shared endeavour: museum archaeologists must publish information about their holdings and collaborate with other organizations such as ADS. This is especially true where museums hold archives that are the subject of unpublished reports known as ‘grey literature’. The challenge of making grey literature publicly available is well documented, as is one of the solutions in the form of the Online Access to the Index of Archaeological Investigations project (OASIS) (Richards 2017). A further challenge for museums in making archives publicly visible is for them to be able to link their own datasets with those held by ADS and others. Apart from ADS these also include Historic Environment Records (HERs) managed by local authorities. A major revision of OASIS (HERALD) as a part of HE’s ‘Heritage Information Access Strategy’ project (HIAS) may provide a much needed solution to the sharing of archive data between ADS, HERs, archive depositors, and museums, since museums will be involved in the online system for the first time (Historic England 2020). However, for this to be a success, museum archaeologists need to understand the museum’s role in the process, and this might necessitate a requirement for commercial units to engage with the revised version of OASIS as a condition of archive deposition.

Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives    279 Many people will be unaware of the existence of ADS or HERs, but there is one highly successful online model which demonstrates the public appetite to engage with the type of information they hold. ‘Know Your Place’ is a digital heritage mapping project that enables the exploration of neighbourhoods online through historic maps, collections, and linked information (KYP 2020). It was developed by Bristol City Council in 2011, primarily as a planning tool and is a geographic information system that makes archaeological records, listed buildings, and monuments data more publicly available. Analytics for the system show that the seven ‘Know Your Place West of England’ websites are collectively being visited by more than 2,500 new users every month (Peter Insole pers. comm.). This clearly demonstrates that the provision of information from multiple digital resources via a single publicly engaging platform has the capacity to increase usage and therefore the potential of those records. Perhaps most importantly, archaeological archive information is presented in the context of other heritage environment resources and is being seen by the public as integral to it. Nevertheless, sites like these must be repeatedly promoted to ensure people are aware they exist. The same could be said for archaeological archives.

13.7  Access: Digital preservation The documentary archive is increasingly being created in digital format. Digital archiving involves the deposition of electronic data which must be regularly migrated to new systems capable of enabling it to be read in the future: this is the only way for it to retain its potential to be accessed. No museum in the UK has accreditation as a ‘Trusted Digital Repository’ although SMA’s survey results suggested that over 50% of museums that collect archives said they were capable of curating digital archive material (Booth et al. 2018). The message is a clear one: in order for digital archives to retain any potential they have, they should not be curated by museums. HE’s response to the Mendoza Review said that guidance should be produced which relieved ‘museums of the expectation that they should attempt to curate digital archive material from archaeological projects, in favour of their deposition in a Trusted Digital Repository . . . ’ (HE 2018: 15). Such guidance has now been produced by ‘The Work Digital/​Think Archive’ project (DigVentures 2020) and SMA has reinforced the need to adhere to this in its new standards. The unknown quantity is how much data and therefore potential has already been lost due to the failure to deposit.

13.8  Use Data collected in England in 1997 showed that archives ‘were not being exploited to their full potential by museums’ (Merriman and Swain 1999: 259). Sadly, no survey since then

280   Gail Boyle has sought to acquire detailed data about the use of archives today; although SMA is drafting a project proposal to do so. Museum archaeologists now work in a different environment to that of the 1990s, in part due to the introduction of ‘a social agenda that includes the right of everyone to have access to, and engage with, the natural, built and cultural heritage that represents the identity of our nation.’ (Hicks et al. 2009: 10). Museum archaeologists, as with others, are increasingly being required to meet the needs of multiple wider-​society agendas and targets set by funders. There have been changes in museum participatory practice, and the identification of priorities relevant to creativity, inclusion, diversity, and others. The UK government austerity programme has also presented museums with an overriding need to justify expenditure and to realize maximum public benefit: one result of austerity measures has been the loss of museum archaeology expertise (Booth et al. 2018). Museums have become increasingly audience-​focused and ‘museum archaeology is good at producing narratives which meet the social justice objectives of current stakeholders.’ (Merriman 2014: 37). The co-​authors of SMA’s 2016 collecting survey said, ‘There has never been greater public interest in archaeology largely thanks to the wide range of exhibitions, public engagement activities, learning opportunities and socially inclusive community projects delivered by museums’ (Booth et al. 2016: 4) but the question here is to what extent archaeological archives have a role to play in this and how much potential they have to serve both the profession and the public.

13.9  Use: Research If archives exist to enable their future re-​examination then they will and should be the subject of academic research in order for their potential to be realized. Similarly, with the introduction of new analytical and scientific techniques, stored collections are prime candidates for re-​assessment. The challenge here is to ensure that legacy archive collections are seen to be as exciting a prospect to research as new material which is being uncovered, and that funders see the value of this. Museums will often be the first point of contact with those wishing to access, consume, and synthesize the information contained within archives, and museum archaeologists have to find ways to enable this to happen. For some the outputs will be academic but for others they may be creative or social. There are two main difficulties that arise in understanding what potential is being or has been realized, the first being how to measure the quantity and outputs of such research and by whom, and the second being how to assess the level of public impact. Studies undertaken in the 1990s and from 2003 onwards showed that archives were being underused and that there was a general failure to use them as a teaching and research resource by universities (Swain 1998, 2007: 139–​41). Guidance that resulted from Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) work produced in 2009 said ‘in only a few cases are students actively encouraged to work with resources held by

Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives    281 other institutions’ including museums (Hicks et al. 2009: 12). Without up to date metrics it is impossible to say what the direction of travel has been. This lack of data should be addressed as a matter of priority so as to be able to advocate the potential for archives. Experience suggests, as referenced by HEFCE, that interaction between museums and university archaeology departments still tends to be ad hoc and also that schemes like Collaborative Doctoral Partnership schemes, which aim to support doctoral projects on museum collections, have not had a major effect on research into archaeological archives. An important HEFCE finding was that museums need to provide information about the methodologies required to consult and interrogate archives (Hicks et al. 2009). Wiltshire Museum (Devizes) is one museum that has addressed this by publishing a Research Charter online, and others would do well to follow suit (Wiltshire Museum 2020). Assessing impact of research relative to archives as a measure of potential is also hampered by a lack of data. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) for the UK Higher Education Institutes defines impact as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’. Of the 6,975 impact case studies submitted for REF2014, just 102 related to archaeology, but without detailed analysis it is impossible to know how much of this research focused on archives (UKRI 2020). However, there are some indications that a far higher level of engagement with archives has been taking place than realized before. The Museum of London scoping study that looked at quality of archives also looked at recorded uses, with interesting results (Grew 2017: 49). For example, for the 10% sample that was surveyed, a total of 1108 uses of various types were identified over a 10-​year period which, when scaled up implies over 10,000 uses for the archive as a whole. (Grew 2017). Amongst many others, the wide range of work successfully being carried out using archives is exemplified by a series of papers delivered at the CIfA Archaeological Archives Group Conference in 2017 with an overall theme that discussed their relevance (CIfA 2017). Also, in December 2019 Wiltshire Museum and Salisbury Museum initiated a project to review the work of 200 postgraduate researchers who have studied their archaeology collections in the last ten years. One aim of this project is to add value to museum records but also to identify the under researched areas of the collections, with a view to promoting them for future enquiry. Although this highlights a high level of research usage it also highlights one of the general failings in the research process for museums, which is a failure to find an efficient mechanism to capture its results. Museum archaeologists have largely become facilitators of research rather than initiators. In order to realize the potential of the archives they hold, they need to become active rather than passive partners in setting research priorities and to advocate for a cohesive and directed national research strategy that specifically targets them. Putting museum archives on the wider sector research map necessitates participation in the development of research frameworks and in projects relating to reference collections and typologies such as those being delivered by Historic England. The archaeological potential of stored historic archives is almost invisible within Regional Research Frameworks.

282   Gail Boyle These frameworks were created from projects undertaken to assess current archaeological knowledge and the archaeological resources available (including those held in museums) so as to create research agenda and strategies to address prioritized research objectives. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions ‘research frameworks have largely bypassed museums and museum collections and their potential as research resources’ (Swain 2007: 172). Work to update three frameworks is in progress and these will be delivered as dynamic online, more accessible and searchable, resources: they will also be linked to the new version of OASIS. This would appear to provide museums with the opportunity to promote significant groups of material in museum collections requiring further analysis. The positive benefits of museums collaborating with wider research agendas have been exemplified in Worcestershire by the ‘Lost Landscapes’ initiative, which resulted from a project that set out to record evidence related to the Palaeolithic period, including that held by museums. This highlighted the potential of Worcestershire’s collections to contribute to regional and national research on the period (Lost Landscapes 2020).

13.10  Use: Exhibitions One obvious way that museums can exploit the potential for archaeological archives for public benefit is through display and engagement. Methods to achieve this as well as audiences for them have been the subject of much discussion and presentations at, for example, all of SMA’s conferences between 2017 and 2020. Nevertheless, it is now highly unusual for permanent galleries or temporary exhibitions to focus on the results of a particular archaeological project. Notable exceptions include significant fieldwork projects that inform the content of site-​based museums such as Jorvik, or more recently the London Mithraeum. The trend today is for interpretation schemes to rely on thematic and synthesized content incorporating objects from many archives. As noted above museums have also become more audience focused, with a plurality of perspectives being required to be taken account of and presented. M Shed in Bristol is an example of how museums can unlock the potential of archives to address these requirements. Approximately 300 archaeological objects, including many from excavations, are incorporated across three thematic galleries which are people-​focused and story-​led. Objects from archives are used to make connections with people’s diversity and their lived experiences in the city (past and present) but with few exceptions no overt connections are made between the objects and archives or their place in the archaeological record. This is not to say that there is no appetite for exhibitions that focus on excavations, but it is still largely objects that take centre stage rather than their associated documentation. In 2017, Museum of London Docklands’ exhibition Tunnel: The Archaeology of Crossrail attracted approximately 96,000 visitors with a 57% increase in museum visitors on the previous year over the same period, with 58,000 extra visits attributed to the exhibition (Morris Hargreaves

Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives    283 McIntyre 2017). This was a highly rated exhibition that improved public perception of the museum and so in this respect highlights the potential for the use of archaeological archives to be the catalyst for this. Nevertheless, museum archaeologists need to become more adept at sharing evaluation data so as to better advocate for the potential of archives to meet and satisfy target audience needs. The additional challenge for museum archaeologists here is to be able to find ways to imaginatively incorporate elements of the documentary archive within exhibitions themselves. This is especially difficult since, largely as a result of the standardization process, much of this resource now presents itself as boxes of impersonal, visually impenetrable technical records and digital data sets. The records being made in the UK today no longer evidence the human hand that made them, which also reduces the museum archaeologist’s capacity to display them as artefacts in their own right (Boyle 2020). Similarly modern museum interpretation and graphic design schemes favour accessible text and an avoidance of a ‘book on the wall’ approach, which as far as archives are concerned necessitates the transformation of the record to other formats to make their content displayable. The increased use of digital recording mechanisms on the one hand, might enable direct access to the data but on the other requires a degree of manipulation and synthesis to make it truly engaging for a public audience in a gallery. Within a temporary exhibition context this may also require a disproportionately high level of resource and financial investment. The ongoing Reykjavík 871 ± 2: The Settlement Exhibition, in Reykjavík, Iceland, did this to an award-​winning standard, having achieved a Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums (NODEM) award in 2006, based on its approach to the use of digital media in the interpretative process. It provides an immersive, multisensory visitor experience which incorporates the use of technology to connect the site with archive and historical evidence (Goodhouse 2013). The exhibition is however atypical of most, in that it benefits from being able to present elements of documentation albeit in digital format alongside the remains of the excavation they relate to. Nevertheless, an interactive touch table enables visitors to personally explore an animated graphic reconstruction of a longhouse by making engaging use of original excavation photographs superimposed over site plans, for which the accompanying text appears when triggered by touch. Clearly the provision of such highly sophisticated interactive content may be beyond the resources of many museums but it does demonstrate the potential for the documentary archive to capture the public imagination and add value to the visitor experience. If museum archaeologists are to unlock the true potential of archives, they must give thought to the archive as a whole and not just the more attractive three-​dimensional finds because they may be easier to interpret or display.

13.11  Use: Engagement A fundamental task of museum archaeologists is to enable people to engage with archaeological collections on a level of their choosing and to understand there is a wide

284   Gail Boyle variety of beneficial outcomes that have nothing to do with acquiring or advancing archaeological knowledge. The Museum of London’s Archaeological Archive Research Centre (LAARC) has been at the forefront of many such innovative engagement activities. LAARC was established to house and make London’s archives accessible (Swain 2007: 133–​6). Since 2002 it has engaged hundreds of volunteers in the care of its legacy archive collections so as to make them accessible (Davis 2014). LAARC’s award-​ winning Volunteer Inclusion Programme (VIP) provided a fulfilling social and learning experience and created a volunteer model of best practice that could be adapted for other organizations. Its volunteer recruitment process created a diverse and inclusive workforce that had personally positive impacts for the volunteers in terms of health and wellbeing as well as opening up the archives (Davis 2014: 50). Similar projects have been initiated in the US (see this volume: Chapter 11). LAARC is not alone in its endeavours to engage people with archives in innovative ways and to use archives for co-​creative purposes. For example, York Archaeological Trust’s ‘YourDig: Converge’ project used participatory interpretation techniques to explore site archives and also used drama, artwork, music, and creative writing to make interpreting archaeological evidence an engaging experience (DigYork 2020). Archaeological materials contained within archives are also used in museum education programmes, for example Bristol Museums offer place-​ based learning opportunities which incorporate locally relevant archaeological material. Revisions to the National Curriculum also enabled new sessions relevant to the prehistoric period to be included as well as continuing professional development for teachers led by museum archaeologists. Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives through engagement may only be limited by the imagination, but the menu of possibilities that presents itself will often be tempered by the prioritization of time and resources. Many of these outreach projects are time-​limited and delivered with external project-​funding, with LAARC’s VIP being an example in case. This means museum archaeologists must continue to be creative in providing engagement opportunities but also to work with other museum and creative disciplines in order to maximize the range of activities provided, as well as the funding to support them. As with other aspects of the management of archaeological archives, engagement with them is not the sole preserve of museums. One under-​exploited avenue for museums, which has the capacity to unlock their potential, lies within the making of the archives themselves rather than just dealing with the end product. The value of community generated research was assessed by HE in 2016 and the results showed that access to professional support affected the destination of the research, and where support had been provided it was more likely to be sent to an HER (Hedge and Nash 2016). In 2018, the Council for British Archaeology published a report on the state of community archaeology in the UK (Frearson 2018). Amongst other findings it reported that over 50% of those surveyed were involved in activities that would result in a legacy archive, and that other evidence suggested 70% of community archaeology groups curated project archives and did not produce reports. They also failed to lodge the archives with a publicly accessible repository and had a lack of awareness of how to produce an archive or where to get guidance (Frearson 2018: 22). In effect these archives have no future

Unlocking the potential of archaeological archives    285 archaeological potential although this would probably not be the case if more museums played an active role in the process from start to finish. Museum archaeologists have the skillsets to provide training in these areas and this would enable them to engage in a truly co-​creative and participatory community practice, and also to further unlock the potential of these archives. This is not to say that this does not happen at all now, or has not happened to great effect before, with Peter Liddle’s work in Leicestershire being a hugely successful example (Liddle 2002). It is possible this type of work has been curtailed by the loss of staff resources and sustained funding would have to be found to support it, although the justification for doing so would appear obvious both from a museum and sector perspective. In her work to assess the perceptions of community archaeology as both practice and profession, Emma Stringfellow argued amongst other things that the practice of public engagement is an integral professional skill for any archaeologist (Stringfellow 2017). Since museum archaeologists are highly skilled in many forms of public engagement this begs the question as to whether or not they could also play a more practical role in the development-​led archaeology process, and also whether this would enhance the archaeological and social potential of archives. As receivers of archives rather than their creators, museum archaeologists have less personal experience or knowledge of the sites they record than ever before, whilst the standardization and recording processes being used are increasingly de-​personalizing and de-​humanizing the archives themselves. This is because they no longer contain the same kinds of social and historical documentation as their earlier predecessors did, nor do they provide a visible human record of the people involved in their making. This is an important consideration for the future potential of archives to resonate with those that wish to connect with those people that made them. If archaeology is about revealing human stories, then the human stories of those people who created the archives are just as important as the material they contain. Museum archaeologists should therefore seek ways to participate in the making of archives, or at least to find ways of recording their social and historical context, as this is just as crucial to the unlocking of their potential in the future, as it is to curate them.

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288   Gail Boyle Merriman, N. and H. Swain. 1999. ‘Archaeological Archives: Serving the Public Interest?’ European Journal of Archaeology 2 (2): pp. 249–​67. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). 2019. National Planning Policy Framework. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. https://​ass​ets.pub​lish​ing.serv​ ice.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​uplo​ads/​sys​tem/​uplo​ads/​atta​chme​nt_​d​ata/​file/​7 79​764/​NPPF_​F​ eb_​2​019_​web.pdf [Accessed 29 February 2020]. Morris Hargreaves McIntyre. 2017. Museum of London Docklands Tunnel: The Archaeology of Crossrail October 2017 Final Report. Unpublished. Museums and Galleries Commission. 1992. Standards in the Museum Care of Archaeological Collections. London: Museums and Galleries Commission. Perrin K. et al. 2013. A Standard and Guide to Best Practice for Archaeological Archiving in Europe: EAC Guidelines 1. Europae Archaeologiae Consilium. Available at: https://​arc​haeo​ logy​ d ata​ s erv ​ice.ac.uk/​arc​hes/​att ​a ch/​The%20S​ t and​ ard%20and%20Gu​ i de%20to%20B​ est%20P​ract​ice%20in%20Arc​haeo​logi​cal%20Ar​chiv​ing%20in%20Eur​ope/​ARCHE​S_​V1​_​ GB.pdf [Accessed 29 February 2020]. Richards, J.D. 2017. ‘Twenty Years Preserving Data: A View from the United Kingdom.’ Advances in Archaeological Practice 5 (3): pp. 227–​37. Rocks-​Macqueen, D. and B. Lewis. 2019. Archaeology in Development Management: Its Contribution in England, Scotland & Wales. Landward Research Ltd. Available at: https://​ www.algao.org.uk/​sites/​defa​ult/​f iles/​docume​nts/​Archaeolog ​y_​in​_​Dev​elop​ment​_​Man​ agem​ent.pdf [Accessed 17 December 2020]. Society of Museum Archaeologists (SMA). 1993. Selection, Retention and Dispersal of Archaeological Collections. Society of Museum Archaeologists. Society for Museum Archaeology (SMA). 2018. Publicly Accessible Repositories and Archaeological Archives. Society for Museum Archaeology. http://​soc​musa​rch.org.uk/​soc​ musa​rch/​gailm​ark/​wordpr​ess/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2018/​04/​Pub​lica​lly-​acc​essi​ble-​repos​ itor​ies.pdf [Accessed 29 February 2020]. Southport Group. 2011. Realising the Benefits of Planning-​Led Investigation in the Historic Environment: A Framework for Delivery. The Southport Group. https://​www.arc​haeo​logi​sts. net/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​Southp​ortr​epor​tA4.pdf [Accessed 29 February 2020]. Stringfellow, E. 2017. Perceptions of Community Archaeology as a Practice and Profession: The experience of the Council for British Archaeology’s Community Archaeology Bursary Holders. MA Thesis, University of Chester. Swain, H. 1998. A Survey of Archaeological Archives in England. London: Museums and Galleries Commission/​English Heritage. Swain, H. 2007. An Introduction to Museum Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UKRI Research England. 2020. ‘REF Impact’. Available at: https://​re.ukri.org/​resea​rch/​ref-​imp​ act/​[Accessed 29 February 2020]. Vincent, S. 2019. A Survey of Fees for the Transfer of Archaeological Archives for the Transfer of Archaeological Archives in England. Available at: https://​resea​rch.hist​oric​engl​and.org.uk/​ Rep​ort.aspx?i=​16220&ru=​%2FResu​lts.aspx%3Fp%3D1%26n%3D10%26rn%3D3%26ry%3D2​ 019%26ns%3D1 [Accessed 29 February 2020]. Wiltshire Museum. 2020. ‘Research’. Available at: https://​www.wilt​shir​emus​eum.org.uk/​resea​ rch/​[Accessed 29 February 2020].

Chapter 14

M u seum re pl i c as Recovering the work of making plaster casts of pre-​Columbian art Jennifer Reynolds-​K aye

14.1  Introduction In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plaster casts were a primary source of information for the public’s knowledge about the past. This was especially true in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, where plaster casts were interspersed with authentic objects in World’s Fairs and museums. While there is a considerable body of scholarship regarding the place of replicas of Classical sculptures in museums, little attention has been given to other areas of world archaeology, such as pre-​Columbian art, which were also commonly represented by replicas in museums and equally held a significant role in educating the public. This is likely due to a confluence of factors, including the decline in popularity and credibility of plaster casts as a display strategy, the primacy in scholarship of casts of Greco-​Roman sculpture, the deterioration of a fragile material, and the ‘mute’ or unintelligible quality of some non-​Western monuments for a European eye (Fane 1993: 146). When plaster casts of monuments have surfaced in scholarship, they have primarily been viewed through the lens of a British or European explorer who single-​handedly produced paper squeezes and their resultant plaster casts from ‘new’ discoveries during proto-​archaeological expeditions. This process of integrating plaster casts from world archaeology requires a rethinking of the types of questions that scholars are asking, and an accompanying shift in methodology. As we start to expand the relevant constituents for plaster casts beyond the named maker to consider the museum-​going public, scholars also need to reckon with the many hands—​skilled and unskilled, free and unfree—​that went into each stage of production. This type of approach recuperates the human element in its fullest range of possibility to infuse the ‘mere replica’ with as many actors as can be recovered from

290   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye the written, visual, and physical evidence. This entails scholars to retrieve and champion the labourers, producers, intermediaries, and entrepreneurs in both the source country and host country. Once their images and names come to light, whether through photographs, diaries, or accession records, there needs to be the same archival infrastructure in museum practice and scholarly recognition in academia. Using casts of pre-​ Columbian art as a case study, this chapter acknowledges the imperialist logic driving the projects of plaster cast production in the field while expanding the definition of cast producer to include the day labourers and entrepreneurs from the source country. By recuperating the lived experience of cast makers in the broadest sense, plaster casts shift from a status of copies to authentic products of very real labour. For casts made in the field, scholarship tends to remain silent on the physical labour that made this work possible, such as carrying supplies, clearing dense foliage or rocky terrain, crafting the mould, and transporting materials from the site. When workers are mentioned by Western explorers like Désiré Charnay and Alfred Maudslay, they are clearly done so through their own perspective and with little intention to humanize the workers. Although case studies have expanded to include the less famous collections, and while theories on plaster casts prioritize a relational understanding between the original and the copy (Brenna et al. 2019), scholarship on plaster casts of objects has not often delved into the lived experience of its workers. This chapter uses the example replica collections of pre-​Columbian art to point to a few possible directions for recovering these perspectives. First, a thorough examination of associated technologies of reproduction, such as photographs and written publications, allows for insights into recovering archaeological labour (see this volume: Chapter 15). This approach encourages a reading of images and text against the grain, with the goal of acknowledging and reckoning with the invisibility of labour in future display practices, digital documentation initiatives, and scholarship. Secondly, it is important to recuperate the role of local agencies and their contributions to disseminating the knowledge and appreciation for archaeological sculptures. Finally, to expand the list of cast makers and hopefully recover more locally based cast producers and agencies behind collections, there is an incredible need for a consolidated database of casts that accommodates digitized acquisition records, related primary and secondary sources, and exhibition documentation.

14.2  Eurocentric approaches to plaster casts After uneven attention to plaster casts in twentieth-​century scholarship—​an era that coincided with the discrediting of plaster casts as an exhibitionary device—​the early twenty-​first century witnessed a resurgence of interest in the material. The major anthologies of this period include Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand’s volume, Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present,

Museum replicas   291 (Frederiksen and Marchand 2010); Museums as Cultures of Copies: The Crafting of Artefacts and Authenticity (Brenna et al. 2019); and Replica Knowledge: An Archaeology of the Multiple Past (Simandiraki-​Grimshaw et al. 2021). Focused studies on architecture, such as Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Lending 2017) have expanded the consideration to larger visual and immersive programmes, and a special edition of Sculpture Journal (Foster et al. 2019) surveyed the latest research in the field to include a geographical breadth and temporal depth often missing from earlier publications. An examination of these survey texts indicates a clear and consistent preference for plaster casts of Western art. This is evident in the continued research into Greco-​ Roman replicas, such as the casts of the Venus de Milo and Laocoön at the Auckland War Memorial Museum (Cooke 2010), or the Throne of Minos in the Humboldt-​ Universität’s Minoan-​ Mycenaean collection (Sattler and Simandiraki-​ Grimshaw 2019). In discussions of copies more broadly, to include models and restorations, the emphasis is still provincially limited to Europe and to more obscure collections such as the Thorvaldsens Museum or the Norsk Teknisk Museum (Brenna et al. 2019). The re-​evaluation of the Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, (formerly known as the South Kensington Museum) in 2019 introduced a broader range of material culture, including presentations on the Minbar of Mamluk Sultan Husam al-​Din Lajin and the plaster casts of the Fasting Buddha from Gandhāra (V&A · Celebrating Reproductions: Past, Present and Future, 2019). This regional expansion also includes a reconsideration of the casts of Angkor Wat by Louis Delaporte of the Musée de Sculpture Comparée (now the Musée des Monuments Français) (Baptiste 2013) and the cast of the gateway from Sanchi in central India (Falser 2019). Despite the headway made of these latter interventions, the quantity of articles and number of scholars continuing to focus on Western objects vastly outweighs these contributions. This privileging of the Western canon extends to more archaeological approaches to replicas, though with a welcome expansion to include strategies like rapid ethnography, a focus on global heritage studies, and the development actionable recommendations for safeguarding these important material objects. These interventions were undertaken by Sally Foster, whose multifaceted approaches include workshops with school children to deep archival research. Though her focus steadily remains on replica ‘Celtic’ crosses (Foster and Jones 2020b), she not only delves into the biographies of specific objects but, from those, masterfully extracts major lessons and methodological approaches that extend to all replicas. At the core of both of these approaches is an expanded roster of actors to include community members and previously under-​appreciated figures such as R.F. Martin from the V&A’s Circulation Department or R.C. Graham, a member of the Sub-​Committee for Scottish History (Foster 2015). These individuals become important agents in the negotiation around plaster casts, in a similar way as rapid ethnography with visitors and long-​time inhabitants of the island of Iona help her understand the continued impact of the St. John’s Cross in its various manifestations. Along with a Siȃn Jones, Foster has crystalized these approaches into a highly accessible document called New Futures for Replicas: Principles and Guidance for Museum Heritage, which

292   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye includes major principles, questions, and resources in one downloadable place (Foster and Jones 2020a). It is this type of work, which archaeologists with an eye towards cultural heritage can lend to the study of replicas, that begins to move beyond the Western and into the global. Within the context of plaster casts of pre-​Columbian sculptures, the story is set against a backdrop of nineteenth-​century technical innovation and political competition, typically between the English and French. During this ‘golden age of faking’ where replicas were a source of both fascination and ambivalence (Briefel and Etherington 2006; Nichols 2015), photographs and plaster casts arose as suitable stand-​ins for European discoveries at World’s Fairs and museums for armchair enthusiasts to enjoy. As Malcolm Baker (2010) coined it, the nineteenth century’s ‘reproductional continuum’ was partly responsible for promulgating knowledge of pre-​Columbian objects. Like the printing press but for three-​dimensional objects, plaster casting technology had revolutionized the availability of monuments and allowed for ‘unmediated communication of an artwork’s essential qualities’ (Nichols, 2015; Sattler and Simandiraki-​ Grimshaw 2019: 103). This was also a period of time where the rise of the panorama and stereoscope revolutionized the visual experience, and concomitant development of technical innovations like electrotyping for manufacturing standardized its physical copies (Nichols 2015; Brenna et al. 2019: 103). Photography played a central role in the rise of plaster casts, and they were positioned as mutually beneficial technologies (this volume: Chapter 15). While photographs captured an atmospheric, architectural, and site-​specific record of pre-​Columbian monuments, the reduced lighting conditions made it nearly impossible to capture an object’s precise details. By adhering to the grooves and indentations of the carved surface, paper squeezes were able to retrieve these small details and translate them into a three-​dimensional form. The mastery over these ‘technologies of representation, reproduction, and removal themselves became a public and self-​conscious form of power celebration . . . that reinscribe the Euro-​American narrative of technological progress and prowess by legitimating the process of ever more precise knowledge transfer’ (Hinsley 1993: 113). The combination of photography, paper squeezes, and plaster casts made a comprehensive record possible, and permitted the wide dissemination of visible knowledge about the pre-​Columbian past (Fane 1993: 150). This multifaceted approach was refined by the French explorer, Désiré Charnay and the British proto-​archaeologist, Alfred Maudslay. They each supplemented cast making with photography, correspondence, diaries, publications, and drawings and etchings (of their own and from those they employed), and thereby secured their place in the history of Mesoamerican scholarship. Within the political arena, the decline of Spanish rule in 1821 combined with the success of excavations in Egypt and the rise of a Darwinian-​infused museum culture (Lending 2017: 54), gave rise to a generation of explorers and funders who wanted to take advantage of the newly formed Republic (Boone 1993: 322). For the English, there arose an opportunity to institute an ‘informal empire’ whereby financial speculation drove investment in extracting natural resources (Aguirre 2005). For example, the entrepreneur and showman, William Bullock, created and displayed the first plaster casts of two

Museum replicas   293 important pre-​Columbian monuments, the Coatlicue (Fig. 14.1) and Calendar Stone for his exhibition Ancient Mexico, which opened in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London (April 1824–​September 1825). At the same time, he also purchased silver mines and advocated for British manufacturing in Mexico through the sister exhibition, Modern Mexico (Aguirre 2005: xxvi, xv). Despite the limited and piecemeal engagement of sole Englishmen in Mexico, England was the first country in the West to mount an exhibition of pre-​Columbian art, and between Bullock, Maudslay, and Henry Christy (Boone 1993: 326), amassed a large collection of objects that was further complimented by Lord Kingsborough’s (1795–​1837) nine volumes of reproductions of Mesoamerican codices in his Antiquities of Mexico (1830–​1848).

Figure 14.1:  Unknown Aztec artist(s), Coatlicue, 1300–​1500, andesite, 350 x 130 x 45 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City (photo: El Comandante, CC BY-​SA 3.0).

294   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye The mid-​nineteenth century also witnessed the arrival of French explorers and collectors, such as Désiré Charnay, Léon Méhédin, and the Anglo-​Franco couple, Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon (Lending 2017: 54). As early as 1851, Édouard Henri Théophile Pingret migrated to Mexico, where he amassed a collection of over 3,000 pre-​ Columbian objects, and was the first to advocate for the production of pre-​Columbian casts from the Museo Nacional’s collection in Mexico City (Pierrebourg 2016). The efforts of private individuals like Pingret, Latour Allard, and other earlier collectors resulted in a significant accumulation of pre-​Columbian objects in the Louvre, enough to warrant the creation of a standalone Museum of Mexican Antiquities in 1850 (later the Museum of American Antiquities) (Pierrebourg 2016). In 1857, the French Ministry of Education dispatched Charnay as the first official government-​sponsored cultural mission to photograph pre-​Columbian ruins in Mexico, which resulted in Cités et ruines américaines (1863) (Williams 1993: 124). The amassing of pre-​Columbian visual and material culture coupled with the invasion of Mexico was part of a larger imperial project that France launched in Latin American countries (Boone 1993: 326). This endeavour reached its pinnacle with France’s military expedition in 1864 and brief rule of Maximilian in Mexico until 1867 (Garrigan 2012: 326). In the same year, France established the Scientific Commission of Mexico, which resulted in its command over the Mexico Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. For the pavilion, the architect Léon Méhédin built a replica of the Temple of Xochicalco with a plaster cast of the Coatlicue near the entrance at the top of the stairs (Fig. 14.2). Near the base of the monument, he placed a plaster cast of the Calendar Stone. The replicas of these important Mexican icons simultaneously signalled a foreign exoticness while reaffirming France’s industrial superiority in copying, exporting, and displaying these plaster casts. Charnay would continue the project of creating plaster casts for US and European consumption, and in the 1880s produced over 140 moulds of pre-​Columbian objects, predominantly from Maya sites like Palenque, Yaxchilan, and Uxmal (Pierrebourg 2016). Against this technological and political backdrop, plaster casts created in the field marked ‘new’ knowledge for French and English explorers, such as Charnay and Maudslay. Charnay and Maudslay primarily focused their expeditions in the Maya regions of Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, and consolidated their research in publications, like The Ancient Cities of the New World (Charnay 1887) and Biologia Centrali-​americana: Or, Contributions to the Knowledge of the Fauna and Flora of Mexico and Central America. Archæology (Maudslay 1889). The connection between these two explorers moves beyond mere parallel tracks, as the two men met coincidentally at Yaxchilan (also known as Menche Tinamit or Lorillard City) in 1882. It was during this chance encounter, that Charnay would change Maudslay’s work forever, as he passed on Lottin de Laval’s technique of paper squeeze production to Maudslay. Maudslay marvelled at the ease, lightness, and precision of the method and chose to employ a combination of paper squeezes and Plaster of Paris depending on the shape and detail of the sculpture he wanted to reproduce (Graham 2002: 109–​10).

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Figure 14.2:  Pierre Petit, Xochicalco Pyramid, photograph, 19 x 24 cm, in Album du Parc, Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris. Documents iconographiques, p. 77. Arch. nat., F/​12/​11872/​2. Archives nationales (photo: Cliché Service photographique des Archives nationales).

14.3  Hidden in plain sight: Labour in plaster cast production This famed meeting between the older generation of well-​meaning but haphazard exploration and the vanguard of rigorous scientific exploration (Davis 1981: 28–​9; Pierrebourg 2016), feeds into a Eurocentric and individualistic narrative that ignores the labour of the men who actually produced the casts. Despite the large number of workers and the high level of skill required to produce the casts in both contexts, only a few individuals such as Julian Diaz and Gorgonio Lopez were recorded by Désiré Charnay and Alfred Maudslay, respectively (Davis 1981: 26). While Charnay and Maudslay received full credit and accolades for their contributions, their accomplishments relied on the underpaid and possibly exploitative labour of mozos (men bought or sold between creditors) (Graham 2002: 88), porters, and labourers from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico that did the hard work of carrying the materials and provisions, clearing the brush, and producing the casts. Underlying this erasure and the general poor treatment of the workers was the wrong-​ headed perceived superiority of some European explorers at the time who ‘resisted accepting the fact that the ancestors of the Indians who accompanied them as guides and bearers could have been the creators of the

296   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye architectural marvels they encountered’ (Florescano 1993: 85). It was more convenient to accept the far-​flung theories that the sites were built by the Greeks, Egyptians, or other ancient Western civilizations. According to Ian Graham, despite five years of photographing and exploring Maya sites, Maudslay ‘himself had taken no moulds of them because at that time he had not yet mastered the technique’ (Graham 2002: 150). Maudslay entrusted a local ladino, Gorgonio Lopez to take paper moulds of the lintels at Yaxchilan (Graham 2002: 105), as well as to make moulds at Quirigua in 1886, and recommended Lopez to Federico Arthes in 1892 to collect material for the Guatemalan exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair. Eventually, Maudslay hired Lorenzo Giuntini, a technician who trained in London under Domenico Brucciani, to spearhead the efforts (Graham 1993: 70–​1). Even though the casts at the British Museum are still affectionately known as the Maudslay casts, the records indicate that he relied heavily on Lopez, Giuntini, and an entourage of unnamed workers. Despite their invisibility in the museum display and the written record, these workers appear regularly in the Maudslay’s photographs from the sites. There are several glass plate negatives and photographic prints to choose from, such as the image of 15 men working in various roles at the Palace in Palenque (Fig. 14.3). Three of the men wear shirts and pants and stand around the site unencumbered by any weight. Eleven of the other 12 men are barefooted and carry large loads on their backs, ranging from soft-​looking sacks to heavy boxes. In the blog entry on the British Museum’s website, Kate Jarvis uses this as an example of the ‘exceptional images at ultra-​high resolution, allowing for almost unlimited zoom and the consequent discovery of myriad overlooked details’ (Jarvis 2017). On the webpage, a red box outlines the detail of the ‘unidentified assistant, porter, and previously undocumented Jaguar graffiti’. Though likely unintended, her use of the language of abundance (‘unlimited’) and ‘discovery’ supports the underlying message of English exploration and informal imperialism. While the Jaguar graffiti contributes to our knowledge of the Palace, the red box also highlights another ‘overlooked detail’ of the need to examine the power dynamics between the assistant, porter, and the photographer, Alfred Maudslay. This visibility of the labourers in the photographs, coupled with uncomfortable mix of silence and derogatory comments in correspondence, is a strange disconnect that reifies the racialized imperialism in this endeavour. Images of Indigenous porters removing plaster cast copies of their cultural heritage for the benefit of European explorers is an uncomfortable dynamic worth further exploration. In the article, ‘Essential Excavation Experts: Alienation and Agency in the History of Archaeological Labour,’ anthropologist Allison Mickel applies a Marxist lens on the exploitative practices of archaeological digs to argue that invisibility and alienation were intentional outcomes of a labour system that disenfranchises their work and expedites the removal of their own heritage (Mickel 2019: 184). Though writing about the history of British and European excavations in the Middle East, Mickel’s approach of reading Giovanni Battista Belzoni and Austen Henry Layard’s memoirs to recover the labour conditions and the labourers’ responses also applies to Maudslay’s writings (Mickel 2019: 185). In October 1887, when Maudslay describes the refusal of the ‘Cahabon Indians’ to accompany him because they

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Figure 14.3:  Alfred Maudslay, Photograph of Palenque taken by A.P. Maudslay, glass negative, 25.4 x 30.6 cm, Asset number: 893231001; Registration Number: Am,Maud,B14.11, The British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

believed ‘the English eat people,’ it demonstrates a visceral fear and distrust (Graham 2002: 144). When Maudslay expresses exasperation that workers headed to Tikal ‘refused to carry loads heavier than 65 lbs’, it provides the reader with a glimpse into the difficult working situation (Graham 2002: 89). What might it have felt like to carry heavy loads on uneven terrain in a hot and humid environment for hours a time? How might we recapture these men’s histories or at least recognize their contributions in the museum and literature? One potential avenue is set forth by historians and anthropologists that have drawn attention to violence embedded in the production of plaster casts of living colonial subjects (Isaac 2011; Feldman 2006; Sysling 2016). When describing the Italian anthropologist Lidio Cipriani (1894–​1962) method of producing a face mask, Jeffrey David Feldman writes ‘After slapping the plaster on her face and wiping the excess on his shirt as best he could, Cipriani tried gripping her hair with one hand, fashioning a pull out of a lock of hair a few inches above her forehead while pressing down on her neck with the other hand. With plaster dripping down her ears and clavicle, Cipriani then placed his knees on her shoulders,

298   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye which only caused her to squirm more as his weight opened a painful gap between bone and muscle’ (Feldman 2006: 257). Perhaps similarly, we can imagine what it might feel like to carry loads of plaster through nearly impassable hills, spend all day clearing massive ruins overgrown with stubborn foliage, or end up in prison when you try to escape the conditions of working for Maudslay (Graham 2002: 114). Maudslay voiced frustration over managing the workers by writing, ‘The whole business was pure slave-​driving—​at last I got tired of it and started back for Coban leaving Gorgonio to worry the alcalde’ (Graham 2002: 115). Yet, how must it have felt to be one of the labourers or even Gorgonio Lopez during these expeditions? While not the same as having plaster ripped from your face under extreme duress, these men faced extremely challenging conditions that can only begin to be glimpsed from the visual and written record. The material objects and scholarly output resulted in Charnay and Maudslay’s fame and longevity in the field of pre-​Columbian studies, even though much of their production relied on the often unnamed, yet often photographed, labour of Indigenous and Ladino workers. Once these plaster casts enter museum collections, they are subject to similar conditions of display, circulation, conservation, and storage. Within this museum context, the plaster casts are further distanced from their original context of production and requisite strenuous labour involved. Over time, this distance grew even wider as their status as mere copies from a bygone era that employed a technology of mass-​production further removed the hand of the craftsman. If we are able to recover these plaster casts as important human-​made creations that required ingenuity, technological advances, and artistry to a degree, then just like any decorative art or other replica practice, it almost becomes an artwork in itself worthy of care and preservation. With the Maudslay casts, for example, the direct impression of the mould on the original surface preserved the original carving and even bits of colour. These details can help restore a damaged pre-​ Columbian monument to an earlier stage and can be referenced as a three-​dimensional secondary source. Similarly, a type of restitution is possible if copies made from plaster casts are returned to source communities, ideally as a temporary measure until the authentic object can be returned (see Fash 2004: 14–​15). Though these are all helpful interventions that the moulds and plaster casts can provide for scholars and conservators, how can museums tell the fuller picture of these objects’ contributions to the visiting public? How might curators and museum educators reconsider the interpretive material that frames their display of plaster casts to tell a fuller history? While no solution will apply in every situation, there are a few simple propositions. In considering the display of the Palenque near the East stairs at the British Museum, perhaps curators could note the names of all known workers and an approximate number of unnamed makers. A fuller explanation of the weight of the average load, the challenging work of making the moulds, and the difficulty of transporting them out of the brush would provide a sense of the lived experience of the labourer. Photographs and diary excerpts would help tell a truer story of this era of cast-​ production and Maudslay’s honest reflections on the labourers who he commanded. Though the human imprint might not be visible on the surface of the plaster—​after all,

Museum replicas   299 these were cast later from the moulds made in the field—​there were innumerable hands and minds for whom these would not exist without their efforts.

14.4  Mexican cast producers: The Abadiano family When compared to Charnay and Maudslay’s exploitative relationship to both Indigenous labourers and the extraction of a culture that was not their own, the Abadiano family’s entrepreneurship in Mexico City provides an important counterbalance. Though they greatly benefitted from their class status, education, and inheritance of wealth, the Abadiano family dedicated their lives to the promotion of Mexican cultural heritage. The family owned ‘Abadiano’s Ancient Bookstore,’ a shop that underwent mergers and relocations, but was in operation from 1684 until 1887 and contained ‘thousands of volumes of Mexican history, literature, religion, philosophy, and political theory’ (Mathes n.d.). During the period of the bookstore’s operation, in the national political arena, a concerted effort to consolidate and preserve the Indigenous past took hold in the seventeenth century as creoles rooted themselves to the land and people of ancient Mexico (Florescano 1993: 82). In 1780, the Jesuit Francisco Xavier Clavijero wrote the Ancient History of Mexico, in which he advocated for preserving ‘antiquities of our native land’ in a museum (Morales-​Moreno 1994: 173), which would occur within a mere ten years with the foundation of the Museo Nacional. Mexican proto-​archaeologists continued to research and publish on pre-​Columbian art, such as José Antonio Alzate’s first description of archaeological monuments of Tajin in 1788, followed by the publication of Antigüedades de Xochicalco in 1792 (Florescano 1993: 84). With the discovery of two major Aztec monuments, the Coatlicue and the Calendar Stone in 1790, creole leaders in Mexico started to think about the ‘Aztec world of pre-​ Conquest times as their equivalent of Classical Antiquity’ (Graham 1993: 53). These immense, iconographically sophisticated, and masterfully carved sculptures provided compelling physical evidence of a complex artistic tradition that linked modern Mexicans to a strong emic lineage. Though comparisons between Mediterranean antiquity and Mesoamerican objects began as early as Alexander von Humboldt’s visit to the Academia de San Carlos in 1800, where he suggested placing Greco-​Roman casts near the pre-​Columbian objects (Fuentes Rojas 2010: 232), it is clear that ‘the interpretive lens of Mediterranean antiquity was applied neither to the Calendar Stone nor to the Coatlicue’ (Miller and Villela 2010: 18). At best, with further archaeological discoveries and analysis, the comparison could be made that ‘the inhabitants in Mesoamerica, just like those in ancient Greek cities, lived in a kind of city museum, literally filled with monuments and symbols that alluded to the founding events of the kingdom’ (Florescano 2012: 89–​90).

300   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye Similar to the founding role that Greco-​Roman sculptures played in rooting a Western art tradition, the Coatlicue and the Calendar Stone marshalled financial and popular support for Mexican antiquity (Garrigan 2012: 17). This is most strongly exemplified by the National Museum of Anthropology, which celebrated the Aztecs (Errington 1993: 241), solidified a proud Mexican identity (Florescano 1993: 94), and ‘transformed Indian idolatrous objects from religious to aesthetic cult objects’ (Morales-​Moreno 1994: 186). The consolidation and transformation of Aztec art resulted in an increased circulation of its key monuments as plaster casts through World’s Fairs. By 1871, Dionisio Abadiano had created a direct impression of the Calendar Stone that was offered to the governor of Indiana by the United States minister to Mexico (Miller and Villela 2010: 27). Dionisio likely worked in the plaster cast workshop in the Museo Nacional with this brother, Francisco Abadiano. Francisco’s son, Eufémio was also adept at making plaster casts of pre-​Columbian monuments in Mexico City, and obtained special permission to reproduce two sets of 34 objects primarily from the holdings of the Museo Nacional (Wilson 1897). He produced one display set, and a second back-​up set that could be used for possible repairs. With an entrepreneurial streak akin to William Bullock, he saw great potential in venturing out in his own business of selling plaster casts of pre-​Columbian monuments to US museums and began with World’s Fairs. He transported these plaster casts from Mexico City to Louisiana for the St. Louis Worlds’ Fair and displayed them from 16 December 1884 through May 1885. To accompany the casts, Abadiano produced ‘Descriptive Catalogue of the Archaeological, Historical and Artistic Collections of Eufémio Abadiano,’ which included the title, dimensions, and description of each cast (Abadiano 1885). Though Eufémio primarily spoke Spanish and needed a translator, Wendell McLaughlin, to communicate during his travels to the US, the publication’s English language indicates the intended audience for the collection. After seeing the casts at the New Orleans World’s Fair, Otis T. Mason, curator of Ethnology, in collaboration with R. Edward Earll, Honorary Curator of the US National Museum and G. Brown Goode, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, arranged for Abadiano to deposit both sets in Washington DC. The US National Museum had recently acquired 22 casts of Maya objects by Désiré Charnay from the Trocadero in 1883 and sought to further develop their representation of pre-​Columbian art. As exportation laws prevented original pre-​ Columbian objects from leaving Mexico, and US-​sponsored archaeological expeditions were limited to people like Edward H. Thompson (1857–​1935), the newly opened US National Museum (opened in 1881; founded in 1846) needed other ways to fill the building (Dyson 2010: 563; Fane 1993: 145–​6; Hinsley 1993: 109). Between May and October 1885, Abadiano travelled to DC with his translator, and set up the casts near Charnay’s collection (Fig. 14.4). The US National Museum eventually purchased both sets of casts at auction for $746.78 on 4 September 1889. Several of Abadiano’s casts, such as the casts of the Coatlicue, listed by Abadiano as ‘Teoyoamiqui, or Goddess of Death’ (Abadiano No. 2, NMNH #77209) and the ‘Aztec Calendar Stone’ (Abadiano No. 1, NMNH #77202), were on continuous display for almost a century, from 1885 until the 1970s. Casts like the carved serpent (Abadiano

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Figure 14.4:  Installation shot of Désiré Charnay’s casts, Antiquities Exhibit in the US National Museum, ca. 1880. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 42, Folder 13, Image No. SIA_​000095_​B42_​F13_​003.

18, NMNH 77221) (Fig. 14.5), were displayed interchangeably with authentic pre-​ Columbian objects. Abadiano’s advantageous method of producing casts that simulated the stony, uneven surface of carved stone not only won him the gold prize for ‘Mexico, Reproductions of Sculptures,’ at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis World’s Fair) in 1904, but also enabled the plaster casts to pass as original stone sculptures (Lending 2017: 94). The vogue for casts of pre-​Columbian art only ramped up further between 1887 and 1910, as Mexico’s involvement in World’s Fairs increased to include the Centenary of the French Revolution, in Paris in 1889, the Pan-​American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, 1901, and the World’s Fair in Rome, 1910 (Morales-​Moreno 1994: 179). By 1892, the Mexican historian Francisco del Paso y Troncoso and Mexican physician and scientist Antonio Peñafiel turned the Museo Nacional into a fully-​fledged reproduction workshop that hired sculptors and cast makers to manufacture objects for the Madrid Historical American Exposition. Despite the operational workshop in the museum, demand was so high that Abadiano’s casts were still requested for later exhibitions, including the 1893 Chicago Exposition and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The circulation and display of casts of pre-​ Columbian art, specifically Aztec monuments in the Museo Nacional, contributed to the set number of sculptures that

302   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye

Figure 14.5:  Eufémio Abadiano, Cast—​Serpent’s Head. 25 June 1885. A77217-​0, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution.

comprise the canon of pre-​Columbian art (Latour and Lowe 2011). The final consolidation of Mexican identity as a continuation of the Aztec lineage, the rise of the World’s Fairs, and the establishment of the plaster cast workshops, all worked in concert to define the field. As Diana Fane writes, ‘First the canon of works to be replicated was not a given, but had to be created’ (Fane 1993: 151–​2). Over time, the canon expanded to include more Maya artwork as well as from West Mexico, but in this nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century moment, the focus was primarily on Aztec works of art and their reproductions. As a few of the only named Mexican cast makers, the Abadiano family played an important yet underappreciated role in the formation and dissemination of canonical works.

14.5  Conclusion and future research As the twentieth century progressed, plaster casts fell out of favour in museum displays (Lending 2017: 227), though at different rates of destruction and preservation. Several of Eufémio Abadiano’s casts, like the ‘Sacrificial Stone’ (Abadiano No. 4), the ‘Monolith of Tenango’ (Abadiano No. 9), and the ‘Calendar Stone’ (Abadiano No. 1) were intentionally destroyed likely due to their poor condition between 1957 and 1974. As the original

Museum replicas   303 pre-​Columbian monuments were safely stored in Mexico City, the demolition of these plaster casts did not give much pause. The rest of the Abadiano casts remain in off-​site storage, though a reshuffling project in the 1990s resulted in some misplaced objects. Within the records, the accession files, installation photographs, and physical objects remain separated and unlinked in a central database, making it challenging to reconstruct the larger history through digital media alone. For further research into casts of pre-​Columbian objects, scholars would need to create a database of all casts of pre-​Columbian art. This would include Tulane University’s Middle American Research Institute, and ‘other sizeable Mesoamerican cast collections at the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, the San Diego Museum of Man, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Musee de l’Homme’ (Fash 2004: 14). To this list, can be added the Harvard Peabody Museum and the musée du quai Branly, and it could be modelled similarly to Professor Stephen Miller’s graduate seminar at UC Berkeley that involved ‘cleaning, cataloging, display, and publication’ (Dyson 2010: 574). A careful analysis of the accession records and related correspondence within the database could help us expand the list of objects produced by Abadiano and further develop the roster of Mexican cast-​makers. Yet even if we are to develop a comprehensive database of all plaster casts and their related materials, scholars would still need to read the materials against the grain. Maudslay’s work continued through the projects led by Peter Matthews and Clara Bezanillas (Fash 2004: 13), and the Google Arts and Culture program with the British Museum to digitize every photograph, paper squeeze, and mould from Maudslay’s collection (Coughenour and Cooper 2017). While this is a necessary first step, the descriptions of the people in the photograph may benefit from a clear acknowledgment of the individual workers and overall approached with a similar care. The challenge remains how to move beyond the Eurocentric lens through which the histories of these artworks are typically filtered, and into reclaiming the way they upheld and furthered the colonial enterprise through production, acquisition, and display. Kavita Singh (2019) provides a useful model for exploring a single object, a cast of the Sanchi gateway, in its multiple iterations. She describes the conditions of its creation, to its display as a central feature of the Cast Court in the South Kensington Museum. She then traces its destruction and eventual invisibility in both the reinstalled Cast Court at the V&A and on its website. This triple erasure of physical destruction, exhibition elimination, and digital deletion highlights the continued colonialist logic today. Even though it is arguably the most studied cast of non-​Western art (Singh 2019: 346), it still remains invisible to the general public, thereby betraying a clear bias in favour of casts of Western art. Casts of pre-​Columbian art are facing a similar erasure, and like Singh, part of the work of this chapter has been to identify and question the subordinate or even absent role that casts of non-​Western art have historically played. Databases may be inherently flawed, and objects remain mute as to the exploitative labour practices that produced them. At the very least, scholars and museum staff can be attuned to their language and

304   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye its complicity in imperialist paradigms and can actively seek to recover the voices of the unheard through text and image. Beyond this, we need to think of approaches like the face casts and triple erasure of the Sanchi gate to recuperate embodied experiences of plaster cast production and uncover the complicity of museum and scholarship practices in further silencing the significance of these casts.

References Abadiano, E. 1885. Descriptive Catalogue of The Archæological, Historical and Artistic Collections of Eufemio Abadiano. New Orleans: Franco-​American Print. Aguirre, R.D. 2005. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baker, M. 2010. ‘The Reproductive Continuum: Plaster Casts, Paper Mosaics and Photographs as Complementary Modes of Reproduction in the Nineteenth-​Century Museum’. In Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by R. Frederiksen and E. Marchand, pp. 485–​500. Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Baptiste, P. 2013. ‘Virtual Visions of Angkor: Plaster Casts and Drawings in the Indochinese Museum of the Trocadero Palace in Paris’. In Archaeologizing’ Heritage? Transcultural Entanglements between Local Social Practices and Global Virtual Realities, edited by M. Falser and M. Juneja, pp. 63–​79. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Boone, E.H. (Ed). 1993. Collecting the Pre-​Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Brenna, B., H.D. Christensen, and O. Hamran. (Eds). 2019. Museums as Cultures of Copies: The Crafting of Artefacts and Authenticity. New York, NY: Routledge. Briefel, A. and M. Etherington. 2006. The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Charnay, D. 1887. The Ancient Cities of the New World: Being Travels and Explorations in Mexico and Central America from 1857–​1882. London: Chapman and Hall. Cooke, I. 2010. ‘Colonial Contexts: The Changing Meanings of the Cast Collection of the Auckland War Memorial Museum’. In Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by R. Frederiksen and E. Marchand, pp. 577–​94. Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Coughenour, C. and J. Cooper. 2017. The British Museum and Google Arts & Culture: Decoding the Secrets of the Ancient Maya, Google. Available at: https://​blog.goo​gle/​outre​ach-​init​iati​ ves/​arts-​c ult​ure/​brit​ish-​mus​eum-​and-​goo​g le-​arts-​c ult​ure-​decod​ing-​s ecr​ets-​anci​ent-​ maya/​[Accessed 2 January 2020]. Davis, K.F. 1981. Désiré Charnay, Expeditionary Photographer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Dyson, S.L. 2010. ‘Cast Collecting in the United States’. In Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by R. Frederiksen and E. Marchand (Eds), pp. 557–​75. Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Errington, S. 1993. ‘Progressivist Stories and the Pre-​Columbian Past: Notes on Mexico and the United States’. In Collecting the Pre-​Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990, edited by E.H. Boone (Ed), pp. 209–​49. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research and Library Collection.

Museum replicas   305 Falser, M. 2019. Angkor Wat. A Transcultural History of Heritage: Volume 1: Angkor in France. From Plaster Casts to Exhibition Pavilions. Volume 2: Angkor in Cambodia. From Jungle Find to Global Icon. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Fane, D. 1993. ‘Reproducing the Pre-​Columbian Past: Casts and Models in Exhibitions of Ancient America, 1824–​ 1935’. In Collecting the Pre-​ Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990, edited by E.H. Boone (Ed), pp. 141–​76. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Fash, B.W. 2004. ‘Cast Aside: Revisiting the Plaster Cast Collections from Mesoamerica’. Visual Resources 20 (1): pp. 3–​17. Feldman, J.D. 2006. ‘Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem’. In Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, edited by E. Edwards, C. Gosden, and R.B. Phillips, pp. 245–​68. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Florescano, E. 1993. ‘The Creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico and its Scientific, Educational, and Political Purposes’. In Collecting the Pre-​Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990, edited E.H. Boone, pp. 81–​103. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research and Library Collection. Florescano, E. 2012. National Narratives in Mexico: A History. Translated by N. Hancock. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Foster, E., T. Kittler, E. Marchand, and E. Payne. (Eds). 2019. ‘Editorial’. The Sculpture Journal 28 (3): p. 291. Foster, S.M. 2015. ‘Circulating Agency: The V&A, Scotland and the Multiplication of Plaster Casts of “Celtic Crosses”’. Journal of the History of Collections 27 (1): pp. 73–​96. Foster, S.M. and Jones, S. 2020a. New Futures for Replicas: Principles and Guidance for Museums and Heritage. Available at: https://​repli​cas.stir.ac.uk/​pri​ncip​les-​and-​guida​nce/​ [Accessed 10 March 2021]. Foster, S.M. and S. Jones. 2020b. My Life as a Replica: St John’s Cross, Iona. Macclesfield: Windgather Press. Frederiksen, R. and E. Marchand. (Eds). 2010. Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Fuentes Rojas, E. 2010. ‘Art and Pedagogy of the Plaster Cast Collection of the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City’. In Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by R. Frederiksen and E. Marchand, pp. 229–​47. Berlin/​ New York: De Gruyter. Garrigan, S.E. 2012. Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Graham, I. 1993. ‘Three Early Collectors in Mesoamerica’. In Collecting the Pre-​Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990, edited by E.H. Boone, pp. 49–​80. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Graham, I. 2002. Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Hinsley, C.M. 1993. ‘In Search of the New World Classical’. In Collecting the Pre-​ Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990, edited by E.H. Boone, pp. 105–​2 1. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Isaac, G. 2011. ‘Whose Idea Was This? Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge’. Current Anthropology 52 (20): pp. 211–​33.

306   Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye Jarvis, K. 2017. ‘Maya Heritage: 150 years of Preservation’. The British Museum Blog, 29 November. Available at: https://​blog.britis​hmus​eum.org/​maya-​herit​age-​150-​years-​of-​prese​ rvat​ion/​ [Accessed 13 July 2020]. Latour, B. and A. Lowe. 2011. ‘The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original Through its Fac Similes’. In Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities And The Arts, edited by T. Bartscherer, pp. 275–​ 97. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lending, M. 2017. Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Mathes, W.M. (n.d.). Introduction: Latin American History and Culture: Series 4: The Mexican Pamphlet Collection, 1607–​1888. Available at: http://​micr​ofor​mgui​des.gale.com/​Data/​Introd​ ucti​ons/​3266​0FM.htm [Accessed 13 July 2020]. Maudslay, A.P. 1889. Biologia Centrali-​Americana, or, Contributions to the knowledge of the fauna and flora of Mexico and Central America. Archaeology /​by A.P. Maudslay; appendix by J.T. Goodman; edited by F. Ducane Godman and Osbert Salvin. London: R.H. Porter and Dulau & Co. Mickel, A. 2019. ‘Essential Excavation Experts: Alienation and Agency in the History of Archaeological Labour’. Archaeologies 15 (2): pp. 181–​205. Miller, M.E. and K.D. Villela. (Eds). 2010. The Aztec Calendar Stone. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute. Morales-​Moreno, L.G. 1994. ‘History and Patriotism in the National Museum of Mexico’. In Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity, edited by F. Kaplan, pp. 171–​91. London and New York: Leicester University Press. Nichols, K. 2015. Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854–​1936, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pierrebourg, F. de. 2016. ‘Moulages et collections, moulages et vestiges mésoaméricains, un dialogue?’ In Situ. Revue des patrimoines 28: pp. 1–​13. Sattler, F. and A. Simandiraki-​Grimshaw 2019. ‘Replica Knowledge: Travelling Thrones’. In Museums as Cultures of Copies: The Crafting of Artefacts and Authenticity, edited by B. Brenna, H.D. Christensen, and O. Hamran, pp. 99–​115. London and New York: Routledge. Simandiraki-​Grimshaw, A., F. Sattler, and K. Angermüller. (Eds). 2021. Replica Knowledge: An Archaeology of the Multiple Past. Berlin: K. Verlag. Singh, K. 2019. ‘Sanchi, In and Out of the Museum’. Sculpture Journal 28 (3): pp. 345–​64. Sysling, F. 2016. Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press. V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum). 2019. Celebrating Reproductions: Past, Present and Future. Available at: https://​www.vam.ac.uk/​event/​GgO31​mgE/​cele​brat​ing-​reprod​ucti​ons-​past-​ pres​ent-​and-​fut​ure [Accessed 9 July 2020]. Williams, E.A. 1993. ‘Collecting and Exhibiting Pre-​Columbiana in France and England, 1870–​1930’. In Collecting the Pre-​Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990, edited by E.H. Boone, pp. 123–​40. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Wilson, T. 1897. ‘Abadiano Collection’. Accession Records 16185. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC.

Chapter 15

Photo graphic prac t i c e s in m u seum arc ha e ol o g y Stefanie Klamm

15.1  Introduction Archaeology has always been dependent on means of visual documentation. Nowadays, most archaeological institutions use digital (image) media stored in databases, but the visual has played a decisive role at least since the professionalization of archaeology in the nineteenth century (and goes back to earlier engagements with the past like antiquarianism; for a general overview of the topic of archaeology and its images see Bohrer 2011; Brusius 2015: esp. 121–​58; Klamm 2017; Riggs 2020; Shanks 1997; Smiles and Moser 2005; Straub 2008). According to the maxim ‘Monumentorum artis qui unum vidit, nullum vidit; qui millia vidit, unum vidit’ (To see one monument is to see none; to see a thousand is to see one), one of the pioneers of archaeology, Eduard Gerhard (1795–​1867) programmatically linked the establishment of the discipline of archaeology to a comparison of as many artefacts as possible with the help of visual material (Gerhard 1831: 111 No. 1). Soon, specialized image collections emerged in the context of newly founded university chairs, but also at museums alike (Gerhard himself was responsible for the antiquity collection of the Königliche Museen and from 1843 onwards held the chair for archaeology at Berlin University, see Stürmer 2009). These ‘Lehrapparate’, or teaching apparatuses as Gerhard called them, initially existed in the form of drawings and plaster casts, but soon incorporated photographs, since, as the example of Gerhard shows, archaeology saw itself as a discipline that should fundamentally start from the comparison of different artefacts with each other, from a methodological point of view. Therefore, one premise was to collect as much visual material as possible for scientific work (see Klamm 2010 for comparative seeing in archaeology and Klamm 2017: 317–​70 for a general discussion of image compendia). Archaeologists like Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827–​1900) and William Flinders Petrie (1853–​ 1942) further developed the essential idea of documenting an excavation primarily and

308   Stefanie Klamm almost solely by means of visual representation—​namely by images, in the last third of the nineteenth century (Lucas 2001: 211–​12). Here, images are to this day a core component of archaeological publications (and archives). In these image collections, photographs were soon separated from other pictorial evidence and placed in special photo collections or archives. They served as tools of everyday research practice and emerged ubiquitously at almost every archaeological museum and every university institute or research institution as well. Thus, many archaeological institutions today have compiled vast collections of nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century photographs reproducing archaeological artefacts, historical monuments, and archaeological sites (Edwards and Lien 2014a; Edwards and Morton 2015; for the case of archaeology, see Klamm and Wodtke 2017; Riggs 2019, 2020: 196–​ 200). Such collections were created at a time when archaeology came into being as a professional university discipline focused on material objects. For drawing together the material basis for research, thereby defining the scope as well as the canon of archaeology, photography offered itself as a practicable means for the comprehensive end of assembling the largest possible image archive. This was a vital part of archaeological practice, not least because archaeology’s objects of research were dispersed across the globe and in various collections and institutions. Before the age of digitization and the production of digital images, analogue photographs were, for a long time, the outstanding working tools in the archaeological sciences. On their basis, archaeology developed many of their constitutive methods, which remain fundamental even today.

15.2  Photographic collections as working collections Collections of photographs at archaeological museums differ categorically in their status from the actual museum collection of archaeological artefacts. Photographs formed (and still form) a working collection for the daily practices in the museum. In comparison to museum artefacts, they often occupy a shadowy existence to the present day—​they rank low in the hierarchy of museum objects, have an uncertain or indeterminate status, and often do not count as ‘real’ collectible objects; they are often ‘just there’ (Edwards and Lien 2014b; Edwards and Morton 2015). Nevertheless, in recent years, interest in photo archives in relation to different sciences and humanities disciplines has grown to a great extent (e.g. Bärnighausen et al. 2019a, 2020b). The accumulation of photographs in (archaeology) museums has resulted in assemblies of different kinds. The example of the Antikensammlung (Collection of Classical Antiquities), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—​Preußischer Kulturbesitz, in Berlin highlights these issues (see Alexandridis and Heilmeyer 2004; Bärnighausen et al. 2019b; Klamm and Wodtke 2017; Wodtke 2020). Firstly, there are photographs that were assembled as reference materials and iconographical reservoirs for comparisons with the

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    309 museum’s artefacts, arranged according to genre, type (e.g. architecture, sculpture, relief, painting, vases) and material as well as epoch (or in some instances, artists). Secondly, the collection contains photographic documentation of the museum’s own holdings of different times. Further, it entails views of archaeological sites and architectural remains in topographical order. Their systematic classification mirrors at least partly the order of archaeological artefacts in the museum itself, as well as the responsibilities of the curatorial staff. It is therefore fundamentally bound to the methodological structure of classical archaeology as a discipline itself. Thirdly, the museum accommodates documents related to the excavations undertaken by the Berlin museums in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside lists of finds, diaries, drawings, or master copies for the excavation result’s publication, it encompasses many photographs. These were often kept as part of so-​called excavation archives, which are grouped together under the topographical designation of their study area or site. In the Antikensammlung one can find for instance residues of excavations conducted in Olympia, Pergamon, and Magnesia on the Maeander River, sites which are located today in Greece and Turkey.

15.3  The Epistemic function of photography in archaeology From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, photography became increasingly established as a medium for the archaeological image; however, others, for example plaster casts or drawings, retained their importance in parallel. In fact, drawing and photography, and not least the cast, complemented each other in archaeological practice. Therefore, the appearance of photography did not exactly imply a sudden departure from the imaging techniques used hitherto in archaeology but, rather, that the ensemble of visual media available to them was extended and reconfigured (Klamm 2017, 2021). The complementary relationship of different media to one another proved further to be essential to the development of archaeology through to today. This should be kept in mind when we talk about the function of photographs in archaeological practice. Photography in the sciences and humanities, as has been analysed in great detail elsewhere, has been part of the shift to an epistemological regime of objectivity (Daston and Galison 2007). This certainly holds true for archaeology as well, but turns out to be a bit more complicated. Mid-​nineteenth-​century accounts of photography, on the one hand, have characterized the technique as one able to represent an abundance of detail to great perfection, even details whose existence was unknown to the creator of the photographs. Photography’s ‘excessive’ ability to provide documentation was emphasized in the very first accounts of the new medium, including with regard to archaeology (Arago 1839; Bohrer 2005: 183–​4). Photography, often quite unexpectedly, made objects and structures that had not otherwise been observed on site visible. Alternatively, photography could depict unclear structures that had yet to be explained. Its abundance

310   Stefanie Klamm of documentation, in other words its ability to represent a great quantity of details at a glance, proved to be very helpful; photography froze a certain situation or state of an excavation, halting its process in a still picture. Therefore, preserving photographs as part of the documentation of an excavation was very often seen as essential (for the function of photography at the excavation site see Klamm 2016, 2021). The above-​mentioned photographic collections were, in light of these features of photography, typically treated as repositories of iconographic or topographical order. The photographs in those collections often became the ‘original’ objects of research. Indeed, Heinrich Dilly has argued that it is not the works of art but instead the photographic reproductions that form the object of art history’s analysis (Dilly 1975: 153). This holds true for much of archaeology as well. Related to the paradigm of objectivity they appeared as transparent and invisible equivalents to objects and sites, quasi naturalized (‘the photograph as fact’ (Schwartz 2006: 74)). This transparency seemed to allow the viewer the look through the material photograph to directly consider what it depicted (Edwards 2001: 56; Schwartz 2006: 74–​5; Wilder 2009: 118–​23). Collecting photographs meant acquiring knowledge: ‘to know the world through possession of its images’ (Schwartz 2006: 75). Thus, thanks to the power of the medium and its supposed mechanical character as instrument to depict reality, the photographs’ historical context as material objects themselves became nearly invisible (Edwards and Hart 2004). Substantial research in recent decades has shown that photographs are embedded in, and are shaped by, different political, social, and cultural contexts; they circulate and bear traces of handling and use. Not only do they depict objects, they are also three-​ dimensional material objects themselves. Photographs therefore have to be seen ‘as cultural documents offering evidence of historically, culturally and socially specific ways of seeing the world’ (Rose 2000: 556). It is by their material qualities, such as the mounting, cutting, retouching, and colouring, or the various forms of inscriptions (e.g. notes, stamps) that photo-​objects are always linked to the contexts of their time, related to institutional history, archival, and academic practices. These layers of sedimented knowledge, which lay in the material qualities of the photo-​object, have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars (cf. e.g. Caraffa 2011; Edwards and Hart 2004; and for an overview of the material approach in photography studies Caraffa 2020). Moreover, epistemologically, photographs often needed a pre-​or post-​production of the actual image, supposedly to inscribe additional evidence therein. This could be by preparations and stagings directly on the excavation site and on the photograph itself (e.g. by retouching the print as well as the negative). These auxiliary means for clarifying the image were often crucial, since the above-​mentioned photographic ‘excess’ posed the risk of indifference and disorientation. The overabundance of countless details in the medium exacerbated endeavours to distil the essence of archaeologically relevant objects and structures and represent it comprehensibly. Excavators who worked with photographs in order to process the results of an excavation therefore often additionally annotated these visual records of the excavation field; their inscriptions and captions on photographic prints aid comprehension and highlight relevant remains and find spots (see examples in Bärnighausen et al. 2019b; Caraffa 2019: 11–​16; Klamm 2017: 43–​7,

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    311 113–​36, 228–​30; 2021). This was equally a very common scholarly practice with regard to photographs in the museum.

15.4  Practices with and on photo-​objects In many cases, photographs are used for scholarly purposes only after processing. In order to function as working instruments in archaeology, they are subject to various forms of treatment. Photographic prints have to be mounted on cardboard, stamped, labelled, retouched, or furnished with signatures or numbers. Negatives can be handled in a similar fashion. At times, prints are trimmed or cut up, reassembled, and put to use in new configurations, such as for publications. Some of these practices, for instance the mounting of albumen prints, have very practical reasons—​since one is not able to handle a very fragile albumen print otherwise. But mounting photographs has epistemological implications, too. It facilitates ‘legitimate handling’ (Edwards 2014: 4) that protects them physically while ensuring access to their content: users needed to be able to browse through the holdings, lay out images, pass them around—​thereby encouraging the practice of comparing photographs, combining, juxtaposing, and isolating them in new ways (Bärnighausen et al. 2020a). The material qualities of photographs as being photo-​ objects can afford such types of use and thereby shaped their adoption in various academic disciplines. These practices give evidence of the intellectual and scholarly work done with (analogue) photographs, but many of them have remained in use or been further developed up to the present, and have to some extent been transferred into the digital realm.

15.5  Annotating A very vivid example of these practices, with regard to archaeology, is a mounted albumen print from the Antikensammlung, which shows a fragment of the frieze of the temple of Artemis in Magnesia, taken at the excavation site (Fig. 15.1). The photograph is today part of the photo archive at the Antikensammlung in Berlin. It stems from Magnesia on the Maeander River in what is today western Turkey. The site was partially excavated between 1891 and 1894 by workers from different parts of the Ottoman Empire for the Berlin Museums headed by the archaeologist and engineer Carl Humann (1839–​ 1896), who also took many of the photographs now in Berlin (Auinger 2016; Panteleon 2015: 206–​12; Wodtke 2020). The print and the cardboard mount are full of annotations and other traces of processing, also on the reverse of the cardboard (see the detailed analysis in Wodtke 2020: 63–​9). Hence, it reveals how many systems of denomination,

312   Stefanie Klamm

Figure 15.1:  Fragment of the Artemision’s western frieze from Magnesia on the Maeander river, photographed by Carl Humann, 1891, albumin paper on cardboard, 20.2 × 11.3 cm (photo). Photo archive of the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, FA-​Mag04-​0001, scan: V. Kant, 2015.

numbering, referencing, assignment, and order can exist via working with a photograph. The complex set of annotations points to various steps, which were necessary to interpret the excavation results, and therefore refers to different layers of time too. Notes on the reverse of the cardboard, for instance, give information on the discovery of the find and a first numbering of the frieze panels, written down soon after the excavation in 1891. This photograph was, among others, used extensively to do research about the frieze long after the end of the excavation so as to re-​established its ancient order by positioning the fragmented and scattered frieze panels with the help of numberings, thereby reconstructing the frieze, at least on paper. Various numbers on the front of the photo-​object, with pencil, ink, and in different colours, refer to different revisions of the fragments for archaeological interpretations at various times—​in the 1890s, at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the 1930s. Hence different publications on the frieze used various numbering systems (see Bärnighausen et al. 2019b; and Wodtke 2020 for details). Other traces of working processes with the photograph are indicated in red: the frieze was first published as a graphic rendering, which was based on tracings of the

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    313 photographs. This is what the note on the right side of the cardboard refers to: ‘trace the part marked red’ (‘das rot unterstrichene durchpausen’). Other indicators for this procedure are small holes in the cardboard made by pins, which were used to fix the tracing paper. The red lines in the photograph, last but not least, point as well to the fragments of different histories: the fragment of the frieze marked with a red line was brought to Constantinople; the other one ended up in Berlin and is now in the Pergamon Museum. The photo-​object with its sophisticated notation system is a perfect example to demonstrate that individual photographs are always embedded in multifaceted and complex networks. These networks consist not only of human actors but also of archaeological fragments, notes, negatives, other prints, drawings, and various diaries, lists, and publications. Only through their interplay can knowledge about the archaeological site be generated and the past subsequently and genuinely be understood. How intensively these photo-​objects were processed and linked with other media, was displayed in the exhibition Unboxing Photographs: Working in the Photo Archive, on show in Berlin in 2018,1 where the cases of photographs from the archives were unboxed, their materiality connected to the daily work practices displayed, and the specific handling performed by archivists, not least by the curators. The exhibition provided a diagrammatic mind map that spatialized the assemblage of negatives, positives, excavation diaries, drawings, and publications alike and illuminated their relationships (Klamm and Schneider 2020: 248, 257). It spelled out again that photography does not produce historical sense and meaning as a singular image, but only in combination with other media and objects.

15.6  Retouching and cutting Ever since its invention in the nineteenth century, as explicated in Section 15.3, photography has been regarded as an objective documentary medium for recording reality—​ one whose production seemed to be achieved mechanically, ‘without the involvement of the human hand’.2 From the very beginning, however, it was customary to intervene quite decisively in the production of photographic images. When preparing images for publication, unwanted sections of a print or negative were masked, and structures added by hand to overexposed areas; contrasts strengthened using white or dark colours, to name but a few very common features (for retouching in general see Fineman 2012: esp. 3–​22; for specific routines around 1900 see Klamm 2015: 47–​51). Photographs stemming from the excavation in Magnesia at the Antikensammlung show this practice

1 

The exhibition was on display at the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 16 February to 27 May 2018. Available at: https://​www.smb.mus​eum/​en/​exhi​biti​ons/​det​ail/​unbox​ing-​phot​ogra​phs/​ [Accessed 10 August 2021]. 2  Instead ‘Nature´s hand’ was supposed to be responsible for the photographic image, as coined by William Henry Fox Talbot in his The Pencil of Nature (1844–​1846) (Talbot 1969 [1844–​1846]).

314   Stefanie Klamm very nicely. It was widely used for extracting the archaeological artefact out of a given context of the excavation site and recontextualizing it in the published results of the excavation. This procedure is not always as visible as in the case of a female sculpture from Magnesia (Fig. 15.2). The statue was photographed shortly after its discovery, probably by Carl Humann in 1892 at the excavation storage site in Balatçık in the vicinity of Magnesia, as its surrounding shows. The negative of this shot reveals a heavy retouching with dark colour to mask the sculpture. Another print made from this retouched negative (probably in the 1930s, indicated by its technique, paper, cardboard mount, and inscription) shows the effect of the retouching; the sculpture seems to float in front of a white background. Via retouching, artefacts were extracted through photographs ever more from the excavation site and set into new contexts of archaeological interpretation, for example, by putting them side by side with other objects thought to be of the same style, period, or belonging to the same building—​the artefact thereby being recontextualized again. To achieve this, another practice was essential too, namely cutting. Photographed arrangements of artefacts taken out of their find context were cut out and re-​used individually or in new combinations in further publications. Many such cut-​out photographs are preserved at the Antikensammlung. They also served the archaeologists as internal working material, who noted important information for subsequent processing—​such as inventory numbers, the scale of the reproduction, the date, and place of discovery, either next to or on the back of individual items. As a result of the process of excavating, archaeologists distinguish archaeological finds from the topographical space, which took place amongst others with the help of various media as photography. It implied on the one hand a de-​contextualization from the excavation site: objects and structures are detached from their exposure context. On the other hand, archaeological artefacts were transferred, in the form of visual

Figure 15.2:  Retouched negative of a sculpture of a reclining woman and subsequent print from Magnesia on the Maeander river, photographed probably by Carl Humann, 1892; left: print, collodion paper on cardboard, 7.6 × 16.5 cm (photo), 1930s, FA-​Mag14-​0007; right: negative, gelatin dry plate, 13 × 18 cm, No. PM 1390. Photo archive of the Antikensammlung Berlin, exhibition view, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photo: D. Katz, 2018.

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    315 representations of them, into new collections according to their genre, such as sculpture or coins (Klamm 2017: 276–​316; 2021). By masking and extracting archaic bronzes from Olympia, another excavation of the Berlin Museum in the last third of the nineteenth century in Greece, Adolf Furtwängler (1853–​1907), who worked on the excavation there in 1878–​1879 (Marchand 2002), recomposed those finds into almost floating ensembles (Fig. 15.3). Their symmetrical arrangement and careful composition in the photograph already indicate their unity and comparability. Aesthetically upgraded, they anticipate later museum installations. Similar arrangements were common, for instance, in portfolios of models for architects and craftsmen, as well as in pattern books, first in engravings but soon also in photographs and, in turn, displays in museums of the applied arts. Thereby, the de-​contextualizations resulted in other re-​contextualizations,

Figure 15.3:  Archaic bronze figures from Olympia, photographed by Brothers Rhomaïdis, 1879, collotype, plate from: Ernst Curtius, Friedrich Adler and Georg Treu, eds., Die Ausgrabungen zu Olympia IV: Übersicht der Arbeiten und Funde vom Winter und Frühjahr 1878–​1879, vol. 4 (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1880), pl. 22.

316   Stefanie Klamm which also produced interpretations of the retrieved artefacts that the archaeologists hoped would convince their scholarly community (Klamm 2017: 265–​72; 2021: 122–​123).

15.7  Photography on display Photographs also formed part of timely exhibition displays to highlight the then newly discovered findings of, for example, the Olympian excavation. This use of photographs in exhibitions continues today, where they are employed to illuminate historic as well as contemporary processes of retrieving the archaeological results on display. Here, they can form ensembles with other media such as drawings or casts. Returning to the example of the excavation in Olympia at the end of the nineteenth century for a moment, it is notable that its spectacular finds of sculpture could only be presented in Berlin and elsewhere outside Greece by means of reproductions (in accordance with the contract of the German Empire with the Greek government) (Klamm 2017: 15, 372–​6). From 1875 to 1881, archaeologists dug at Olympia in an attempt to find one of the most legendary sanctuaries of ancient Greece; the Temple of Zeus and the one of Hera (the Heraion). The excavation was set up at the highest level of German society, declared a German Imperial project, and conducted in conjunction with the Berlin Museums. It was an enterprise of terrific national prestige at a time of strong competition between European nations in all fields of science, industry, and culture (Klamm 2017; Kyrieleis 2002; Marchand 1996: 77–​91). The excavators therefore spent considerable time and money to have at least the pedimental sculptures and the metopes of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia completely moulded in plaster, the plaster casts being the preferred medium of sculpture reproduction since the eighteenth century (Frederiksen and Marchand 2010; Schreiter 2014). But the display of the excavation results additionally included other visual means. Besides the presentation of mainly sculptures in casts, site plans of the excavation as well as photographs of the site and of other findings were shown. While we do not have any views of exhibits of Olympian finds in Berlin to see how the different media were exactly displayed in space (see Klamm 2017: 384–​6), we have more visual sources for a later display in Dresden. In 1882, Georg Treu (1843–​1921), leading archaeologist at the Olympia excavation as of 1877/​1878 and later editor of the sculptural finds, was appointed the director of the antiquities and cast collection in Dresden, which was significantly reorganized and expanded under his direction. The heart of the collection, which was reopened in 1891, was the Olympia and the Parthenon Halls. There, Georg Treu supplemented sculptural casts with drawings, models, and photographs. Treu’s differentiated and thoughtful use of various media can be traced in part through contemporary views of the collection rooms, made by the photographer Hermann Krone (1827–​1916) in 1891. Krone’s photograph of the Aeginetes Hall (Fig. 15.4) opens the view through the door to the opposite wall of the Olympia Hall. The reconstruction of the large ridge acroter from the roof of the Heraion is visible, cut from the

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    317

Figure 15.4: Aeginetes Hall of the Kgl. Abguss-​ Sammlung Dresden, photographed by Hermann Krone, from: photo album of the Dresden plaster cast collection, 1891, albumin paper on cardboard, 12.2 × 17.3 cm (photo), Archive of the Skulpturensammlung Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, detail.

doorframe at the top. Below hangs a large format plan of the sanctuary. Below the plan, and on the right-​hand side, one can detect framed photographs with passe-​partouts, some in panoramic format, which probably showed views of the excavation site. Plans and photographs illuminate the spatial as well as architectural context of the sculptural casts and casted architectural elements in the same room. Casts complemented by photographs and plans as well as visual reconstructions of monuments and landscapes presented the cultural landscape of Olympia and a spatial environment, not just an art history of Olympian sculpture. Treu thus attempted a reconstruction of antique culture in its material remains that went beyond a simple history of ancient sculpture in chronological order (including experiments with ancient polychromy) and beyond the aim of aesthetic education (Klamm 2017: 387–​96). This was in line with the reinstallation of

318   Stefanie Klamm many archaeological exhibits at the time, for instance in the Neues Museum in Berlin, which moved from a chronology of ancient art or artefacts to a reconstruction of ancient culture and environment (Bergvelt and van Wezel 2011; van Wezel 2003). This historic example alludes as well to more recent practices of exhibiting photographs in (not only) archaeology. Photographs are still regarded as media with special truth effects and promises of authenticity, as a supposedly neutral, explanatory illustration of an object or circumstance and in doing so are usually not historicized, but in a sense considered as timeless and unmediated (Schnittpunkt at al. 2010; Edwards and Lien 2014b: 7–​8). In ethnological and archaeological exhibitions photographs are often used to contextualize individual objects or groups of objects. They then, both spatially and temporally, point beyond the objects on display, for example by illustrating regions of origin, contexts of use, or even situations of field research (see the analyses of the PHOTOCLEC project (photoclec.dmu.ac.uk), cf. Edwards and Lien 2014b: 8; Edwards and Mead 2013). In a similar way, cultural history exhibitions use photographs largely unquestionably for the reconstruction and spatial staging of museum interiors (Griesser-​Stermscheg and Lehne 2010; cf. Brink 1997). Conventional forms of presentation also include the use of photographs in the sense of an ‘authentic contemporary witness’ (cf. Jones 2010), especially in historical and archaeological exhibitions. Here, they function as a means to create emotions, evoke memories, or provide an atmospheric experience, through which objects can be experienced sensuously, as in Yadegar Asisi’s Pergamon panorama in the temporary exhibition building of the Pergamon Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island (Asisi 2011; Scholl and Schwarzmaier 2018). In this context, photographs are often greatly enlarged or cropped to create an effective scenery, or they are, purely as a means of design, reduced to colouring, format, or style, and used as wallpaper or gap filler. Especially in exhibition design, photographs are not infrequently ‘manipulated beyond recognition, and certainly beyond any claim to be an historical document [ . . . ]—​all without any documentation so that the museum visitor has no idea of what they are looking at’ (Edwards and Lien 2014b: 9). Another one of these strongly conventionalized modes of perception and ‘gestures of showing’ (‘Gesten des Zeigens’ (Muttenthaler and Wonisch 2006: 38–​9)) is the well-​established exhibition practice in art photography and art history of showing photographs primarily in their uniqueness as artefacts produced with an artistic and aesthetic intent. Framed with a passe-​partout, they are mainly presented as singular individual images or art objects in the white cube (for a critique of this convention see Krauss 1982; Sekula 2003). Displaying photographs as flat and only two-​dimensional items—​‘flatware’ as it is often coined—​elides not only their materiality, which is crucial for their function as ‘working objects’ (Daston and Galison 2007: 19–​27, 53) in archaeology, but also much of the historic context of their emergence and further uses. The established forms of presentation often prove to be insufficient (cf. Bessel 2015). Hence, forms of display are needed that reflect critically on the social and cultural practices tied to photography and complicate exhibition narratives about the past. This should include the material culture

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    319 of photography and its function in the making of (archaeological) knowledge and—​as part of the museum’s knowledge system—​the curatorial design should comment critically on collecting practices or politics of representation in the museum (Edwards and Lien 2014b: 9–​11). The exhibition Unboxing Photographs: Working in the Photo Archive, for instance, has questioned those institutional and political contexts of the use of photography and tested new ways of display as well with regard to archaeology (Klamm and Schneider 2020).

15.8  Effaced in the photo archive Looking at photographs as photo-​objects also allows us to reflect on the contested history of archaeology and its difficult heritage. Photographs or photo archives are not objective or neutral—​they are expressions of current interests and preferences, and are always entangled with politics. Those collections were established during the colonial and imperial era and are part of colonialism’s appropriation of the global world (Stoler 2010), as is archaeology as a whole. They are endowed with a specific order, which is often further developed, and might ultimately be discarded in its turn. But its underlying assumptions, for example of the photograph as an ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ depiction or the colonial practice the photographs emanated from, very often stay on and are not necessarily questioned in everyday work with these photographs. Even though photo archives or collections are dynamic places, whose ordering systems and contents are under continual reconstruction, we need to call consistently into question how a photograph was produced and what it shows. Cataloguing is one of the difficult museum practices connected to photographs, since categories, titles, names, and inscriptions are never objective (see for anthropology museums Turner 2020). Names, for instance, can embody racist stereotypes or conform to outmoded cultural concepts, as suggested for example by the term the ‘Orient’. Other labels ignore the presence of certain people or modern cities. They are part of the colonial legacies of those collections, which are embodied in museum practices until today. In archaeological photo collections, we find, for instance, images of modernity such as street scenes (Fig. 15.5). Visible here is the village of Bergama, which was erected on the ruins of the ancient metropolis entitled ‘Pergamon’. But in the archaeological ordering system, the modern village was not a category of any value and therefore elided by the inscription, which simply says ‘Pergamon’ (see, for example, Klamm and Schneider 2020: 247, 258–​9). Archaeological labour is also very often blanked out in the photographs and their classification, with the exception, every now and then, of (male) western archaeologists presenting themselves in photographs, for instance, at an excavation site, signalling their familiarity with the research environment or with the handling of the camera. Documented in this way is the individual’s impact and relevance ‘on-​site’, which is enhanced by the fact that they are also very often named on the photograph or its

320   Stefanie Klamm

Figure 15.5:  Pergamon –​Bergama, unidentified photographer, after 1900, albumin paper on cardboard, 10.6 × 17.2 cm (photo). Photo archive of the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, FA-​Perg115a-​0001, scan: V. Kant.

mount (see for anthropological field research Edwards 2011a; Morton 2005). In contrast, a variety of anonymous individuals can be seen in such photographs as Fig. 15.6. One of them is identified as the ‘little Turk’ (‘kleiner Türke’) on the mount.3 The young man is often visible in the photographs of Magnesia as a reference figure. Nowhere is his name mentioned. He, as well as the research assistant at the excavation Otto Kern (1863–​ 1942), who is referenced as ‘Hr. Kern’, was used by the photographer Carl Humann as a marker to scale certain positions in some photographs of the agora at Magnesia. Both individuals are literally ‘placed’ within the picture as markers. Using people as markers for important positions at an excavation site is, to this day, a very common archaeological practice. The intention is to pinpoint archaeological finds that can otherwise hardly be distinguished in the excavated ground. The presence of human figures, moreover, serves orientation in relation to scale. They help to structure the excavation environs and to highlight the sites of finds or details of portrayed objects, therefore making it easier for viewers to orient themselves and convey a sense of the magnitudes of the 3  The inscription on the reverse reads: ‘Magnesia on the M. 62. Agora. The fountain seen from the south. Hr. Kern stands on the wall, which bears the 7-​meter-​long inscription; the little Turk stands against the northwestern column of the fountain house. Grand gate Humann January 22, 92’.

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    321

Figure 15.6:  “The little Turk” and Herr Kern –​Magnesia on the Maeander river, “Brunnenhaus” at the Agora, photographed by Carl Humann, 1891, albumin paper on cardboard, 11.2 × 19.5 cm (photo). Photo archive of the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, FA-​Mag09-​0002, scan: V. Kant.

represented subjects (Bärnighausen et al. 2019b: 49; Klamm 2017: 10, 47–​51; Wodtke 2020: 73–​5). Unlike the excavator, the young man is just mentioned by his ethnic status. In fact, we know nothing about him: was he a son of one of the workers, fascinated and interested in this engineering project and the idea of being pictured? Or was he a paid errand boy, placed there by the German photographer as part of his job? Was he made to pose as part of the power wielded by the western Bourgeois photographer (Bärnighausen et al. 2019b: 49)? Very often Indigenous labour, on which excavations rely so heavily, is made to vanish in the accounts of those excavations, although the achievements of these labourers have more recently been presented as contributing to the merits of (western) archaeology as discipline (cf. Quirke 2010; Riggs 2017: 350; 2020: 197–​8; Shepherd 2003; for a counterpoint by showing (anonymous) workers prominently as part of the colonial and scientific narrative of success but not as individual and sovereign actors with agency; see Vennen 2018). The boy (or young man) stands slightly stiffly with his arms hanging close to his body. His head is bent forward and down a little. However, his gaze goes up and he is looking right into the camera, claiming a certain ‘presence’ in the picture (Edwards 2015). If a

322   Stefanie Klamm person returns the camera’s gaze and looks directly at it, this reciprocated gaze calls our attention toward the photographer himself, or toward the decisions or chance events that led, in a highly concrete situation, to the creation of this particular photograph. How are photographs actually produced? What happens outside of the field of vision of the camera lens? The portrayed individual is no longer simply a motif, but instead indicates that he was an active participant in a situation. Emerging now within the intended image through his presence is a kind of ‘disruption,’ which tells another, different story, one that exceeds the photographer’s control. The photograph and its inscriptions can leave us thinking about processes of appropriation and reappropriation in the nineteenth century and today. The entanglement of classification systems with current interests and politics remains very much relevant in the digital realm. Here, colonial legacies in classifying artefacts and universalizing reference systems continue to exist in the meta-​data of digital files, if the circumstances of the photograph’s captions and titles are not critically reflected and ordering systems are effectively left unquestioned. Hence, unequal relations of power can continue to have an effect on, for instance, the collaboration with Indigenous or source communities about their heritage displayed in the digitized photographs. Online databases might ultimately reflect the values and categories of the museum rather than those of such communities. The authority of the museum relating to knowledge about the past is not automatically questioned by digitization projects (not the least since issues of ownership and copyright of data persist) (cf. Gowlland and Ween 2018: 7–​9; Turner 2020: 157–​83).

15.9  The futures of photo archives To this day photo collections in archaeology museums are subjects of historicization themselves. The photographs in them have shifted at least in part from working instruments to museum or archival objects, which has heightened the awareness of their historicity and in part also their materiality (Edwards and Lien 2014b: 6). The so-​called excavation archives in the Antikensammlung, including their photographs, moved recently to the Zentralarchiv (Central Archive) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, mainly for conservation reasons and for proper indexing. There, they are now integrated into the institutional archive and can be re-​examined as part of the history of the medium and the history of archaeology, including their re-​evaluation as historical objects. This historicization can enable reflection on essential premises of the discipline of archaeology, such as its dependence on visual media, but at the same time opens up new hierarchizations (Caraffa 2011: 12). On the one hand, these photographs are now, as Edwards (2011b) has argued for a long time, resourceful objects, which can and should be studied for their historical and social contexts. On the other hand, a systematic and thoughtful indexing and reappraisal of certain holdings can also lead to the further loss of the masses of other photographs, which have not been handled in this way. In recent

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    323 years, together with the general appreciation of historical photographs and its ensuing rise in the museum’s system of value, archaeological imagery has been part of (art)historical exhibitions, which look at photographs mainly from an aesthetic point of view and displays them in the format of art objects. This in turn means that boundaries in the museum system are drawn anew and many ‘author-​less’ photographs will nonetheless never be seen (Caraffa 2019: 21–​2). The attribution to ‘great photographers’ moreover often elides other stories like the colonial and imperial history that those photographs are part of. Increasing demands for the digitization of photographic collections let those two sites of the story reappear. Through digital protocols, photo-​objects can be reduced to mere image content—​to an online picture library—​disregarding their historical content as objects and their materiality, thus limiting their potential. This can leave them at risk of being perceived as redundant and in this process threatened with disposal (Edwards and Morton 2015; Sassoon 2004). Nevertheless, digitization projects can also lead to a greater visibility and accessibility of photographic holdings and engage with the complex histories of those collections, thereby heightening the awareness that they are also part of our cultural heritage, which needs to be secured for the future.4

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Photographic practices in museum archaeology    325 Edwards, E. and S. Lien 2014b. ‘Museums and the Work of Photographs’. In Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs, edited by E. Edwards and S. Lien, pp. 3–​17. Farnham, Surrey/​Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Edwards, E. and M. Mead. 2013. ‘Absent Histories and Absent Images: Photographs, Museums and the Colonial Past’. Museum & Society 11 (1): pp. 19–​38. Edwards, E. and C. Morton. 2015. ‘Between Art and Information: Towards a Collecting History of Photographs’. In Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information, edited by E. Edwards and C. Morton, pp. 3–​23. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fineman, M. (Ed). 2012. Faking it. Manipulated Photography before Photoshop. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frederiksen, R. and E. Marchand (Eds). 2010. Plaster casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Gerhard, E. 1831. ‘Rapporto intorno i vasi volcenti.’ Annali dell’Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica 3: pp. 5–​111. Gowlland, G. and G. Ween. 2018. ‘Nuts and Bolts of Digital Heritage. Bringing the Past into the Virtual Present’ Nordisk Museologi 2–​3: pp. 3–​13. Griesser-​ Stermscheg, M. and Lehne, A. 2010. ‘Wieder haben wollen. Das Foto als Bilddokument für die Rekonstruktion musealer Interieurs’. In Schnittpunkt, edited by N. Sternfeld and L. Ziaja, pp. 55–​76. Wien/​Berlin: Turia and Kant. Jones, S. 2010. ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’. Journal of Material Culture 15: pp. 181–​203. Klamm, S. 2010. ‘Sammeln –​Anordnen –​Herrichten. Vergleichendes Sehen in der Klassischen Archäologie’. In Vergleichendes Sehen, edited by L. Bader, M. Gaier, and F. Wolf, pp. 383–​405. Munich: Fink. Klamm, S. 2015. ‘Retusche, Zensur und Manipulation –​Gedruckte Fotografie im Ersten Weltkrieg’. In Gedruckte Fotografie. Abbild, Objekt und mediales Format, edited by I. Ziehe and U. Hägele, pp. 45–​55. Münster: Waxmann. Klamm, S. 2016. ‘Graben –​Fotografieren –​und Zeichnen? Praktiken der Visualisierung auf deutschen Ausgrabungen um 1900’. In Zeigen und/​oder Beweisen? Die Fotografie als Kulturtechnik und Medium des Wissens, edited by H. Wolf and M. Kempf, pp. 247–​66. Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter. Klamm, S. 2017. Bilder des Vergangenen: Visualisierung in der Archäologie im 19. Jahrhundert: Fotografie—​Zeichnung—​Abguss. Berlin: Gebr. Mann. Klamm, S. 2021. ‘Reconfiguring the Use of Photography in Archaeology’. In Hybrid Photography. Intermedial Practices in Science and Humanities, edited by S. Hillnhütter, S. Klamm, and F. Tietjen, pp. 114–​27. London/​New York: Routledge. Klamm, S. and F. Schneider. 2020. ‘Unboxing Photographs. Foto-​Objekte Ausstellen’. In Foto-​Objekte. Forschen in archäologischen, ethnologischen und kunsthistorischen Archiven, edited by J. Bärnighausen, C. Caraffa, S. Klamm, F. Schneider, and P. Wodtke, pp. 244–​63. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag. Klamm, S. and P. Wodtke. 2017. ‘Vom Versammeln und Archivieren. Konzepte archäologischer Fotosammlungen im Vergleich’. Fotogeschichte. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 144: pp. 39–​50. Krauss, R.E. 1982. ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/​View’. Art Journal 42 (4): pp. 311–​19. Kyrieleis, H. 2002. Olympia 1875–​2000: 125 Jahre Deutsche Ausgrabungen. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern.

326   Stefanie Klamm Lucas, G. 2001. Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. London: Routledge. Marchand, S.L. 1996. Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–​ 1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marchand, S.L. 2002. ‘Adolf Furtwängler in Olympia’. In Olympia 1875–​2000: 125 Jahre Deutsche Ausgrabungen, edited by H. Kyrieleis, pp. 147–​62. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern. Morton, C. 2005. ‘The Anthropologist as Photographer. Reading the Monograph and Reading the Archive’. Visual Anthropology 18 (4): pp. 389–​405. Muttenthaler, R. and R. Wonisch. 2006. Gesten des Zeigens. Zur Repräsentation von Gender und Race in Ausstellungen. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Panteleon, I.A. 2015. Eine Archäologie der Direktoren. Die Erforschung Milets im Namen der Berliner Museen 1899–​1914. Paderborn: Fink/​Schöningh. Quirke, S. 2010. Hidden Hands: Egyptian Workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880–​1924. London: Duckworth. Riggs, C. 2017. ‘Shouldering the Past: Photography, Archaeology, and Collective Effort at the Tomb of Tutankhamun’. History of Science 55 (3): pp. 336–​63. Riggs, C. 2019. ‘Photographing Tutankhamun: Photo-​Objects and the Archival Afterlives of Colonial Archaeology’. In Photo-​Objects. On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo-​ Archives in the Humanities and Sciences, edited by J. Bärnighausen, C. Caraffa, S. Klamm, F. Schneider, and P. Wodtke, pp. 291–​308. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Riggs, C. 2020. ‘Archaeology and Photography’ In Handbook of Photography Studies, edited by G. Pasternak, pp. 79–​96. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Rose, G. 2000. ‘Practising Photography: An Archive, a Study, Some Photographs and a Researcher.’ Journal of Historical Geography 26 (4): pp. 555–​7 1. Sassoon, J. 2004. ‘Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction’. In Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by E. Edwards and J. Hart, pp. 186–​202. London and New York: Routledge. Schnittpunkt, Sternfeld, N., and Ziaja, L. (Eds). 2010. Fotografie und Wahrheit. Bilddokumente in Ausstellungen. Wien/​Berlin: Turia +​Kant. Scholl, A. and A. Schwarzmaier (Eds). 2018. Pergamon -​Meisterwerke der antiken Metropole und 360°-​Panorama von Yadegar Asisi. Petersberg/​Berlin: Imhoff/​Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Schreiter, C. (Ed). 2014. Gipsabgüsse und antike Skulpturen. Präsentation und Kontext. Berlin: Reimer. Schwartz, J.M. 2006. ‘“Records of Simple Truth and Precision”: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control’. In Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, edited by F.X. Blouin Jr. and W.G. Rosenberg, pp. 61–​83. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sekula, A. 2003. ‘Reading an Archive. Photography between Labour and Capital’. In The Photography Reader, edited by L. Wells, pp. 443–​52. London: Routledge. Shanks, M. 1997. ‘Photography and Archaeology’. In The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, edited by B.L. Molyneaux, pp. 73–​107. London: Routledge. Shepherd, N. 2003. ‘“When the Hand that holds the Trowel is Black”. Disciplinary Practices of Self-​Representation and the Issue of Native Labour in Archaeology’. Journal of Social Archaeology 3: pp. 334–​52.

Photographic practices in museum archaeology    327 Smiles, S. and S. Moser. (Eds). 2005. Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Stoler, A. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Straub, E. 2008. Ein Bild der Zerstörung: Archäologische Ausgrabungen im Spiegel ihrer Bildmedien. Berlin: Lukas. Stürmer, V. 2009. ‘Eduard Gerhard –​Begründer der institutionellen Archäologie in Berlin’. In Die modernen Väter der Antike, edited by A.M. Baertschi and C.G. King, pp. 145–​64. Berlin/​ Boston: de Gruyter. Talbot, W.H.F. 1969 [1844–​1846]. The Pencil of Nature. New York: Da Capo Press. Turner, H. 2020. Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation. Vancouver/​Toronto: UBC Press. van Wezel, E. 2003. Die Konzeptionen des Alten und Neuen Museums zu Berlin und das sich wandelnde historische Bewusstsein. Berlin: Gebr. Mann. Vennen, M. 2018. ‘Arbeitsbilder –​Bilderarbeit. Dei Herstellung und Zirkulation von Fotografien der Tendaguru-​ Expedition’. In Dinosaurierfragmente. Zur Geschichte der Tendaguru-​Expedition und ihrer Objekte, 1906–​2017, edited by M. Vennen, I. Heumann, H. Stoecker, and M. Tamborini, pp. 56–​75. Göttingen: Wallstein. Wilder, K. 2009. ‘Looking Through Photographs: Art, Archiving and Photography in the Photothek’. In Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte, edited by C. Caraffa, pp. 117–​28. Berlin/​München: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Wodtke, P. 2020. ‘“Am Tempel nichts Neues.” Die Foto-​Objekte von Magnesia am Mäander und Pergamon im Fotoarchiv der Antikensammlung’. In Foto-​ Objekte. Forschen in archäologischen, ethnologischen und kunsthistorischen Archiven, edited by J. Bärnighausen, C. Caraffa, S. Klamm, F. Schneider, and P. Wodtke, pp. 58–​81. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag.

Chapter 16

Listeni ng to archaeol o g y mu se ums John Kannenberg

16.1 Introduction The multisensory turn in academia has led to the emergence of sound studies as a discipline unto itself (e.g. Bijsterveld and Pinch 2012; Bull 2013; Lingold et al. 2018; Papenburg and Schulze 2016; Sterne 2012; Street 2016). What does this mean for archaeology museums? While the sound of the ancient world has inspired countless Hollywood reconstructions and a growing body of research, rarely does the general public—​much less museum practitioners—​think about the way archaeology itself sounds. However, archaeology museums have been actively engaging with the acquisition and display of contextually relevant sounds for decades. This chapter will begin by challenging the stereotype that museums are inherently silent spaces, followed by a brief overview of intersections between the practice of archaeology and sound, before briefly surveying the collection and display of sounds by multiple types of museums, including those focused on archaeology. Finally, the chapter presents a case study of the archaeology-​ related aspects of an artistic research project on the curatorial care of sounds as museum objects (Kannenberg 2020), emphasizing why museums of any kind wishing to display sounds in their galleries need to develop listening practices of their own.

16.2  Challenging the ‘silent museum’ stereotype Museums are not silent spaces, nor were they always intended as quiet spaces. In the early days of the collecting traditions that would inspire the modern museum, the

Listening to archaeology museums    329 keepers of Renaissance period cabinets of curiosities hosted small groups of visitors, giving narrated private tours which often encouraged visitors to touch, smell, taste, and listen to the objects on display; there is also evidence that the early museums of the seventeenth century such as the Ashmolean in Oxford and the British Museum in London also allowed visitors to touch and listen to objects, which would have been aligned with some scientific thinking of the time regarding the derivation of knowledge from objects (Howes and Classen 2013: 18). Museums as places where people remain silent while passively looking at objects and ‘subvocalizing’ (or reading as an internal monologue) their object labels (Bubaris 2014: 392) came about as a result of museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum, becoming nationalized public spaces early in their development (Cox 2015: 215). As they were now viewed as an extension of the state, museums accepted an unspoken responsibility for training their citizenry not only in the culture of the world, but also in obedience to the state. They engaged their visitors in what Carol Duncan (1995) refers to as ‘civilizing rituals’, where ‘sound’ and ‘noise’ became conflated as an improper distraction from the true ‘agent of knowledge’ (Bubaris 2014: 391)—​the visual learning experience. While the concept of silent contemplation may have been the primary motivation behind the earliest examples of quiet museum experiences—​ conveniently reinforced by the nineteenth-​century notion of the need for ‘peace and quiet’ while pursuing intellectual and academic work (Picker 2003: 41–​81)—​it might just as easily have been due to the lack of technology via which to record and play back sounds. Even with an audience’s intention to remain quiet, however, there is no such thing as true silence within architectural spaces, which makes sound—​at least for those physically capable of hearing—​an integral part of the museum experience. The active design of sounds experienced within architectural space has been proposed by Blesser and Salter (2007: 2) as the practice of ‘aural architecture’, while listening to the overall acoustic environments of museum spaces as a methodology within curatorial practice has been suggested by Zisiou (2011). Bubaris (2014: 398) has written of the need for museums to employ a ‘sound designer’—​a combination of acoustician, architect, exhibition designer, and artist—​to work alongside curators and art handlers to create a sonic environment within galleries that cannot only employ sound as a medium for conveying information, but also as a means of aesthetically enhancing visitor experience. This need has increased dramatically following the multisensory turn throughout the humanities, with museum practice turning towards experimentation with multisensory (Levent et al. 2014) and digital (Dziekan 2012) approaches to curation and exhibition design. Although art galleries and museums have been mounting major exhibitions of sound-​ based art since the mid-​to-​late twentieth century—​with the term ‘sound art’ coined in 1979 for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Dunaway 2020)—​it has for the most part taken museums dedicated to natural history, anthropology, and archaeology much longer to begin incorporating sounds and the act of listening into their exhibition practices.

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16.3 Archaeology and sound The multisensory turn has found researchers across numerous academic disciplines investigating non-​visual aspects of their traditional subject matter, including archaeology. What follows is a brief overview of some contemporary archaeological approaches to sound as subject matter, which may inform the interpretation of archaeological material within museums. This includes approaches to musical instruments and archaeoacoustics, reconstructing past sounds, and the sounds of archaeological fieldwork. ‘Sound archaeology,’ as defined by the Sound Archaeology Research Group at the University of Huddersfield, contains two primary concentrations: the reconstruction of ancient musical instruments, and the investigation of archaeoacoustics, the acoustic properties of ancient sites of musical performance (Conner et al. n.d.). The musical approach to the world of sound archaeology focuses on attempts to reconstruct what the past sounded like via human musical practice. In his introduction to a special issue of the journal World Archaeology, John Schofield (2014: 291) identified three areas in which archaeological practice could contribute to a material culture-​based approach to the sound of the ancient world: ‘the instruments . . . on which the music is made; the place the music is made, performed or remembered; and the place that inspired that music to be made or which is recalled or described in song’. Schofield does, however, suggest that a broader notion of the sound of place, beyond the musical, should also be considered within archaeology, including the overall soundscape of ancient human settlements (Schofield 2014: 289). Other papers in this special issue of World Archaeology highlight, however, pitfalls in the interpretation and representation of sound making objects that museums should be mindful of. For instance, a paper on Moche clay whistles (100–​900 CE), theorizes their impact upon the soundscape of an urban location (Scullin and Boyd 2014: 364–​5), but extrapolates generalized conclusions about a community’s soundscape from archaeological evidence of musical instruments. In particular, there is a bias towards the belief that all sound-​producing artefacts must be musical instruments, when of course this is not the case. Coins jangle, chariot wheels grind, and swords clang; Scullin and Boyd’s definition of ‘sound-​producing artefacts’ appears to be limited only to obvious musical instruments. This narrow view of objects that are capable of producing sound extends to the authors’ embrace of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s notion that there is an ‘ideal soundscape’ agreed-​upon by human communities (Scullin and Boyd 2014: 365). One simply needs to be the unwilling earwitness to a neighbour’s late-​night party the day before an early work meeting to realize that an ideal community soundscape is a utopian ideal that cannot, and has never, existed; and while Schafer’s work was ground-​breaking in its time during the late 1970s, his penchant for bias against human-​ generated sounds has long been criticized as ‘grounded in normative ideas of which sounds “matter” and which do not’ (Eisenberg 2015: 198); as dividing human experience

Listening to archaeology museums    331 up by individual senses rather than acknowledging it as a multisensory whole (Ingold 2007: 10); and for aspiring to an aesthetic purity rooted in the recording and playback of Western art music (Sterne 2013: 190). A soundscape is not something inert; the sounds of a place change over time. Modern interpretations of ancient musical instruments can, therefore, be extremely problematic, due to a lack of knowledge and understanding of ancient notions of aesthetic taste, a topic long known to be riddled with disagreement and subjectivity even in its modern forms (Scarry 1999; Wilson 2007).

16.3.1 Reconstructing sounds of the past A popular method for the museological display of sounds of the past is via the attempted reconstruction of past soundscapes. One of the primary sources for this practice is contemporaneous writings about what an era sounded like, which can not only describe sounds heard, but under scrutiny can also locate the human voice within the soundscapes of the ancient past since ‘the voice is whatever pulls sound toward language, and vice versa’ (Butler 2015: 115). The analysis of ancient poetry in its original language can reveal sounds of the past through its use of sound-​based techniques like onomatopoeia (Gurd 2019: 191). A practice of historical sound reconstruction often employed by museums is the synthetic re-​creation of soundscapes of historical places and events via the creative editing of audio recordings. These audio compositions are often played back in museum gallery spaces, either on a continuous loop (such as the atmospheric sounds of horse-​drawn carriages and newspaper hawker banter in the Streets of Old Detroit exhibition at the Detroit Historical Society), or at the request of a visitor via the press of a button or triggering of a motion sensor (such as the reconstructed sound of the interior of a nineteenth-​century apothecary at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago). These types of sound reconstructions often use techniques derived from sound design for radio drama and cinema. Dolly MacKinnon (2019: 135–​6) has, for instance, demonstrated how museum-​produced soundscape recreations of early modern battlefields can help alter typically gendered perceptions of the experience of war via the inclusion of sounds relating to the wartime activities of women and children using film diegesis techniques. While sound reconstructions remain technically challenging even for early modern events, they can be extremely difficult in the case of the ancient world, such as an auralization project attempting to simulate the sound of a public speaking event in Late Republican Rome (Holter et al. 2019). As technology advances, the temptation to recreate the sound of the ancient world can also lead to ethical challenges as well. One project aimed to reconstruct the alleged voice of Nesyamun, an ancient Egyptian priest whose mummified remains are in the collections of the Leeds City Museum (Davis 2020). Researchers claimed to have ‘accurately reproduced’ Nesyamun’s voice by 3D printing the remains’ desiccated larynx and playing a synthesized electronic

332   John Kannenberg tone through it (Howard et al. 2020); the 3D printed larynx was constructed using data collected during a CT scan of the mummified body. While declaring that a mummy had spoken from beyond the grave was an obvious shortcut to viral internet exposure, the science and ethics of the project were also quickly questioned by multiple Egyptologists, historians, and art theorists (Press 2020). The British research team justified their project by invoking Nesyamun’s coffin inscriptions describing him as ‘true of voice’, a misunderstanding of a common descriptor found in ancient Egyptian funerary texts. Christina Riggs, a historian of visual culture who has written about the West’s obsession with unwrapping Egyptian mummies (Riggs 2014), was one of the experts critical of the Nesyamun research, declaring via her Twitter account that it was part of the long history of Western mummy desecration that is ‘alive and well. Only the rationalisations, and the tech, get to change’ (Riggs 2020). Beyond the troublesome ethics of the Nesyamun project, the question of whether this research provides information about the way the ancient world sounded is a valid one. Is a plastic, 3D printed copy of a mummified and deformed human larynx, devoid of its own characteristic soft tissue, combined with an electronic tone an accurate representation of a human voice, as the researchers claimed in their article? The resulting sound produced by the researchers adds nothing to our knowledge of the sound of the ancient world; it is an unquestionably artificial twenty-​first century construct.

16.3.2 The sounds of archaeology What does archaeological practice sound like? Aside from visiting an archaeological dig, there are few opportunities to experience the sounds generated by archaeological fieldwork; however, its characteristic and repetitious acts like digging, brushing, measuring, and sifting, could make archaeological practice an area deserving of sonic study. Consider an example of Hollywood sound design that depicts the sounds of archaeology in action: a scene of Egyptian workmen digging at dusk in the ancient city of Tanis, Egypt to unearth the mythical Well of the Souls, overseen by infamous cinematic colonialist archaeologist Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The scene, which occurs at roughly 58 minutes and 30 seconds into the film, is sonically sparse. The sounds heard are primarily overdubbed pickaxes against sand, wind, and the voices of the Egyptian diggers; they sing a traditional work song in Egyptian Arabic. This melding of the authentic and the inauthentic to tell a fictional adventure story is arguably one of the most heard examples of archaeological practice sound within popular culture. Yet there is evidence that archival documentation of historical archaeological practice does exist, such as a collection of Qufti songs sung during the Egyptian excavations of Flinders Petrie in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology (Quirke 2009: 439–​61).

Listening to archaeology museums    333

16.4  The collection and display of sounds by museums There are three major uses of sound in museums: music (performed or recorded); audio tours; and sounds on display. Within the following overview of these uses it is important to acknowledge that ‘curatorial and artistic roles and approaches are tied to the institutional structures and the funding systems they are embedded in’ (Semmerling 2020: 195). As with every other aspect of museum practice, incorporating sound and its design in museum spaces requires creativity within limited budgets and restrictive policies.

16.4.1 Performance spaces The most common instances of museum listening involve musical sound. Museums have been used as musical venues nearly since the beginning of their history; one of the earliest sound recordings of a museum environment is an 1888 Edison wax cylinder recording of a 4,000-​person choir performing the composer Handel’s ‘Israel in Egypt’ in London’s Crystal Palace. In the twentieth century, the Whitney and Guggenheim museums in New York City introduced a new generation of American composers including Steve Reich and Philip Glass by presenting landmark concert performances in 1969 and 1970 (Potter 2000: 197). Classical and contemporary compositions are often matched with paintings and sculptures in museums, with gallery-​specific performances in front paintings or sculptures regularly presenting linkages between visual art and musical movements; for example, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has regularly conducted its own annual classical proms event for decades, and has even presented contemporary electronic improvised music by OxLOrk, the Oxford University Laptop Orchestra. This event also included gramophone demonstrations in the Ashmolean’s Cast Gallery and Music and Tapestry Gallery.

16.4.2 Recording culture At the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, recording technology inspired a new method for studying and collecting the cultures of recently ‘discovered’ Indigenous peoples (Makagon and Neumann 2009: 1). Anthropologists and ethnographers such as Frances Densmore (1924), who made ethnographic field recordings of Native Americans while working for the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, overwhelmingly focused on collecting sound recordings of Indigenous music. These early experiments in ‘recording culture’ have since influenced sound

334   John Kannenberg studies, with contemporary researchers suggesting anthropological methodologies be applied to the study of contemporary sonic culture (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015). While museum sound archives have always been available to researchers, it is only recently that some museum sound archives have been shared with visitors. The event Reel 2 Real at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford in 2012 presented field recordings of Indigenous songs and ceremonial music from the Pitt Rivers’ collections as a live DJ-​style remix, a musical backdrop to a candlelit walk through the museum’s galleries. While exciting, engaging, and ground-​breaking, the sounds on display during the event were essentially background music; a texture providing sonic ambience for a visual experience. The music was presented in dialogue with the museum’s visual objects, but remixed so that its form was altered, distancing it from the musicians’ original intent. Rather than explore why the music being played was originally created, the DJ re-​sculpted the music into a form of entertainment.

16.4.3 Music museums Music as subject matter is also prevalent throughout museum practice, although it is often not heard but seen via displays of musical instruments, such as the collections presented at the Horniman Museum in London or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Newer music museums, such as Vienna’s Haus Der Musik (2000), go to great lengths to include the act of listening within the visitor experience, via interactive exhibits about the science of acoustics, or allowing visitors to conduct a virtual orchestra (Gruber and Wildner 2016). Likewise, museums dedicated to the art of music recording put music itself on display, such as the Museu da Música Mecânica (Museum of Mechanical Music) in Pinhal Novo, Portugal, founded in 2016 by private collector Luis Cangueiro. Cangueiro’s exhaustive collection of mechanical musical instruments and audio reproduction devices fills a two-​storey purpose-​built museum, allowing visitors to access the sight and sounds of the history of sound technology; however, the devices available for independent listening are limited in number, alleviated to some extent by private tours including demonstrations of displayed objects.

16.4.4 Music in the archaeology museum The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has produced multiple exhibitions, displays, and events related to the sound of the ancient world. The Kelsey’s experiments in sound began in 1999 with ‘Music in Roman Egypt’ curated by T.G. Wilfong, both a physical exhibition and an online exhibition, surveying objects related to music in the Kelsey’s collection from Karanis, Egypt. Several of the objects in this exhibition became the basis for a small permanent display in the Kelsey of sound-​making objects from Karanis curated in 2011 by Wilfong and the author. More recently, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology exhibited 3D printed

Listening to archaeology museums    335 reproductions of Roman-​era Egyptian musical instruments for visitors to handle and play themselves, including reed instruments, clappers, and bells and symbols cast in metal, in their ‘Sounds of Roman Egypt’ exhibition (Stevens 2019).

16.4.5 Roaming audio tours The personal museum audio tour’s roots go back to the origins of recorded sound. Soon after the invention of the phonograph, recorded sound was used at world’s fairs (Griffiths 2008: 235), while museum scholar Anton Fritsch (1904: 255) suggested that phonographs could be used in museums to deliver curatorial commentary; soon after, a 1908 exhibition on tuberculosis at the American Museum of Natural History did exactly that (Pavement 2014: 14) but proved controversial—​critics suggested such radical new technologies risked oversimplifying learning material for young audiences with decreasing attention spans (similar to pushback against the internet in the early 1990s.) It was several decades before the gramophone was used for such purposes at museums in Europe, first in Munich’s Deutsches Museum in 1930, then at the Science Museum in London on 10 May 1931, when a gramophone was used to describe the contents of a display case and recite directions to the museum’s exhibits (Griffiths 2008: 236–​7). Following widespread adoption of radio by the general public in the first two decades of the twentieth century, museums in the United States embraced it to provide free ‘distance learning’ by collaborating with local newspapers to publish complementary visual material on the same day as a planned museum radio broadcast. This was again critiqued by museum professionals for allegedly lowering academic standards (Griffiths 2008: 237–​40). One of the most significant museum-​related radio broadcasts of the twentieth century was a 1939 live BBC broadcast from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo featuring the first public performance of music played using the two trumpets that had been found in the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, overseen by the then British Museum director T.G.H. James (James 2012: 388–​9). Radio broadcasting technology led directly to the development of the personal-​use museum audio guide. An early 1950s experiment saw Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum staff collaborate with Dutch electronics company Philips to broadcast audio content from a central tape recorder to handheld audio receivers carried by visitors; this technique was then fine-​tuned by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who began using its own ‘Guide-​A-​Phone’ radio system for audio tours beginning in 1954 (Pavement 2014: 16), ushering in what soon became a mainstay of museum visits. Radio technology is still used today for the ‘audio experience’ portion of blockbuster exhibitions pioneered by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, such as 2013’s David Bowie Is . . . which went on to travel the world (Fitchard 2014). For these shows, audio was delivered to the visitor via individually worn headsets using a combination of radio broadcasting to send the audio to the visitor’s headphones, and GPS technology to tell the broadcasting system what to play based on where visitors were located within the galleries. These specialized experiences, along with many other audio tours offered by

336   John Kannenberg museums around the world, utilize purpose-​built devices issued by the museum that visitors return after their visit. They are proprietary devices, so visitors must learn to use a new interface for a single experience. With smartphones now nearly ubiquitous, many museums now deliver audio tours via mobile apps accessed on a visitor’s own personal device. Podcasting, the delivery of digital audio files via the internet, is also used to deliver audio tour content to visitors’ devices, a safe strategy in the post-​COVID-​19 world.

16.4.6 Stationary sound and video, ‘sounding objects’ Just as the ‘silent museum’ is a stereotype, the silent visual art museum tends to be the general public’s default idea of ‘the museum’. However, many other museum types have long co-​existed alongside the art museum, and their display practices often incorporate the display of sounds within primarily visual galleries, particularly science museums. These museums are more apt to exhibit what have previously been referred to as ‘museological sound objects’ (Kannenberg 2017)—​sounds displayed inside museums of all types that are intended to be listened to as objects themselves. Displays such as a giant walk-​through human heart, with a booming recording of a heartbeat emanating from speakers inside the sculpture, have been mainstays at science museums since the 1950s, such as the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (1954–​2009). Natural history museums, like the Field Museum in Chicago, often include push-​button bird calls on-​ demand within exhibits of ornithology, and its hand-​operated Parasaurolophus model head offers visitors the chance to hear what a specific type of dinosaur may have sounded like. However, finding a place for sound within material culture museums can be an arduous, complex conceptual process: London’s Science Museum created a year-​long task force for workshopping ideas for mounting a major exhibition foregrounding the act of listening rather than the act of looking (Boon et al. 2017).

16.4.7 Archaeological and historical sound design Installing a ‘sonic backdrop’ to an archaeological site as part of a museum exhibit has become a popular method for displaying historical sound environment recreations. The 1984 reimagining of the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, UK, included synthesized music created from samples of a Viking panpipe found at the site, as well as conversations in Old Norse realized by Christine Fell, delivered over a 64-​channel sound system while visitors rode through the archaeological site in slow-​moving ‘time cars’ (Addyman and Gaynor 1984: 11–​13). These types of sound recreations have also been added to spaces like the period rooms at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Yet, similar to the early reactions against the phonograph, radio, and audio tours, contemporary sound recreations within the comprehensive re-​imagining of the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2007 left reviewers doubtful:

Listening to archaeology museums    337 . . . [The] galleries of 18th-​century French decorative arts conjure the routine of an aristocrat . . . A sound track transforms the period room into a walk-​in stage set, replete with French conversations and the sounds of a crackling fire, dice rolling on a game table, and a horse-​drawn carriage passing by the window . . . doubts remain about . . . the dumbed down presentation. (J. Kaufman quoted in Bryant 2009: 75)

In the past decade, the trend towards ‘immersive experiences’ across the art and entertainment fields has led to sound-​based installation projects becoming a standard component of museum displays and institutional marketing strategies. It is impossible to read an advert for, or review of, the London Mithraeum without encountering a reference to its sonic display. Opened in 2017, the re-​installation of the London Mithraeum, a Roman-​era temple to the god Mithras discovered in 1954 beneath the streets of London, creates an atmospheric experience for visitors through a combination of light, haze, and sound which attempts to restore what has been lost of the site’s structure, including what it sounded like inside it. When visitors proceed down into the reconstructed ancient space, a light show by artist Matthew Schreiber combines with artificial smoke to visually extend the walls of the temple, while a multichannel soundtrack featuring the sounds of sandals on stone, murmurings in Latin, and sounds of a meal being eaten can be heard, attempting to ‘evoke the rituals and activities that took place [there]’ according to the Museum of London Archaeology, who provided consulting for the reconstruction project. But while the sonic component of the reconstruction is highlighted by reviews (Dex et al. 2017), scholarly articles by the reconstruction’s project manager (Jackson 2017: 56–​7), on the London Mithraeum’s website, visitor brochure, and signage, the authorship of the sound piece goes unattributed, unlike the light show, evidence of the continued primacy of the visual within museum practice.

16.4.8 ‘Sound art’ Musicians using museums as a concert venue gradually evolved throughout the twentieth century into ‘sound artists’ installing sounding works in galleries normally reserved for visual artworks. Sound-​based artworks have now become so commonplace in art museums that in 2015, London’s National Gallery presented a hybrid exhibition, Soundscapes, pairing paintings in its collection with musical sound works that sonically illustrated each visual work. This introduced the concept of listening as part of a visual art experience to one of the art world’s more conservative audiences, who potentially might have viewed these sounds as intrusive. In her PhD thesis on curating sound-​ based artworks, Linnea Semmerling (2020) discusses the complex opinions on sound’s presence within art museums held by art and music theorists versus those writing from a museum studies perspective. Semmerling points to sound-​based artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle (amongst many others within the field) who claims that sound is a misbehaving intruder in visual exhibitions, ‘expos[ing] the hidden laws of [museums’] scopic regime’; however, Semmerling believes writers within museum studies, like

338   John Kannenberg Rupert Cox, focus mostly upon sound’s potential to reform the museum (Semmerling 2020: 17). These two viewpoints have the potential to either work together to make positive change within museums, or to work at odds against each other if the musicians and sound artists who create sound-​based work for museum display are merely interested in tearing down the visual hegemony of their museological oppressors. Complicating matters further, those who study and practice ‘sound art’ actively resist defining exactly what ‘sound art’ is (Groth and Schulze 2020: 13–​16), in a similar fashion to the complexities surrounding the definition of ‘museum’ (Candlin and Larkin 2020; Nelson n.d.). In many respects, the ongoing struggle to define sound art can be distilled into a single question: what differentiates sound art from music, if anything? Although this question remains mostly unanswered, for the sake of brevity and clarity it is helpful to use Cox’s summary of LaBelle’s position, in which sound art ‘is an approach to sound as both subject and object . . . it uses sound as a medium in order to address questions about sound’ (Cox 2015: 218). Sound art most often manifests itself within art museums as installation pieces which inject sounds into the acoustic environment of the gallery, like the sound installation pieces discussed above. Sound art installations are usually either repetitions of pre-​recorded (or pre-​programmed) material; produced by purpose-​built sculptural devices meant to be both seen and heard; or ‘generative’ sounds—​ongoing, randomized permutations of sonic material that continue to change or evolve via a set of rules that keep the sounds from repeating in exactly the same form (Eno 1996: 330–​ 3). In the past decade, several blockbuster exhibitions of sound-​based artworks around the world have attempted to establish a sound art ‘canon’ (e.g. Celant 2014; Frieling and Zimbardo 2017; London and Neset, 2013; Weibel 2019). Beyond art museums, sound installations often take on ethnographic or anthropological subject matter, combining music with recordings of nature sounds, such as the work of artist/​anthropologist Steven Feld (Cox 2015: 227–​8), or oral histories such as John Wynne’s 2017 Transplant and Life, a collaborative work with photographer Tim Wainwright installed at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London holds a collection of over 33,000 sound recordings; though much of their archive is oral histories of conflict, it also includes sounds related to war such as artillery gunfire dating back to the Second World War. Since much of this material has been donated by the BBC, their cataloguing of non-​ musical or spoken sounds are labelled as ‘sound effects’, implying that they are source material to be used to create a sonic atmosphere, rather than sonic artefacts in their own right. This was subverted by an installation at the IWM created by artist Nick Ryan. An approach veering closer to musical composition than the recreation of specific historical events was taken by sound artist Gerald Fiebig who, along with sound designer Heiko Schlachter, composed Cadolzburg Echo Space, a site-​specific sound installation for the Cadolzburg Castle museum near Nuremberg, Germany (Fiebig et al. 2017). Fiebig’s installation alternated between a constructed soundscape made from stock library sound effects and musical composition, both of which evoked the sonic history of the castle in different ways. Intentionally artificial elements of the sound piece, such as the methodical stripping away of the sound effects one by one as the soundscape

Listening to archaeology museums    339 recording continues, alerted the audience of its inauthenticity, an aid to each visitor’s own interpretation of the historical space where it was heard (Fiebig et al. 2017: 68).

16.5  The Archaeology gallery at the Museum of Portable Sound Many problems encountered by museums attempting to display sounds derive from acoustical problems due to the ocularcentric design of gallery spaces. As sound reproduction technologies have become more sophisticated, such as purpose-​built multichannel speaker systems, as well as portable virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) systems, museum professionals have continued to experiment with new ways to add sounds into visual museum displays to deliver ‘immersive’ experiences to their audiences; while there remains a lack of established best practices for so-​called ‘sonic engagement’, a joint project by the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, UK and the University of Nottingham began to grapple with many of these issues across a series of projects using augmented reality and location-​based sound technologies (Cliffe et al. 2019). These types of sonic museum practices forgo a didactic approach to the use of sound in favour of atmospherics, with ‘sound designs’ of the type discussed in Section 16.4.7 that add another, different type of opportunity for visitor engagement—​ a primarily emotional experience received viscerally or bodily via background sound rather than delivering audible didactic content. Bubaris (2014) argues that this type of passive listening while viewing physical objects is a new form of museum meaning-​ making, and as an affective experience this is quite definitely the case. But is ‘immersion’ the best use of sound in museums? The immersive approach tends to combine multiple simultaneous sounds in the assumption that attentive listening to time-​based media is too demanding for museum visitors; however, this assumption is based on navigating the physical architecture of a visual museum. What if a museum was created specifically for the purposes of listening? What type of architecture, if any, would it need? The following case study is part of my own artistic practice; as an artistic researcher, my research into the overlaps of museum practice, archaeology, and sound are an example of ‘thinking in, through, and with art’ (Borgdorff 2012: 44), and as such it represents an artistic contribution to knowledge which precludes my necessity to write about it here from my own perspective, as both practitioner and researcher. The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) is an institution created in 2015 for which I serve as Director and Chief Curator (and sole staff member). It is a portable museum in which its galleries of sounds exist on a single mobile phone. Although there is a MOPS website , there is no app to download. Before the COVID-​19 pandemic of 2020, visitors arranged to meet in person, brought their own headphones (for health and safety reasons), and listened to the MOPS collections from this iPhone, since the sound files are not distributed online. Following the pandemic

340   John Kannenberg in March 2020, online visits to the museum via video chat were offered, still requiring meeting the museum Director rather than converting the museum to an app or website full of downloadable sounds. This absurdist and performative approach to museum practice may seem unnecessarily restrictive, but having hosted nearly 1,500 visitors in five years of running MOPS, it has become apparent that these rules are not only what makes MOPS succeed as a museum, but also in convincing its audience to engage in attentive listening. The need to book an appointment forces visitors to set aside time to simply sit and listen, a luxury in a world where our typical experience of headphone-​ based listening is as backdrop to, or distraction from, some other primary activity (commuting, exercising, chores, etc.). At the time of writing, the MOPS Permanent Collection Galleries contain nine hours of audible material: 325 sounds, most of which come from field recordings I have made myself, divided into 30 topical galleries. The galleries are organized within four main themes: Natural History, Science and Technology, Architecture and Urban Design, and Art and Culture. Visitors use a Gallery Guide book (Kannenberg et al. 2019) whose 288 pages contain all the object labels, photographs, didactic panels, and information graphics that would normally be hung on the walls of a traditional museum. Visitors can either entirely direct where to go in the museum’s collection during their visit or take curated guided tours (playlists) of collection highlights. The interaction between myself as the artist, the mobile full of sounds, and the guidebook ‘creates’ MOPS each time it is visited. The conversations I have with MOPS visitors touch on an array of topics relating to the experience of sound in daily life. Over hundreds of hours of conversations, I have observed people unaccustomed to pondering their experiences of sound and listening suddenly realize how important particular sounds have been in their lives, and have in turn learned from their insights—​making changes to my museum’s content and practices in direct response. Because the MOPS objects tend to be sounds that are not typically perceived by the general public as musical—​things like the sound of Germany’s highest waterfall, a crosswalk signal in San Francisco, footsteps in a catacomb beneath Alexandria, or skateboarders at the South Bank Undercroft in London—​they offer a unique experience of attentive listening that shifts the visitor’s perspective onto sounds they might otherwise ignore. In turn, categorizing these sounds via systems of museological taxonomy connects them to the world of human cultural experience, offering visitors an interpretation of sounds that, in its intersection with the long-​standing tradition of visual museum display, attempts to readdress the balance between sound and vision in daily life. The shared suspension of disbelief, or perhaps, a shared willingness to indulge the imagination, between myself and the MOPS visitor turns this meeting between artist, audience, and mobile into a portable contact zone (Clifford 1997)—​a place of personal meaning-​making based around the listening experience. The unusual form and practice of MOPS has roots in late twentieth-​century mix tape culture (Moore 2004). Before digital playlists and recordable Compact Discs, mix tapes shared carefully selected items from personal collections of recorded sound. Mix tapes were often exchanged as gifts between friends or lovers, and their carefully sequenced songs often contained hidden subtexts (Jansen 2009). Mix tapes were also storehouses

Listening to archaeology museums    341 of memory, evoking specific times, places, or events in people’s lives (Jansen 2009). MOPS is mix tape as museum; though its sounds are digital, they have been carefully selected, categorized, and sequenced within taxonomies derived from visual museum practice, personally shared with each MOPS visitor whenever the museum opens to the public. The MOPS Archaeology Gallery (Gallery 22, Art and Culture) includes only one example of the sound of an ancient musical instrument. The decision to avoid overtly musical objects in the Archaeology Gallery is based in part upon how problematic it can be to unravel the contexts within which ancient musical instruments were heard, and the actual music that would have been played. The objects on display in the Archaeology Gallery cover a narrow selection of time and place across the ancient world, with sounds relating to Ancient Egypt, Graeco-​Roman Egypt, and the Roman Empire in Europe, limited by my own travels. I intend to continue adding new objects to MOPS for as long as the museum remains active. Three of the sounds in the Archaeology Gallery are discussed below.

16.5.1  Example objects from the MOPS archaeology gallery OBJECT 1 (Fig. 16.1) King Tutankhamun’s Trumpets Played After 3000 Years BBC Radio Broadcast Egyptian Museum, Cairo 16 April 1939 Digital transfer of LP recording, 2.55 The Archaeology Gallery begins with one of the few sound objects on display in MOPS that I did not record myself. In this case, it is an excerpt from the live BBC radio broadcast made in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 1939 as discussed above. Several aspects of this recording make it of interest as a listening experience; some of these

Figure 16.1:  Waveform of the sound of MOPS Archaeology Gallery Object 1.

342   John Kannenberg same aspects are also examples of some questionable practices of early forms of sound archaeology, and its inclusion in part demonstrates what a sound archaeologist should never do. The excerpt of the radio broadcast begins with voiceover narration by BBC announcer Rex Keating who introduces trumpet player James Tappern of the 11th Hussars British cavalry regiment, and describes how difficult it is for a modern trumpet player to sound the trumpets from Tut’s tomb; another British male voice is then heard, making a melodramatic announcement: ‘The trumpets of the pharaoh Tutankhamun –​Lord of the Crown, King of the South and North, Son of Re!’ after which Tappern begins to play one of the trumpets. Presumably improvising (Finn 2011a), Tappern managed to coax tunes out of both trumpets; however, while his ability to even sound the instruments, much less play recognizable tunes on them, was astonishing due to their significant differences from modern instruments, he unfortunately hit several sour notes during his performance. A BBC Radio 4 programme, Ghost Music (Finn 2011b), included portions of Tappern’s performance and an interview with his son, also a professional trumpet player, who confirmed the accomplishment of Tappern’s performance, but offered no information on whether his father played a composed tune or an improvisation. Archaeologist Christine Finn, who hosted the 2011 programme, mentions how modern day archaeological ethics would prevent anyone from playing ancient musical instruments such as these today due to the objects’ fragility and rarity; she does not, however, discuss the ethics of the only two surviving ancient Egyptian trumpets being played by an officer of the British Empire ‘by permission of [his regiment]’, as Keating mentions in the broadcast, inside a museum established under colonial rule, while native Egyptians stood by and watched. It is these ethical questions that led me to include this object in MOPS, as the recording so bluntly raises them itself; yes, the playing of the trumpets by a modern human after they had been silent for 5,000 years is exciting, but hearing a British man pretend to be a member of the ancient Egyptian military by invoking the name of an ancient god leads to raised eyebrows, snickers, or groans from MOPS visitors, which then leads us to discuss the ethics of this recording: Why was a white British man asked to play these instruments and not an Egyptian? How does this performance make us understand the way the ancient world sounded, if at all? MOPS visitors of many walks of life, from baristas to accountants, art history students to practicing architects, have experienced this recording and left their visit with a new critical way to think about the historical practices of archaeologists. OBJECT 4 (Fig. 16.2) Archaeologists Clearing a Roman Theatre Lisbon, Portugal 9 April 2015 Digital field recording, 1.59 On a public street in Lisbon, an ancient Roman theatre interrupts the normal flow of traffic. The theatre had long been forgotten, lost under layers of later urban design. When Lisbon was struck by a catastrophic earthquake in the eighteenth century, the

Listening to archaeology museums    343

Figure 16.2:  Waveform of the sound of MOPS Archaeology Gallery Object 4.

Figure 16.3:  Waveform of the sound of MOPS Archaeology Gallery Object 5.

theatre reappeared through the damaged street above it. Archaeologists now continuously excavate the site, observable by any passers-​by. This is the only recording in the MOPS collection that captures the sound of archaeological fieldwork being conducted. OBJECT 5 (Fig. 16.3) Ancient Roman Well San Clemente, Rome, Italy 13 April 2017 Digital field recording, 1.00 The twelfth-​century basilica at San Clemente in Rome was built atop the ruins of a fourth century church, which itself was built atop a Republican villa and warehouse destroyed during the great fire of Rome in 64CE. Inside the villa level, an ancient fresh water well is accessible to tourists who are invited to use it to refill their water bottles. Although this is the same spring that would have been heard in this chamber during the Roman Republican era, the presence of later architecture built above the villa level suggests the acoustics of the space are now quite different from the era in which the well was originally constructed; the sounds of contemporary tourists also make this recording an inauthentic representation of the location’s sonic history, yet the flow of the water remains an audible connection to the way this space has sounded throughout its long history.

344   John Kannenberg As with many of the topics covered within the MOPS galleries, the Archaeology Gallery allows visitors to experience a radically different perspective than they are accustomed to finding within most archaeology museums. Using the evocative power of listening, these sound objects confront visitors with an embodied experience, placing their own ears at the position of microphones used to capture the sounds; the sounds of archaeology are presented as both historical record and contemporary experience. Hearing Tutankhamun’s trumpets prompts questions about political and human rights issues related to archaeological practice; hearing the archaeologists at work on the Roman amphitheatre in Lisbon puts visitors in the footsteps of a contemporary archaeologist’s fieldwork; listening to San Clemente’s water well places visitors in an acoustic environment similar to one that was experienced by ancient Romans. In mere moments of attentive, stationary listening, visitors come away from MOPS feeling as though they have travelled through time and space in a way that traditional museum practitioners have often struggled to communicate visually. These experiments with object-​based listening have proven that visitors can experience a museological sense of wonder (Greenblatt 1991: 42) with only sounds, headphones, and an empathic, conversational guide, free of a traditional museum architectural infrastructure.

16.6  Conclusion: The Future of sound in archaeology museums What can be expected from the future of sonic exhibition practices in archaeology museums? As recounted above, the potential is vast, and technology offers many exciting possibilities for this work to take on new forms of design and listening. As the MOPS case study suggests, however, powerful possibilities exist for the creative use of simple tools and inexpensive resources. Unfortunately, within the area of creative sound installations, there appears to be a lack of interest within institutions, curators, and artists regarding listening back to visitor experiences of sound in museums. For example, Cox (2015: 226–​30) makes several assertions about audience experiences of various sound art installations, some of which he collaborated in making; he reports on specific audience experiences by referring to a collective, idealized ‘audience’ without providing proof that these observations were made by individual visitors; the assertions are either made by Cox himself or other artists speaking about their own work. Crucially, Semmerling (2020: 187) proves that artists and curators often make the mistake of assuming audiences will react to their work according to the artist’s own intentions which can lead to wildly different interpretations of sound works. She argues that any attempt to create universal best practices for sounding artworks is futile as ‘such principles could never apply once and for all, but will continue to be renegotiated and rehearsed in every exhibition’ (Semmerling 2020: 199). The need to clarify what meanings are being made for individual visitors via sounds has become clear. Curators

Listening to archaeology museums    345 and practitioners who work with sound must do so in ways that involve actively gathering information on their unique audience’s expectations and reactions, otherwise the sounds injected into the traditionally visual museum environment risk being misheard, misinterpreted, or simply ignored. Without following through on listening back to museum listeners who experience sounding objects and artworks within museum spaces, the effort to incorporate sound within the visual environment of museum spaces runs the risk of merely echoing the idea that museums are ‘promot[ing] one single interpretation within the grand narrative of high culture’ (Bubaris 2014: 392). Particularly now, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-​first century which has seen the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements begin to have direct impacts upon museum practice, museum professionals must remain ever more diligent against allowing assumptions about audience interpretation to guide their approach to multisensory displays. The act of listening itself can be an act of empathy (Bodie 2011); the listener identifies themselves within what is being heard, and the possibility of providing guidance through museum listening experiences by trained staff could potentially lead to more positive visitor experiences of any sonic materials put on display. In wanting to provide listening experiences for their audiences, it is now more crucial than ever for museums to make the effort to listen to those audiences.

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348   John Kannenberg London, B.J. and A.H. Neset (Eds). 2013. Soundings: A Contemporary Score. New York: Museum of Modern Art. MacKinnon, D. 2019. ‘Hearing Early Modern Battles: Soundscape Audio as a Way of Recreating the Past’. Parergon, Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36 (2): pp. 115–​40. Makagon, D. and M. Neumann. 2009. Recording Culture Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. Los Angeles: SAGE. Moore, T. (Ed). 2004. Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. New York, NY: Universe Publications. Nelson, T. (n.d.) ‘Why ICOM Postponed the Vote on its New Museum Definition’. Museums Association Available at: https://​www.mus​eums​asso​ciat​ion.org/​muse​ums-​jour​nal/​opin​ion/​ 2019/​10/​01102​019-​def​i nit​ion-​just-​start-​of-​conve​rsat​ion/​ [Accessed 31 August 2020]. Novak, D. and M. Sakakeeny. 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham: Duke University Press. Papenburg, J.G. and H. Schulze. 2016. Sound as Popular Culture. A Research Companion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pavement, P. 2014. ‘Gramophones in the Gallery: A Chronology of Museums and Media Technology’. Journal of Museum Ethnography 27: pp. 12–​26. Picker, J.M. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potter, K. 2000. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Music in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Press, M. 2020. ‘Attempts to Reconstruct a Mummy’s Voice Are Cursed’ Hyperallergic Available at: https://​hypera​ller​gic.com/​539​573/​attem​pts-​to-​reco​nstr​uct-​a-​mum​mys-​voice-​are-​cur​ sed/​[Accessed 26 February 2020]. Quirke, S. 2009. ‘Petrie Archives in London and Oxford. In Sitting Beside Lepsius: Studies in Honour of Jaromir Malek at the Griffith Institute, edited by J. Málek, D. Magee, J. Bourriau, and S. Quirke, pp. 439–​61. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. Riggs, C. (2020) Christina Riggs on Twitter: ‘A prescient and pertinent tweet from Mirjam -​ because don’t think the “talking mummy” is a one-​off.’, Twitter Available at: https://​twit​ter. com/​pho​togr​aph_​tut/​sta​tus/​1221​0652​5881​6757​760 [Accessed 29 February 2020]. Riggs, C. 2014. Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Scarry, E. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schofield, J. 2014. ‘The Archaeology of Sound and Music’. World Archaeology 46 (3): pp. 289–​91. Scullin, D. and B. Boyd. 2014. ‘Whistles in the Wind: The Noisy Moche City’. World Archaeology 46 (3): pp. 362–​79. Semmerling, L. 2020. Listening on Display: Exhibiting Sounding Artworks 1960s–​Now. PhD dissertation. Maastricht University. Available at DOI:10.26481/​dis.20200430ls [Accessed 9 January 2021]. Sterne, J. 2013. ‘Soundscape, Landscape, Escape’. In Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, Sound Studies Series, edited by K. Bijsterveld, pp. 181–​ 94. Bielefeld: Transcript. Sterne, J. (Ed). 2012. The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Stevens, A. 2019. ‘3D Printing Brings Ancient Egyptian Instruments to Life’. Museums Association. Available at: https://​www.mus​eums​asso​ciat​ion.org/​muse​ums-​jour​nal/​ in-​pract​ice/​2019/​02/​07022​019-​pet​rie-​egypt-​musi​cal-​inst​rume​nts-​kent/​ [Accessed 18 October 2020]. Street, S. 2016. The Memory of Sound: Preserving the Sonic Past. London: Routledge.

Listening to archaeology museums    349 Weibel, P. 2019. Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art. Karlsruhe, Cambridge, MA and London: ZKM/​Center for Art and Media; The MIT Press. Wilfong, T.G. 1999. ‘Music in Roman Egypt’. Available at: https://​exhi​biti​ons.kel​sey.lsa.umich. edu/​galler​ies/​Exhib​its/​MIRE/​MIRE.html [Accessed 28 July 2020]. Wilson, C. 2007. Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. New York: Continuum. Wynne, J. 2017. ‘Transplant and Life’. Sensitivebrigade.com. Available from: http://​www.sensi​ tive​brig​ade.com/​Tran​spla​nt_​a​nd_​L​ife.htm [Accessed 9 September 2020]. Zisiou, M. 2011. ‘Towards a Theory of Museological Soundscape Design: Museology as a “Listening Path” ’. Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 11 (1): pp. 36–​9.

Pa rt E

F I E L DWOR K I N T H E M U SE UM Transformative practice

Chapter 17

Recreating c ont e xt for m useum c oll e c t i ons u sing dig i ta l t echnol o gies as a form of curat i on Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps

17.1  Introduction: Object context Archaeologists certainly study objects, but in many cases, the insights obtained come from the compilation of relationships found among observations made on many objects rather than the presence and identity of single items. In other words, archaeologists do not rely on the singularities as Kopytoff (1986) defines them, but rather study varied associations of artefacts grouped together as aggregates (Rezek et al. 2020). This poses a challenge for archaeologists and museum professionals with an interest in archaeological collections. In such contexts, it is not so much that museums do not need objects (Conn 2010), but rather in addition to the physical objects, they need to consider and therefore have available, information on hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of objects and their relationships. This poses a twin challenge. First, archaeologists need to focus on recording relationships among artefacts (Holdaway et al. 2019). Second, museums need to consider the curation of these relationships rather than just the objects themselves (Barker 2010). Here we use the results from a research project investigating early to mid-​Holocene occupation of the Fayum north shore region of Egypt to consider both these challenges (Holdaway and Wendrich 2017). At the British Museum’s Department of Egypt and Sudan Reading Room, it is possible to study stone artefacts collected by Gertrude Caton-​Thompson and Elinor Gardner during their 1920s fieldwork in the Fayum north

354    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps shore, Egypt. These museum objects form part of the material remains of a period of early twentieth-​century archaeological fieldwork and therefore inform, at least in an indirect way, about the theoretical understanding of Neolithic Egypt; what was collected in the field and removed to overseas museums, and therefore what was valued at the time. But in the early twenty-​first century, how might these objects and others provide a basis for understanding the early to mid-​Holocene human occupation of the Fayum region of Egypt? The questions have changed since Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s pioneering work. For example, we are no longer concerned with the establishment of Neolithic villages or the transmission of a Neolithic package from southwest Asia into North Africa, but instead seek ways of understanding how mobile societies constructed socioeconomies that included both wild and domestic resources (Holdaway and Wendrich 2017). The villages that Caton-​Thompson and Gardner interpreted from the Fayum sites of Kom W and Kom K reflect differential preservation of archaeological materials in a distributed landscape. The objects collected provide one source of information, but a great deal of archaeological analysis now relies on artefact context; the relationships that once existed between one object and many others. In addition to the actual objects that Caton-​Thompson and Gardner removed from Egypt, archaeological analysis today requires details of the history of collection, and the methods used to locate, retrieve, and transport objects to their current location. The investigations of Caton-​Thompson and Gardner in the 1920s made this region famous, culminating in their monograph The Desert Fayum, published in 1934. The British Museum holds materials collected during their fieldwork as do other institutions worldwide. However, Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s 1920s work was not the only investigation in the Fayum with a number of researchers working on different aspects of the archaeology of the region over the ensuing 90 years. These materials also rest in a variety of institutions (sections 17.3.1 and 17.3.2). In contrast to earlier work, our project did not involve the creation of large artefact collections to augment those currently held in various museums. Instead, we focused on making observations on objects resting on the surface leaving objects where they were found, collating information from artefact collections already conserved in museums, analysing data obtained from other sources (e.g. satellite imagery, sediment analysis), and only in limited instances, excavating selected areas with the objects found remaining in Egypt. Documenting relationships among these data sets received more attention than artefact collection with the varied data sets related together within a single data model. Here we describe this model including data acquisition and data relationships across the history of work in the Fayum paying particular attention to the metadata. We use this project to comment on use of archaeological data by museums in the future.

17.2  Archaeological fieldwork In some ways, archaeological excavation defines the discipline hence the trope that archaeologists go on ‘digs’. However, this characterization and its associated metaphors

Recreating context for collections    355 of discovery of the unknown are not without critics (e.g. Wingfield 2017). Excavation often focuses on archaeological sites whereas activities in the past occurred across landscapes, therefore archaeologists do not literally discover the past. Archaeology is as much an exercise in reconstructing what is missing as it is documenting what is present (Lucas 2012). What remains today is a product of a variety of processes that affect the preservation and association of materials within landscapes. The archaeological record is therefore a landscape record that reflects materials from the past that exist in the present (Harrison 2011). Since the archaeological record reflects the summation of processes occurring since archaeological sites began to accumulate, there is no reason to assume that the record observed by archaeologists working at different times was the same as the record encountered today. As discussed below, this is particularly apparent in the Fayum where not only is the archaeological record Caton-​Thompson and Gardner investigated different to that present in the first decades of the twenty-​first century, but this record continues to change, largely through destruction with the expansion of economic infrastructure. Also evident in the Fayum, is the need to understand erosion as a process that formed records visible to researchers in both the 1920s and today (Emmitt et al. 2017, 2021). Therefore, equating archaeology with excavation as the sole or even primary process of historical discovery inadequately describes the need to consider both the processes of record transformation and the history of work within a region, the collection, categorization, and dispersal of materials resulting from investigations previously undertaken. Rather than limiting documentation to descriptions of artefacts recovered from excavation, archaeologists need to consider database formation that integrates information in a variety of forms related to all investigations undertaken within a region. In this sense, it is no longer solely about documentation, literally the writing of reports such as The Desert Fayum, but instead designing and creating a data integration and management system. Relevant information relates to objects manufactured, used, and ultimately abandoned in the past, but also to observations of contexts, and contemporary and past processes. Here as an example, we focus on archaeological activity at the site of Kom W, Fayum north shore, during the course of nearly a century, from the 1920s until the present day (Fig. 17.1). The goal in doing this is to consider the relationship between archaeological fieldwork and the documentation of archaeological collections held in repositories and museums (Buchanan 2019). Rather than a site report with results of a single project, we consider how data model construction might provide a context for future researchers, one that does more than catalogue finds, but provides a narrative of ‘data’ creations relevant to Kom W. In the parlance of data management, we seek to reconstruct the metadata behind nearly a century of observations recognizing that different theories drove the consideration of data in different periods. Obviously, our ability to do this is based on the nature of the records kept. And here historical contingency plays a part as Harrison (2011) suggests. Caton-​Thompson’s notebooks that she kept while working in the Fayum, for example, did not survive a World War Two bombing event in London (Caton-​Thompson 1983). Understanding what is not available is therefore at times as

356    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps

Figure 17.1:  Location of the Fayum and Kom W within it, along with other places discussed in-​ text. Satellite image ESRI World Imagery, ArcGIS 10.6.

important as establishing what records remain. Despite lost records or observations not recorded, a good deal of the context for the finds made at different times can be reconstructed (Shirai 2018; Wendrich 2007). In creating the database for the Fayum project, we have worked to construct the metadata for the range of data types created over the periods of work at Kom W. Here we describe both the structure of this database and consider how it relates to the curatorial and educational functions of museums (Barker 2010).

17.3  Kom W Caton-​Thompson and Gardner (1934) excavated Kom W on the north shore of the Fayum Depression, Egypt, in their 1925–​1926 season, revealing pits, hearth features, faunal material, stone artefacts, and pottery among other forms of material culture. Based on these materials, they interpreted Kom W as the remains of a Neolithic village and this interpretation persisted in early syntheses of the prehistory of the wider region (e.g. Childe 1936; Braidwood 1958). Kom W represented the most extensive Neolithic site Caton-​Thompson and Gardner encountered in the Fayum, both in the depth and extent of deposits, and in the concentration of portable material culture. Their

Recreating context for collections    357 interpretation as a village settlement is therefore not surprising particularly given the limited knowledge of the Neolithic in the mid-​twentieth century. However, recent reassessment of archaeological remains in Egypt, particularly those found in other parts of the Fayum north shore, call into question the presence of villages during the Neolithic in Egypt (Holdaway et al. 2016; Holdaway and Wendrich 2017; Phillipps and Holdaway 2016; Phillipps et al. 2016a; Wengrow 2006). Contemporary studies suggest Kom W was a location that retained stratified deposits in an area that was otherwise eroded forming surface lagged deposits. Kom W lacks evidence for structures consistent with a village but does provide evidence for pottery storage vessels (Emmitt et al. 2017, 2021). Kom W is located within the Fayum Depression, a naturally occurring basin, separated from the Nile Valley by a ridge known as the Nile–​Fayum divide (Sandford and Arkell 1929). Floodwaters from the Nile Valley once entered the Fayum basin at Hawara and caused fluctuations in the level of Lake Qarun that formed within the basin (Hassan 1986). At present the surface of the lake averages 44m below sea level but in the early Holocene lake levels were considerably higher and therefore the lake covered a much greater surface area than it does today (Phillipps et al. 2016b). Kom W is located to the north of the lake, in an area referred to as the Fayum north shore.

17.3.1 The Desert Fayum In the 1920s, Caton-​Thompson and Gardner undertook substantial archaeological fieldwork on the Fayum north shore and identified locations attributable to the Neolithic period. They collected and removed substantial numbers of portable artefacts obtained through both excavation and surface collection. They identified hearths and grinding stones, and retrieved flaked stone artefacts, pottery sherds, and animal bones. Caton-​ Thompson and Gardner surveyed the Fayum north shore defining a series of shallow lake edge basins as well as palaeo-​shorelines that suggested lake level advances and retreats (Phillipps et al. 2016b). These shorelines suggested a reduction in lake levels providing the basis for a relative chronology for artefact assemblages. Their report appeared in 1934 under the title of The Desert Fayum. Caton-​Thompson’s collection strategy in the Fayum reflected her previous experience and training. Early work at the French site of Roches Rouges and later work with Petrie at Abydos (Wendrich 2007) involved the identification of stone artefacts as well as the use of seriation that she later applied to analyse assemblages from Kharga Oasis (Caton-​ Thompson 1952). These experiences influenced the types of artefacts Caton-​Thompson considered diagnostic and therefore suitable for collection. Investigations of stratified deposits at Hemamieh were also influential (Caton-​Thompson 1928). As a result, artefact significance assessment in the Fayum involved placement within a typological sequence, with new forms preferred for collection over those already described. Caton-​Thompson applied a typology to classify portable stone artefacts, using 27 separate classes that covered a variety of material forms including flint, limestone, and

358    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps basalt (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner 1934: 19–​22). Pottery classification used five forms applied to complete objects (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner 1934: 35). For stone artefact classification and therefore collection preferences, classification included bifacial projectile points, core axes, and sickle blades as well as microliths. In publications, the emphasis on complete tools of particular forms affected artefact quantification. For example, Caton-​Thompson and Gardner (1934) suggested that bifacial tools from the Fayum north shore, including ground, chipped, and polished stone axes comprised 40 percent of stone artefact assemblages. Later studies, however, suggested that the proportions were much lower. Collection strategies therefore need consideration when using information incorporated from different sources. Simple quantification, comparing tool proportions from the early twentieth-​century work with those from the twenty-​first-​century field projects for example, might lead to spurious results with collection practices not considered. Based on typological comparisons, Caton-​Thompson identified two separate assemblage types suggesting these represented the product of occupation by two different cultural groups separated topographically by changes in the level of Lake Qarun. Artefact classification allowed attribution to the two culture groups with artefacts collected stored at the Kom Aushim Michigan dig house (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner 1934: 4). While these artefacts filled 30 cases, final numbers and subsequent locations of most artefacts remain unknown (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner 1934: 5). Multiple collections occurred at some sites with Caton-​Thompson noting ‘Between Kom W. V. and Z. an incessantly replenished store of surface implements may always be collected’ (Caton-​ Thompson and Gardner 1934: 22). However, beyond such statements no records remain of the frequency of artefact collection from specific locations. At Kom W, K, and surface sites, axes, arrowheads, and sickle blades amongst other types were retrieved, sorted, catalogued, and these appeared in publications (Caton-​ Thompson and Gardner 1934: 25–​ 41). Collection involved some other artefacts including samples of the abundant stone flakes and cores, since these appear in museum collections attributable to Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s work but details about the collection of these artefacts are lacking. Caton-​Thompson and Gardner (1934: 26) commented generally on the context of the sites identified. For example, they noted surrounding flat, potentially arable areas at Kom W (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner 1934: 23) and at Site H high densities of artefacts at the mouth of wadis suggested water transport from further up the wadi system (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner 1934: 61). These and similar observations when combined with Gardner’s work on lake level changes indicated an interest in landscape context that was well ahead of its time. However, detailed locational information is lacking. Adding historical observations like those made by Caton-​Thompson and Gardner to the data model poses challenges. Caton-​Thompson and Gardner surveyed the Fayum north shore defining a series of shallow lake edge basins as well as palaeo-​shorelines on a topographic map (Phillipps et al. 2016b). However, the locational information they provided varied in precision with the majority of observations made using text-​based descriptions in their book and a limited number of articles. The database described

Recreating context for collections    359 below recorded these observations georeferencing them together with an indication of their precision. Distribution of most materials that Caton-​Thompson and Gardner collected and removed from Egypt occurred within England, with the majority sent to the Petrie Museum of Archaeology at University College London. Other institutions purchased smaller collections with some additional examples donated by Caton-​Thompson. Institutions in at least 12 other countries also received small assemblages, although a definitive list is difficult to determine. Publications described only a sample of the objects collected, with distribution data recorded only for objects that appeared in print. The London blitz destroyed additional notes that may have existed with the rest of Caton-​ Thompson’s Fayum archives (Caton-​Thompson 1983). The majority of countries that received material were in Europe, however institutions in the USA and Japan also received material. Additionally, some material remained in Egypt. Stone artefacts composed the bulk of the material distributed, as noted consisting mainly of examples of the various tool types identified by Caton-​Thompson. English institutions also received examples of the baskets excavated from the Upper K Pits along with pottery. Complete or near complete vessels went to the English and European collections with sherds sent further afield. Kyoto received a series of decorated Fayum sherds, representing most known examples (Nakano 2016).

17.3.2 Prehistory of the Nile Valley Following Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s work, no further archaeological investigation occurred on the Fayum north shore until the 1960s when Fred Wendorf and Romauld Schild incorporated the area into a larger study of the Quaternary geology and prehistoric archaeology of the Nile Valley involving members of the Combined Prehistoric Expedition (Wendorf and Schild 1976). Using stratigraphic observations as well as radiocarbon dating, Wendorf and Schild (1976: 161) defined four episodes of lake advance and recession using sections drawn in 46 excavated trenches. Like Caton-​Thompson and Gardner, Wendorf and Schild collected surface scatters notably from three areas at the site of E29H1 and areas at E29G1 and E29G3 (Site R following Caton-​Thompson’s designation) (Wendorf and Schild 1976: 184; Holdaway et al. 2018). However, their collection strategy involved collecting all artefacts rather than just those with typological significance. At Kom W (labelled E29H2 by Wendorf and Schild), excavations involving two trenches for ‘stratigraphic purposes’ (Wendorf and Schild 1976: 212) used a series of levels, each 10cm deep, with subsequent recording of the stratigraphic layers (Fig. 17.2). Because of the focus on stratigraphy, material culture descriptions are lacking in their Prehistory of the Nile Valley publication, although attribution to levels occurred for artefacts encountered (stone artefacts and pottery sherds). The typology for the Epipaleolithic of the Maghreb created by Tixier in 1963 formed, with modifications, the basis for stylistic comparisons of stone artefacts from the Fayum

360    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps with other regions (Schild and Wendorf 1975; Schild et al. 1968; Wendorf 1968; Wendorf and Schild 1976). A proportion of the materials collected and removed from the Fayum by Wendorf and Schild now reside in the British Museum in the Wendorf Collection of Egyptian and Sudanese Prehistory.

17.4  The Fayum Neolithic in the light of new discoveries In 1981, Kozlowski and Ginter (1989: 170) analysed a small sample of stone artefacts from Kom W as part of their larger investigation around the Qasr el-​Sagha area (Ginter et al. 1980; Ginter and Kozlowski 1982; Kozlowski and Ginter 1993). At Kom W, they sampled a 1m2 area near Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s Strip E, from which they retrieved 34 retouched tools and 263 flakes (Fig. 17.2). The results of their analysis suggested finished tools constituted only five percent of the total artefact assemblage, despite the descriptions Caton-​Thompson and Gardner provided. Their collection likely remains in Egypt although its exact location is unknown. The data available for their assemblage

Figure 17.2:  Kom W and excavation areas of Caton-​Thompson and Wendorf and Schild, and the sampling squares of recent excavations. The exact location of the sampling square of Kozlowski and Ginter is unknown but was in the vicinity of strip E.

Recreating context for collections    361 consists of observations of materials and artefact frequency for stone artefact and ceramic assemblages but limited to retouched tools and diagnostic sherds. Likewise, illustrations exist only for these types.

17.4.1 The Desert Fayum reinvestigated Permission to remove antiquities from Egypt halted in 1983 leading to significant changes in archaeological work and funding (Stevenson 2019). Our work in the Fayum reflected both these changes and our interest in a landscape archaeology undertaken from a geoarchaeological perspective (Holdaway and Fanning 2014). Rather than seeking to obtain diagnostic artefacts, we focused on establishing relationships between objects, understanding the processes that led to their visibility in varying concentrations across the landscape. With this focus, investigations involved the acquisition of observations from a variety of data sources. The collection of objects and their removal from the field was in many cases unnecessary. Acknowledging Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s pioneering work, we published The Desert Fayum Reinvestigated (Holdaway and Wendrich 2017). Following a methodology originally developed in Australia (Holdaway and Fanning 2014), artefact location and analysis occurred at the point where artefacts lay on Fayum north shore surfaces. The artefacts were located in a UTM coordinate system using electronic survey equipment, picked up and analysed, and then returned to their original position. In other words, the archaeological record encountered remained as we found it, once fieldwork was complete. Using a sampling design based on 1900m2 transects, recording involved assigning attributes and taking measurements for stone and pottery artefacts with a maximum dimension of 20mm or above (described in Holdaway and Wendrich 2017). In total, 220,000 records resulted from this survey work, including 55,000 records in the areas immediately adjacent to Kom W, known as the X1 survey area (Emmitt et al. 2021). Collection of objects and transport back to a field laboratory occurred in some cases, with the collected materials stored in the magazine at Kom Aushim. Examples included stone artefacts from the surface of Kom W, where the density of material precluded the easy application of in situ location and analysis techniques. Analysis of faunal material was also not possible in the field since faunal elements required specialist identification (Linseele et al. 2014). As well, limited excavation at Kom W produced stone artefacts as well as pottery sherds only analysable in the field laboratory. When beginning the excavation of Kom W in 1925, the site as Caton-​Thompson and Gardner saw it was very different to the site that exists today (Emmitt 2019; Emmitt et al. 2017, 2021). Partly this is due to processes of erosion that occurred in the past and still continues. Where contemporary development has not modified Fayum north shore land surfaces, buttes occur in various sizes, along with linear sand dunes, sand ripples, exhumed middy hills, and extensive gravel patches (Emmitt et al. 2021). Analysis of sediment samples obtained from a series of excavations in the area surrounding Kom

362    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps W indicates both erosion and periods of increased moisture alternating with periods of sustained evaporation sufficient to create evaporate precipitation (Koopman et al. 2016). Today, Kom W forms a low mound with a carpet of artefacts covering the surface. Reconstructions of site morphology based on published section drawings and descriptions indicate that prior to Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s work, windblown sand largely covered the site. The method of investigation used in the 1920s involved excavating a series of linear trenches across the width of the site and the redeposition of objects not collected, back into the previous trench as each new trench excavation proceeded (Emmitt et al. 2017) (Fig. 17.2). This method explains the carpet of artefacts that now exists across the site as well as the levels of erosion sustained. Stone artefacts and pottery discarded in the backfill now form a protective cap across the deposit with finer sand and silt clasts removed through wind action. A salt crust formed through the combination of morning dew and evaporation has further stabilized the surface (Koopman 2008). Sediment analyses from samples obtained close to Kom W indicate that active erosion occurred at times of occupation. This suggests alternating burial and exposure during periods of cultural material deposition. Radiocarbon ages suggest that the Kom W deposits are the most recent of a series of similar deposits that surround the site. As the most recent of such deposits, Kom W existed as a mound into the 1920s whereas erosion lagged other stratified deposits over the course of the mid to late Holocene. Indeed, Kom W was likely once larger in area with erosion reducing the size of the site over the last 6,000 years (Emmitt et al. 2021). This erosion modified artefacts found at Kom W. For example, large ceramic vessels (i.e. those with a volume > 5,000cm3), found less than 20cm from the surface have eroded rims, suggesting their repeated exposure (Emmitt 2019). Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s reports provided few details on what happened to the objects not collected from Kom W. However, geomorphological studies suggest many of the abandoned artefacts now rest close to the surface of the site. This explains why artefact densities are so high ranging from 160–​730 artefacts per m2. It is likely that the surface artefacts are both mixtures derived from multiple depths within the trenches and concentrations formed on the surface as the result of post excavation deposition. In addition, since the time of excavation, wind erosion has resulted in further deflation and therefore additional artefact concentration producing the artefact rich surface seen today. We also know that some of the objects collected by Caton-​Thompson occurred in small ‘caches’ that appear in different parts of the landscape. Over the course of the Fayum North Shore survey, we identified 11 such caches (Fig. 17.1). While some may be the result of non-​scientific activities, for example tourists as Kuper (2007) observed elsewhere in the Egyptian Western Desert, many are likely the result of Caton-​Thompson’s surface collection activities. The concentration of broken tools such as sickle blades in these caches suggests the upending of a container used to collect surface artefacts. If so, then the caches represent artefacts considered, but not ultimately selected, for collection. In one case, in survey transect L1C2, a sherd identified during our transect

Recreating context for collections    363 surveys retained script giving its place of retrieval, likely mining site B at Umm es Sawan (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner 1934). The script matches the calligraphy of similar inscriptions on artefacts collected by Caton-​Thompson that are now in museum collections. Therefore, it seems likely that this artefact represents an addition to the Fayum assemblages, probably accidently left behind, providing a unique historical insight into Caton-​Thompson’s field methods for artefact identification. Recent re-​examination of Kom W involved two surface collections on the kom. The first consisted of collecting artefacts from each of the strips excavated by Caton-​ Thompson. Because of the density of the artefacts, a 50cm x 50cm square was completely collected on each strip designated A-​T, resulting in the collection of 1,444 stone artefacts (Fig. 17.2). The second surface collection involved the complete collection of artefacts in a 5x5m square (Sq. 1) on the central part of the kom, one of the areas of highest density (Fig. 17.2). During the 2006 study season, 2,044 artefacts were analysed from this context with a further 2,333 artefacts analysed in 2007. In 2008 two 3x1m surface units were collected providing 2,631 artefacts, bringing the total analysed to 8,452 artefacts. Unlike the work of Caton-​Thompson and Gardner, the focus of this analysis was not typological. Rather investigation focused on understanding raw material reduction to produce flakes, some of which were likely used in their own right, with even fewer re-​sharpened or shaped into so-​called ‘formal tools’. An additional aim was to investigate how people used the landscape during the Neolithic, using the movement of stone artefacts reduced at locations like Kom W. Continued work of this nature provides a wider assemblage context for the bifacial tools initially described by Caton-​Thompson, re-​establishing relationships between formal tools and associated ‘debitage’ and between early twentieth and twenty-​first-​century (data) collection agendas. Limited excavation at Kom W sought to clarify the extant deposits in relation to the series of parallel trenches that Caton-​Thompson and Gardner excavated. Materials from these excavations became part of the collection curated at the Kom Aushim storage magazine (Beyt Sobek). In addition, partial excavations at hearths in the X Basin area surrounding Kom W provided charcoal for radiocarbon determinations, exported to the UCLA radiocarbon facility with a permit from the Supreme Council of Antiquities in collaboration with the Egyptian Mining Resources Authority (EMRA). Survey using the transect system described above provided information on 55,000 objects in the area surrounding Kom W. In addition, systematic field walking surveys conducted between survey transects targeted the location and description of hearths and grinding stones. Locations in UTM and descriptions for these features formed part of the data model.

17.5  Database design It seems obvious that answering many significant archaeological questions requires large datasets organized within databases (Wesson and Cottier 2014). However, large

364    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps datasets in archaeology come in two forms. In the first, data are composed of many repeated observations of a small number of attributes (e.g. the length of thousands of stone flakes) suitable for predictive and probabilistic inference (Kintigh 2006). In the second, data come from the diversity of archaeological observations made on a wide variety of artefact forms (Gidding et al. 2013; Kansa 2012; Kansa and Bissell 2010). This raises challenges for database integration, including standardization of content, recording, and suitable use of data management systems (e.g. Holdaway et al. 2019; Kintigh et al. 2018; Richards 2017; Snow et al. 2006). In archaeology it becomes crucial to consider how to handle relationships between observations and interpretations within a database system (Holdaway et al. 2019; Huggett 2012; Oikarinen and Kortelainen 2013). Database designs also need to include acquisition and organization of data in a social and historical sense (Cooper and Green 2016). There are good examples of individual studies tracing the collection history of particular material types suitable for establishing such data acquisition histories, including from our own work in the Fayum (e.g. Emmitt 2019). However, integrating multiple examples of such studies to describe the collection history of many different material types obtained is a challenge since data formats vary as do the data acquisition methods. The approach adopted for the Fayum placed a particular emphasis on metadata construction together with the definition of spatial referents. Metadata describes the structure of the data, that is the definition of the data record, the attributes used to describe this record, and the values the attributes might take. The metadata provides details of the instruments used to obtain the data, and crucially for our Fayum work, it includes our assessment of how collection methods changed over the 90 years of archaeological work in the Fayum north shore. The insistence of a spatial referent reflects our interest in the landscape archaeology of the Fayum with the need to consider datasets beyond the individual site. The implementation of the data model uses a spatial hierarchy beginning with two base units of observation: objects and features (Holdaway et al. 2019). Objects are archaeological phenomena held by hand and moved, such as a stone artefact, pottery sherd, or faunal element. Features are not moveable and therefore describe such occurrences as hearths or storage pits. All observations are resolvable to one of these units and each has a unique identifier (UNID) and spatial referent in the form of coordinate data measured in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) as a point or an area. Overlaying these base units is a series of spatial identifiers that bound the observation within the wider data structure. These are area of interest (AOI) and place of interest (POI). Figure 17.3 provides an example of this structure, but within the URU Fayum Project north shore survey, areas such as the X1 survey area are POIs, whereas the survey transects within them are AOIs. Definition of POIs uses the extent of the AOIs that compose them, whereas AOIs have a defined boundary designated by the investigator, as opposed to the spatial extent of archaeological phenomena. This schema applies to survey and excavation alike, and to the implementation of both across the history of archaeological work as the units of observation are flexible. Because of this, it is possible

Recreating context for collections    365 Place of Interest (POI)

Project Area

Area of Interest (AOI)

Object Feature

Figure 17.3:  Example of spatial-​hierarchical schema used to structure data from the Fayum (Project area). Within the POI representing the extent of the area investigated, an AOI (survey transect) represents an area of intensive survey. Mapping and analysis of individual objects (shown as a stone artefact) and features (shown as a partially exposed hearth) occurred within each AOI. Details in Holdaway and Wendrich (2017). Satellite images ESRI World Imagery, ArcGIS 10.6.

to incorporate data collected by previous investigations in the Fayum, many now in museum collections, into the wider data structure. Spatial precision relates the original methods of data recording. For example, an object recorded in 2012 may have a location accurate to within a centimetre since recording involved a total station, but an object excavated by Caton-​Thompson in the 1920s may only be related to an area equivalent to an AOI or POI. The material collected from Trench 2 by Wendorf and Schild (1976), for example, is attributable to a level, which is an arbitrary vertical division, within the Trench 2 AOI, which falls under the wider POI of Kom W. The material collected by Caton-​Thompson and Gardner is variable in spatial precision since much provenance comes from text descriptions. In some cases, the surviving records indicate objects collected from ‘X Basin’, meaning that the maximum level of spatial resolution for that object is the X Basin POI. However, in other cases, such as the excavation of Kom W, Caton-​Thompson and Gardner recorded provenance data in the form of three-​dimensional measurements relative to the local excavation datum. Although limited to a small number of objects, these data provide the depth of each object relative to the depth below the surface of the site when excavated. Site surface depth

366    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps comes from stratigraphic drawings allowing georectification with contemporary survey coordinates recorded in UTM. Georectification of Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s published section drawings allowed the construction of a grid representing the divisions of their trenches (Emmitt et al. 2017). This allowed for the transferal of Caton-​Thompson and Gardner’s three-​dimensional coordinates into UTM and from this a spatial referent for museum objects. In addition, the database incorporates contextual data. In the first instance this means including metadata of who or what researcher or research project collected the data, but also what collection strategies they employed. This may occur in the database as referenced text-​blocks from larger publications where publications are open access or out of copyright, or as data entered by our research team derived from museum catalogues. Caton-​Thompson and Gardner (1934: 74–​5) described a series of sites in the area surrounding Kom W. For Site V and Site X, we have only approximate positions with objects described as occurring between these sites and Kom W, in what we refer to as the X1 survey area (Emmitt et al. 2021). Aside from an inventory of objects, observations describe the surrounding environment. For example, descriptions indicate Site X as positioned on the west side of a large wadi mouth. Such data become attributable to the AOI with inclusion in the associated metadata. A polygon represents the AOI in this case, georeferenced from the original maps of Caton-​Thompson and Gardner (1934).

17.6  Future directions Published archaeological field studies of the early to mid-​Holocene in Egypt, the period of interest in our Fayum study, provide detailed descriptions but in only a few cases involve analyses. Indeed, in many studies, description stands in for analysis. Archaeological reports, for example, provide the frequencies of artefact forms listed in tables. The presence and proportions of these different artefact forms provide the means to identify cultural relationships and therefore forms of culture history often interpreted using concepts like population movement and cultural evolution. Even in recent reports, tabulation of frequency data occurs in ways that would not look out of place in The Desert Fayum that Caton-​Thompson and Gardner published in the beginning of the twentieth century. In this sense, field archaeology and archaeological research conducted in museums share a similar approach. In field archaeology as in museums, refining typology, the key agenda for material culture analysis of the twentieth century, has remained dominant. Certainly, nearly 100 years of work in the Fayum has added refinements, with new typological categories compared to those used by Caton-​Thompson and Gardner allowing for more extensive comparisons geographically. But contemporary typological comparisons continue to build on the fetishization of complete, formal tools, Kopytoff ’s (1986) singularities mentioned above (e.g.

Recreating context for collections    367 Shirai 2010, 2016). Such typological approaches specify which artefacts to consider important with these rarely contested. In doing so they promote a material culture aesthetic frequently imposed from elsewhere defined in the past by colonial archaeologists with little consideration of the utility of the types used (see Warfe 2003 for a critique of typological approaches in Egypt). Like field archaeology, much work within museums focuses on inventory and the recording of very basic attributes related to the objects themselves. To some degree, this reflects the size of collections and the exponential increase in the numbers of objects collected in recent times (Barker 2010). There are many, many objects to catalogue and typological approaches provide the means to efficiently describe artefact form. While museum studies often include examining collection history, few examples show the integration of legacy data in a meaningful way into contemporary datasets (exceptions include Stevenson 2019; Were 2019). Provenance is important for all scholars studying the past, but perhaps the conception and implementation needs consideration as our Egyptian case study shows. Objects exist within a variety of contexts; spatial, social, and they do not exist in isolation, rather as part of entangled webs of relationships with other objects and people (Hodder 2012). Objects also exist in the present, a concept that museum practitioners acknowledge better than archaeologists working outside of museums. This also means that relationships are dynamic. Unfortunately, the documentation of archaeological field research, the ‘site report’, rarely considers such dynamism. The data management system we developed for the Fayum project attempted to provide the structure where this was possible. The use of metadata and the relational structure linking attribute tables allows the addition of new sets of observations. The addition of AOIs or indeed POIs is also possible at some future time, allowing the database to grow. At the same time, the system allows for the incorporation of legacy data; observations acquired by scholars working on earlier projects. The relational design does away with the need to mix description with analysis. The key is not an inventory of objects and their typological description commonly seen in site reports. Rather, data types in our Fayum system vary in form. Some, such as the Worldview satellite data or the sediment analysis results are not related to objects or indeed ‘archaeological’ at all. Data in different forms allow analyses that move away from typologically based, culture historical reconstruction, allowing in the Fayum for example, studies of mobility based on artefact solid geometry and trace element material composition (Emmitt et al. 2018; Phillipps and Holdaway 2016). If, as Conn (2010) suggests, museums are less reliant on objects and therefore the fetishization mentioned above, then to better serve the museum-​going public, archaeologists need to provide museum professionals with an understanding of the relationships among materials and their contexts. Lists of ‘significant’ artefact types, the typological significance of which remains undisputed, provide inadequate bases on which museum professionals might make use of archaeological studies. How archaeologists move from the presence of artefact types to interpretations of things like population movement needs greater clarity. At times, archaeological inference has

368    Simon J. Holdaway, Joshua Emmitt, and Rebecca Phillipps aspects of a black box approach, where archaeologists have the knowledge through, for example the application of artefact typologies to unlock the true past. The archaeologist in such instances becomes the undisputed expert. There are multiple issues with providing archaeologists with such an unchallengeable status. It is the antithesis of open science, but it also clouds the theoretical basis that drives interpretations. As is clear from Moser’s (2006) account of collection strategies that set up the Egyptian collection at the British Museum, and Stevenson’s (2019) discussion of the history of archaeological work in Egypt more generally, archaeologists need to consider the destructive impact of invasive fieldwork and the colonial legacies of collecting practices. In Egypt, archaeologists have largely failed to engage with discussions of postcolonial identity and heritage, although some good examples exist (e.g. Moser et al. 2002). If relationships take centre stage rather than objects, then these include relationships between collections and source communities. This means unpacking the relationships between objects, the history of collection, the presence of objects in museums, their display, and the methods for deriving archaeological interpretations. Part of this requires archaeologists to consider the integration of all relevant datasets. Archaeologists also face criticism concerning the destructive impact of invasive fieldwork. Archaeological fieldwork is currently synonymous with excavation. With emphasis on the creation of contexts rather than excavation, archaeology might become synonymous with data integration and analysis. Perhaps this is the means for archaeologists to engage in the post-​colonial critique of their own practice. Construction of knowledge by archaeologists by this means in turn has flow-​on effects to museums. Objects displayed reflect the ideology of archaeological practice and it is not possible to refrain from political statements in the construction of museum instillations (Levy 2006). Archaeologists could focus on documenting relationships helping museum professionals who construct the instillations explain archaeological knowledge construction. This includes an understanding of context in all its complexity and the use of contemporary data management tools to facilitate this.

17.7  Twenty-​first century challenges Both field archaeologists and those using museum collections to consider the early to mid-​Holocene past of Egypt face the challenge of moving beyond typological artefact description. For archaeologists this requires reimagining the site report and emphasizing methods of data integration. This provides the scope for wider ranging analyses as well as engagement with the colonial construction of heritage records. For museum professionals an emphasis on relational database and metadata construction provides the opportunity to construct installations that overcome the need to see archaeologists as the expert purveyor of the unwritten past using methods reflecting unexplainable specialist knowledge. One approach to emphasizing context over

Recreating context for collections    369 typological description is to use contemporary data management tools, constructing databases compatible with a variety of data sources. In the Fayum, such a database must deal with the legacy of nearly 100 years of research and collections of objects made for different reasons dispersed around the world. It must also deal with a heritage record under continued modification by past and contemporary processes. Our proposed solution places much weight on documenting the history of object acquisition as well as the integration of a variety of data types. Rather than artefact collections, the bulk of observations occur without modifying the archaeological record. Curation preserves sets of relationships among objects as well as among other types of data rather than just the objects themselves. The challenge is to consider the use of such a database to illustrate both human activity in Egypt’s past and contemporary and past archaeological practice.

Acknowledgements The Royal Society of New Zealand through a Marsden grant (UOA1106), the National Geographic Society (8293-​ 07, 8295-​ 07, 8413-​ 08), and the University of Auckland supported work reported here. The Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) provided the University of California Los Angeles, Groningen University, University of Auckland Fayum Project (URU) permission to work on the Fayum material. We also wish to thank Alice Stevenson for the invitation to contribute to this volume. Seline McNamee prepared Fig. 17.3.

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Chapter 18

Ethno gr a ph i c c ollections a nd archaeol o g i c a l resea rc h James L. Flexner

18.1  Introduction During the last two decades, many archaeologists have turned their attention to collections of objects and documents not typically considered ‘archaeological’, because of the nature of the material, how it was collected, or how it is categorized within the museum. These types of collections are usually labelled ethnography, ethnology, or anthropology, depending on the museum and its history (in this chapter the term ‘ethnographic’ is used to generally refer to these types of collections). The objects in these collections were usually exchanged from living people to anthropologists, missionaries, or colonial agents, though there were also many other processes that led to ethnographic objects entering museum collections, including outright theft of cultural property. In European museums ethnographic collections are typically dominated by non-​Western cultures, though again this will depend to some extent on the institution in question. Reasons for using ethnographic collections to carry out archaeological research are quite variable. In some cases, archaeologists are looking for materials to supplement evidence from field archaeology, because ethnographic collections can include objects that would not preserve in an archaeological context (for example, Flexner 2016c). In others, archaeologists have taken a more ethnoarchaeological approach, where more recent objects are used to provide an analogue for material traces from the deeper past. This might involve a ‘direct historical approach’ (Steward 1942) where the archaeologist is attempting to trace ancestral links to practices through material objects, or a more generalized analogical approach (Stahl 1993). As an example, Whitridge (2004: 223–​6)

Ethnographic collections and archaeological research    375 uses carved wooden Inuit ‘maps’ to illustrate his understanding of space and place as part of a deeper interpretation of the Arctic past. More recently, archaeologists have used archaeological theory and methods to ask research questions of ethnographic collections themselves. One shift in this type of research is using broader assemblages rather than individual objects, and centring the focus on ethnographic collections as the main object of research (e.g. see Byrne et al. 2011; Harrison et al. 2013). One of the inescapable aspects of ethnographic collections is their relationship to the colonial past. Ethnographic objects were often collected from a colonial context. In other words, rather than ‘pristine’ representations of Indigenous material culture, they often reflect the complex interactions that emerged during the making of the modern world (Gosden and Knowles 2001; Thomas 1991). The context of collecting itself was also deeply entangled with colonial relationships, what Bennett (2009) has referred to as a ‘governmentality’ linking practices of field anthropology with the ordering and surveillance of colonial subjects. As the field of museum archaeological practice continues to grow, it will be incumbent on archaeologists and other researchers to address the entanglements of ethnographic collections with colonialism. In many cases, this will require developing close relationships with the descendant communities related to people whose things were collected and remain in museum storerooms.

18.2  What are ethnographic collections and why use them in archaeology? There are two relatively straightforward ways to define ethnographic collections. One would be to simply use whatever terminology the museum uses for that part of the collection labelled ‘ethnography’, ‘ethnology’, ‘anthropology’, or another similar term. The other would be to define any objects collected from living people at the time of removal from a source community as ethnographic. Unfortunately, both of these definitions fall somewhat short in practice. In part this is because of the dynamic nature of collections themselves. Just like surface assemblages or stratified sites, museum assemblages reflect a complex palimpsest of traces of human activity requiring sophisticated techniques of disentanglement and recording (see Wingfield 2017). The reality is that most museum collections, particularly historical collections which might contain objects collected as early as the 1600s CE, do not offer a straightforward boundary to match the imagined disciplinary distinctions between archaeology and anthropology. This is especially true of collections dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s, a time when the divisions between anthropology and archaeology were less clear-​cut than they would become in the second half of the twentieth century (Gosden 1999). Because disciplinary identities were being formed during this time, the definition of collections as archaeological or ethnographic can appear somewhat arbitrary or anachronistic

376   James L. Flexner from a contemporary perspective. In this sense archaeological work that integrates perspectives and material from both disciplines can be perceived as representing a ‘return’ to old roots rather than a completely new field of inquiry. In characterizing the archaeological collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Hicks (2013: 3–​6) has noted the presence of large numbers of objects, particularly from Africa, Oceania, Australia, and the Americas that are defined as archaeological despite deriving from living traditions. In a study of ‘British Neolithic’ stone tool collections in the British Museum, Sheridan et al. (2011) not only found artefacts from elsewhere in Europe, but also jade adzes collected from living communities in Papua New Guinea during the twentieth century. Collections clearly marked as ‘prehistory’ may contain objects that could be classed as ethnographic because of the method of collection. It is important to distance Indigenous peoples from the European notion of prehistory. Stone tools collected from living communities do not represent the artefacts of cultural ‘survivals’ or ‘contemporary ancestors’ of Stone Age peoples from around the world. Classifying them as such reflects an unrealistic linear vision of history that supports a patronizing colonial attitude to objects as well as associated cultures. On the other hand, understanding the historical processes of classification and categorization through which collections were assembled can be useful for understanding their past and ongoing complicated relationships to museum practices in the present. Another somewhat arbitrary distinction, particularly in colonial settler societies such as the United States, Australia, and Canada, but also in Europe, is the habit of distinguishing between ethnographic collections of ‘exotic’ cultures, and ‘historical’ or ‘culture history’ collections of objects made by Europeans and their descendants. Again, these distinctions are coloured by a colonial view of the world that separated white and non-​white, and can mask very real interactions between people in settings of colonial interaction (for example a missionary’s desk as ‘history’ but the wooden spears once displayed above that desk as ‘ethnography’). To some extent then, archaeological research into ethnographic collections has to sidestep the ideal of any hard and fast definition of which objects can and cannot be classed in such a way. What is defined as ethnographic will depend to some extent upon the questions being asked by the researcher, and the parameters circumscribing their investigations. A key observation here is that any archaeological research that seeks to use ethnographic collections must physically explore the collections to search for relevant objects and related notes, documents, or photographs. The same is true for research in related disciplines that aims to use an archaeological or archaeology-​adjacent approach to understanding collections. It is not enough to simply search the catalogues using existing database categories derived from historical documents (Wingfield 2011). Because collections are constantly changing as they are re-​interpreted, moved, and re-​ assembled, it is critical to understand them in terms of this dynamic nature. It is for this reason that an archaeological approach is warranted: just like an excavation site, we have to be cognizant of the historical ‘formation processes’ (Schiffer 1987) that shape what we see in collections in the present.

Ethnographic collections and archaeological research    377 While their histories can make ethnographic collections complicated to use and study, the potential value of this type of research is immense. It has been suggested that these types of collections can be used as ‘supplements’ and ‘records’ to archaeological research (Flexner 2016c). Wingfield (2017: 595) takes issue with this terminology, suggesting that it implies an ‘anti-​archaeology’ of artefacts removed from their context. However, these terms were used with a specific meaning in mind. Ethnographic collections can be considered a ‘supplement’ to archaeological surveys and excavations precisely because so often they preserve objects that would not be recovered in the humid tropical environments. In Vanuatu excavations of missionary houses dating from the 1850s–​1890s recovered primarily objects of glass, ceramic, and metal of European origin with some local food remains (Flexner 2016a). In museums in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland, Indigenous objects from the same time period were ‘recovered’, such as wooden clubs, barkcloth, and shell valuables collected by missionaries that would be unlikely to have survived outside of a museum storeroom (Flexner 2016b, c; Haddow et al. 2018). Archaeological research into ethnographic collections is thus equally ‘fieldwork’, albeit with a different set of considerations for the formation of the assemblages in question. Collections of objects are just as much ‘sedimentary’ as the deposits of an archaeological site because they can have layers not only of physical things from different time periods, but also layers of meaning as the objects moved through different environmental and cultural contexts. A major challenge is temporality: stone tools collected by early ‘ethnographic’ collectors might have been centuries old at the time of collection. In other cases, the dates of collection might be decades or even centuries earlier than the date of accession into a museum. Another limitation is geographic precision. In some cases, collectors were very specific, pinpointing a particular village or even recording what person(s) made and exchanged an object. In others, location might be defined generically (‘New Hebrides’; ‘West Africa’), or erroneously. Collectors also often did not distinguish between the place where materials originated, place of production, and place of collection, often only recording the latter. This is a limitation as it masks Indigenous as well as colonial trade networks that often stretched across hundreds or even thousands of kilometres. It is also one of the places where archaeological analyses can add to the story of these objects, for instance in tracing the stone sources of polished adze blades in Polynesian collections (Richards and Günther 2019). One of the roles of archaeologists working with such collections is to tease apart precisely what kinds of information these assemblages can offer, while also recognizing where the limitations lie. A key is to develop familiarity with the material culture not only of a specific area, but also adjacent areas that might have been connected through Indigenous or colonial exchange networks. This allows the archaeologist to examine, for example, a collection of objects from the Pacific and to determine more specific provenance for an object (taking an item labelled ‘New Hebrides’ and specifying a particular club style to a particular island) or to identify unlikely attributions (finding objects identified as coming from a particular island that do not in fact match the known material culture of that island or its immediate neighbours or trading partners). These

378   James L. Flexner kinds of identifications improve the information available to the curators and subsequent researchers using a particular collection. They also assist in developing a deeper understanding of the exchanges and networks represented by assemblages of ethnographic objects (see discussion in Flexner 2016b).

18.3  Current approaches: Actor–​ networks, assemblages, entanglements Archaeologists interested in working with ethnographic collections should be aware of approaches deriving from related disciplines, not only anthropology but also art history and even economics (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Bell and Geismar 2009; Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Gell 1998; Morphy 2007; Strathern 1990; Thomas 1991). The focus here is on work by archaeologists using ethnographic collections, but this work has borrowed heavily from other disciplines, especially when seeking useful theoretical frameworks to understand the objects in question. Gosden and Marshall (1999) used the concept of ‘object biography’ to examine a Fijian sperm whale tooth necklace from the Pitt Rivers Museum. They argued that such an approach, following the object through its multiple lives from Pacific Islander exchange network to museum storage, helped to better construct an understanding of the shifting meanings in relationships between people and things. More recently, three main theoretical trends have emerged in the archaeology of ethnographic collections: actor–​network theory (Latour 2005), assemblage theory (DeLanda 2006), and to a lesser extent entanglement theory (Hodder 2012). All of these approaches have been identified as useful because of the ways that they distribute agency among networks of places, materials, things, and people. Agency, broadly defined, is the ability to act on the world in some way (see Dobres and Robb 2000). Importantly, in the theoretical frameworks outlined above, agency is not unique to humans or even living beings. Instead, not only objects but physical substances and forces (metal, water, gravity, radiation) are all given agency within a particular network or system. Referring to actor–​network theory, Byrne et al. (2011: 8) point to the ‘flatness’ of networks conceptualized in this way (see also Harrison 2013: 15–​27). Rather than constructing a hierarchy with human beings as the primary agents who then act upon relatively passive nature and things, actor–​network theory challenges us to imagine the network as existing at some level without hierarchy. Networks in this way are constructed of nodes and links which can exist in an infinite number of arrangements that can be ever-​ changing. Which is not to say there is no underlying logic or causality in this framework. Of course, certain physical properties or social rules will constrict possibilities within a given network. But these are largely open to transformation and negotiation (at least outside of physical absolutes).

Ethnographic collections and archaeological research    379 Actor–​network theory allows archaeologists to discover forms of agency that are generally less prominent in our analyses. In Indigenous ethnographic collections, the ‘source communities’, can appear relatively mute in relation to the objects, at least on the surface. An archaeological approach can outline the different ways that objects represent ingenuity, integration, accommodation, or even parallel motives in relation to the colonial agents with whom people traded. For example, Papua New Guinea collections reflect people’s interest in creating new forms of material culture more likely to succeed in the evolving market for ethnographic objects; drawing in colonial power for local purposes so as to entrap agents of the state into reciprocal relationships; and even sending away objects that would be unstable or dangerous in the local social milieu (Clarke and Torrence 2011; Torrence and Clarke 2013). Such an approach also necessitates recognizing the ongoing potency of certain objects which survived their colonial displacement to become strong symbols but also instigators of identity construction (Knowles 2011). Actor–​network theory and related theories of ‘hybridity’ also challenge the notion that barriers between cultures, disciplines, or collections are fixed, stable, or impermeable. Archaeologists have applied these concepts to ethnographic objects deriving from colonial contacts in North America to show the ways that things can undergo a process of hybridization in situations of cross-​cultural interaction (Liebmann 2015; Loren 2015). This approach is not without its critics. Hybridity, like agency, risks being used as a facile throwaway interpretation rather than a carefully conceptualized theoretical framework (Silliman 2015). However, there remains potential to further develop hybridity particularly in relation to ethnographic collections and the theories being discussed here. Two of the key volumes demonstrating archaeological approaches to ethnographic collections (Byrne et al. 2011; Harrison et al. 2013) include chapters that take a more-​ or-​less explicit actor–​network approach to understanding ethnographic objects. One of the interesting elements of this kind of research is that the collections involved are not only of objects, but of assemblages that include related documents. These might include a collector’s notes and museum records, but also things like sale catalogues and advertisements (Torrence and Clarke 2011; Harrison 2011). The availability of various kinds of documents further amplifies the ability of archaeologists to trace different kinds of agency through the ethnographic collection (Bell 2013; Davies 2011). It is important to keep in mind, however, that the objects themselves tell as much of a story as the related documents. Archaeologists are not simply using the artefacts in the collection to illustrate the ‘real’ documentary history. Objects themselves can complement as well as contradict dominant historical narratives (Beck and Somerville 2005), which is where they can be demonstrated to contain a form of their own agency (Isaac 2013; Knowles 2013). Assemblage theory draws on the relationships between different things and their properties to construct a sense of the emergent whole that exists because of those relationships. Materials, energy, ideas, and actions emerge to create an entirety that is larger than the sum of its parts. Law Pezzarossi (2014) applies assemblage theory to an

380   James L. Flexner analysis of Nipmuc (New England, USA) basketmaking practices. While the study primarily uses archaeological artefacts, it could easily be expanded to analysis of baskets from ethnographic collections, and is a valuable illustration of the theoretical approach. The analysis goes beyond simply asserting Native American agency in the colonial past. It ‘implicates the necessary involvement of many other forces and their capacities as well, including material properties of wood, whether ash or oak; Indigenous knowledges of basketmaking (both passed down from earlier generations and developing); and, not inconsequentially, the unique economic circumstances of the late eighteenth century in New England’ (Law Pezzarossi 2014: 354–​5). Entanglement theory offers a similar framework that focuses on the relationships possible among humans and things, conceptualized as Human–​Human (HH), Human–​ Thing (HT), Thing–​Thing (TT). One of Hodder’s (2012) goals is to reinstitute the ‘thingness’ of objects in these relationships. Objects have certain physical properties and attributes in addition to representing social relationships. Entanglement theory balances the relational conceptualization of networks by scholars like Latour (2005) and Strathern (1990) against the materialist tendencies of archaeologists (Olsen 2010). Entanglement further argues that these relationships can often be conceptualized by a ‘stickiness’, that is a tendency for things to become increasingly entangled in more and more complex ways as time moves on. Drawing on this concept, Thomas (2019) offers an analysis of the introduction of metal hatchets to Roviana, Solomon Islands in the colonial period during the 1800s, many of which ended up in ethnographic collections. He argues that this introduction resulted in an increasing prominence of headhunting, generally from Roviana at the expense of neighbouring Islanders. Where headhunting robbed people of their personhood, turning them into objects, axes because of their physical properties could accumulate power and become personified in the process.

18.4  Future horizons: Post-​colonial, repatriation, Indigenous-​led By its very nature, archaeological research on ethnographic collections sits across disciplinary boundaries, not only between anthropology and archaeology but also with history, art history, and museology. The materials used are various, involving the study of assemblages of objects, related documents, and places in the world, from museum storerooms to remote villages where artefacts originated. Objects also continue to produce or involve relationships between people, including networks of researchers, curators, and descendant communities who might have strong cultural, intellectual, historical, or emotional ties to ancestral things. This means that archaeologists working with ethnographic collections need to be fairly flexible in their approach to research. Fieldwork in and beyond the collection will involve studying a variety of materials, using different skillsets to carry out the necessary analyses to understand a given collection.

Ethnographic collections and archaeological research    381 It will also often involve a sensitive approach to handling things and negotiating appropriate representation of ethnographic objects in conversations with descendant or source communities. Most of the archaeological research on ethnographic collections focuses on colonial exchanges: European collectors of various types acquiring Indigenous objects for curation in museum settings, either directly or indirectly (for an exception see Parrott 2011). In many cases this means that such collections offer an opportunity to reflect on both sides of the colonial encounter. Part of the focus on agency in these kinds of studies is a reflection of an interest to shift archaeological narratives towards the ‘post-​colonial’ (see Lydon and Rizvi 2010). In addition to shifting the scales to non-​human agents through the use of frameworks such as actor–​network theory, archaeological studies seek to relocate agency in the colonial encounter more firmly towards the hands and minds of Indigenous peoples. Objects both shaped, and were shaped by, European desires for ‘curios’. Indigenous creators responded to the desires of collectors and acted in their own interests to negotiate their place in the colonial order through trade. Harrison (2002, 2006) has argued that glass Kimberley spear points represent precisely this kind of object, as representatives of ‘authentic’ Aboriginal culture for Europeans as well as artefacts of negotiation within and between Aboriginal communities. One area that has particularly emphasized the agency of Indigenous creators and traders is in the archaeology of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century missionary collections. In part this is because missionaries were often the earliest resident colonial agents in different parts of the world. Missionaries also developed some of the closest ties with Indigenous communities because they often had to forge sincere relationships to attract converts. At the same time, Indigenous people opportunistically used their relationships with missionaries to expand their trade networks, gain political advantage over local rivals, or even find refuge from the violent and unpredictable colonial frontier (e.g. Middleton 2008; Morrison et al. 2015). It was not uncommon for missionaries to collect objects, folklore, and photographs documenting native ways of life, even as they sought to transform or even erase those ways of life (Lawson 1994; Smith 1997). The result was the formation of collections of objects that then often formed the basis of ethnographic collections in museums in Europe and European settler colonies (Jacobs et al. 2015). Missionary collections provide ample opportunity to ‘discover’ the Indigenous agency that shaped ethnographic collections. Wingfield’s (2013) analysis of the London Missionary Society collections at the British Museum revealed the processes of hybridization undermining the ‘pure’ categories of ‘European’ museum and ‘Indigenous’ object. Archaeologies of ethnographic collections from the Pacific missions have shown the ways that Indigenous people used objects to enmesh missionaries into local exchange networks, an act that often had serious political implications. While these exchanges were sometimes taken by missionaries as acts of ‘sincere’ conversion, those doing the converting may have had other motives, as argued for the case of a gift of navela (stone money) to the missionary H.A. Robertson in Erromango Island, Vanuatu (Flexner 2016a: 165). Missionary collections can further reflect the fact that not

382   James L. Flexner all colonial relationships are simply about power. A lay missionary woman’s collection from the Solomon Islands reflects the close interpersonal relationships and indeed friendships forged in the spaces of conversion, especially with local women and children (Smith 2010). Of course, it is one thing for mostly white communities of scholars, curators, and collection managers to assert that ethnographic objects reflect the agency of their creators, quite another to translate that historical agency into meaningful connections with living Indigenous communities. While academic research has increasingly sought a post-​colonial synthesis, the reality is that the divisions of power and wealth between European and European settler colony museums and the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral objects they curate remain markedly uneven (these same colonial legacies also apply to universities and access to academic knowledge in anthropology and archaeology). Museums of course have been aware of this for some time, particularly since the Civil Rights movements beginning in the 1960s, and the subsequent passage of various kinds of legislation to protect sacred ancestral remains such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1980 in the United States. Ethical, legal, and professional responsibilities increasingly drive museums to confront their colonial pasts and to engage or re-​engage with what are often called ‘source communities’ or ‘originating communities’ (the former is used here). Source communities are generally the descendants of those people who created the things now housed in ethnographic and other collections (Peers and Brown 2003). Engagements with source communities take on many forms, ranging from relatively superficial consultation to the co-​production of long-​term relationships that allow source communities to take back significant control over their ancestral objects. In Australia and the United States, repatriation of human skeletal and mortuary remains has been a major concern (Fforde et al. 2002; Thomas 2000; this volume: Chapter 3) though increasingly there is also collaborative work around returning other objects temporarily or permanently (Allen et al. 2002: 319–​22; Hicks 2020; this volume: Chapter 12). One of the ongoing issues facing ethnographic collections is the representation of Indigenous people within museum spaces not only as consultants and collaborators, but as curators and researchers in their own right. Hays-​Gilpin and Lomatewama (2013) reflect on the importance of developing these kinds of relationships at the Northern Arizona Museum. One of the key observations in relation to Hopi artefacts in that museum (the authors prefer the term ‘artefact’ to object as it implies human relationships) is that Indigenous people perceive their objects in terms of ‘I-​Thou’ relationships, rather than the ‘I-​It’ relationships inherent to Western scientific models. Where archaeologists and anthropologists seek to divide objects according to functional categories (technology, subsistence, trade), Hopi see connections between people, their environment, spirits, and the artefacts that can mediate those connections. While Lomatewama avoids asserting that Hopi confer personhood on their artefacts per se, he also indicates that nothing is perceived as inert matter in Hopi understandings of the world since everything derives from a living nature. Further, because artefacts like people are meant to have a life cycle, the artificial fixing of physical properties through museum curatorial

Ethnographic collections and archaeological research    383 practice can be damaging to Indigenous experiences of artefacts, for example where the preservation of a mask prevents its now dead owner from carrying out their duties as an ancestor. Hays-​Gilpin and Lomatewama (2013) provide a powerful argument that these kinds of Indigenous perspectives can translate positively into changing museum practice, from the ways museums collaborate with source communities to the stories told through exhibition displays. Archaeologists absolutely have a role to play in helping museums to develop more of an Indigenous-​led practice, including in relation to their ethnographic collections. Besides the large-​scale employment of archaeologists to return excavated skeletal remains and other sacred ‘archaeological’ objects, an archaeological sensibility can assist museums in expanding knowledge of their other collections, including those labelled ‘ethnographic’. Further, archaeological fieldwork in the more orthodox sense of field surveys and excavation often necessitates building strong ties with local communities. These relationships can then be built upon with museums as well, bringing relevant ethnographic collections back to communities, or bringing communities into the museum space to renew relationships with ancestral things.

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384   James L. Flexner Davies, S.M. 2011. ‘Plumes, Pipes and Valuables: The Papuan Artefact-​Trade in Southwest New Guinea, 1845–​1888’. In Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, edited by S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison, and R. Torrence, pp. 83–​115. New York: Springer. DeLanda, M. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. Dobres, M-​A. and J.E. Robb (Eds). 2000. Agency in Archaeology. London: Routledge. Douglas, M. and B. Isherwood. 1996. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Routledge. Fforde, C., J. Hubert, and P. Turnbull (Eds). 2002. The Dead and their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy, and Practice. London: Routledge. Flexner, J.L. 2016a. An Archaeology of Early Christianity in Vanuatu: Kastom and Religious Change on Tanna and Erromango, 1839–​1920. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Flexner, J.L. 2016b. ‘Archaeology and Ethnographic Collections: Disentangling Provenance, Provenience, And Context in Vanuatu Assemblages’. Museum Worlds 4: pp. 167–​80. Flexner, J.L. 2016c. ‘Ethnology Collections as Supplements and Records: What Museums Contribute to Historical Archaeology of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu)’. World Archaeology 48 (2): pp. 196–​209. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gosden, C. 1999. Anthropology and Archaeology: A Changing Relationship. London: Routledge. Gosden, C. and C. Knowles. 2001. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change. Oxford: Berg. Gosden, C. and Y. Marshall. 1999. ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’. World Archaeology 31 (2): pp. 169–​78. Haddow, E., J.L. Flexner, S. Bedford, and M. Spriggs. 2018. ‘Pendants and Beads of Stone, Shell, and Tooth from Southern Vanuatu’. In The Archaeology of Portable Art: Southeast Asian, Pacific, and Australian Perspectives, edited by M. Langley, M. Litster, D. Wright, and S.K. May, pp. 102–​24. London: Routledge. Harrison, R. 2002. ‘Archaeology and the Colonial Encounter: Kimberley Spearpoints, Cultural Identity and Masculinity in the North of Australia’. Journal of Social Archaeology 2 (3): pp. 352–​77. Harrison, R. 2006. ‘An Artefact of Colonial Desire? Kimberley Points and the Technologies of Enchantment’. Current Anthropology 47 (1): pp. 63–​88. Harrison, R. 2011. ‘Consuming Colonialism: Curio Dealers’ Catalogues, Souvenir Objects and Indigenous agency in Oceania’. In Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, edited by S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison, and R. Torrence, pp. 55–​ 82. New York: Springer. Harrison, R. 2013. ‘Reassembling Ethnographic Museum Collections’. In Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, edited by R. Harrison, S. Byrne, and A. Clarke, pp. 3–​35. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Harrison, R., S. Byrne, and A. Clarke (Eds). 2013. Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Hays-​Gilpin, K. and R. Lomatewama. 2013. ‘Curating Communities at the Museum of Northern Arizona’. In Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, edited by R. Harrison, S. Byrne, and A. Clarke, pp. 259–​83. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Ethnographic collections and archaeological research    385 Hodder, I. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Malden: Wiley-​Blackwell. Hicks, D. 2013. ‘Characterizing the World Archaeology Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum’. In World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization, edited by D. Hicks and A. Stevenson, pp. 1–​15. Oxford: Archaeopress. Hicks, D. 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press. Isaac, G. 2013. ‘We’wha Goes to Washington’. In Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, edited by R. Harrison, D.R. Byrne, and A. Clarke, pp. 143–​ 70. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Jacobs, K., C. Knowles, and C. Wingfield (Eds). 2015. Trophies, Relics and Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Knowles, C. 2011. ‘“Objects as Ambassadors”: Representing Nation Through Museum Exhibitions’. In Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, edited by S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison, and R. Torrence, pp. 231–​48. New York: Springer. Knowles, C. 2013. ‘Artifacts in Waiting: Altered Agency of Museum Objects’. In Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, edited by R. Harrison, S. Byrne, and A. Clarke, pp. 229–​57. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–​ Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law Pezzarossi, H. 2014. ‘Assembling Indigeneity: Rethinking Innovation, Tradition and Indigenous Materiality in a 19th century Native Toolkit’. Journal of Social Archaeology 14 (3): pp. 340–​60. Lawson, B. 1994. Collected Curios: Missionary Tales from the South Seas. Montreal: McGill University Press. Liebmann, M. 2015. ‘The Mickey Mouse Kachina and other “Double Objects”: Hybridity in the Material Culture of Colonial Encounters’. Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): pp. 319–​41. Loren, D. DiPaolo. 2015. ‘Seeing Hybridity in the Anthropology Museum: Practices of Longing and Fetishization’. Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): pp. 299–​318. Lydon, J. and U. Rizvi (Eds). 2010. Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Middleton, A. 2008. Te Puna -​A New Zealand Mission Station: Historical Archaeology in New Zealand. New York: Springer. Morphy, H. 2007. Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-​Cultural Categories. Oxford: Berg. Morrison, M., D. McNaughton, and C. Keating. 2015. ‘“Their God is Their Belly”: Moravian Missionaries at the Weipa Mission 1898–​1932, Cape York Peninsula’. Archaeology in Oceania 50 (1): pp. 85–​104. Olsen, B. 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Lanham, Maryland: Altamira Press. Parrott, F. 2011. ‘Death, Memory and Collecting: Creating the Conditions for Ancestralisation in South London Households’. In Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, edited by S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison, and R. Torrence, pp. 289–​ 306. New York: Springer. Peers, L. and A.K. Brown (Eds). 2003. Museums and Source Communities. London: Routledge. Richards, M.J. and J. Günther. 2019. ‘The Past, Present and Future Values of the Polynesian Stone Adzes and Pounders Collected on the Pandora.’ Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 29 (1): pp. 1–​15.

386   James L. Flexner Schiffer, M.B. 1987. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Sheridan, A., Y. Pailler, P. Pétrequin, and M. Errera. 2011. ‘Old Friends, New Friends, a Long-​ Lost Friend, and False Friends: Tales from Project JADE’. In Stone Axe Studies III, edited by V. Davis and M. Edmonds, pp. 411–​26. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Silliman, S.W. 2015. ‘A Requiem for Hybridity? The Problem with Frankensteins, Purées, and Mules’. Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): pp. 277–​98. Smith, A.M. 1997. ‘Missionary as Collector: The Role of the Reverend Joseph Annand’, Acadiensis XXVI (2): pp. 96–​111. Smith, D.M. 2010. ‘“We Wia Ragai”: Missionary Collection and Synergetic Assemblages in the Solomon Islands 1920–​1942’. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14: pp. 188–​208. Stahl, A.B. 1993. ‘Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in Historical Perspective’. American Antiquity 58 (2): pp. 235–​60. Steward, J.H. 1942. ‘The Direct Historical Approach to Archaeology’. American Antiquity 7 (4): pp. 337–​43. Strathern, M. 1990. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, D.H. 2000. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books. Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Thomas, T. 2019. ‘Axes of Entanglement in the New Georgia group, Solomon Islands’. In Archaeologies of Island Melanesia: Current Approaches to Landscapes, Exchange, and Practice, edited by M. Leclerc and J.L. Flexner, pp. 103–​16. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Torrence, R. and A. Clarke. 2011. ‘“Suitable for Decoration of Halls and Billiard Rooms: Finding Indigenous Agency in Historic Auction and Sale Catalogues’’ In Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, edited by S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison, and R. Torrence, pp. 29–​54. New York: Springer. Torrence, R. and A. Clarke. 2013. ‘Creative Colonialism: Locating Indigenous Strategies in Ethnographic Museum Collections’. In Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, edited by R. Harrison, S. Byrne, and A. Clarke, pp. 171–​95. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Whitridge, P. 2004. ‘Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: “Place” and the Archaeology of Inuit Imaginaries.’ Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11 (2): pp. 213–​50. Wingfield, C. 2011. ‘Donors, Loaners, Dealers and Swappers: The Relationship behind the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum’. In Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, edited by S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison, and R. Torrence, pp. 119–​40. New York: Springer. Wingfield, C. 2013. ‘Reassembling the London Missionary Society Collection: Experiments with Symmetrical Anthropology and the Archaeological Sensibility’. In Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, edited by R. Harrison, S. Byrne, and A. Clarke, pp. 61–​87. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Wingfield, C. 2017. ‘Collection as Reassemblage: Refreshing Museum Archaeology’. World Archaeology 49 (5): pp. 594–​607.

Chapter 19

Scientific inv e st i g at i on of museum obj e c ts Planning, analysis, and wider impact Patrick Sean Quinn

19.1  Introduction A wide range of techniques from the scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and the earth sciences can be applied to museum objects in order to collect specific types of data from them. This is used for a variety of purposes including object identification, materials characterization, technological reconstruction, provenance determination, authentication, conservation, and monitoring. It can supplement traditional visual and metric analyses of artefacts as well as providing insights that cannot be obtained with the naked eye, or simple tools such as a hand lens or callipers. Most scientific techniques involve sophisticated apparatus of some kind, as well as the expertise to operate them and to interpret the data that they provide. Analysis is therefore conducted mainly by external or in-​house specialists, in collaboration with curators and collections managers. Many techniques involve the handling and physical sampling of objects and therefore need to be well justified, rigorously planned, and carefully executed in order to both protect the collections that they are performed on and maximize the benefits of the procedure(s). Despite this, surprisingly few specific guidelines exist for the scientific analysis of museum artefacts, both within the published literature and in the procedures of museums themselves. This chapter addresses the topic in detail by considering the various steps that may be involved in the process of studying museum artefacts scientifically, highlighting key considerations, and possible points of contention, and advocating strategies for best practice. It approaches these issues primarily via the scientific study of archaeological pottery and other ceramic objects in several countries worldwide. However, many of the concepts and considerations are relevant to other types of objects, both inorganic and organic (this volume: Chapter 20). Greater

388   Patrick Sean Quinn consideration is given to invasive/​destructive methods of analysis, because of the potential risks that they pose to museum objects. The chapter is aimed both at museum staff looking after collections and scientists seeking to analyse them. It is hoped that the views and priorities of these main parties are equally represented.

19.2  Methods of scientific analysis There is a multitude of different scientific methods of analysis, originating from a wide range of disciplines, that can be applied to the study of museum objects (Stuart 2007). These can be roughly divided into techniques of inorganic and organic materials analysis and various types of high-​resolution imaging. In the case of ancient ceramics, which are one of the most common artefact types held by many museums worldwide (e.g. Cooper 2000), inorganic methods of analysis include mineralogical and petrographic characterization via thin section petrography (Quinn 2013) and X-​ray diffraction (XRD) (Quinn and Benzonelli 2018), geochemical characterization via X-​ ray fluorescence (XRF) (Hall 2017), instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) (Pollard et al. 2007: 123–​36), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (IC-​ MS) (Golitko and Dussubieux 2017), as well as micropalaeontology (Quinn and Day 2007). These provide data on the composition and geological origins of the clay-​rich body of pottery and other ceramics, as well as decorative slip, paint, and glaze layers, which is used to interpret their raw material sources and production locations. Mineralogy and geochemistry are widely applied in studies on the movement of people and goods via processes of trade and exchange (e.g. Day et al. 2011; Travé et al. 2016), settlement shift, and migration (e.g. Cootes and Quinn 2017; Quinn and Burton 2015). The composition of organic residues and coatings trapped within and applied to ceramic objects can be analysed by gas chromatography mass spectroscopy (GC-​MS) (Barnard and Eerkens 2017) and Raman spectroscopy (Pollard et al. 2007: 83–​5). These approaches are typically applied in studies of the uses of archaeological ceramics, to detect evidence for the production and consumption of particular plant and animal-​based substances (e.g. Copley et al. 2003). Scientific methods of imaging include reflected and transmitted light microscopy (Quinn 2013), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) (Ionescu and Hoeck 2017), X-​radiography (Berg 2008), and 3D micro X-​ray computed tomography (μ-​CT) (Kozatsas et al. 2018). They enable ceramics and other artefacts to be examined at much higher magnifications than the naked eye or hand lens, and can reveal their internal structure. Such information is valuable for the study of ancient ceramic technology including pottery forming (e.g. Ther 2016) and firing (e.g. Faber et al. 2009). Many of the above techniques require the removal of a small amount of material from an object, which is prepared in a specific format (Fig. 19.1) before being analysed in a laboratory using specialized apparatus (Fig. 19.2). The size of the sample varies from several grams in the case of SEM to a few milligrams for ICP-​MS and INAA. Certain

Scientific investigation of museum objects    389

Figure 19.1:  Sample formats used for the scientific analysis of archaeological ceramics. Thin section (A), SEM mount (B), polished block (C), milled powder for INAA, XRD, FT-​IR (D), XRF pressed pellet (E) and fused bead (F), digested solution for ICP-​MS/​extracted residue for GC-​MS (G). Archaeological ceramic specimen with visible evidence of invasive sampling for compositional analysis (H). Reproduced from Quinn (2018: fig. 1, 44).

(a)

(b)

Figure 19.2:  Examples of some scientific apparatus used to analyse archaeological ceramics. Petrographic microscope with stepping stage and digital camera (A), scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive X-​ray spectroscopy (SEM-​EDS) (B).

scientific preparations, such as thin sections, can be re-​analysed many times, whereas others are consumed during analysis, for example extracted organic residues. Museum objects can also be analysed non-​invasively without the need to sample them or even handle them. Important non-​destructive techniques include X-​radiography, portable X-​ray fluorescence (pXRF) (Quinn et al. 2020) (Fig. 19.3), and portable Raman Spectroscopy.

390   Patrick Sean Quinn (a)

(b)

Figure 19.3:  Exhibited museum object being analysed non-​invasively in situ without sampling or handling. Geochemical characterization of ceramic statue of Emperor Qin Shuang’s Terracotta Army in Pit 1 of the mausoleum museum near Xi’an, China via portable x-​ray fluorescence (pXRF). Gently cleaning spot on surface of statue before analysis (A). Analysing statue with pXRF in tripod (B) (Quinn et al. 2020).

19.3  Choice of technique A key step in any proposed scientific research on museum objects is selecting the specific technique to be applied. This is influenced by many factors including the aim of the investigation, the nature of the object, the equipment, funding available, and the details of any comparative studies. Defining the question(s) being posed of scientific analysis should always be the first and most important step, as this will determine the technique and type of apparatus required. Possible questions include: what is this object made of; how was it manufactured; where was it manufactured; how was it used; it is a fake; what is its state of preservation; has it been repaired and how? These and other questions drive archaeological research into museum collections as well as investigations that are necessary for their conservation. As outlined above in relation to scientific research on ancient ceramics, certain techniques lend themselves more to specific types of investigations, for example the interpretation of the use of pottery vessels is most effectively studied through the characterization of trapped ancient organic molecules with GC-​MS and the reconstruction of firing technology is usually approached by SEM and/​or XRD. Some scientific approaches can be achieved using several alternative types of apparatus, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, bulk geochemical characterization or ceramics can be carried out via XRF, INAA, and ICP-​MS. However, not all three techniques can analyse every chemical element present in ceramics and some produce better quality data than others (see Section 19.5: Access, Sampling, and Analysis). These considerations may favour the use of one type of apparatus over another for a particular project or in relation to the questions being asked of the material and the type of data required to tackle this.

Scientific investigation of museum objects    391 It is not uncommon in scientific investigations on museum artefacts for several techniques to be applied to the same object(s). A single project can have several different goals, which necessitate the application of quite different approaches. In addition, certain scientific methods are complimentary and should ideally be applied together for better results. For example, geochemistry and thin section petrography, which produce very different types of data, one elemental and the other mineralogical, can be integrated with one another in order to characterize the inorganic composition of the clay body of ceramics more effectively. By providing an alternative perspective, it is possible to come to clearer conclusions about artefact composition, origins, technology, use, deterioration, and other such questions. The nature of the object being analysed greatly influences the type(s) of scientific techniques that can be applied to it. The characterization of organic and inorganic artefacts requires the use of different approaches, as do mineralized objects compared to glassy ones, and metallic and non-​metallic samples. Aside from the type of material that it is made from, important considerations include whether the object can be sampled or needs to be analysed non-​destructively, if it can be transported or exported, how large it is and whether it can fit in the chamber of the apparatus, and whether it is on display in a public gallery or located in the museum stores. Whilst a particular scientific technique may be more suitable than others, or provide appropriate analytical sensitivity, the choice of method and apparatus is often strongly influenced by what is available and/​or affordable. Certain museums have in-​house analytical facilities that are normally preferred over the purchase of external machine time. Similarly, the availability of equipment and expertise within the laboratories of external analysts will usually determine the techniques that they choose to apply to museum objects, even when it might be more suitable from a purely analytical perspective to seek an alternative elsewhere. Expertise is a key concern when selecting which scientific technique(s) to apply to the analysis of museum objects. Many methods involve the use of specialized equipment that requires a skilled operator. The analysed samples may need to be prepared in a particular format, which can require the execution of a complex and sometimes dangerous protocol, for example the acid digestion of inorganic artefacts for ICP-​MS. After analysis, recorded scientific data typically needs to be interpreted by an expert in order for it to be of value. This expertise required to prepare samples for a particular type of analysis, operate the equipment and interpret the data may not exist within the museum that houses the objects under study, meaning that an external consultant needs to be recruited for a particular investigation.

19.4  Benefits, risks, and permissions Museum objects are finite, irreplaceable, and often delicate. They have been collected on the basis of their cultural and aesthetic value, and considerable resources are dedicated to their storage, preservation, and display. With this in mind, scientific techniques that

392   Patrick Sean Quinn can require handling, removal, and particularly sampling, cannot always be applied to them. Some objects are simply too rare, valuable, small, and/​or fragile to be subjected to analysis. They may be currently on display as part of a permanent or temporary exhibition and thus subject to restrictions. Other objects, on the other hand, may be of less relative value, more abundant in the collection and stored away, with low probability of being exhibited in the foreseeable future. The likelihood of a particular targeted object being analysed scientifically is determined by several factors, including its value to the museum, the risks posed by the proposed analytical investigation and the benefits of the analysis in terms of the insights that it can potentially provide. Scientific analyses can benefit museum collections in several possible ways. If carried out properly, they can add value to objects by revealing information about their life history that would not otherwise be available through their macroscopic, typological study. In the case of human-​made material artefacts such as ceramics, this includes their origins, technology, use, and discard, which is informative of the activities of the people that made them, used them, and left them behind. As discussed above, scientific analysis can be used to investigate specific aspects of an artefact’s biography that is tied to particular human activities. Museums serve not only as places to store, protect, and display ancient artefacts; their job is also to reveal the meaning hidden within their collections and to use this to tell the story of past cultures through their material remains. In order to do this effectively and to provide new insights that improve the knowledge of their collections, they sometimes need to undertake and/​or permit scientific studies. Archaeological science is by its nature a progressive and innovative discipline, regularly absorbing new approaches from other fields. By applying these to museum collections, it is possible to breathe new life into old objects that might otherwise lay unused and be of less value. Certain scientific approaches also play a vital role in the process of conserving and protecting museum objects, which is not related to their cultural interpretation (Stuart 2007: 1–​2). These include both high resolution imaging and materials characterization, which are used to monitor the degradation of artefacts and to design appropriate strategies for their conservation and repair. Such processes are essential museum work that directly benefit the objects that it houses and as such they need to be permitted for the greater good of the collection. Scientific analyses may also be applied to objects to authenticate them and resolve disputes about their origin and the means by which they arrived in a museum’s collection (e.g. Greenberg 2007). The various benefits of scientific analyses need to be carefully weighed up against a range of possible risks and drawbacks that they can pose. These include potential damage that can be inflicted by handling museum objects and removing them from their protective cases and packaging. They may need to be taken off display or a gallery may need to be temporarily closed while the analysis takes place. Scientific investigations by external specialists are nearly always conducted in the presence of museum curators or collections managers, so are inherently consuming in terms of staff time that could be used elsewhere. Some analyses require the loan and long-​distance transport of objects,

Scientific investigation of museum objects    393 which is both a risk in terms of accidental damage or loss, and can also involve significant paperwork. Perhaps the greatest risk to museum objects posed by scientific investigations is the sampling required for invasive methods of analysis. Cutting, snipping, or drilling a sub-​ sample from a unique, finite, and irreplaceable ancient artefact that has been collected specifically for its cultural importance is in direct conflict with the role of museums as custodians and keepers of these valuable objects. Some methods require the removal of a considerable chunk of an object, for example in the case of thin sections and SEM preparations of ceramics (Fig. 19.1H). This may significantly alter its morphology and render it unsuitable for display. Other techniques are minimally invasive, for example micropalaeontological characterization of ceramics and statues via calcareous nannofossils, which can be carried out by scraping a few milligrams of material from a base or hidden area (Quinn 2017). Even methods that are considered to be non-​invasive, such as pXRF, should ideally be carried out on a spot that has been cleaned and is free of potential surface contaminants, a process that may leave visible traces (Fig. 19.3A). The decision as to whether the advantages of a particular proposed scientific investigation outweigh the risks that it poses and the effort involved in its execution, is normally made via some sort of internal or external application process that results in the granting of permission, or not. Many museums have their own procedures that need to be followed in order to apply for permission to undertake scientific analysis, particularly those requiring the sampling of objects (e.g. Peabody Museum 2016; British Museum n.d.). These require applicants to provide details about the investigation such as its aims and background, the objects that are to be analysed, the specific preparation and analysis techniques used, the personnel involved and the site of analysis, the plans for publication of the results and other forms of dissemination. In some countries, permission is granted by a regional body rather than the museum itself. In others, there may be both regional and national procedures to follow when applying to study museum objects. Scientific staff working within larger museums often have to apply to undertake analysis of the collections within their own institutes via the same procedures as external researchers. In cases where export of material is requested, this may require additional permission, in line with national guidelines and law, if it is permitted at all. Applications are typically assessed by a panel and can involve several stages. It may take months or sometimes years to arrive at a final decision, depending on the project. An unsuccessful proposal may have the opportunity to be refined and resubmitted in order to increase its chances of approval. Some simply do not make it due to the risk to the collections and the resources required, which are deemed to exceed the benefits of the analysis. Some analyses are almost certain to be turned down, for example the invasive sampling of complete or reconstructed exhibited artefacts at a world-​renowned museum. On the other hand, projects wishing to sample abundant fragmented objects within museum stores that have not been accessed in many years and are unlikely to be exhibited in the future, have significantly more chance of being approved, as long as they are well thought out and will benefit the collection in some way. Poorly contextualized objects

394   Patrick Sean Quinn of uncertain provenience, as well as bags of artefacts that have not been individually accessioned, are more likely to be given up for analysis. However, these are generally of less interpretative value to scientific studies. It is sometimes assumed by archaeological scientists that museums’ unspoken mission is to prevent all but the most essential studies. Scientists on the other hand can be seen by museum staff as destructive individuals who are happy to violate pristine artefacts by cutting pieces off them. Neither of these views are of course strictly true, however there is certainly a conflict of interests between the two parties. The application process and subsequent sampling, described below, is meant to reconcile these differences and enable rigorous, beneficial scientific investigations to be carried out in a manner that carefully manages any impact to the collection. Where applications are considered by the museum themselves rather than an external body, it could be argued that the power lies in their hands to decide whether to approve or reject them. However, most museum staff are familiar with scientific work and its value, and may actively advocate it. They should, however, consider whether the aims of the project could be achieved by using traditional non-​scientific methods of study, whether a similar study has already taken place, and whether the persons applying to undertake specialist analysis are suitably experienced. Museum collections are one of the main sources of artefacts for archaeological scientists to analyse and draw data from, so it is important for them to also be familiar with the practices of these institutions. Many museums have online catalogues that can be used to explore their collections and identify objects that might suit a particular investigation, technique, or question.

19.5  Access, sampling, and analysis Scientific investigations of museum artefacts can proceed once they have been approved and the equipment and personnel are in place. The details of what happens next depends on various factors including the nature of the proposed investigation, the type(s) of artefact(s) being analysed and their location, as well as the techniques being used. All analysis will, however, involve access to the artefacts under study, be it the opening of display cases containing exhibited objects for in situ non-​invasive analysis, the retrieval of stored artefacts for sampling, or the export of materials for external sampling and analysis. Despite not requiring physical sampling of the targeted objects, non-​invasive in situ scientific analyses can involve significant planning, particularly if the artefact is on display. Expensive, bulky, and potentially hazardous equipment, for example ladders, scaffolding, or hoists, may need to be brought in the museum, which can require the closure of specific galleries or out of hours access. The deployment of analytical devices that omit ionizing radiation, for example X-​ray imaging equipment and pXRF, will need to be undertaken in a safe way, in accordance with the museum’s local rules. Museum staff, including curators, health and safety personnel, and security guards normally

Scientific investigation of museum objects    395 need to be present for the duration of the analysis, as a witness as well as to advise safe practice for both the analysts and the objects being studied. In cases where the use of invasive techniques has been approved, sampling may take place at the museum or in the laboratory undertaking the analysis. Sub-​samples can be taken at the museum then transported elsewhere for analysis, before returning the parent object(s) to their storage location. In the case of archaeological ceramics, sampling can be done with pliers or a rotating diamond cutting device (Fig. 19.4). Sub-​samples should be placed in labelled bags and their details carefully recorded. Sub-​ sampling usually needs to be monitored by curatorial staff in order to ensure that it is carried out in a manner that impacts as little as possible on the artefact. This includes avoiding specific diagnostic features and artefact labels. While the size and general orientation of sub-​samples may have been specified and approved in advance, it is not uncommon for there to be some further negotiation when the cutting or snipping is actually carried out. Museum objects often have long and complex accession numbers that enable them to be catalogued. These are not always ideal for discussion within reports, theses, and

Figure 19.4: Sub-​sampling objects for invasive scientific analysis in museum storeroom. Small pieces of archaeological pottery are being clipped/​cut with carpenter’s pliers and a portable rotating diamond-​tipped tool and bagged for thin section preparation elsewhere. Volos Museum, Greece.

396   Patrick Sean Quinn publications, so can be replaced by analytical numbers that are unique to the project, for example a six-​character system composed of a three-​letter project and/​or site number and a three-​digit analytical number (e.g. ABC001-​ABC999) (Quinn 2013: 29, 33). A safe record should be kept of the relationship of any such coding system to the original catalogue or context numbers and a concordance table published alongside results. Sub-​sampling may need to be carried out by museum staff rather than the analyst(s), in which case explicit instructions should be provided in order to ensure that damage is minimized and the sub-​sample is suitable for analysis. Contamination is a concern for geochemical and residue analyses, and can render data unusable. This can come from deposits left on the outside of artefacts from their burial, from conservation material, or in the case of organic residue analysis, from the handing of sherds without gloves. In cases where export of complete artefacts has been agreed for the purpose of sampling or non-​invasive analysis off-​site, there is a clear risk of the object being lost or damaged in transport, as well as during their time at the external laboratory. Given the wide range of different analytical techniques applied to the many different types of museum objects, it is not possible here to cover the details of data collection for each and every type of study. Good accounts can be found in Pollard et al. (2007), and with particular reference to museum curation, in Stuart (2007). Nevertheless, some general points are worth discussing. An important consideration for many types of scientific analyses, particularly those that generate quantitative results, such as the abundances of particular elements, or use instrumental methods of identification, for example the presence of specific organic molecules or minerals, is data quality. Good quality data is central to successful and ultimately meaningful archaeological science. It can be ensured by rigorous planning, careful sample preparation, regular machine calibration and monitoring. The latter should be carried out each time in order to assess the behaviour of equipment at that particular moment and the quality of the data it produced. Certified reference materials (CRMs) of known composition that contain the elements or molecules of interest, can be analysed alongside the archaeological unknowns in order to assess identification and quantify measures such as accuracy, precision, and limits of detection. Miniaturized non-​invasive versions of traditional apparatus, such as pXRF, while offering greater ease of use, are generally more limited in terms of the quality of data that they produce (Speakman and Shackley 2013), making monitoring an essential part of any quantitative analysis (Wilke 2017). Most scientific analyses do not end with data collection, but instead use this to detect patterning within or between artefacts in terms of their composition or structure. Processing, statistics, and classification are several important steps in the analysis and interpretation of scientific data collected on museum objects, which need to be carefully thought out. This is usually undertaken on a computer away from the site of analysis. The detected patterning and signals then need to be interpreted archaeologically and used to address the specific aims and questions of the investigation.

Scientific investigation of museum objects    397

19.6  Write up and dissemination Most scientific analyses of museum objects are written up as a report or publication. This is an essential record of the project. The level of detail included varies considerably depending on the nature of the analysis and its purpose. Ad hoc in-​house analyses for object identification may not be recorded in detail, whereas large scale internal or external research projects with wider archaeological goals are likely to be fully documented as an official report or publication to be disseminated widely to other researchers. Such documents should include the aims of the project and the archaeological background to the material, the samples selected (with reference to museum registration/​accession numbers), methods applied and why, the full analytical results including images and quantitative datasets, their interpretation and implications for the project objectives. Internal reports tend to contain less contextual information and implications, and may be rather matter-​of-​fact, whereas journal publications, book chapters, books, and theses should normally use scientific research findings to create a narrative about the past. For quantitative data from projects on museum objects to be utilized in future related studies, it is key to provide details of quality control procedures (see Section 19.5: Access, Sampling, and Analysis) (e.g. Burton et al. 2019: 9). They should also contain information on the whereabouts of the analysed scientific preparations so that these can be accessed by other interested researchers (see Section 19.7: Future of Scientific Preparations and Datasets). It is good practice for external analysts working on museum objects to share their results and data with the institution that owns the material, as this can then be linked to the artefacts, thus enriching their object biographies. Findings may end up being disseminated as part of exhibitions. Museum staff should also be clearly acknowledged in reports, theses, and publications for their role in providing access to and permission to sample objects (e.g. Borgers et al. 2019: 16). It is usually the researcher that retains academic ownership of the study, unless otherwise agreed, or if the research is part of paid contract work. External scientists and museum staff often work as a team on scientific projects, rather than one simply facilitating or being contracted by the other. In such cases, reports and particularly publications should be co-​authored in order to reflect this (e.g. Quinn et al. 2017). Conference presentations, invited talks, posters, websites, and other forms of dissemination should ideally follow the similar principles in terms of transparency and acknowledgement as reports and publication, though are likely to contain less detail in terms of methods and data sharing. The widespread existence of online journals in both archaeology and science means that it is possible to disseminate full datasets, images, and other important material that cannot always be accommodated in articles and chapters (e.g. Quinn and Burton 2015: 294). Another means of making data available for future research is online databases (e.g. Hein and Kilikoglou 2012; Quinn et al. 2011). These can enable users to

398   Patrick Sean Quinn browse and query datasets anywhere in the world, thus extending the impact of research beyond its initial publication.

19.7  Future of scientific preparations It is important to consider what will happen to scientific preparations of museum objects once analysis has been completed (Quinn 2018). Some can be restudied, for example thin sections, XRF pellets, and SEM mounts, and should therefore be safely stored in a location where they can be accessed by future analysts working on related projects. This could be at the museum where the parent artefact resides, or in the collections of the laboratory that undertook the analysis. Strategies for the post-​analysis treatment of scientific preparations, and the data that was collected from them, vary considerably and many museums and laboratories lack clear policy on this matter. This can make samples hard to locate and access; many are even lost entirely. The needs and opinions of archaeological scientists and museum staff on what to do with scientific preparations often differ, leading to dispute over the custody of these samples. Scientists are typically keen to keep the specimens that they prepare and analyse from museum objects, and may assume that they can be added to their personal collections or that of their laboratory. In many cases, museums do not have the equipment and expertise to re-​analyse such samples, whereas external scientists do. The latter benefit from building up reference collections for future comparative research, as well as teaching. However, these can be difficult for other researchers to access, particularly when analysts retire or pass away, or a laboratory closes down. By returning scientific preparations to the appropriate museum to be accessioned alongside their parent object, it is possible to ensure their safekeeping and access. This will also negate the need for additional invasive sampling of the same objects using similar techniques, thus protecting and preserving the unique, irreplaceable artefacts. However, maintaining thin sections and other scientific samples within museum stores generally reduces the likelihood of them being studied in the future, compared to their integration into the reference collections of the laboratories that requested, prepared, and analysed them in the first place. Clearly there is no single solution to the question of where to store scientific preparations of museum objects once their analysis has been completed, however, some recommendations can be made (Quinn 2018). The overall value of a particular analytical sample post analysis is strongly related to the likelihood of it being restudied. This varies depending its format and the apparatus needed to analyse it. Scientific samples with high potential for re-​analysis should preferably reside in a location where the appropriate apparatus exists for their scientific study. In most cases, this will be the laboratory that analysed them. In this case, their whereabouts should be clearly stated in reports and publications resulting from the analysis (e.g. Cootes and Quinn 2017). If museums request the return of such preparations, but do not house the equipment to re-​study them, then loan and export of the samples should be considered in cases where the original analysts or other researchers wish to examine them and collect further data

Scientific investigation of museum objects    399 from them. A plan for the ownership and curation of scientific preparations of museum objects should be an essential part of applications for destructive analysis, or at least feature in the dialogue between analysts and museums when such projects are being negotiated.

19.8  Concluding remarks A vast range of scientific techniques can be used to study museum artefacts of many kinds, as part of internal investigations related to identification, authentication, and conservation, as well as external research projects into their origins, technology, and wider meaning. They have many benefits and can enrich museum collections, adding value to the vast numbers of objects stored and exhibited worldwide. As such, specialist scientific investigations should be encouraged and facilitated rather than being seen as a threat. Museum objects represent valuable sources of information that can be further interpreted by means of science and may become part of wider narratives about the past. Their analysis is also essential in order to push the boundaries of archaeological and conservation science through the testing of new techniques and apparatus. Many traditional methods of inorganic and organic materials science are however invasive and require the removal of a sub-​sample that is transformed into a scientific preparation for analysis. For this reason, such investigations need to be well-​justified, planned, and subject to rigorous application procedures. Portable, non-​ invasive technologies that do not require physical sampling or even handling offer new possibilities for more widespread analysis and the study of highly prized objects. They are not, however, without their limitations and need to be subject to strict quality control procedures to ensure that the data has utility beyond the project it is applied to. Thorough write up and dissemination via reports, publications, and presentations is a vital step in the scientific analysis of museum objects. Online databases hold significant potential in this respect. There are many examples of successful collaboration between museum staff and archaeological scientists, but also instances of disagreement, divergent practice, and mistrust. By understanding each other’s roles, goals, and needs, the two parties can work together to both protect and at the same time unlock the hidden meaning of ancient artefacts. It is hoped that by exploring the scientific analysis of museum objects this chapter provides some much-​needed clarity on the topic.

References Barnard, H. and J.W. Eerkens. 2017. ‘Assessing Vessel Function by Organic Residue Analysis’. In Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis, edited by A. Hunt, pp. 625–​47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berg, I. 2008. ‘Looking Through Pots: Recent Advances in Ceramics X-​radiography’. Journal of Archaeological Science 35: pp. 1177–​88.

400   Patrick Sean Quinn Borgers, B., P.S. Quinn, P. Degryse, M. De Bie, and K. Welkenhuysen. 2019. ‘Roman Pottery Production in Civitas Tungrorum, Central Belgium, during the 1st–​3rd Centuries AD’. Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 62: pp. 267–​84. British Museum (n.d.). Scientific Study of British Museum Collection Material: Form EE1. Available at: http://​www.britis​hmus​eum.org/​abo​ut_​ us/​departments/​conservation_​and_​ science/​facilities_​and_​services/​collection_​ scientific_​study.aspx [Accessed 18 January 2021]. Burton, M., P.S. Quinn, A. Tamberino, and T. Levy. 2019. ‘Ceramic Composition at Chalcolithic Shiqmim, Northern Negev Desert, Israel: Investigating Technology and Provenance Using Thin Section Petrography, Instrumental Geochemistry, and Calcareous Nannofossils’. Levant 50: pp. 237–​57. Cooper, E. 2000. 10,000 Years of Pottery. London: British Museum Press. Cootes, K.V.E. and P.S. Quinn. 2017. ‘Prehistoric Settlement, Mobility and Societal Structure in the Peak District National Park: New Evidence from Ceramic Compositional Analysis’. Archaeometry 60: 678–​94. Copley, M.S., R. Berstan, S.N. Dudd, G. Docherty, A.J. Mukherjee, V. Straker, S. Payne, and R.P. Evershed. 2003. ‘Direct Chemical Evidence for Widespread Dairying in Prehistoric Britain’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 100: pp. 1524–​9. Day, P.M., P.S. Quinn, V. Kilikoglou, and J.A. Rutter. 2011. ‘World of Goods: Transport Jars and Commodity Exchange at the Late Bronze Age Harbor of Kommos, Crete’. Hesperia 80: pp. 511–​58. Faber, E.W., P.M. Day, and V. Kilikoglou. 2009. ‘Fine-​Grained Middle Bronze Age Polychrome Ware from Crete: Combining Petrographic and Microstructural Analysis’. In Interpreting Silent Artefacts: Petrographic Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics, edited by P.S. Quinn, pp. 139–​56. Oxford: Archaeopress. Golitko, M. and L. Dussubieux. 2017. ‘Inductively Coupled Plasma-​Mass Spectrometry (ICP-​ MS) and Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma-​Mass Spectrometry (LA-​ICP-​MS)’. In Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis, edited by A. Hunt, pp. 399–​423. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenberg, M. (Ed). 2007. Cult Statue of a Goddess: Summary of Proceedings from a Workshop Held at the Getty Villa May 9, 2007. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. Hall, M.E. 2017. ‘X-​Ray Fluorescence-​Energy Dispersive (ED-​XRF) and Wavelength Dispersive (WD-​XRF) Spectrometry’. In Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis, edited by A. Hunt, pp. 342–​62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hein, A. and V. Kilikoglou. 2012. ‘ceraDAT: Prototype of a Web-​Based Relational Database for Archaeological Ceramics’. Archaeometry 45: pp. 1–​17. Ionescu, C. and V. Hoeck. 2017. ‘Electron Microprobe Analysis (EPMA)’. In Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis, edited by A. Hunt, pp. 288–​304. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kozatsas, J., K. Kotsakis, D. Sagris, and D. Konstantinos. 2018. ‘Inside out: Assessing Pottery Forming Techniques with Micro-​ CT Scanning. An Example from Middle Neolithic Thessaly’. Journal of Archaeological Science 100: pp. 102–​19. Peabody Museum. 2016. Analytical Sampling Policies and Procedures. Online Document. Peabody Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology at Harvard University. Available at https://​www.peab​ody.harv​ard.edu/​files/​Ana​lyti​cal%20S​ampl​ing%20P​olic​ies%20and%20 Pro​cedu​res%202​018.pdf [Accessed 14 January 2021]. Pollard, M., C. Batt, B. Stern, and M.M. Young. 2007. Analytical Chemistry in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scientific investigation of museum objects    401 Quinn, P.S. 2013. Ceramic Petrography: The Interpretation of Archaeological Pottery & Related Artefacts in Thin Section. Oxford: Archaeopress. Quinn, P.S. 2017. ‘Calcareous Nannofossils as a Tool for the Provenance Interpretation of Archaeological Ceramics, Building Materials and Related Artefacts’. In The Archaeological and Forensic Applications of Microfossils: A Deeper Understanding of Human History, edited by M. Williams, T. Hill, I. Boomer, and I.P. Wilkinson, pp. 159–​75. Bath: Geological Society Publishing House. Quinn, P.S. 2018. ‘Scientific Preparations of Archaeological Ceramics Status, Value and Long Term Future’. Journal of Archaeological Science 91: pp. 43–​51. Quinn. P.S. and A. Benzonelli. 2018. ‘X-​Ray Diffraction and Archaeological Materials Analysis’. In The SAS Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences, edited by S.L. López Varela, pp. 1796–​ 1800. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Quinn, P.S. and M. Burton. 2015. ‘Ceramic Distribution, Migration and Cultural Interaction Among Late Prehistoric (ca. 1300–​200 B.P.) Hunter-​Gatherers in the San Diego Region, Southern California’. Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 5: pp. 285–​95. Quinn, P.S. and P.M. Day. 2007. ‘Ceramic Micropalaeontology: The Analysis of Microfossils in Ancient Ceramics’. Journal of Micropalaeontology 26: pp. 159–​68. Quinn, P.S., L. Stringer, D. Rout, T. Alexander, A. Armstrong, and S. Olmstead. 2011. ‘Petrodatabase: An On-​line Database for Ceramic Petrography’. Journal of Archaeological Science 38: pp. 2491–​6. Quinn, P.S., S. Zhang, X. Yin, and X. Li. 2017. ‘Building the Terracotta Army: Ceramic Craft Technology and Organisation of Production at Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Complex, China’. Antiquity 91: pp. 966–​79. Quinn, P.S., Ying, Y., Xia, Y., Li, X., Ma, S., Zhang, S. and Wilke, D. 2020. Geochemical Evidence for the Manufacture, Logistics and Supply-Chain Management of Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Terracotta Army, China. Archaeometry, 63: 40–52. Speakman, R.J. and M.S. Shackley. 2013. ‘Silo Science and Portable XRF in Archaeology: A Response to Frahm’. Journal of Archaeological Science 40: pp. 1435–​43. Stuart, B.H. 2007. Analytical Techniques in Materials Conservation. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Ther, R. 2016. ‘Identification of Pottery‐Forming Techniques Using Quantitative Analysis of the Orientation of Inclusions and Voids in Thin Sections’. Archaeometry 58: pp. 222–​38. Travé Allepuz, E.T., P.S. Quinn, and M.D. López Pérez. 2016. ‘To the Vicinity and Beyond! Production, Distribution and Trade of Cooking Greywares in Medieval Catalonia, Spain’. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 6: pp. 397–​410. Wilke, D. 2017. ‘Some Updated Quality Concerns on Non-​Destructive Geochemical Analysis with XRF Spectrometry’. Advances in Applied Science Research 8: pp. 90–​4.

Chapter 20

C onservation a nd t h e care of hum a n re ma i ns in muse ums Barbara Wills

20.1  Introduction Museum collections often include human remains but not all are easily recognizable as such. A useful definition comes from the UKs Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums: ‘the bodies, and parts of bodies, of once living people from the species Homo sapiens . . . includes osteological material, soft tissue including organs and skin, embryos and slide preparations of human tissue’ (DCMS 2005: 9). This includes mummified remains (bodies that include soft tissues preserved along with the skeletal remains), bog bodies, skeletal remains, cremated remains, medical collections, and spirit collections. However human remains can also be partial or form part of a larger composite object. Diverse examples include: fish-​hooks, a glass stoppered jar labelled ‘the mother liquor from human brain’, fragmented gallstones, a bone necklace and musical instruments from a Tibetan Chod practitioner, a lock of hair purportedly from the head of King Edward IV, a terracotta Roman cinerary urn and a medieval reliquary. The definition also covers anatomical tables (dissected human tissues preserved and laid out on wood boards for past medical teaching). On a larger scale are ossuaries: assemblages of human bones in sacred buildings often presented decoratively, such as the interior of the Capela dos Ossos in Évora, Portugal where the walls are lined with skulls, bones, and hair. There are areas of possible confusion. Human tissues, such as hair and nails that are shed during life are not human remains. Hence memento mori jewellery where the tissue is taken after the death of the individual fall into the category of human remains, but locks of hair given during life, perhaps to be cherished by transforming them into jewellery, do not.

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     403 Curiosities such as witch-​bottles (ceramic bottles filled often with human hair, iron nails, and urine and used for apotropaic purposes) probably do not constitute human remains (though, theoretically, they might if taken post-​mortem).

20.2  How human remains have survived The impetus to preserve the human body is seen in many past and present cultures (Pearson and Chamberlain 2001; Pearson et al. 2005; Spindler 1996). Examples of intentional mummification of the soft as well as the hard tissues are found on almost every continent; from ancient Egypt to the Canary Islands to the South American Inca, Jivaro, and Chinchorro, from Turkey to the tombs of the Scythians, from medieval Europe to the Anga of Papua New Guinea. Success of preservation varies depending on a number of factors: the efficacy of traditional techniques, the skill and consistency of the original practitioners, and the stability and continuity of the resting place. Treatments, in essence, rely on inactivating the invading bacteria and other decay organisms and subsequently maintaining that environment. This can be achieved through practices such as prolonged exposure to smoke, shrinkage of skin using tannins and heat, the use of preservatives such as natron, or intentional placing in an extreme environment (e.g. desiccated, anaerobic, or frozen). Such environments also preserve bodies where there was no apparent intention to mummify. Peat bogs are an example where low temperatures, low pH, and anaerobic water combine to offer remarkable preservation. The factors that influence soft tissue preservation include the length of time the body was kept before treatment, the ambient environment (heat accelerates decay; absence of moisture can slow or halt degradation) and condition on death: septicaemia or wounds, for example, tend to hasten decomposition. Resins and unguents applied as part of religious observances or deposition rituals can also influence decay one way or the other. The environment of the resting place, whether interior (such as a coffin, vault, tomb, or cave) or exterior (such as tower or mountain top) also affects preservation of both soft and hard tissues. Subsequent grave disturbance by animals, or humans in terms of relocation of the contents or grave robbing, also have consequences for preservation. Hard tissues, such as bones and teeth, often survive well without special intervention, though here too there is variability. They are found intact (to some degree) in a wide variety of burial and other contexts, though soils with a neutral or slightly alkaline pH best preserve them (Gordon and Buistra 1981). Acidic or free-​draining soils such as gravel and sand can lead to very poor preservation. At the site in Sutton Hoo (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK), for example, bone preservation varied from reasonably good (especially skull and long bones) to no bones surviving whatsoever (Hummler and Roe 1996: 46), depending on the location within the site.

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20.3  Study and analysis of human remains The UK supports research on human remains where it sheds light on: human evolution and adaptation; population relationships through genetics and morphology; past demography and health; diet, growth, and activity patterns; disease and causes of death; evolution of disease and of medicine; burial practices, beliefs and attitudes, and the diversity of body-​related cultural practices (DCMS 2005: 8). Present analytical possibilities, many derived from advances in medical diagnosis, already reveal much information and will undoubtedly develop further. Radiocarbon dating can indicate age; stable isotope studies such as carbon and nitrogen give information on diets, and strontium and oxygen point to geographical origins. DNA analysis, increasingly useful as accuracy and sensitivity develops, can address genetic questions and uncover the history of disease. Histological sectioning of skin and other tissues reveals changes due to age, disease, and other factors. Intestinal contents disclose both diet and parasites. In-​depth evolutionary developments can be tracked, such as child development and relationships between populations (Antoine and Ambers 2014: 20). The latest generations of analytical tools—​micro computerized tomography (micro-​CT) scanners, laser, and optical scanners that capture both two-​ dimensional and three-​dimensional data (MacLeod 2014: 141)—​are extending our access to detail. For example, broken skulls can now be digitally reconstructed using CT scanning combined with virtual manual reconstruction (Harvati et al. 2019). Traditional autopsy has been replaced by radiographic techniques and CT scanning can offer alternatives to tissue rehydration (the method by which tissue samples can be prepared and then cross-​sectioned for microscopic examination) (Zimmerman 2014: 119). A related and expanding area of research with broad investigative potential is biocodicology (Fiddyment et al. 2019) which can divulge DNA traces on the surface of an object; each biological interaction over time and each episode of handling may leave detectable evidence. Hence the information offered by other life forms on a surface is now potentially analysable and can offer stratified information. Substances associated with the dead, such as those used in funerary rituals, also cannot be overlooked. Oils and perfumes applied to the newly deceased are increasingly the focus of research. Rhea Brettell and others have sought and found evidence in Roman Britain of inhumation practices that could imply a deliberate attempt at body preservation: an infant inhumation discovered at Wraggs Farm, Arrington, Cambridgeshire, UK, contained among the remains a white resinous substance (Brettell et al. 2014). This was later identified as resin from the genus Pistacia (family Anacardiaceae) using Fourier-​ transform infrared Raman spectroscopy (FTIR) and gas chromatography–​mass spectrometry (GC-​MS). The presence of resin has various interpretations: denoting high social status it could also form part of a ritual ‘package’ related to body preservation.

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     405 Cremated individuals can also yield identifiable traces of organic residue; ritual organic materials may have been applied after gathering the bones from the pyre (Brettell 2016). What has this to do with conservation? The investigative potential, developing as the result of the increasing range and sophistication of analytical apparatus, has significant implications in terms of how human remains are treated and conserved in collections. An obligation is now placed on conservators and others in museums to employ preservation techniques which both minimize interference and facilitate study: safeguarding the remains as well as future analytical potential.

20.4  What makes care of human remains different? Why are human remains singular, the focus of particular concern? We are each human, embedded within our context and culture. We accumulate understanding and information during life and some of this is expressed within the body itself, remaining as evidence within our tissues after death and in any accoutrements of our grave. As a species, we value both life itself and the knowledge and skills that develop with experience. We each take our turn, learn, interact, add to the collective store, and die. A central aim of museums is to comprehend something of the life that others have led before us—​ at different times and in other places—​so that these lives can be reflected back to the audiences and visitors who want to learn and understand. Clearly, we recognize in ourselves the people who have shared our experiences and yet have existed in sometimes astonishingly different and varied contexts and communities. And for many communities the remains are living ancestors, not specimens for study. They may require ongoing ritual attention, nourishment, and sometimes care within their own community rather than within a museum or collection (this volume: Chapters 2, 3, and 12). Data are collected in order to record, explain, celebrate, preserve, and exhibit human cultures. However, amidst all gathered and cherished objects, notes and documents, human remains occupy a special position. Understanding this exceptionality makes the analysis, care, and conservation of human remains a significant, and often an extremely personal, part of the stories that museums tell. Human collections provide a unique insight into the past; and their study and analysis can result in profound knowledge of individuals and their societies. Consequently, human remains are treated differently in collections. According to special protocols established nationally and internationally (see Section 20.5), human remains require respect, care, and dignity whether during handling, storage, or display. An inventory needs to be maintained and a programme of data collection and documentation established to collate and develop information that adds to inventories and databases (Antoine and Taylor 2014). Working with human remains is not like working with objects. Even when well prepared and acquainted with professional, curatorial, cultural, and conservation

406   Barbara Wills protocols, the challenging presence of a dead body is inescapable. Is there a ‘right’ reaction? How should one feel? Does anything remain of the living entity that we can connect with, and if so what sort of relationship is possible? Clearly the dead are different, inanimate, yet culturally they retain or even develop after death some other form of influence; they can indeed be sacred (Balachandran 2009: 201–​2). Intimate, intrusive work can consequently be difficult for the living. Reactions include sorrow, fear, aversion, or unease. This can be especially intense where children or infants are preserved, where soft tissue is remaining, and where much of the dead individual remains intact.

20.5  Guidance documents and protocols for the care of human remains In recent decades special protocols have been put in place, nationally and internationally, regarding human remains. These offer guidance and provide supporting legal frameworks. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) Code of Ethics outlines a series of principles relating to curation, respect, research, and display of human remains (ICOM 2017: 10, 20, 26). This guidance derives from evolving legislation such as the Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act (1972), the Aboriginal Relics Act (1975), the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains (World Archaeological Congress 1989), The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 1990), the Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples (Canada 1992), and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007). Nationally, UK museum policy documents (e.g. Antoine and Ambers 2014) derive from the 2003 report by the UK’s DCMS Working Group on Human Remains and subsequent 2004 consultation on that document. In practice, the UK’s Human Tissue Act 2004, which primarily relates to human remains less than 100 years old, does not generally apply to the activities of museums and other institutions which house older human remains. On the other hand, artworks composed of human soft tissues and bodily fluids that are less than a century old (such as the frozen blood self-​portrait by artist Marc Quinn) may be subject to Section 14 of the Act, in which the Human Tissue Authority requires a specific licensing regime and a required code of practice. Further useful reference bodies include the UK’s Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums, published by the DCMS in 2005. DCMS’ subsequent Working Group on Human Remains examined and questioned the status of human remains within the collections of publicly funded UK Museums and Galleries and explored the need for legislative change. Additional relevant information is made available by The Advisory Panel on the Archaeology of Burials in England (APABE), The British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology (BABAO), and The Human Remains

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     407 Subject Specialist Network. These organizations and their published statements have provided templates for other institutions to build their own protocols, for example Recommendations for the Care of Human Remains in Museums and Collections by the German Museum Association (Deutscher Museumsbund e.V 2013). Further thoughtful discussions have followed, such as the paper A Critical Engagement with the ‘Recommendations for the Care of Humans Remains in Museums and Collections’ (Förster and Fründt 2017). These protocols focus thought and are practical and workable. However, they are not fixed forever, and the inevitability of evolutionary change is acknowledged: ‘Different people have different attitudes to death and human remains, and these change over time . . . Policies made now may need to be reviewed in the future’ (DCMS 2005: 8). The validity of some contributions is sometimes questioned (Atkinson 2020). Consequently, conservators and curators—​indeed any who work with human remains—​are, in their work, aiming at a moving target. Required not only to observe the established legal and ethical guidelines which govern study, display, and restitution protocols, museum professionals must also consider contemporary sensitivities in relevant communities and look attentively to the future. Best practice in museums and institutions, crucially, means reaching out to those who connect with and value collections (Pye 2001: 175). This is especially true of human remains. Stakeholders include Indigenous groups, archaeologists, anthropologists, museums, and other institutions, as well as visitors and various other audiences, religious groups, scientists etc. All is intertwined; ‘. . . it is impossible to separate out issues of repatriation or display from those of conservation, documentation and research in relation to human remains.’ (Hill 2014: vi). Indeed, more recent debates around research reflect a shift in attitudes that cannot be fully addressed by procedures published 15 years ago, as the UK Museums Association’s policy manager Alistair Brown has highlighted (Atkinson 2020). The sensible way ahead is surely through mutually agreed process; to avoid consultation with interested parties is morally questionable (Riggs 2014). Reciprocity and the aim of consensus necessarily set a good foundation for any useful study. Much is to be gained from engagement with living groups and individuals; asking, listening, and subsequently feeding back the results. Richer information tends toward better outcomes (Schorch 2020: 1–​2).

20.5.1 Human remains and past conservation treatments Successful long-​term preservation of human remains depends not only on the original mummification technique, natural or otherwise, but on subsequent events. Human remains, along with numerous objects, were generally received into collections having already suffered significant change. After initial discovery, taking the remains away from the place of deposition undoubtedly imposed huge stresses. Indeed, an original grave site was likely chosen in ancient times for its particular qualities, including stability and respect for place. Over time any buried or interred human remains would

408   Barbara Wills have acclimatized to that environment so the shock of removal (in terms of the changes in temperature, humidity, and exposure to light) would have been great. During and after excavation human remains were not always kept intact or in context with their wrappings or grave goods. This was driven by a number of factors: the specific interests of the excavator (textiles, for example, might have been seen as being of primary value), an overriding methodical approach to data-​gathering (by which soft tissues could be sacrificed to measure the hard), etc. On excavation in the past, stabilization treatments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not always as beneficial as intended. Archaeologists themselves often did the work—​gluing, impregnating, coating—​using largely natural materials such as waxes, shellac, bitumen, animal glues, starches, and gum Arabic (O’Grady and Odegaard 2016: 86–​7). The repair techniques were taken either from what was then commonplace mending (practically adapted through on-​and off-​site experimentation) or using the skills of artist restorers (Gilberg and Vivian 2001: 88–​9). After excavation, perhaps passing through many hands into various public and private collections, human remains (here focusing especially on ancient Egyptian wrapped mummies) were sometimes stripped in a manner that shocks present day sensibilities (Riggs 2014) and understandably so. The remains were unlikely to be stored in ideal environments, often kept in unsuitably damp, hot, or uncontrolled spaces. Coffins may have been stood upright, exposed to light and dust for prolonged periods, subjected to thoughtless handling and (to a conservator’s critical professional eye) suffered from rough or damaging repairs. Having been acquired by a museum, how suitable then was the care? The typical nineteenth-​century approach was, if funds allowed, to build impressive housing for collections, protect from vandalism and theft, and regularly clean. Control of the environment and good handling practices were an aspiration but not always successfully implemented (Norman 2001). The threat of attack by pests was ever-​ present; this led to treatment and re-​treatment using a succession of pesticides. The effect was beneficial in that the organic-​based objects survived, detrimental in terms of leaving a residue of toxicity and contamination (Sculthorpe 2014: 32). As collections care developed and progressed throughout the twentieth century, less obvious but equally important preservation needs (systematized by the definition of the agents of decay) became better understood and so remedial actions could be successfully implemented. Early conservation and restoration interventions, though sometimes problematic, do however have intrinsic value: they can help disclose the collection history. Documenting these treatments is thus helpful (O’Grady and Odegaard 2016: 92). Hard tissues such as bones and teeth were sometimes repaired using traditional (or simply readily available) glues and consolidants. Some methods which showed initial success later presented longer-​term problems (Wills et al. 2014: 57). During the period of the 1950s to 1990s, newer polymers such as soluble nylon, polyvinyl acetate, or acrylic emulsions were in vogue. When applied as a surface treatment, these coatings often led to loss of detail, peeling surfaces, and difficulty in removal. Bones, stuck together without first consolidating fragile edges, would break again. Repeated breakage

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     409 and re-​gluing left a build-​up of alternating layers of detached bone fragments and adhesive (Cook and Ward 2008). Such treatments damaged the bone and could result in inaccurate measurement. Conservators often have the experience of examining an object previously treated, and then passing judgement. It is unfair to criticize; past archaeologists, restorers, conservators, curators, worked within the traditions, materials, techniques, and information available at the time. It is important to recognize that present-​day professionals also work within current perceptions and limitations; the next generation will (hopefully) have wider resources, improved techniques, and greater wisdom. Conservators are perhaps more aware than most that they practise within a narrow window of the full breadth of time. When faced with a complex conservation challenge they can hear an imagined future professional asking the question: why did you do this? It is an incentive to do a thoughtful job in the present. Indeed, in a wider sense the question—​what will future people bless or curse us for?—​has never been more relevant.

20.5.2 How interventive conservation treatments may limit information What do museums aim to carry forward to future generations? Is it the object/​individual itself, or is it the information that is embodied? The answer is ‘ideally both’. Here is a conundrum: some stabilization techniques can obscure information at the present time and might impede future data-​retrieval efforts (Redfern and Bekvalak 2017). Well thought through techniques have kept human mummies intact and displayable over decades (e.g. Johnson and Wills 1988) but have also risked limiting subsequent analyses. Consolidation and adhesive treatments with organic constituents (such as hydroxypropyl cellulose or Paraloid B72 ethyl methacrylate co-​polymer) that penetrate, or even sit on the surface, may contaminate, for example, the carbon dating process making the sample appear younger than it really is. Solvents can cause problems: adhesives used for stabilization are dissolved or carried in solvents, and solvents alone can be used as cleaning agents (for example to destroy mould spores). The consequences can be poor but not readily apparent. Irreversible hydrolytic damage can occur with the use of water; this and other polar solvents affect the hydrogen bonding between the base pair of molecules in a strand of DNA (and other proteins) and thereby weaken the structure (Zimmerman et al. 2008). Even gentle surface cleaning such as brushing with a soft brush can limit information; the biocodicology possibilities of detecting DNA from surface interactions give pause for thought before treatment. Preserved specimens in fluids may also lose their research potential through exposure to solvents: fluids, while preserving the outward appearance of the specimen can cause damage such as cross-​linking, strand breakage, and chemical modification of DNA (Carter 2003: 24).

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20.5.3 Human remains and contemporary conservation One definition of a conservator (indeed of any expert) is: the person who knows what not to do. In terms of care of human remains this is relevant; much can be done but how much should be done? The conservator’s judgement call is particularly crucial here, balancing the technical possibilities against what is ethically justifiable or practically necessary. How far to strive for non-​interventive treatments, so as to avoid the use of added or introduced substances such as solvents and resins? What about exceptionally fragile or active decay? What if the human remains have already been treated in the past or clumsily restored? Conservators are not alone in making decisions: they operate in a supportive dialogue with other relevant professionals. Input and information provided by the responsible curator and other appropriate specialists is crucial. DCMS guidance states ‘Any interventive conservation work should be done in accordance with strict protocols and policies and . . . be carried out or supervised by an accredited conservator, trained and experienced in caring for biological materials and overseen by an osteologist’ or similarly qualified individual (DCMS 2005: 19). Although, in some instances, past conservation intervention did limit the information that is possible to glean from human remains, it is also true that the conservator is often best placed to be the first to discover it (Coddington and Hickey 2013). The work entails intimate proximity, often for extended periods of time. The individual is examined in depth. This unique opportunity for observation gives rise to insights that can then be further developed through analysis and curatorial research, leading to discovery which adds to both conservation and other disciplines. Here the particular skill of the conservator is not as a bioarchaeological or related specialist, but as one who notes anomalies and curiosities, who can catalyse and initiate discovery (Cassman and Odegaard 2004). Knowing the potential for information loss through treatment, how then does the conservator apply practical knowledge and experience to the care of human remains? The conservator’s mandate—​ to extend the museum ‘life’ of the object as far as possible—​impels him/​her to seek, learn, and undertake reliable conservation methods. Conservators come well equipped: their background and ongoing professional development helps in understanding the materials and their decay pathways. Conservation training instils a rational methodology: a series of evaluated safe steps are followed so as to minimize any risk of damage. Hand skills are honed, and the appropriate tool and technique is chosen for a range of stabilization treatments. Having made the case for avoiding interventive treatments, in some circumstances intervention is entirely necessary. The preservation of a newly excavated bog body, for example, is necessary: it would otherwise be liable to distortion, shrinkage, and cracking on drying. Intervention may also be required if the remains are very fragile, to prevent major physical loss, or to bring together parts in order to make sense of the whole. For example, when working with a natural medieval mummy (from rescue excavations in the Fourth Nile Cataract in Sudan), the author found a number of detached pieces

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     411 of desiccated skin which showed clusters of intentional body modifications: dark markings. It was only when these fragments were joined that it was possible to understand which part of the body they belonged to (the upper thigh and hip) and perceive the nature of the grouped patterns. In this case, a minimal amount of conservation adhesive was used to join the fragments; tiny dots applied at regular intervals along the cross-​sectional edge of each fragment using the point of a pin and gently held together until set. Conservation treatments are written up with precision and detail; all added materials, their concentrations and solvents, and their place of application are described so the reader knows what was done and where. Treated areas can then be avoided if necessary for sampling or other purposes. The conservation materials themselves (tested and approved for their long-​term stability) are in theory reversible, so what is applied can later be extracted. However, in practice this is unlikely ever to be completely true: reversibility is at best partial. Also, if the artificial strengthening agent that holds the tissues together has been removed, the result will be a reversion to the original fragile state or worse. Consequently, the best recommendation before interventive treatment is to take targeted samples (with good curatorial advice regarding what and where) so that unaltered human tissue remains available for study. When working on human remains, the question of a possible health hazard arises. There can, for example, be a distinctive odour. Here the Risk Assessment (RA) is a useful protocol through which all hazards can be assessed (Wills 2014: 67). Potential risks such as the presence of fungal spores or the likelihood of contamination with pesticides should be addressed as both are a real danger. Appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) needs to be worn if working with the human remains, together with extraction/​air ventilation in place as necessary. The danger of contagion by pathogens, however, recedes as time passes. There is a negligible risk from anthrax, where the spores can survive over centuries, and smallpox poses a very remote risk. A significant aspect of the RA focuses on a person’s response to working with human remains; his or her reaction is not always an easy factor to anticipate even for those who have had previous similar or related encounters. Nor should it be problematic, it is simply human to react to the presence of the dead. Conservators, like other specialists, operate within a developing discipline, learning from the past and adapting their techniques in response to new information and possibilities. All thoughtful, fruitful approaches should be shared widely: we ‘need to actively develop and disseminate standard conservation procedures to anyone dealing with human remains to preserve their value’ (Berger 2013: 32). Collections care advice applies to human remains as it does to all objects. The fundamentals of preventive care and passive conservation aim to provide the best collection environment through professional knowledge, applied with appropriate support and funding. This translates into all aspects of ‘good housekeeping’. The common degradation factors: physical forces; thieves, vandals; fire; water; pests; pollutants; light; incorrect and/​or cyclical temperature and relative humidity, custodial neglect; and dissociation (Caple 2011) are to

412   Barbara Wills be considered, identified, and minimized as far as possible. As with all collections, a condition survey is crucial to the understanding of each individual or object, enabling prioritization and defining the scope and cost of any conservation project. Good documentation and imaging, though essential, has not always been done: this is an intrinsic part of all aspects of collections care and conservation. The varieties of human remains and their preservation methods require a variety of contexts and environmental conditions to keep them safe (see online supplementary table). What suits bog bodies will not be appropriate for dry human remains, and both these categories differ from fluid-​preserved collections. General environmental advice, however, still applies. Most will be most stable under the lowest light levels possible, and in as narrow a daily variation of temperature and humidity as is reasonably achievable (fluctuations of humidity and high temperatures are catalysts for deterioration processes). At the British Museum, a two-​year Clothworkers’ Foundation Conservation Research Fellowship (Safeguarding a body of evidence: researching and conserving a group of exceptional naturally-​mummified Nilotic human remains) provided the impetus to develop passive, non-​interventive conservation methods. The project allowed the time and focus to develop minimal intervention techniques; successfully supporting and stabilizing natural mummies without using conservation adhesives, resins or consolidants (Wills 2013; Wills et al. 2014; Wills and Antoine 2015). These uncomplicated yet subtle methods, together with other similar passive approaches (Harrison and Smalley 2017; Pye 2001; Rae 1996), are applicable to a wide range of human remains including wrapped and unwrapped mummies, both natural and intentional. The case study below illustrates some of the techniques.

20.6  Natural mummies’ conservation; Gebelein human remains case study A group of Late Predynastic natural mummies in the collections of the British Museum were stabilized using the passive, supportive techniques developed during the Research Fellowship above. Indeed, further refinements arose as different hands and minds sought to solve the conservation challenges. Here the aim of conservation was to prepare the human remains for study, storage, and possible occasional display, again avoiding interventive conservation as far as possible. The focus of stabilization was thus on the use of support materials to create a customized ‘cradle’ to hold all the elements of the body in perfect register. The project arose as part of the ongoing obligation to research and stabilize the collection under the direction of the British Museum’s Curator of Bioarchaeology, Daniel Antoine. It also served as an opportunity to pass on skills to younger colleagues. The human remains had been removed from the site of Gebelein in Egypt under the direction of Wallis Budge in 1896 after a local resident drew Budge’s attention to them.

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     413 Dating to the mid-​fourth millennium BC, they belonged to a period that predated the practice of intentional mummification. Their astonishing physical survival is evidently the result of burial in a desiccating environment which then remained dry and stable over an extended period. One individual (Gebelein man A, British Museum number EA32751) has been on display at the British Museum for more than a century. The remainder reside in a conditioned mummy store in the Department of Egypt and Sudan. Gebelein man was briefly away from public gaze during an episode of conservation in 1987 (Johnson and Wills 1988); a female mummy from the same site (Gebelein woman A, British Museum number EA32752) was conserved and put on display in his place for that time. A survey revealed the condition of the mummies. Three of the six bodies were found to be partially clothed or covered. All lie in a flexed or similar position. Other than the two that had been on display, the group appeared little altered since arrival in the British Museum a century before (Fig. 20.1). They showed repairs typical of the late nineteenth century, including the use of animal glue, wood, plaster of Paris, textiles, string, and copper wire. Some areas of the body (such as the neck and torso of one individual) were padded and/​or wrapped with bundles of linen both ancient and modern, apparently stuck on with animal glue. These repairs, as well as being contaminants, were potentially or—​in the case of copper wire, actually—​physically damaging to original tissues. Analytical information was also difficult to access; for example, collagen analysis of some bone fragments had shown contamination. Although some bodies were generally stable, the condition of each varied, and there was variation of stability within each individual. Soft tissues and wrappings were in

Figure 20.1:  An individual from the site of Gebelein (EA32753) in original tray prior to conservation. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

414   Barbara Wills areas cracked, fragile, and detached, and there was dust. Even the relatively robust hard tissues such as bone were occasionally broken off. Detached pieces and fragments of all sizes lay loose in the trays along with remnants of old padding and packing materials. These problems offered an interesting conservation challenge: not only were we to stabilize and prepare the Gebelein individuals for study but also to map and make sense of the early restoration interventions and undo these if possible. Although no original treatment record existed, it was likely that the repairs had been done soon after excavation. The process of conservation for each individual took place in a separate, private room dedicated to the purpose within the Organic Artefacts Section, Department of Collection Care in the British Museum. Three conservators undertook the work; Verena Kotonski (Fig. 20.2), Sophie Rowe, and the author. There was an advantage in working alongside each other; problems could be discussed and jointly solved. The aim of treatment was to: identify and remove any restoration; clean; relocate in position any detached parts as far as possible, and stabilize without use of adhesives and consolidants. Figure 20.1 illustrates the problems: the tray is small, limbs are broken, and there are extraneous materials including paper bundles of linen and wooden internal supports. A visual aid helped treatment: an image of the mummy in its tray was taken and then printed to scale, laid on the table alongside, and taped in position. Cotton threads over

Figure 20.2:  Colleague Verena Kotonski at the beginning of the conservation process of another Gebelein individual (EA32755): the gridded full-​size photographic image alongside allows detached parts to be temporarily relocated during treatment. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     415 the image provided a location grid. It was covered with Melinex (clear polyester film) so that each fragment could be transferred to its corresponding area of the image as each element was examined (Fig. 20.2). This helped keep track of the original location of all elements. The dust was examined under magnification to understand its constituents, which included finely divided black carbon dirt, textile fragments, particulates such as sandy soil, dried vegetal material (resembling straw), and cotton wool. Dry methods of cleaning the surface were trialled—​various conservation sponges, gentle brushing, and vacuuming—​and the most suitable technique for each particular area of the body was selected. The close examination required before and during cleaning necessitated detailed surface examination; giving further insights into what was especially fragile, what was loose, and what might be wrongly placed or not belong. Samples of all materials were kept for future reference. At an early stage we also planned the final mount and chose the conservation-​grade materials that were to be used in supporting the human remains. The base board had to be light in weight, strong, and of a size both to suit the body and fit a CT-​scanner. Ideally it would have no metal components as these would complicate the scanning process. Although the chosen support board (Cellite™ 220 Aluminium Faced Aluminium Honeycomb Sandwich Panels, 13.70mm thickness) was lightweight and robust, it was made largely of aluminium. So, a detachable upper ‘mattress’ was created which could be easily detached from the Cellite™ board beneath to facilitate the scanning process. This upper structure was made of Plastazote foam (closed cell cross-​linked polyethylene, LD45 density) wrapped with Tyvec® (flashspun high-​density polyethylene non-​woven fabric) used smooth side uppermost. It provided a padded base for the remains and a substrate suitable for pinning into, and thus securing, the tailored supports: i.e. the smaller, subtly contoured and padded props, walls, cushions and tapes that would hold the human remains together (Fig. 20.4). Once the structure of each body was understood and its ideal layout determined, passive supports were made to prop the parts in exactly the right places. Where skin or textiles were loose, they could be secured by wrapping with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) tape to keep positioned. Props, supports, and walls were made of Plastazote, cut to the exact shape of the area it was to make contact with. Where a cut Plastazote edge was too abrasive, it was covered with Relic Wrap™ (polytetrafluoroethylene sheet) for added smoothness. Where extra cushioning was needed, a ‘puff ’ of polyester wadding was placed over the top of the Plastazote strut which was then covered with the Relic Wrap™. The prop, wall or support was then pinned in place using a minimum of two non-​metal pins to keep it stable. A significant advantage of this method is reversibility at any stage: the pins can be removed if access is needed to that area or the support needs to be modified. It is similarly easy to replace it back in position. Loose fragments that could not be replaced in position were stored either in labelled self-​seal plastic bags, crystal boxes, or on specially-​made trays (Fig. 20.3). The group are presently stored in the dedicated human remains store, on shelves with good air flow

Figure 20.3:  A tray made to contain disassociated parts of Gebelein individual (EA32753) using supporting pads to stabilise. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 20.4:  Gebelein individual (EA32753) after stabilizing treatment, with all body parts supported and positioned. As the detached arm may belong to another individual, it was mounted separately. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     417 but protected from dust by clear plastic curtains. The environment is monitored and controlled (Fig. 20.4). Once cleaned, secured, and stabilized, the group was further examined by CT scanning and research is ongoing, providing insight into ancient Egypt’s Late Predynastic period. Re-​analysis using infrared imaging has, for example, revealed the presence of the oldest figurative tattoos in the world (Friedman et al. 2018).

20.7  Conclusion Is it appropriate to express the personal in a chapter of this kind? This subject above any other evokes responses, feelings, reactions (this volume: Chapters 2 and 3). Having worked closely with the dead over four decades, I can list not one, but, over the passage of time, a variety of differing reactions. On first encounters it was initial caution bordering on apprehension accompanied by a sense of challenge—​what was needed to do good work with human remains? Feelings of pity and shared humanity developed over time (felt deeply on discovering a tooth abscess in the skull I was treating while experiencing a painful abscess in the same position at that time). What dominates now? A deep attachment to the human remains I have worked with and no remnant of aversion; this runs alongside a sense of professional progression. Conservators have striven to improve not only conservation techniques but to clarify the thinking behind the treatment; to understand better why we are intervening as well as how. If, by consent, human remains continue to remain in collections, they call for considerate care. They have the greatest potential when conserved well, kept in good conditions and made available for study, learning (Jakob 2007; Antoine and Ambers 2014) and for other respectful purposes. Fundamental is the avoidance, as far as possible, of intervention including active conservation treatments. The resulting depth of knowledge benefits not just the niche specialist but all who take an interest in our origins and our journeys, our ancestors and how they lived. Here, conservation can play an important role.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people for their input and advice, including: Daniel Antoine, Rebecca Whiting, Pia Edqvist, Verena Kotonski, Sophie Rowe, Anna Harrison, Nicholas Burnett, Susannah Pancaldo, and Elifgul Dogan.

418   Barbara Wills

References Antoine, D. and J. Ambers. 2014. ‘The Scientific Analysis of Human Remains from the British Museum Collection Research Potential and Examples from the Nile Valley’. In Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum, edited by A. Fletcher, D. Antoine, and J.D. Hill, pp. 20–​30. London: British Museum Press. Antoine, D. and E. Taylor. 2014. ‘Collection Care: Handling, Soring and Transporting Human Remains’. In Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum, edited by A. Fletcher, D. Antoine and J.D. Hill, pp. 43–​8. London: British Museum Press. Atkinson, R. 2020. ‘New Research into Egyptian Mummies Leads to Calls for Major Ethical Review’. Museums Association January 2020. Available at: https://​www.mus​eums​asso​ciat​ ion.org/​muse​ums-​jour​nal/​analy​sis/​2020/​01/​30012​020-​new-​resea​rch-​into-​egypt​ian-​mum​ mys-​leads-​to-​calls-​for-​major-​ethi​cal-​rev​iew/​ [Accessed 2 October 2020]. Balachandran, S. 2009. ‘Among the Dead and Their Possessions: A Conservator’s Role in the Death, Life and Afterlife of Human Remains and their Associated Objects’. Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 48 (3): pp. 197–​219. Berger, S. 2013. ‘Treating Bones. The Intersection of Archaeology and Conservation’. Honors Thesis in the Department of Anthropology University of Michigan. https://​deepb​lue.lib. umich.edu/​han​dle/​2027.42/​100​180. Brettell, R. 2016. ‘The Fragrant Dead: How to Treat the Departed, Roman Style’. Current Archaeology 312: pp. 34–​9. Brettell, R.C., B. Stern, N. Reifarth, and C. Heron. 2014. ‘The ‘Semblance of Immortality’? Resinous Materials and Mortuary Rites in Roman Britain’. Archaeometry 56 (3): pp. 444–​59. Caple, C. 2011. Preventive Conservation: Caring for Artefacts and Collections. London and New York: Routledge. Carter, J. 2003. The Effects of Preservation and Conservation Treatments on the DNA of Museum Invertebrate Fluid Preserved Collections. MPhil thesis. University of Wales. Available at: https://​amgued​dfa.cymru/​media/​16607/​MPhil-​DNA-​prese​rvat​ion.pdf [Accessed 3 February 2021]. Cassman, V. and N. Odegaard. 2004. ‘Human Remains and the Conservator’s Role’. Studies in Conservation 49: pp. 271–​82. Coddington, J. and J. Hickey. 2013. ‘MoMA’s Jackson Pollock Conservation Project: Insight into the Artist’s Process’. Inside Out Blog. Available at: https://​www.moma.org/​expl​ore/​ins​ide_​ out/​2013/​04/​17/​momas-​jack​son-​poll​ock-​conse​r vat​ion-​proj​ect-​insi​ght-​into-​the-​arti​sts-​ proc​ess/​ [Accessed 10 November 2020]. Cook, J. and C. Ward. 2008. ‘Conservation Assessment of the Neanderthal Human Remains from Krapina, Croatia, and its Implications for the Debate of Display and Loan of Human Fossils’. British Museum Technical Research Bulletin 2: pp. 39–​44. DCMS. 2005. Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums. London: Department for Culture, Media, and Sport. Deutscher Museumsbund. 2013. Recommendations for the Care of Human Remains in Museums and Collections. Editor of the German text: Dorothea Deterts, editor of the English translation: Anne Wesche. Deutscher Museumsbund e.V. (German Museums Association) http://​ www.conc​erne​dhis​tori​ans.org/​conten​t_​fi​les/​file/​TO/​296.pdf. Fiddyment, S., M. Teasdale, J. Vnouček, E. Lévêque, A. Binois, and M.J. Collins. 2019. ‘So You Want to do Biocodicology? A Field Guide to the Biological Analysis of Parchment’. Heritage Science 7 (1): article 35: pp. 1–​10. https://​doi.org/​10.1186/​s40​494-​019-​0278-​6.

Conservation and the care of human remains in museums     419 Förster, L. and S. Fründt. 2017. Human Remains in Museums and Collections: A Critical Engagement with the ‘Recommendations for the Care of Humans Remains in Museums and Collections’. Berlin: German Museums Association. Friedman, R., D. Antoine, S. Talamo, P.J. Reimer, J.H. Taylor, B. Wills, and M.A. Mannino. 2018. ‘Natural Mummies from Predynastic Egypt Reveal the World’s Earliest Figural Tattoos’. Journal of Archaeological Science 92: pp. 116–​25. Gilberg, M. and D. Vivian 2001. ‘The Rise of Conservation Science in Archaeology (1830–​1930)’. In Past Practice. Future Prospects, edited by A. Oddy and S. Smith, pp. 87–​93. London: British Museum. Gordon, C.C. and J. Buikstra. 1981. ‘Soil pH, Bone Preservation, and Sampling Bias at Mortuary Sites.’ American Antiquity 46 (6): pp. 566–​7 1. Harrison, A. and R. Smalley. 2017. ‘The Care, Conservation and Study of Archaeological Textiles from Jordan and Sudan, with Particular Reference to the Fourth Nile Cataract Mummies’. In Excavating, Analysing, Reconstructing: Textiles of the 1st Millennium AD from Egypt and Neighbouring Countries: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Research Group ‘Textiles From the Nile Valley Antwerp, 27–​29 November 2015, pp. 120–​41. Tielt: Belgium. Harvati, K., C. Röding, A.M. Bosman, F.A. Karakostis, S. Grün, T. Karkanas, M. Koutoulidis, and K. Gorgoulis. 2019. ‘Apidima Cave Fossils Provide Earliest Evidence of Homo Sapiens in Eurasia’. Nature 571: pp. 500–​504. Hill, J.D. 2014. ‘Preface’. In Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum, edited by A. Fletcher, D. Antoine, and J.D. Hill, pp. v–​vi. London: British Museum Press. Hummler, M. and A. Roe. 1996. Sutton Hoo Burials: Reconstructing the Sequence of Events. In Interpreting Stratigraphy, edited by S. Roskams, pp. 39–​53. Print Unit: University of York. ICOM. 2017. ‘International Council of Museums Code of Ethics for Museums’. https://​icom. mus​eum/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2018/​07/​ICOM-​code-​En-​web.pdf [Accessed 29 May 2020]. Jakob, T. 2007. ‘The Value and Future Potential of Human Skeletal Remains Excavated at the Fourth Cataract’. Sudan and Nubia 11: pp. 43–​7. Johnson, C. and B. Wills. 1988 ‘The Conservation of Two Pre-​dynastic Egyptian Bodies’. In Conservation of Ancient Egyptian Materials, edited by S.C. Watkins and C.E. Brown, pp. 79–​ 84. London: United Kingdom Institute for Conservation (UKIC), Archaeology Section. MacLeod, N. 2014. ‘Imaging and Analysis of Skeletal Morphology: New Tools and Techniques’. In Palaeopathology in Egypt and Nubia, edited by R. Metcalf, J. Cockitt, and R. David, pp. 141–​55. London: Archaeopress. Norman, M. 2001. ‘“It Is Surprising That Things Can Be Preserved as Well as They Are”. Conservation and the Ashmolean Since Before 1683.’ In Past Practice. Future Prospects, edited by A. Oddy and S. Smith, pp. 159–​66. London: British Museum Occasional Paper 145. O’Grady, C. and N. Odegaard. 2016. ‘The Conservation Practices for Ceramics of Sir Flinders Petrie and Others Between 1880–​1930’. In Recent Advances in Glass and Ceramics Conservation, edited by H. Roemich and L. Fair, pp. 85–​95. Inowrocław: POZKAL Spólka for ICOM Committee for Conservation. Pearson, M.P. and A. Chamberlain. 2001. Earthly Remains: The History and Science of Preserved Human Bodies. London: The British Museum Press. Pearson, M.P., A. Chamberlain, O. Craig, P. Marshall, J. Mulville, H. Smith, C. Chenery, M. Collins, G. Cook, G. Craig, J. Evans, J. Hiller, J. Montgomery, J.L. Schwenninger, G. Taylor, and T. Wess. 2005. ‘Evidence for Mummification in Bronze Age Britain. Antiquity 79 (305): pp. 529–​46.

420   Barbara Wills Pye, E. 2001. ‘Caring for Human Remains. A Developing Concern’. In Past Practice -​Future Prospects, edited by A. Oddy and S. Smith, pp. 171–​6. London: British Museum Occasional Paper 145. Rae, A. 1996. ‘Dry Human and Animal Remains. Their Treatment at the British Museum’. In Human Mummies: A Global Survey of Their Status and the Techniques of Conservation, Vol. 3: The Man in the Ice, edited by K. Spindler, H. Wilfing, E. Rastbichler-​Zissering, D. ZurNedden, and N. Nothfurfter, pp. 33–​8. New York: Springler-​Verlag. Redfern, R. and J. Bekvalac. 2017. ‘Collection Care and Management of Human Remains: Forensic Analysis of the Dead and the Depositional Environment’. In Taphonomy of Human Remains: Forensic Analysis of the Dead and the Depositional Environment, pp. 369–​84. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell. Riggs, C. 2014. Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. London: Bloomsbury. Schorch, P. 2020. ‘Sensitive Heritage: Ethnographic Museums, Provenance Research, and the Potentialities of Restitutions’. Museum and Society 18 (1): pp. 1–​5. Sculthorpe, G. 2014 ‘Caring for, Conserving and Storing Human Remains’. In Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum, edited by A. Fletcher, D. Antoine, and J.D. Hill, pp. 31–​3. London: British Museum Press. Spindler, K., H. Wilfing, E. Rastbichler-​Zissernig, D. ZurNedden, and H. Nothdurfter. 1996. Human Mummies: A Global Survey of Their Status and the Techniques of Conservation. New York: Springer-​Verlag. Wills, B. 2013. ‘Leather and the Medieval Christian People of the Fourth Cataract Region of the Nile: Two Case Studies’. In Postprints of the 10th Interim Meeting of the ICOM-​CC Leather and Related Materials Working Group, Offenbach, Germany 2012, edited by C. Bonnot-​Diconne, C. Dignard, and J. Göpfrich, pp. 150–​ 6. Offenbach: DLM-​ Deutsches Ledermuseum/​ Schuhmuseum. Wills, B. 2014. ‘Wrapping the Wrapped: The Development of Minimal Conservation of Ancient Human Wrapped Mummies from the Region of the Nile’. In Wrapping and Unwrapping Material Culture. Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives, edited by S. Harris and L. Douny, pp. 157–​67. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Wills, B. and D. Antoine. 2015. ‘Developing a Passive Approach to the Conservation of Naturally Mummified Human Remains from the Fourth Cataract Region of the Nile Valley’. British Museum Technical Research Bulletin 9: pp. 49–​56. Wills, B., C. Ward, and V. Sáiz Gómez. 2014. ‘Conservation of Human Remains in Archaeological Contexts’. In Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum, edited by A. Fletcher, D. Antoine, and J.D. Hill, pp. 49–​75. London: British Museum Press. Zimmermann, M.R. 2014. ‘Studying Mummies: Giving Life to a Dry Subject’. In Palaeopathology in Egypt and Nubia: A Century in Review, edited by R. Metcalfe, J. Cockitt, and R. David, pp. 119–​27. Oxford: Archaeopress. Zimmermann, J., M. Hajibabaei, and D.C. Blackburn. 2008. ‘DNA Damage in Preserved Specimens and Tissue Samples: A Molecular Assessment’. Frontiers in Zoology 5: article 18: pp. 1–​13. https://​doi.org/​10.1186/​1742-​9994-​5-​18.

Pa rt F

E X H I B I T IONA RY C U LT U R E S

Chapter 21

M u seum s a nd archaeol o g i c a l exhibit i ons History, institution, and reality in China Siyu Wang and Kan Hang

21.1  Introduction In China, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage serves as the supreme organization in managing museum-​related affairs, whose routine operation concerns museums and archaeological resources. Art galleries and science museums are controlled separately by two other administrative authorities, the Ministry of Culture and the China Association for Science and Technology. From the perspective of museum or exhibition types, however, it has been archaeological museums and exhibitions that have been the most prominent for quite some time. There is a close relationship between archaeological resources and museums, yet Chinese researchers have rarely investigated the historical and institutional causes behind this. This chapter addresses these issues. Chinese archaeological resources can be subdivided into two parts. Chinese scholars usually call these ‘unearthed cultural relics’ and ‘archaeological sites’, which are separately categorized into ‘movable cultural relics’ and ‘immovable cultural relics’ according to the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics. This explains why museums in China adopt dissimilar regulations and practical approaches towards the collection and exhibition of these two categories. This chapter explores the construction of archaeological displays by taking into consideration the differences between ‘unearthed cultural relics’ and ‘archaeological sites’.

424    Siyu Wang and Kan Hang

21.2 Institutional background: 1949–​2000 In order to understand archaeological exhibitions in Chinse museums, it is first necessary to decipher how museums gain access to archaeological resources, because it forms the basis for museums’ subsequent actions. Although specifically stipulated in the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics, in which authorized museums are the rightful collectors of cultural relics and that authorized archaeological excavation is the legitimate method of obtaining cultural relics, effective and consistent coordination between museums and archaeological institutions is often lacking. In reality, in China’s existing cultural heritage system, the divide between different entities is more pronounced than ever. After the founding of the New China in 1949, the management of archaeological resources was rapidly incorporated into national macro-​management. As early as 1950, the Government Administration Council of the Central People’s Government enacted the Interim Procedures for the Investigation and Excavation of Ancient Cultural Sites, regarding the management of movable cultural relics, which demanded that: . . . relevant local educational and cultural departments and public security bureaus should protect the existing or fortuitously discovered architectural structures, cultural relics and books of revolutionary, historical and artistic values . . . the unearthed movable cultural relics should be relocated to safe places and kept properly by the local People’s Government. (Article 3)

As further explained in Article 15, ‘these heritages are owned by the country; the Ministry of Culture of the Central People’s Government and the local People’s Government of the greater administrative area or educational and cultural departments of the military and political committees will negotiate a solution’. They will be preserved by central or regional museums. Under special circumstances, they will be first handed to the excavation groups for research; but after research, they will be on display for public visit and study (Article 15). The articles validated national museums’ collection and exhibition of unearthed cultural relics and they outlined when research institutions should transfer cultural relics to such museums. The Interim Procedures required ‘the excavation units to complete excavation reports within one year of the completion of excavation’ (Article 15). Since the 1960s, a series of laws and regulations further consolidated the aforesaid rule regarding the transfer of cultural relics. Opinions of the Ministry of Culture and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage on Museums and Cultural Relics (Draft), published in 1962, specified ‘timely delivery of cultural relics to museums for preservation after the completion of reports’ (Opinion 8) and advised ‘concentrated preservation of precious but vulnerable cultural relics at provincial museums or heritage institutions

Museums and archaeological exhibitions    425 for avoidance of damage. In the case of local exhibitions, substitute the authentic relics with replicas’ (Opinion 9). Comparably, the Interim Procedures for the Management of Ancient Sites and Graves Research and Excavation issued in 1964 prescribed: . . . after the completion of their excavation reports, all excavation units should deliver the unearthed cultural relics (including intact artefacts and fragments that can be pieced together) and specimens (referring to fragments of research value) to the cultural relics management department (or its assigned units) of the province, autonomous region or municipality for preservation . . . The parts of the samples needed by the excavation institutions for research or teaching reasons can be distributed by the cultural administrations of the province, autonomous region or municipality; if the excavation institutions need parts of the samples, they can negotiate with the cultural administrations of the province, autonomous region or municipality; in case of extremely important cultural relics or differentiated opinions, the Ministry of Culture should be informed and make the final decision. (Article 15)

The above statements reveal a divide among archaeological and cultural relics research institutions, local government, cultural relic management departments, and museums at all levels as indicated by expressions such as ‘differentiated opinions’ or ‘negotiate’. The continuance of this divide partly engendered the establishment of museums by archaeological research institutions in recent years. The aforesaid rules mainly applied to unearthed cultural relics; as for archaeological sites, which are deemed unmovable cultural relics, most of the pre-​2000 regulations have seldom included specific provision on their exhibition, but instead put emphasis on their preservation. Many archaeological sites were mentioned in The Administrative Measures for the Protection of Local Cultural Heritages and Historical Sites passed in 1951. The 1961 Interim Regulation for the Management and Protection of Cultural Relics officially identified the legal meaning of ‘cultural relics’, and ‘heritage sites’ was officially made one type of ‘cultural relic’. Moreover, the Interim Regulation implemented a so-​ called ‘Sites to be Protected’ system featuring a county (city)-​province (autonomous region or municipality)-​nation echelon, which proclaimed the start of locality-​based cultural relic management. In other words, these are regarded as local resources, where the archaeological sites are managed by local governments and cultural relics management departments at all levels. As a result, the respective roles and responsibilities of the commanding State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the local governments become confused and their boundaries blurred. The State Administration of Cultural Heritage formulated rules to guide and regulate works related to cultural heritage while local government at all levels took charge of specific works. Disagreements between the two parties led to central–​local divergence, because under the administrative system of China, neither party is affiliated with the other. After 2000, this institutional background entailed the need to build a plethora of site parks and site museums under the ‘Great Site’ policies.

426    Siyu Wang and Kan Hang From the mid-​1960s, China experienced long political turmoil and only gradually regained order in the 1980s. In the decade-​long chaos, the development of museums and archaeological works almost came to a full stop. The passing and implementation of the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics (First Edition) in 1982 had a significant influence on China’s museums and archaeological works, which officially decreed rules concerning the above-​mentioned problems. This included rules for transferring unearthed cultural relics to museums, for the protection of heritage sites, and for specific management works. In the 1990s, on top of further consolidation of the legislative achievements, the highlight was the passing of the Administrative Measures on the Transferring of Archaeological Excavations in 1998. The Administrative Measures made more detailed rules for the distribution of archaeological resources among museums at different levels and among archaeological research institutions and museums. For example, according to the Administrative Measures, ‘when transferring archaeological excavations, museums and archaeological research institutions or teaching institutions at province, autonomous region or municipality level or above should be considered first while taking into account the needs of local county or city museums’ (Article 12); ‘the excavation institutions should provide a proposal of transfer within one year of the completion of archaeological excavation report’(Article 5), and ‘after the transfer of the archaeological excavations, the collecting unit should guarantee the later use by the original excavation institutions for research or teaching reasons’ (Article 5).

21.3  Museum construction and the exhibition of cultural relics in China Starting from 1949, the New China first took over, reorganized, and transformed the 21 museums built by previous governments and defined them as ‘national, popular and scientific social educational institutions’. In view of China’s then political system, the guidance of central government played a decisive role in shaping the nature of museums and other public cultural institutions. In 1958, President Mao Zedong inspected Anhui Provincial Museum and suggested ‘major cities in every province should have a museum like this one’. In September of the same year, the construction of the National Museum of Chinese History, National Museum of Chinese Revolution, and the Military Museum of Chinese People’s Revolution commenced in Beijing. These three museums are usually referred to as the ‘three major museums’ in China, whose exhibition model has become the template for provincial museums. Data shows, in response to Mao’s appeal and the ‘three major museums’, 214 diversified museums were inaugurated after 1965 (Shan 2009).

Museums and archaeological exhibitions    427 The construction of these museums coincided with the developments in the transferring of archaeological cultural relics, which was discussed above. Today, getting an overview of the types of these museums can be very difficult, but in terms of scale, so-​called Chorography museums were undoubtedly mainstream in China. In the 1950s, the trend of learning from the Soviet Union climaxed, leading to the proliferation of Chorography museums. An article published in 1957 advocated that ‘every region should construct a Chorography museum’, reflecting local historical, agricultural, natural, and humanistic features, and emphasized that it should be closely related to the redoubled efforts on ‘the research of local cultural relics’ (Yu 1957: 70). The lion’s share of ‘local cultural relics’ are in fact unearthed cultural relics. In addition, it is reasonable to assume that most of the Chorography museums built in the 1950s were large-​scale. Yu (1957) argued that Chorography museums ‘are only applicable to border regions or regions at provincial level or above’ (Yu 1957: 70); under China’s province-​city-​county-​townships administrative system, even ‘cities’ were unqualified for building Chorography museums. This echoes with the legislative requirement of transferring the archaeological cultural relics in quantity to a higher administrative level. Huijun Zhao (2017) made a general review of the Chorography museums of the 1950s in China and used Shandong Provincial Museum as an example. She observed that during the preparatory phase, ‘to enable the transformation to a Chorography museum, the museum will admit 30,000 pieces of historical relics exhibited at the Shandong Cultural Relic Management Committee’ (Zhao 2017: 74). It is further worth noting that the article stressed the significance of building Chorography museums and its locality, differentiating them from national museums. However, research by Zhao (2017) found that when Shandong Provincial museum was built in 1956, Soviet experts and peer museums criticized it for ‘failing to combine national history with local history’ and ‘disjointing from national history’, and stated that ‘people need to be educated with local as well as national knowledge’. The statements implied that when conceiving of exhibitions for unearthed cultural relics, Chorography museums needed to uphold the ideology of a highly unified nation-​state, reflecting the local character in a holistic way and equally the unbreakable bond between the local regions and the nation. Since 1950—​politically, economically, and culturally—​China’s Central Government has imposed an unprecedented influence on all local regions. Thus, we can deduce that while Chorography museums seemingly stress local characters, central guidance is always indispensable. To best balance central guidance and local interests, one solution is to provide best practice guidance for local regions to follow. Among the ‘three major museums’, the History of China Exhibition at the National Museum of Chinese History serves as an example. The preparation for the History of China Exhibition started in 1958 following the key concepts of a linear and continuous sequence and a Marxist historiography complying with the ‘primitive society-​slave society-​feudal society’ development stages. In addition, it adopted a curatorial approach featuring ‘contributions from all sides’. Ruide Chen (2011: 145) recalled, ‘the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China called on national support for the exhibitions and met with

428    Siyu Wang and Kan Hang positive response from cultural relic and archaeological institutions in the country. They contributed cultural relics in collection as well as on display prioritizing the needs of national museums’. This exhibition and curatorial model proved effective and local museums followed suit. When exhibiting unearthed cultural relics and telling local histories, local Chorography museums also followed the approximately same model characterized by a distinct uninterrupted sequence and a subtle social development stage theory. This historical view was unshakable for China’s cultural heritage system back then. Chunyu Huang (2015) quoted speeches made in 1958 by Wang Zhiqiu, the then Deputy Director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, who elucidated the primary purpose of works related to cultural relics: ‘to review and research the cultural relics by adopting a Marxist-​Leninist perspective, position and approach’ (Huang 2015: 19). That is why this chapter emphasizes the mainstream status of Chorography museums and the highly centralized resource model they adopted. This historical trajectory had a lasting impact on the status quo of China’s museums. Although historical and archaeological exhibitions in China today lay less stress on stages of social development, the style has long been formed and the ownership of unearthed cultural relics has settled down. Even after the reform and opening up of China in 1980s, subversive restructuring of the museum has yet to happen. Since the 1980s, central authorities have delegated more autonomy and flexibility to local museums. Today, few provincial museums label themselves as Chorography museums, which essentially are their predecessors. Since all provincial museums are the beneficiary of this historical trajectory, they lack the impetus to challenge it. Even central authorities occasionally face challenges from provincial museums, and at a more grass-​ roots level, city, county, or township museums have always had very limited autonomy under provincial governance. Moreover, at the grass-​roots level, museums and other public cultural institutions play a more negligible role in the local political landscape. And while being heavily dependent on the government’s financial and policy support, museums in China have difficulty in reversing the historical trajectory with a bottom-​ up strategy. During this process, the signature of museums in China at all levels is the permanent exhibitions that tell general history, while their flexibility is manifested through multifarious temporary exhibitions. Since the 1990s, in particular, along with the prosperity of the Chinese cultural industry, temporary exhibitions have become increasingly important for museums. Being a major expenditure of local public finance, the frequency and quality of temporary exhibitions are directly incorporated into official evaluation systems. Among these temporary exhibitions, by virtue of the mission and copious collections of major museums, history-​themed special exhibitions showcasing unearthed cultural relics have become central linchpins. However, the western-​style curator system has not been implemented in state-​owned museums in China. The core departments of Chinese museums, including Collections, Exhibition, and Education Departments, often take independent actions without a designated academic curator to coordinate the works; while in the West, the integration of research, design, and education planning associated with an exhibition can take three to five years or longer. In

Museums and archaeological exhibitions    429 contrast, reshuffling of systems in China is too frequent, which sometimes requires museums to plan ten or more temporary exhibitions in a year. As a result, lacking closer deliberation, the temporary exhibitions at major museums can only attract audiences by displaying fine and rare relics. In terms of style, many history-​themed special exhibitions have stirred controversy in the museum industry for merely showing off artefacts without context. Behind the unearthed archaeological and cultural relics, the archaeological background, historical narrative, and historical perspective are all obscured. To a degree, with the flourishing of temporary exhibitions, the contest for unearthed cultural relics between museums, or between museums and archaeological research institutions, has been diminished; however, contention among Chinese scholars has never stopped. In the 1980s, the famous Chinese archaeologist Su Bingqi publicly stated that archaeologists should not hastily hand over cultural relics to museums, because the latter have different criteria of judgment and after the handover, archaeologists can face great difficulties in reclaiming the material (Su 1984). After 2000, a new generation of archaeologists voiced concern, stating that while considerable quantities of materials had been accumulated, there had been a failure to produce archaeological reports for the public in a timely manner, leading to a waste of resources (Zhang 2001; Zhe 2001). The argument reflected the fact that some archaeological research institutions still took possession of massive cultural relics despite the Administrative Measures on the Transferring of Archaeological Excavations having been issued in 1998. In recent years, this phenomenon has persisted, setting in motion the independent research institutions’ resolve to establish their own public museums, or the oft-​mentioned archaeological museums, instead of quickening the step of delivering unearthed cultural relics to the major museums. The Institute of Archaeology CASS and some local institutes of archaeology with rich cultural relic resources in Henan and Shaanxi provinces have set the precedent. And the Archaeological Museum of China, led by the Institute of Archaeology CASS, was scheduled to open in 2020. The discipline of archaeology in China, since its introduction, has long been officially identified as a secondary discipline under historiography with a research paradigm characterized by a historiographical tradition; nominally, the emergence of archaeological museums lay stress on the significance and popularization of archaeology, but most of them still wave the flag of history education and promotion of ancient civilization. Therefore, it is still uncertain how and to what degree these archaeological museums can break away from the limitations of history-​themed special exhibitions, but judging from the background of their construction, a key incentive is to eliminate conflicts surrounding the ownership of unearthed cultural relics.

21.4  Exhibiting sites: From academic materials to public resources These discussions mainly focus on the exhibition of unearthed cultural relics. In contrast, exhibiting archaeological sites faces greater challenges in feasibility, differs from

430    Siyu Wang and Kan Hang traditional museum approaches, and underscores the philosophy of publicness. As previously mentioned, policies made before 2000 were mainly concerned with the preservation of archaeological sites and rarely brought up ways of exhibiting them. In practice, however, an array of archaeological site museums has been established that puts presentation first. Banpo Museum, opened in 1958 in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, is the forerunner, and was underpinned by strong political support. Instructed by General Chen Yi, the then Vice Premier, the preservation and exhibition of the site was to provide convincing proof of the Marxist theory of social development stages and to demonstrate the independent origin of Chinese civilization (Wang 2019). To this end, the museum kept the ash pits, the residential sites, and other ruins that were revealed through excavation and showed them to the public, setting a precedent in China. When the political support from the central government waned in the 1980s, the building and opening of site museums (see this volume: Chapter 9) was interlocked with the most important archaeological finds, and local regions gradually gained the upper hand. Playing a dominant role in the management of these site museums, local governments developed site tourism to boost their finances. The model of the Terracotta Warriors Museum (Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum) was widely emulated during that period. Officially opened in 1979 after its completion, the museum has attracted numerous visitors. The number of annual visitors stabilized at above a million after 1980, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s the number reached the 2 million threshold, and ultimately remained at around 1.5 million visitors (Terracotta Warriors Museum 2009). It has become an iconic superstar among all tourist destinations and has substantially boosted the economy. However, support only from local government is far from enough, especially for long-​term archaeological excavations still in progress that are directly dominated by the archaeological research institutions. Therefore, the stance of archaeologists is a major contributory factor in turning a site into a museum-​like public-​oriented resource. At this point, the above-​mentioned allocation of unearthed cultural relics once again becomes the reason that archaeologists shift their opinions and priorities. Siyu Wang (2019) took the Sanxingdui Museum in Sichuan Province as an example to explore the tensions between provincial, municipal, and more grass-​roots museums over the ownership of unearthed cultural relics found in a major archaeological discovery in the mid-​ 1980s. Against the institutional background described earlier, museums at a higher level were more likely to have those unearthed cultural relics; but in that case, the researchers would be separated from the research materials. Therefore, archaeologists sought to keep unearthed cultural relics near to themselves. Consequently, one of the reasonable solutions was to build a local site-​based museum. As noted by Siyu Wang (2019), though initially disinclined to plan the exhibition of the sites, archaeologists at this stage in fact became ardent supporters of local site museums. From 1980, the number of site museums in China increased to over 20 within two decades; however, the introduction of ‘great site policies’ after 2000 outweighed other aspects in the popularization of archaeological site museums. It is generally considered

Museums and archaeological exhibitions    431 that the first of the great site policies was the Measures for the Administration of Special Funds for Great Sites Protection jointly issued by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and Ministry of Finance in 2005. According to the Measures, a ‘great site’ is an archaeological site with an ‘enormous scale’, ‘great significance’, and ‘far-​reaching influence’, and the protection and presentation of the archaeological sites should be supported by a dedicated project of central government. Furthermore, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage released the ‘Overall Planning for the Protection of Great Site during the 11th Five-​Year Plan’ in 2006 and designated 100 archaeological sites on the official list. The number increased to 150 in 2013 in the ‘12th Five-​year Plan’. Crucially, exhibitions have been stressed to a much greater extent in ‘great site’ policies than in China’s previous official heritage polices. This was reflected in the Measures for the Administration of Special Funds for Great Sites Protection formulated in 2005 and the Overall Planning for the Protection of Great Sites during the 11th Five-​Year Plan formulated in 2006, which raised the principle of ‘exhibition first’ and the requirement of ‘building 10 to 15 high-​quality high-​standard demonstration site parks for great sites protection and exhibition and a series of site museum’. The idea of an ‘archaeological site park’ had been recognized as an important innovation in exhibiting archaeological sites. Shan Jixiang, then Director of State Administration of Cultural Heritage, wrote an article to expressly describe the concept of archaeological site parks. According to him, different from traditional practices of isolating sites from local communities, archaeological site parks draw on concepts of parks, especially those of American national parks, with an eye to holistically preserving and exhibiting the sites, as well as their surroundings, and taking on a more publicly accessible approach (Shan 2010). At policy level, following the 2006 Overall Planning, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage implemented the Administrative Measures on the National Archaeological Site Park (Trial) in 2009 and announced the first group of national archaeological site parks the following year. Daming Palace Site Park officially opened to the public in 2008 to great praise from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. Data shows that from 2005 to 2012 nearly RMB 180 million of the national special fund went to the Daming Palace Site Park and the local government made up the shortfall, which added up to a total investment of RMB 12 billion (Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage 2016). More importantly, with the guidance of central government and the enthusiastic response from local regions, archaeological site parks became extremely fashionable around 2010. Their advance, however, encountered obstacles very quickly. Firstly, the sustainable operation of these archaeological site parks has long been neglected on account of the enormous investment in infrastructure. Many archaeological sites in China are located in economically underdeveloped areas or even wilderness, and geographically speaking, they are not ideal tourist destinations. Even so, local governments still directly invested into most of these archaeological site parks for political reasons while lacking a systematic evaluation for their practical feasibility. Secondly, their touristic quality was not fully realized, primarily, because of a lack of archaeological or historical knowledge, which inhibited visitors from comprehending the archaeological site. Meanwhile archaeologists often criticize the park-​style landscapes, sculptures, and abstract culture

432    Siyu Wang and Kan Hang typical of archaeological site parks as not being authentic, and that the hard floor used for building parks impedes sustainable archaeological works (Du 2017; Zhang 2010). As for Shan Jixiang’s idea of cohering parks with cities and communities, a large number of archaeological site parks actually followed an ‘enclose land to build park’ pattern, resulting in extensive relocations and isolations. Consequently, the conflicts between all stakeholders of archaeological site parks are increasingly prominent. Lastly, it is still doubtful whether archaeological site parks are necessarily favourable for the protection of the sites themselves. The fundamental idea of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the basic principle of cultural heritage exhibitions is ‘protection coming before exhibition’. But as for archaeological site parks, with the intensive investment from local governments, the discursive power of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, as a representation of the central government, has been diminished and the dedicated project disregarded. The local government, however, is more concerned about political or economic gains from the huge investment in the short term than it is about site protection in the long term. The authorities may proclaim that their every move serves the protection of the site and would avoid unnecessary construction projects, but the number of construction projects grown in the name of archaeological site parks has actually increased since 2010. As the key promoter of the great sites policy and archaeological site parks, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage is not completely unaware of the problems. In 2012, in the wake the appraisal and selection of the first group of archaeological site parks and the initiation of the second group, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage issued the Announcement on Further Standardizing the Construction of Archaeological Site Parks and Appraisal of the Second Group of National Archaeological Site Parks, pinpointing current problems, which can be summed up as putting construction before protection and operation. When introducing Special Planning for the Protection of Great sites during the 13th Five-​Year Plan in 2016, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage took the stance of maintaining the total number of ‘major great sites’ and consolidating ‘data integration’, ‘scientific research’, and ‘service capacity’. This framework has empowered ‘archaeological site park 2.0’ in some regions, and rural revitalization and urban renewal guided by more comprehensive thought on cultural industrialization in a broader sense. Whether this ‘archaeological site park 2.0’ will work in the next few years or not is still to be demonstrated. However, there are much clearer indications that the motivation and actual power would be held more in local governments’ hands while the role of central projects would step back.

21.5  Conclusion This chapter has reviewed and investigated the history, institution, and reality of archaeological exhibitions from two perspectives, namely unearthed cultural relics and archaeological sites. In general, archaeological exhibitions have gradually become

Museums and archaeological exhibitions    433 more diverse and promising with the advancement of exhibition technologies. At the same time, with the growth of heritage and museum studies in China, scholars now pay much more attention to the politics behind heritage sites and museum exhibitions. They keep working on solutions to the conflicts between heritagization or musealization and local communities, trying to find a proper approach to integrate archaeological exhibitions within regional development, and arguing for the possibility of constructing a more centralized and professional-​oriented administrative system (Chen 2009; Meng 2001; Sun 2016; Yu 2016). In order to have a better understanding of the above issues, we should realize that in China archaeological exhibitions have always cohabited with the fluidity of public bodies and that different institutions, departments, and academic communities have different discursive power and interact with each other in changing ways. However, in practice, we still need more evidence to demonstrate whether or not the exhibition of unearthed cultural relics can break free from previous exhibition styles and to see if the exhibition of archaeological site parks can successfully find a development path in line with China’s complex administrative reality.

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434    Siyu Wang and Kan Hang Shan, J. 2009. ‘Inheriting Tradition, Insisting Innovation, Leading Scientific Development in the Cause of Chinese Museums: A Review of Last 60 Years and Prospect of Future About Chinese Museums’. (Jicheng youliang chuantong, jianchi gaige chuangxin, tuidong zhongguo bowuguan shiye kexue fazhan: Xinzhongguo bowuguan shiye liushi nian huigu yu zhanwang)’. Chinese Museums 3: pp. 4–​10. 单霁翔，继承优良传统，坚持改革创新，推动中国博物馆事业科学发展—​—​新中国博 物馆事业60年回顾与展望，刊于《中国博物馆》2009年第3期，pp. 4–​10. Shan, J. 2010. ‘Exploration and Practice of the Large-​scale Archaeological Parks’. (Daxing kaogu yizhi gongyuan de tansuo yu shijian). China Cultural Heritage Scientific Research 1: pp. 2–​12. 单霁翔，大型考古遗址公园的探索与实践，刊于《中国文物科学研究》2010年 第1期: pp. 2–​12. Su, B. 1984. ‘Improving Academic Work’. (Tigao xueshu shuiping, tigao gongzuo zhiliang). Sichuan Cultural Relics 3: pp. 9–​13. 苏秉琦. 提高学术水平，提高工作质量. 刊于《四川文物》1984年第3期: pp. 9–​13. Sun, H. 2016. ‘Rethink about the Large Archaeological Sites Protection in China’. (woguo daxing yizhi baohu wenti de sikao). China Cultural Heritage 6: pp. 61–​7 1. 孙华. 我国大型遗址保护问题的思考. 刊于《中国文化遗产》2016年第6期: pp. 61–​7 1. Terracotta Warriors Museum. 2009. Grand Ambition: Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Terracotta Warriors Museum ((Kaichuang Hongtu: Qinshihuang bingmayong bowuguan sanshi nian jinianji). Xi’an: Northwest University Press. 秦始皇兵马俑博物馆. 《开创宏图—​—秦 ​ 始皇兵马俑博物馆三十年纪念集》，西北大 学出版社，2011. Wang, S. 2019. Values and Power: Reflections on the Large Archaeological Sites in China (Jiazhi yu Quanli: Zhongguo dayizhi Zhanshi de Guancha yu Fansi). Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishing House. 王思渝，《价值与权力：中国大遗址展示的观察与反思》，上海古籍出版社，2019. Yu, B. 2016. ‘Analysis on the Demand Characteristic and Current Issue of the Financial System of the Large Archaeological Sites Protection’. (Dayizhi baohu caizheng zhidu xuqiu tezheng yu xianzhuang wenti fenxi). China Cultural Heritage Scientific Research 1: pp. 25–​32. 于冰. 大遗址保护财政制度需求特征与现状问题分析，刊于《中国文物科学研 究》2016年第1期: pp. 25–​32. Yu, H. 1957. ‘Opinions about Chorography Museums’. (Guagyu dizhi bowuguan de jidian zatan). Relic Reference 7: p. 70. 于鸿志，关于地志博物馆的几点杂谈，刊于《文物参考资料》1957年第7期，70. Zhang, Z. 2001. ‘Free Talks About Archaeological Reports’. (Manyi kaogu baogao). Chinese Cultural Relic News, 09 of Pub. 张忠培. 漫议考古报告. 刊于《中国文物报》2001-​09-​02第7版. Zhang, Z. 2010. ‘Suggestions on Constructing Archaeological Parks’. (Guanyu jianshe guojia kaogu yizhi gongyuan de yixie yijian). Southeast Culture 1: pp. 6–​8. 张忠培. 关于建设国家考古遗址公园的一些意见. 刊于《东南文化》2010年 第1期，pp. 6–​8. Zhao, H. 2017. ‘Local or National: The Research on the Transformation of Chorography Museum in the Early Period of New China’. (Difangxing huo quanguoxing: xinzhongguo chengli chuqi dizhi bowuguan zongzhi bianqian). Museum 4: pp. 73–​7. 赵慧君，地方性或全国性：新中国成立初期地志博物馆宗旨变迁，刊于《博物 院》2017年第4期: pp. 73–​7. Zhe, Z. 2001. ‘Opinions about the Ideal Archaeological Reports’. (Lixiang de kaogu baogao zhi wojian). Chinese Cultural Relic News, 22 July. 者之. “理想的考古报告”之我见，刊于《中 国文物报》2001-​07-​22第7版.

Chapter 22

Tel ling stori e s at t h e Ashmolean Mu se um An Ancient Middle East gallery for the twenty-​f irst century? Paul Collins

22.1  Introduction The University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum contains one of the United Kingdom’s most significant archaeological collections from the ancient Middle East. In 2009, following a major capital project to redevelop much of the Ashmolean, a suite of spaces devoted to the ‘ancient world’ was opened on the ground floor of the museum that included a gallery devoted to the ‘Ancient Near East’. Ten years on from that opening, an opportunity to reconsider the display and interpretive methods for this gallery was made possible as a result of private funding. Such permanent galleries rarely receive the focus and investment that ticketed temporary exhibitions receive. This has become a significant issue over the last decade as the traditional role of museums—​to collect, preserve, and share collections through displays—​has expanded (or been challenged) to include a greater focus on supporting individuals and communities, not least around issues of social equity and diversity. In addition, many museums with collections that derive from non-​Western countries have begun to confront their responsibilities within a post-​colonial setting, that is the recognition of a need to decolonize. This chapter discusses some of the approaches to these challenges being developed at the Ashmolean, where the aim is to make the refurbished gallery as relevant and accessible to as broad an audience as possible; ultimately rolling out successful elements, when appropriate, to the rest of the museum. Inevitably, this work cannot be taken as a model for all museums, which will need to respond to their own unique collections, histories, and audiences, but rather as a case study for today’s museum professionals as they revise

436   Paul Collins their permanent galleries to meet the changing expectations of modern museum visitors. The first sections explore recent thinking around engagement through storytelling and narratives using archaeological collections, followed by a description of the specific gallery redevelopment project and some of the lessons learned.

22.2  Telling stories in museums Our [Ashmolean Museum’s] world famous collections range from Egyptian mummies to contemporary art, telling human stories across cultures and across time.1

If a museum is to claim as one of its goals the understanding of other cultures, times, or places, then telling human stories would seem to be an accessible and meaningful way of helping to achieve this. But many archaeological museums are traditionally not very good at it. Their displays have all too often been shaped by chronological and typological considerations, without significant social narratives. This can be true for presentations of prehistoric cultures as well as those with written sources: the focus can be largely on change through time, cultural groupings, and/​or objects displayed as ‘art’, where objects are either isolated or placed in association with others for contemplative viewing (Witcomb 2003: 1–​2). Many of these approaches derive from a nineteenth-​century object-​based epistemology where the emphasis is on facts and where any meaning is achieved primarily through the ordered arrangement of collections. Some museums have attempted to move away from these methods of display with the aim of storytelling, specifically through the use of narrative tools (Bedford 2001, 2004). This can include personal perspectives, stories involving an event or series of events containing emotional but authentic content as told by someone (Allen 2004). Other related approaches have endeavoured to reveal something of the emotional and spiritual roles that object types have played in contemporary and past lives. These methods focus on the ‘ways that people use objects to shape and make sense of their world. The coupling of person and object together in the museum experience involves respect for a museum visitor’s lifeworld, the unique perspective on experiences and ways of knowing that each person has’. (Wood and Latham 2014: 163). In such object-​based dialogues, ‘the object, the presentation, the visitor, even the friends and family accompanying the visitor, jointly participate in an act of meaning’ (Evans et al. 2002: 53). Experiences in museum galleries are therefore built on prior knowledge of the world and this leads to new ideas and conceptions. Meaning is constructed and recognized as a shared effort in which understanding is built through a perceived sense of personal connection with objects. This could be extended further through exploring an object’s biography and social life, connecting its production,

1 

Ashmolean Museum: About www.ashmolean.org/​about.

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    437 exchange, consumption, and disposal with modern parallels (Brysbaert 2012; Gosden and Marshall 1999). These methodologies offer the opportunity of presenting a more holistic approach to people and their multiple social identities, including gender, and their relationships with each other and with things. Such approaches recognize that ‘people interpret the past in light of their own experiences and cultural constructs; we see the past not as it was but as we are’ (Barker 2010: 296). If a key aim of a museum display, however, is to provide visitors with an insight into historic and/​or prehistoric societies, this needs very careful crafting so that the past is not completely submerged by the present. As Lowenthal (2015), via Hartley, reminds us, the past is a foreign country where they do things differently. How then are museums to make these distant, fragmentary, and alien worlds accessible to modern audiences through archaeological objects? A partial answer may be found in the history of museum anthropology, where the focus has been on the study and display of ‘archaeological, ethnographic, and art collections historically originating from non-​Western peoples’ (Kreps 2020: 5). The development of these collections and their presentation to the public has been explored by Shelton (2006). He highlights display methodologies developed at the Museum of Mankind (the Ethnography Department of the British Museum) between 1970 and 1997 where some of the temporary exhibitions used elaborate scenographies to recreate the physical context in which objects from the collection had once been used. Other displays used part reconstructions of original physical spaces in mixed-​genre exhibitions. From the mid-​1990s, however, Shelton identifies a ‘narrative fragmentation’ and the adoption of ‘art-​type’ displays that resulted in the ‘subordination of interpretation to aesthetic presentation’ (Shelton 2006: 73–​4); an approach that remains popular for both ethnographic and archaeological exhibitions. Revisiting these contextual methodologies for antiquities is of course very possible since, as with ‘ethnological objects’, they were often fully embedded in public or private life. Using groupings of objects—​a method long recognized as enabling meaning in museum displays (see for example Moore 1997: 52–​72)—​typological and chronological displays of archaeological material can be dismantled in favour of relationships that evoke something of their original physical and social contexts (Swain 2007: 210–​64). Those contexts have traditionally been delivered by text panels, labels, and graphics, but increasingly made possible through interactives (both digital and physical) and, when exhibition space allows, immersive experiences provided by stage settings or larger-​scale installations (for some the challenges associated with these see Shanks and Tilley 1992: 82; Swain 2007: 291–​318).

22.3  A Sensory turn As objects are integral to our actions, indeed intimately tied up with everyone’s lives (Gosden and Marshall 1999), interaction is not just a visual one but rather a multisensory

438   Paul Collins experience. Despite this understanding, the physical actuality of objects and the ways in which we experience them is too often ignored in the museum encounter: the museum’s preoccupation with information and the way it is juxtaposed with objects—​the biographies of historical objects and the persons associated with them . . .—​immediately takes the museum visitor one step beyond the material, physical thing they see displayed before them, away from the emotional and other possibilities that may lie in their sensory interaction with it. (Dudley 2010: 4)

This has persisted despite the so-​called ‘material turn’ in anglophone archaeology and anthropology which has provided crucial insights into the embeddedness of material objects in human social life and the meanings and values objects thereby acquire (Pollock 2016: 280). More recently, however, there has also been a ‘sensory turn’, in which the importance of touch, sound, and smell, in addition to sight, have been emphasized and explored in museum studies (Howes 2014; Levent and Pascual-​Leone 2014). Sensory engagement with objects beyond the purely visual has long been a taboo in museums, having emerged out of nineteenth-​century scholarship that developed a distinction between a ‘noble’ sense of sight and the ‘base’ senses of touch, smell, hearing, and taste (Candlin 2010). Touching and handling objects has been especially discouraged, and not just for reasons of conservation. As a result, most museum visitors will experience museum collections through displays where the encounter is predominantly a visual one that takes place at a distance because artefacts are either placed behind glass or out of reach. A physical connection with the objects, that is, the opportunity to touch and feel the reality of a thing—​a type of engagement that is generally taken for granted when trying to make sense of the world (Chillot 2013)—​is therefore made impossible. Such restrictions are now being challenged, however, as research highlights the value of touching and handling objects and especially their importance in learning (Black 2005; Chatterjee 2008, 2010). There are a number of ways in which touch can be offered in permanent galleries to harness the emotional and intellectual connections people have with objects, not only to create a richer visitor experience, but to provide opportunities to explore and contrast systems of values other than our own, including those around touching things (Candlin 2010; Classen 2012; Pye 2007). The physicality of an object is necessarily important when considering its value for touching and here replicas can provide an obvious alternative to the ‘real’ thing. The quality of modern 3D printing is becoming such that it is possible to replicate something akin to the texture of original objects but reproduce them using materials that can withstand regular handling or that are cheap to replace (see for example, Di Giusppantonio Di Franco et al. 2015). Indeed, the use of this material for touching might offer an opportunity to rethink attitudes relating to direct engagement with ancient objects in a museum context more generally: the tons of pottery fragments that cover every ancient site are so common that perhaps a few might be sacrificed for the sake of touch. This idea has been proposed by Thompson (2016: 179–​80) who suggests that many private collectors, who relish the intimate relationship that touch

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    439 fosters between them and their objects, may be more inclined to stop collecting if public institutions allowed patrons to physically handle objects. As with touching, the other senses have the power to provide emotional and intellectual engagement with objects, but sound, smell, and taste have also traditionally played limited roles in museum displays and their interpretation. This too is now changing, especially in regard to the way these senses can help in reducing the distance between objects and the museum visitor (Levent and Pascual-​Leone 2014). Research on the agency of sound and the ways it affects the visitors’ experience is helping to enrich exhibition design (Bubaris 2014). Similarly, the use of smell and taste have been used successfully in museums for knowledge production (Drobnick 2014).

22.4  A Flexible display Museums increasingly cite the need for flexible and responsive permanent galleries. This includes not only the ability to easily and inexpensively reconfigure and update spaces and content, but also an understanding that this flexibility needs to be underpinned by new work-​procedures and improvisatory practice (Morgan 2013: 158). The redevelopment of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum between 2003 and 2006 has been especially instructive in these respects (Fitzgerald 2005; Morgan 2013). Kelvingrove’s traditional displays were dismantled in favour of a cross-​collections themed approach that was ‘rooted less in chronology and traditional subject-​disciplines and more in the social, experiential and emotional’ (Morgan 2013: 160). The conceptual division between ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ exhibitions was broken down by developing a system of ‘modular’ display fittings and fixtures, and a complete overhaul of existing organizing principles. ‘Guided by the principle of “telling stories”, the new displays were intended to be self-​contained and non-​sequential; thus enabling changes to be made to labels, individual objects, or entire displays without disrupting narratives within galleries’ (Morgan 2013: 160).

22.5  Decolonizing collections Many museums across Europe, the United States, and Australia have begun to confront their responsibilities within a post-​colonial setting and are tackling the challenge of decolonizing their institutions. Although there is much debate around what this means and how it can be achieved, there is a shared recognition of a need to expand perspectives portrayed beyond those of the dominant cultural group, particularly white colonizers, and examine museums as monuments to empire and slavery as well as the stories that can be told from the collections (Chambers et al. 2014). National museums in particular amassed collections as a direct result of their home country’s control over colonies or

440   Paul Collins through political and economic influence in neighbouring regions from as early as the eighteenth century, but this also applies to many regional and university museums. As imperial institutions, these museums come with authority and popular reach, and the decisions on the selection of the objects that entered their collections, their display practices, and the dissemination of information about those choices beyond their doors have had a significant impact on their reception and understanding (see for example Duthie 2011). Through their ethnographic representations and compartmentalized approach to archaeological material, these museum displays contributed to the domestication of not only the contemporary colonized non-​Western world but also its past, colonizing antiquity as much as they did the living communities of the region (Gosden 2012). Knowledge of such histories has become essential for today’s museum professionals as they revise their galleries in order to meet the changing expectations of modern museum audiences.

22.6  The Ancient Middle East at the Ashmolean Ancient Middle Eastern study has only recently begun to confront its colonial past and acknowledge the extent to which that past permeates both its scholarship and its public reception (Bahrani et al. 2011; Bernhardsson 2005; Collins 2019; Verderame and Garcia-​ Ventura 2020). The historic formulation of an ‘Ancient Middle East’ (an unabashedly Eurocentric term) and its place in narratives that describe the rise of Western civilization continue to shape the arrangement of museum displays (Collins 2020: 233). In any attempt to decolonize museums, not least their displays, it is important, therefore, that these constructs as well as institutional collection histories are acknowledged and critiqued. On that basis, a history of the Ashmolean’s ancient Middle East collections is for the first time presented here. The Ashmolean was established in 1683 as a university museum open to the public. For its time, it was considered a model scientific institution in which natural and artificial objects from around the world could be brought together for the study and teaching of the ‘natural sciences’ (MacGregor 2001). Several antiquities from Egypt were among this early collection but the wider Middle East was not represented. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries new ways of thinking emerged that divided the natural world and the human world. The emergence of racial science also separated peoples into different races and placed them on a sliding scale from ‘primitive to civilized’, a system that was applied to contemporary as well as ancient societies (Challis 2013). Artefacts from societies deemed to belong to the ‘civilized’ world (essentially Europe and the ‘Biblical’ literate regions of pre-​Islamic Egypt and the Middle East) came to form the core of the Ashmolean’s collections, while collecting other objects was seen as the

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    441 role of new Oxford University museums (University Museum of Natural History, the History of Science Museum, and the Pitt Rivers Museum). The Ancient Middle East collections in Oxford have their origins with the Reverend Greville Chester (1830–​1892). Chester was an Oxford alumnus and ordained clergyman who, having been forced to retire owing to ill health in 1865, spent the latter half of his life making annual trips to the warm climate of Egypt and the Levant (Siedmann 2006). Here he collected ancient objects which he either gifted or sold to the British Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Ashmolean Museum. In 1889, the Museum purchased from Chester a large number of amulets and seals. On the recommendation of the Visitors a special grant of £300 was made by the Common University Fund for the purchase of Mr. Greville Chester’s collection of Phoenician, Hittite, and other Oriental Antiquities. A special scientific importance attaches to this Collection from the fact that these specimens were obtained by Mr. Greville Chester himself during a long course of travel, on a great variety of sites in Western Asia, and that the place of discovery is therefore in each case approximately known . . . They consist for the most part of bronze figures and of signets in the form of cylinders, scarabs, scaraboids &c., in various materials. The collection includes 703 objects and to these Mr Greville Chester has added by free gift 60 more. (Evans 1889: 1–​2)

Chester was a vocal supporter of Arthur Evans’ plans to move the Ashmolean Museum from Oxford’s Broad Street to its present site on Beaumont Street, which was made a reality in 1894. Some 14 years later, ‘a spacious new Gallery for the Egyptian and Oriental Departments’ had been constructed (Evans 1908: 1). In 1909, David Hogarth was appointed Keeper (equivalent to Director) and the Ashmolean and University Galleries—​which contained among its paintings and classical sculptures two Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud presented by their excavator Henry Layard—​were amalgamated to form the current institution. The seal collection continued to grow with deposits and acquisition to an ‘Asiatic Section’: ‘Two sets of miscellaneous seals collected in Syria by Miss Gertrude L. Bell and Mr. T.E. Lawrence respectively’ (Hogarth 1909: 8). The collection began to expand beyond amulets and seals in 1910 when Hogarth started to purchase cuneiform tablets, although examples had already been acquired by the Bodleian Library (Hogarth 1910: 14). Three years later these objects were grouped into a ‘West Asia Section’ with the addition of objects that had been plundered by locals from the site of Deve Hüyük in Syria and where they were purchased by Leonard Woolley and T.E. Lawrence (Moorey 1980). Unprovenanced seals also continued to attract attention: The dealers in Paris and the Near East have been able to collect during the past two or three years miscellaneous tomb-​furniture from Western and Southern Anatolia and Northern Syria, thanks to the stimulus imparted to grave-​robbing in previously unsophisticated regions by the advent of the Baghdad Railway . . . Having learned now that we pay particular attention to West Asian engraved seals, dealers have sent us a great variety in the course of the year. (Hogarth 1913: 6–​7)

442   Paul Collins It was, however, the First World War and its aftermath that significantly transformed the Western Asiatic collections in Oxford. This was a direct result of the invasion, occupation, and then mandate control of Palestine and Mesopotamia (the latter subsequently established as the Kingdom of Iraq) by the armies of the British Empire and first evidenced in the Keeper’s Report of 1919: A marble figurine of the earliest Sumerian style, which was unearthed in a slightly damaged condition at Istabalat by an entrenching party on the eve of battle preceding our occupation of Samarra in 1917 . . . From Assur itself (also thanks to the passage of our troops) has been received a stamped brick from the Palace of Shalmaneser I. (Hogarth 1922: 7)

A joint excavation at Kish in southern Iraq by the University of Oxford and Chicago’s Field Museum was initiated in 1922 with the first fieldwork undertaken the following year and seasonal expeditions until 1933 (Moorey 1978). As was the standard practice at the time, there was a division of finds between the excavators and the host country (for the nineteenth-​century origin of this system of partage see Stevenson 2019: 223). The agreement with the Iraqi Antiquities Department allowed that after the official division between Iraq and the excavators, Oxford (that is, the Ashmolean Museum) was to receive all the remaining inscribed objects, while Chicago received archaeological, skeletal, and scientific material; both institutions would also get representative collections of the categories not allocated to them for museum display. Oxford’s funding for the excavations had been largely provided by Herbert Weld-​Blundell, who also donated to the Ashmolean a large collection of cuneiform documents he had purchased both in Baghdad and at the site of Larsa (where they were being looted) in 1921–​1922 (Hogarth 1922: 9). This included the famous Sumerian King List prism, often referred to by the name of its donor. The University of Oxford also provided financial support in 1931 for excavations in Palestine at Jericho and Tell Ajjul, receiving an allocation from the excavators’ share of the division of finds. Between 1950 and 1990 the University contributed funding for excavations at some 40 other sites across the Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, Israel, West Bank, Iran, and Yemen (Moorey 1987: 54 provides a complete listing) led by the British Schools of Archaeology (Iraq, Jerusalem, and Ankara) as well as other museums and universities. As a result, significant collections derive from Jericho, Jerusalem, Tell Atchana, Abu Hureyra, and Nimrud. By 1990 the practice of division of finds had largely been ended by the countries of the Middle East and the Museum ceased to support excavations in the region (revealing a direct link between sponsorship and acquisition). The Ashmolean continued to purchase ancient Middle Eastern objects at auction and from antiquities dealers until 1998, the year in which Christopher Brown was appointed Director and plans were initiated for the redevelopment of the Museum. A written policy existed, however, from the 1960s specifying that objects could be acquired by the Museum only if the legality of export from their country of origin could be verified. On this basis gifts or bequests continue to be accepted or objects acquired by private purchase.

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    443

22.7  The Ashmolean’s Ancient Near East gallery 2009–​2021 The Ashmolean’s Ancient Near East (ANE) gallery is a 180m2 rectangular room with three doorways, two of which connect to neighbouring galleries (Ancient Cyprus and Aegean World) while the third provides access to and from the Welcome Space, situated just inside the main entrance to the museum, an extension of a large, naturally lit stairwell some six storeys high (Fig. 22.1). The gallery is part of a suite of spaces that encompass the ‘ancient world’, that is prehistory to approximately AD 600. The galleries are arranged through a concept of ‘Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time’, in which adjacencies are considered important to help suggest cultural connections across geographical regions, as well as through time between floors (Walker 2013). An opportunity to challenge the traditional compartmentalized approach to the ancient world as found in displays and curatorial departments, especially those of larger museums, was not taken during the 2005–​2009 redevelopment. Adopting a conventional approach, a dedicated ANE gallery was established that presents objects from a geographical area reaching from Iran to Western Turkey and the Levant, ranging in date from approximately 10,000 to 350 BC. Lack of display space means that material culture dating between 350 BC and AD 600 is placed in neighbouring galleries devoted to The Greek World and Rome (and where they play a peripheral role). The layout of the ANE gallery is broadly chronological, with the most ancient objects placed nearest to the door leading from the Welcome Space, and moving through the gallery to the empires of Assyria and Persia (or the journey reversed if entering from the Ancient Cyprus gallery). Within this scheme, material is organized regionally and thematically (Gilmore 2011).

Levant

Persia

Mesopotamia

Tell excavation model Welcome Space

Ancient Cyprus

The Persian Empire

Horses

Anatolia

Writing

Early Farmers

The Assyrian Empire

Neo-Hittite

Religion

Early Farmers

Jericho

Aegean World

East Mediterranean

Babylon

Judah

Nimrud

Urartu

Iran

Figure 22.1:  Floor plan of the Ancient Near East gallery at the Ashmolean Museum (2009–​2021).

444   Paul Collins In the years following the opening of the ANE gallery, a number of issues relating to visitor engagement became apparent. The arrangement of freestanding cases created a corridor between the Welcome Space and the Ancient Cyprus gallery, with no particular display to arrest or distract visitors. Low lighting, largely a result of the in-​case system rather than the design, makes the gallery appear gloomy and uninviting, especially when approached from the brighter Welcome Space. In addition, as noted by a reviewer, the gallery lacks any interactives for people to engage with, either physically or emotionally (Gilmore 2011: 128). Perhaps the greatest challenge for the uninitiated visitor is, however, the scale of the ancient Middle East as represented by the display—​a vast span of time and an enormous geographical region containing a seemingly impenetrable mosaic of diverse peoples, languages, and cultures. The layout of objects is shaped by a mixture of approaches, some thematic (for example, Ritual and Religion), others chronological and typological in which objects are often presented in rows. As with all the ‘ancient world’ galleries, contextual information and narrative stories are presented on text panels situated adjacent to cases containing relevant objects while in-​case labels with short thematic paragraphs and tomb-​stone information (object type, material, date, provenance—​if known—​and museum accession number) are arranged on horizontal strips in the lower half or vertically at mid-​height. This arrangement means visitors are faced with a challenge of working through a hierarchy of information—​from broadly thematic ex-​case panels, some distance from the objects, to in-​case label runs—​ in order to construct relationships and meanings.

22.8  Making it possible The redevelopment of the Ashmolean’s ANE gallery has been made possible by private funding. Philanthropy has become an important, albeit increasingly controversial, means of maintaining and developing activity in museums as public funding has been reduced (Bailey 2019; Museums Association 2018: 12–​16). What is critical for this discussion, however, is the institutional priorities for such fundraising. It is certainly often easier to find financial support for short-​term, potentially high-​profile exhibitions which come with the bonus of income streams through ticket sales and merchandising. In this model, however, the permanent collections must often wait for opportunistic moments such as, for example, when a funder wishes to support an area of personal interest or the vision of a curator. All too often: Budget restraints mean that permanent exhibits are rarely re-​displayed beyond an occasional case, or the addition of a new object or two. Except for museums that are too large to get around in one visit, they offer little to encourage people to return. Meanwhile, temporary exhibitions are used to pull in the punters. They often originate with marketing departments, and in the traditional blockbuster model call for huge resources. Their success can end up making the rest of the building seem

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    445 astonishingly empty. This divide often leaves permanent galleries looking out-​dated, uncared for and irrelevant. (Allen 2006: 20)

Indeed, much of the thinking and experimentation with design and interpretation at the Ashmolean has been concentrated on its ticketed temporary exhibition programme. These three to five-​month charging exhibitions have a different scale (three large, interconnected spaces) and more tightly focused themes than the permanent galleries. As the latter are free to enter seven days a week, they inevitably attract a larger and more diverse audience (the museum receives on average some 850,000 annual visitors). In order for these core displays to be made relevant, meaningful, and valued by visitors and so as to encourage return visits, it has been recognized that they need to respond to shifting demographics and the political landscape and that this requires a proactive approach, especially in relation to equity and inclusion. The Museum therefore developed in 2018 an explicit strategy designed to address these areas called ‘Ashmolean for All’. This starts with an understanding that institutional change is required in all aspects of the museum’s operation. As an ‘umbrella strategy’, it is intended to inform and become embedded in every aspect of the Museum’s work, from the presentation of displays, programmes, and partnerships, to workplace culture and operational policies. At its core is the aim of improving the way the Museum represents, works with, and includes diverse communities and individuals: existing visitors, potential visitors, staff, and volunteers. In terms of enhancing visitor engagement in the Ashmolean’s public galleries, audience evaluation undertaken in 2018–​2019 has been crucial for identifying challenges, many of which are partly around perception: these reports reveal that the Museum is viewed as being for specialists rather than a general audience, and peer-​focused rather than audience-​focused; it caters to visitors wanting an educational/​intellectual experience but is not thought to be for those interested in a social or spiritual experience; and within the galleries, there is not enough to do, especially for a non-​specialist visitor or families. As a result, the Museum appears to lack warmth and emotion. Ashmolean for All therefore focuses, at least initially, on developing provision for families, young people (16–​24 years), and older people. Continued evaluation will be required to measure success, which will be judged on the size and diversity of audiences.

22.9  Constraints and challenges Given the chronological and geographical layout of the Ashmolean’s collections across galleries and floors it will not be possible to take advantage of the refurbishment to challenge what is meant by an ‘Ancient Middle East’ through a broader rearrangement. Opportunities, however, will be taken in the gallery itself to question this construct, not least a need to retain the geographical and chronological coverage of the displays, which will end with the arbitrary stopping of the clock with the Achaemenid Persian Empire

446   Paul Collins (and the conquests of Alexander the Great) as traditional narratives often do. The layout of the Museum means that it also will not be possible to extend the available display area. Indeed, the basic arrangement of wall cases will need to be retained as the funding is sufficient to allow for only a number of these to be replaced along with all the freestanding cases. This means that some narratives will be spread across adjacent cases and necessitate the retention of certain design elements in new cases to achieve a consistent, unified look. The refurbishment will, however, enable significant problems of poor lighting and navigation through the gallery to be addressed.

22.10  Audience testing for an Ancient Middle East gallery Audience testing is recognized as an important part of designing and delivering successful displays and other activities in museums, but one that requires adequate planning and resources, not least sufficient time for it to be undertaken (Falk and Dierking 2000). In advance of the gallery development, therefore, opportunities were taken to test methods of delivering engaging gallery text, explore ways of displaying objects for more effective storytelling (especially in their relation to text and graphics), and open up a wider conversation with visitors about what they want from a gallery experience. This was enabled by programming a number of temporary displays in the Museum’s ‘Laboratory’, a single space devoted to showing contemporary art and current research from across the University, as well as through interventions in the ANE gallery itself.

22.10.1 Doing things differently This Laboratory display (January–​February 2019) focused on a selection of objects drawn from a longer list being compiled to tell stories in the new gallery around early farming communities. Different styles of text and approaches to storytelling were tried with panels and labels (Cockcroft 2019). As part of the experiment, the display space was given a ‘living room’ feel complete with comfortable seating. Drop-​in visitors were invited to provide feedback by completing questionnaires and members of the Museum’s Learning Department ran focus groups for more in-​depth responses with both local people, including members of the Middle East diaspora through the Multaka-​Oxford project (Bird 2019). Key findings included: • A need to reconsider the name of the new gallery. ‘Ancient Near East’, the standard term in scholarship on the region, did not make sense to visitors and focus group participants; there was a clear preference for ‘Ancient Middle East’. Although, as

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    447 noted above, this term is Eurocentric, it reflects a growing awareness of the need ‘to reconnect [the] ancient cultures with the land in which they are now situated, which in general parlance is now called the Middle East’ (Emberling and Petit 2019: 11). • Having single or group focus objects are a useful storytelling device. Not in itself a novel finding as other museums have focused on developing permanent galleries ‘around a manageable number of key objects carefully chosen to helpfully focus visitors’ attention, and act as gateways to the [intended] messages’ (Batty et al. 2016: 75). • Comfort is important. This is often overlooked in museums, but a comfortable visitor is a more relaxed visitor and arguably more reflective and receptive to learning as a result.

22.10.2 Owning the past: From Mesopotamia to Iraq Inspired by attempts of so-​called Islamic State or Daesh to eradicate the national borders of Iraq and the lives of many of its peoples in the years 2014–​2017, a dual-​language (Arabic and English) Laboratory exhibition (December 2020 to August 2021) considered the origins of the modern country, especially in the context of the region’s archaeology and heritage. A number of the Ashmolean’s employees and Oxford alumni (especially Gertrude Bell) were instrumental in the establishment of Iraq as well as the formation of the University’s ancient Middle East collection in the period 1914–​1932. To explore the impact of these events on people in the region, members of Oxford’s Syrian, Iraqi, and Kurdish diaspora with the help of two paid ‘Community Ambassadors’ were involved in a number or workshops through 2020 to help shape the broad themes of the display and with the intention of representing their voices in the exhibition.

22.10.3 Voices in the galleries This project (June 2019) explored how ancient objects can also connect with more recent, living memories and be a source of comfort and inspiration (Cory and Collins 2019). It focused on young people’s responses to objects in the ANE gallery and captured their voices in labels, audio, and film. This was a collaboration between the Museum and teachers at a local Oxford secondary school, working with a number of students from Eritrea, Syria, and South Sudan and who were part of a larger group in a school programme run by English teachers. Having each chosen an object in the gallery that meant something to them visually (either because it connected them to a memory or a place), the students had the opportunity to handle them (without protective gloves which is a normal conservation requirement) so that they could engage with the objects directly. They then returned to school and wrote a personal response to their object.

448   Paul Collins Their written text was produced as a label by a Museum designer and placed in the display case beside the relevant object. The original plan to include labels in the student’s first language could not be completed because of budget and time constraints but short videos with photographs and audio, including the students reading their label in English and their first language, were produced for the Museum’s website (https://​www.ashmol​ ean.org/​voi​ces-​in-​the-​gall​ery).

22.11  The Ancient Middle East at the Ashmolean: Telling human stories The refurbished Ancient Middle East gallery will be introduced to the majority of visitors through a wall projection of an animated map of the wider region. This will offer a brief description through dynamic text and graphics of what is meant by ‘Ancient Middle East’ and the geographical and chronological range of the gallery. The projection will be adjacent to a case devoted to a history of the collection (Colonialism and collecting: The Ancient Middle East in Oxford) visible from the Welcome Space and Aegean World doors. As the Cyprus gallery door receives less visitor traffic than the other two entrances, a traditional text panel will offer much of the information as in the projection but with a focus on challenging any Western-​centric narrative that judges the development of civilization as ‘progress’ which culminates with Ancient Greece (in the neighbouring gallery) (Fig. 22.2). The gallery will comprise nine thematic sections. As with the layout of the ANE gallery, the new arrangement will allow visitors to undertake a chronological journey through the length of the room, with the recognition that every section—​each consisting

Interactives Persian Pottery

Aegean World Interactives

Welcome Space

Ancient Cyprus

Persian Empire

Village Life

Interactives

Modern Thoughts

Claiming the Past

Traders and Travellers

Schools and Scholars

Assyrian Empire

Assyrian Empire

Assyrian Empire

Kings and Gods

City Life

Figure 22.2:  Floor plan of the Ancient Middle East gallery at the Ashmolean Museum (2021).

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    449 of one or more cases—​will be self-​contained and therefore meaningful without reference to other parts of the gallery. There will be no attempt to make the gallery comprehensive, such as by filling chronological or cultural gaps with single objects, graphics or other media, but rather rely on the strengths of the excavated collection. An aim is to avoid the geographic/​cultural divisions of the ANE gallery (for example, separate displays for Mesopotamia, Levant, Iran). Although broadly thematic, each section will focus on providing insights into human ways of life and worldviews at specific times and places, telling stories where possible through objects that reflect diverse genders, ages, and voices. Village Life 10000–​5000 BC City Life 4200–​3000 BC Kings and Gods 2600–​2000 BC Schools and Scholars 2000–​1600 BC Traders and Travellers 2500–​1200 BC The Assyrian Empire 900–​600 BC The Persian Empire 520–​330 BC Persian Pottery 3500–​500 BC Colonialism and collecting: The Ancient Middle East in Oxford Situated on the wall alongside the first case of each section will be a ‘pillar’ providing a title, time span in years, and a map showing the geographic location of sites represented by the cased objects. The case displays of each section will be unified visually, and distinguished from others, by distinct colour palettes and textures. Every section will have a ‘focus object’ representing a human. These will be treated with a consistent approach throughout the gallery using lighting, background colour, and negative space so as to provide easily visible points of reference. Adjacent to each of the focus objects will be an in-​case text panel with a short summary (approximately 125 words) of the narratives carried by the objects in the case. These stories will be constructed from groupings of objects with labels containing short contextualizing descriptions. The texts are intended to be easy to read and as engaging and immediate as possible, intended to encourage sympathy, curiosity, and active consideration; they are written by the interpretation manager with content provided and checked by the curator. The labels could be read independently or together to form a whole—​the viewer can choose where to enter the story and the theme. As examples, the following is summary and label text for the first case of the ‘City Life 4000–​3000 BC’ section: The World’s First Cities and the Invention of Writing Over many hundreds of years, some towns across the Middle East grew into cities with populations in the thousands. What encouraged them to come together? Perhaps they needed protection from food shortages or attacks from rival communities. Perhaps they wanted to trade goods or serve their gods. A privileged few were rich and powerful. The majority were workers or even slaves, paid in bread,

450   Paul Collins beer, wool and butter oil. And in order to help keep track of everything, officials came up with an invaluable and ingenious invention -​the world’s first writing. Eye Idols These strange little figures were found in their hundreds in the remains of a building (perhaps a temple) at Tell Brak. They are known as ‘Eye Idols’ but actually they may not be gods -​just simplified representations of people that were given as offerings to a god. One has an oddly pyramid-​shaped head –​perhaps a headdress. About 3600 BC Fit for the grave A vast cemetery containing many hundreds of bodies was found at Susa in modern day Iran in the early 20th century. It was next to the monumental building shown above, perhaps a temple. Was it the result of a battle? A plague? A natural disaster? Or were the bodies moved from burials in scattered villages as a statement of belonging -​communities symbolically brought together in death as in life? Frustratingly, archaeologists didn’t record enough information to help solve the mystery. As well as bodies, the excavation uncovered bowls and pots, perhaps buried in sets of three or four. They are of an exceptionally high quality: eggshell thin and painted with abstract designs. About 4100 BC Pots for the people Families used many different types of pots for storing and serving their food and drink. In a city many thousands of pots would be needed, especially as they break easily and need to be replaced. The invention of the potter’s wheel meant similar pots could be produced faster and in larger numbers by specialist potters. This pot on a stand was for holding beer. It’s typical of wheel-​made pottery made in southern Iraq, as is the vessel with the tiny handles. About 3200 BC A 5000 year old handprint The knuckles of the person who made this bowl (and probably thousands more just like it) have left an impression inside. It was shaped by simply pressing clay into a mould (possibly just a bowl-​shaped hole in the ground). Bowls like this were cheap and had many uses but may have been mainly for baking bread. About 3100 BC Pottery tools Pottery seems an odd choice for a blade –​but Southern Iraq has no metal and very little stone, so cheap, disposable tools were made from clay. These pottery sickles, used for cutting reeds, wheat and barley, were made in moulds before being baked hard in ovens. They probably didn’t last long, but they were cheap and could be mass produced. The nail-​like objects may have been used to grind food or for rubbing animal skins to make them soft. About 3100 BC

The objects will be further contextualized by associated landscape images or graphic reconstructions of buildings with people. The objects will not themselves be displayed simply as illustrations and, although there may be many stories inherent in each of them, the key point is that the story will arise out of their grouping as much as individually. In this way, objects will no longer simply be background scenery but become actors that help to describe the larger story.

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    451 The new gallery will have a focus on objects derived from documented excavations. Provenance information will be noted in some of the label descriptions, but others will be implied by the ‘pillar’ map. Audience testing has suggested that the detail of traditional tombstone information is not needed for the majority of visitors when narrative descriptions are available. As this information about individual objects remains essential for specialist enquiries as well as collections management it will be provided as online pdf case lists, the links for which will be advertised at each of the three gallery doors and updated as needed, to reflect changes as a result of object moves. When objects without provenance are included in the displays, this fact will be highlighted in their label text. Some unprovenanced material will figure in the Colonialism and Collecting case which will explore the practices that established the Ancient Middle East collection at the Ashmolean up to the present. This display will include archival photographs, helping to contextualize the colonial legacy of archaeology and the hyperreality of its presentation in the museum (Riggs 2017). Half of this case will offer a flexible space for installations of modern responses to the collection, current events, debates, or research as well as opportunities for co-​curated displays. Three ‘pods’ evenly spaced through the gallery will incorporate low-​tech interactives and video screens with films and audio relating to their surrounding sections. These will include opportunities for physical engagement, such as an interactive mimicking a saddle quern and rubber from Abu Hureyra in Syria (displayed in the neighbouring case) to enable a visitor to experience and understand something of the hard, repetitive work associated with women as evidenced by skeletons from the site (Molleson 1994). In the central pod, samples of the types of stones and ores imported into Mesopotamia, such as lapis lazuli and copper, will be available to touch, so as to connect with displays focused on Traders and Travellers. Short videos will explain cuneiform script, a recitation of a portion of the Gilgamesh epic in its original Sumerian language (with subtitles in Arabic and English), and an exploration of the Sumerian King List, among others. As the pods will also be part of the wider museum engagement programme, they will serve as dispensers for pencils and worksheets that will be replaced regularly by the front of house staff. Crucially, physical engagement can be made apparent throughout the gallery even if it has to be imagined, intuited, or remembered. So, for example, the importance of holding and handling ancient amulets to make them effective will be made apparent in label descriptions by referencing the glass of the modern display case that separates the visitor from the intended protective properties of the objects. This emotional engagement will be further amplified through the addition of visual images, so that a photograph of a mother and newborn infant will be included alongside a so-​called Lamashtu plaque—​designed to ward off a Mesopotamian demoness who stole babies—​so as to help recall memories of holding a baby and the instinctive desire to protect it from harm. Finally, a level of flexibility in the displays will be enabled through the use of magnetic mounts on metal backboards. Developed by the museum’s mount maker in collaboration with conservators, these will permit small-​scale or lightweight objects as well as labels to be held at the end of rods and so brought closer to the glass for viewing without the need for shelves. Although adding to the challenges of in-​case shadows, they will allow for the replacement of labels and the rearrangement of the display relatively

452   Paul Collins quickly and cheaply, which is especially important for a museum where objects are regular removed for both teaching and loans. This system of mounting objects also means it will be possible to respond to changing ideas in the narratives as well as contemporary events over the life of the gallery while maintaining a consistency of design and interpretation.

22.12  Conclusions Humans cannot live without stories. We surround ourselves with them; we make them up in our sleep; we tell them to our children; we pay to have them told to us. (Greenblatt 2017: 2)

Developing museum displays for storytelling presents powerful opportunities to foster ‘understandings of community, identity, history and nation that reflect the interconnected, migratory and entangled qualities of our histories’ (Thomas 2016: 15). Achieving such displays, however, comes with challenges, especially when attempting to tell stories of people’s lives that are extraordinarily remote and different from our own and that can be reconstructed only from fragmentary archaeological objects. Here it has been suggested that traditional approaches to displaying such objects by type and chronology should be dismantled in favour of more contextual exhibitions. Within such displays, stories can be constructed through object/​label constellations, that create ‘paragraphs’ within display case ‘chapters’. Although the start and end point for each story will be different for every visitor, the physical display case frames each chapter, but the narratives can be carried into adjacent cases and spaces or indeed across entire galleries, in no particular direction, both chronologically and geographically. This approach allows for a flexibility in telling stories, enhanced in the Ancient Middle East gallery with the use of moveable magnetic mounts for labels and some objects that provide opportunities to flex the narratives in response to new interpretations, contemporary events, and object moves. A hierarchy of information is thus established but not through a rigid approach that is applied evenly through the gallery, or even the museum, but can be nuanced to express cultural differences and the stories that derive from them. Such disruptions in visitor experiences could help to bridge the current gap that exists in museums between approaches to permanent and temporary exhibitions. Whether it will ever be possible for the whole museum space to be ‘embraced as one that is always in a state of flux’ (Vaughn 2009) is likely to be determined by available resources as well as ambition. Yet permanent galleries can be part of active engagement and exhibition programmes, such as with cross-​museum shows (for an example that was being developed at the Ashmolean but ultimately not realized for lack of funding see Collins 2019: 22–​3). This would ‘provide a space that constantly attracted visitors wanting to see what was different’ (Vaughn 2009).

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    453 As a test case for implementing an Ashmolean-​wide policy of enabling greater inclusion and diversity for its displays, audiences, and staff, the development of an Ancient Middle East gallery has highlighted a number of issues around museum processes already recognized at other institutions. The Ashmolean approached the project as if it were a temporary exhibition or traditional gallery display. This was understood as a linear process in which objects are selected, a design developed in advance of label and panel text being written, and everything delivered to a preconceived timetable. In attempting to tell stories with objects and integrate text and images as integral parts of that narrative, however, much could have been learnt from the experiences of redeveloping Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum where the exhibition process was ‘nonlinear and evolving where design and execution become entangled; an implicit and intangible form of meaning-​ making drawing on the personal and idiosyncratic; and an affective, embodied, and sensory knowledge practice’ (Morgan 2013: 167). One important development at the Ashmolean was to challenge the traditional expectation that the curator would lead on writing text. Instead, an equal partnership was established, with the curator providing sufficient content for the interpretation manager to shape into engaging label text. While the development of different processes for delivering projects of this sort is important, non-​linear approaches also require much more time, not least for consultation and involvement with staff, visitors, and communities. This is a significant ask for many institutions where staff are already heavily committed and may need to be relieved of some duties; Ashmolean curators, for example, support or undertake university teaching and have research as a component of their contract as well as their regular and irregular museum activities. Ultimately, therefore, the desire to make permanent galleries engaging, relevant, and flexible spaces for diverse audiences can only be achieved as part of wider institutional change that includes every aspect of the museum’s strategy and all its stakeholders.

References Allen, S. 2004. Finding Significance. San Francisco: Exploratorium. Allen, V. 2006. ‘Changing with the Times’. Museums Journal 106 (8): p. 20. Bahrani, Z., Z. Çelik, and E. Eldem (Eds). 2011. Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–​1914. Istanbul: SALT. Bailey, M. 2019. ‘How Ethical Can Museums Afford to Be? We Ask Five Major UK Art Institutions About Funding Challenges’. The Art Newspaper. 3 September 2019. https://​www. theartnewspaper.com/​news/​how-​ethical-​can-​uk-​museums-​afford-​to-​be Barker, A.W. 2010 ‘Exhibiting Archaeology: Archaeology and Museums’. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: pp. 293–​308. Batty, J., J. Carr, C. Edwards, D. Francis, S. Frost, E. Miles, and R. Penrose. 2016. ‘Object-​ Focussed Text at the British Museum’. Exhibition 36 (1): pp. 70–​80. Bedford, L. 2001. ‘Storytelling: The Real Work of Museums’. Curator 44 (1): pp. 27–​34. Bedford, L. 2004. ‘Working in the Subjunctive Mood: Imagination and Museums’. Curator 47 (1): pp. 5–​11.

454   Paul Collins Bernhardsson, M.T. 2005. Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bird, N. 2019. ‘Multaka-​Oxford: A ‘Meeting Point’ For People and Cultures’ Museum ID. Available at: https://​mus​eum-​id.com/​mult​aka-​oxf​ord-​a-​meet​ing-​point-​for-​peo​ple-​and-​ cultu​res/​ [Accessed 16 December 2019]. Black, G. 2005. The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement. Abingdon: Routledge. Brysbaert A. 2012. ‘People and Their Things. Integrating Archaeological Theory into Prehistoric Museum Displays’. In Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories. Essays in Honour of Professor Suzan M. Pearce, edited by S.H. Dudley, A.J. Barnes, J. Binnie, J. Petrov, and J. Walklate, pp. 255–​70. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Bubaris, N. 2014. ‘Sound in Museums –​Museums in Sound’. Museum Management and Curatorship 29 (4): pp. 391–​402. Candlin, F. 2010. Art, Museum and Touch. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Challis, D. 2013. The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie. London: Bloomsbury. Chambers I., A. De Angelis, C. Ianniciello, M. Orabona, and M. Quadraro (Eds). 2014. The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History. Abingdon: Routledge. Chatterjee, H. (Ed). 2008. Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling. Oxford: Berg. Chatterjee, H.J. 2010. ‘Object-​Based Learning in Higher Education: The Pedagogical Power of Museums.’ University Museums and Collections Journal 3: pp. 179–​81. Chillot, R. 2013. ‘The Power of Touch’. Psychology Today 11 March 2013. Available at: https://​www. psyc​holo​gyto​day.com/​us/​artic​les/​201​303/​the-​power-​touch [Accessed 21 November 2019]. Classen, C. 2012. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Studies in Sensory History). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Cockcroft, J. 2019. ‘Storytelling; ‘Doing Things Differently’ in Gallery 8’. The Ashmolean 78: pp. 40–​2. Collins, P. 2019. ‘Museum Displays and the Creation of the Ancient Middle East: A View From the Ashmolean and British Museum’. In Museums and the Ancient Middle East: Curatorial Practice and Audiences, edited by G. Emberling and L.P. Petit, pp. 15–​26. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Collins, P. 2020. ‘Museums as Vehicles for Defining Artistic Canons: The Case of the Ancient Near East in the British Museum’. In Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, edited by A. Gansell and A. Shafer, pp. 232–​52. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cory, C. and P. Collins. 2019. ‘Voices in the Gallery’. The Ashmolean 78: pp. 43–​4. Di Giusppantonio Di Franco P., C. Camporesi, F. Galeazzi, and M. Kallmann. 2015. ‘3D Printing and Immersive Visualization for Improved Perception of Ancient Artifacts’. Presence 24: pp. 243–​64. Drobnick, J. 2014. ‘The Museum as Smellscape’. In The Multisensory Museum: Cross-​ Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, edited by N. Levent and A. Pascual-​ Leone, pp. 177–​ 96. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Dudley, S.H. 2010. ‘Museum Materialities: Objects, Sense and Feeling’. In Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, edited by S.H. Dudley, pp. 1–​ 18. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Telling stories at the Ashmolean Museum    455 Duthie, E. 2011. ‘The British Museum: An Imperial Museum in a Post-​Imperial World.’ Public History Review 18: pp. 12–​25. Emberling, G. and L.P. Petit. 2019. ‘Curating the Ancient Middle East’. In Museums and the Ancient Middle East: Curatorial Practice and Audiences, edited by G. Emberling and L.P. Petit, pp. 3–​14. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Evans, A. 1889. ‘Report of the Keeper to the Visitors for the Year 1889’. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Evans, A. 1908. ‘Report of the Keeper to the Visitors for the year 1908’. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Evans, E.M., M.S. Mull, and D.A. Poling. 2002. ‘The Authentic Object? A Child’s-​Eye View’. In Perspectives on Object-​Centered Learning in Museums, edited by S.G. Paris, pp. 50–​70. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Falk, J. and L. Dierking. 2000. Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Fitzgerald, L. 2005. ‘Building on Victorian Ideas’. In Reshaping Museum Space edited by S. MacLeod, pp. 133–​45. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Gilmore, G. 2011. ‘The ANE Gallery at the Ashmolean, Oxford’. Near Eastern Archaeology 74 (2): pp. 125–​8. Gosden, C. 2012. ‘Post-​Colonial Archaeology’. In Archaeological Theory Today, edited by I. Hodder (2nd edition), pp. 251–​66. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Gosden, C. and Y. Marshall. 1999. ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’. World Archaeology 31 (2): pp. 169–​78. Greenblatt, S. 2017. The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. London: The Bodley Head. Hogarth, D.G. 1909. ‘Report of the Keeper of the Antiquarium for the year 1909’. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, pp. 3–​ 9. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Hogarth, D.G. 1910. Report of the Keeper of the Antiquarium for the year 1910. In Report of the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, pp. 4–​20. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Hogarth, D.G. 1913. ‘Report of the Keeper of the Antiquarium for the year 1913’. In Report of the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, pp. 2–​12. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Hogarth, D.G. 1922. ‘Report of the Keeper of the Department of Antiquities for the year 1922’. In Report of the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, pp. 4–​14. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Howes, D. 2014. ‘The Secret of Aesthetics Lies in the Conjugation of the Senses’. In The Multisensory Museum: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, edited by N. Levent and A. Pascual-​Leone, pp. 285–​300. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kreps, C. 2020. Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Levent, N. and A. Pascual-​ Leone. 2014. The Multisensory Museum: Cross-​ disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory and Space. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Lowenthal, D. 2015. The Past Is a Foreign Country—​ Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

456   Paul Collins MacGregor, A. 2001. The Ashmolean Museum: A Brief History of the Museum and its Collections. Ashmolean Museum & Jonathan Horne Publications. Molleson, T. 1994. ‘The Eloquent Bones of Abu Hureyra’. Scientific American 271 (2): pp. 70–​5. Moore, K. 1997. Museums and Popular Culture. London and Washington: Cassell. Moorey, P.R.S. 1978. Kish Excavations, 1923–​33: With a Microfiche Catalogue of the Objects in Oxford Excavated by the Oxford Field Museum, Chicago Expedition to Kish in Iraq, 1923–​33. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Moorey, P.R.S. 1980. Cemeteries of the First Millennium B.C. at Deve Hüyük. BAR International Series 87. Oxford: BAR. Moorey, P.R.S. 1987. The Ancient Near East. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Morgan, J. 2013. ‘Examining the ‘Flexible Museum’: Exhibition Process, A Project-​Approach, And the Creative Element’. Museum and Society 11 (2): pp. 158–​7 1. Museums Association. 2018. Museums in the UK 2018 Report. London: Museums Association. Pollock, S. 2016. ‘From Clay to Stone: Material Practices and Writing in Third Millennium Mesopotamia’. In Materiality of Writing in Early Mesopotamia, edited by T.E. Balke and C. Tsouparopoulou, pp. 280–​91. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Pye, E. 2007. The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museum and Heritage Contexts. London and New York: Routledge. Riggs, C. 2017. ‘Objects in the Photographic Archive: Between the Field and The Museum In Egyptian Archaeology’. Museum History Journal 10 (2): pp. 140–​61. Seidmann, G. 2006. The Rev. Greville John Chester and ‘The Ashmolean Museum as a Home for Archaeology in Oxford’. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 16 (1): pp. 27–​33. Shanks, M. and C.Y. Tilley. 1992. Re-​constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Shelton, A.A. 2006. ‘Museums and Anthropologies: Practices and Narratives’. In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by S. MacDonald, pp. 64–​80. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Stevenson, A. 2019. Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums. London: UCL Press. Swain, H. 2007. An Introduction to Museum Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, N. 2016. The Return of Curiosity: What Museums Are Good for in the Twenty-​first Century. London: Reaktion Books. Thompson, E.L. 2016. Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present, New Haven. Vaugh, A. 2009. ‘Changing with the times’ Opinion, 13 November 2009. Available at: https://​ www.mus​eums​asso​ciat​ion.org/​muse​ums-​jour​nal/​opin​ion/​2009/​11/​14841-​2/​# [Accessed 21 November 2019]. Verderame, L. and A. Garcia-​Ventura. 2020. Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond. Atlanta, GA: Lockwood Press. Walker, S. 2013. ‘The Redeveloped Ashmolean Museum’. In The Aegean World: A Guide to Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean Antiquities in the Ashmolean, edited by Y. Galanakis, pp. 11–​19. Oxford and Athens: Ashmolean Museum and Kapon Editions. Witcomb, A. 2003. Re-​Imagining the Museum. London and New York: Routledge. Wood, E. and K.F. Latham. 2014. The Objects of Experience. Transforming Visitor-​Object Encounters in Museums. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 23

The Archa e ol o g y of Qatar Ga l l e ry at the Nationa l Mu se um of Qata r Karen Exell *

23.1  Introduction This chapter focuses on the presentation of archaeology within a new museum in the Gulf Region, examining the impact of the range of disciplines, specialisms, and cultural backgrounds involved in the production process on the resulting visitor experience, and suggesting that the National Museum of Qatar (NMOQ) has, in this respect, emerged as a leading twenty-​first-​century museum paradigm. European archaeology museums and exhibitions have followed a trajectory from an early focus on public service and didactic education with objects as chronological indicators, to mirroring archaeological theory as it moved through processual and post-​ processual debates which foregrounded answering questions about human society and historical processes and subsequently critiquing the subjectivity of such interpretations (see Barker 2010 for an overview of the development of archaeology in museums in Europe and the US with associated literature). Throughout, the educational mandate of archaeological displays has been central but its effectiveness unclear (McManus 2009). In tandem and in the light of postmodernism and changing government policies of inclusion and representation (see Golding and Modest 2013), museums have attempted to re-​position themselves as spaces of debate, foregrounding the visitor experience and

* 

The author worked on the National Museum of Qatar project from 2015 to 2019.

458   Karen Exell active engagement (Falk and Dierking 2000; Vergo 1989; Witcombe 2003), rather than as object repositories or proponents of grand historical narratives. In the Arabian Gulf, museums represent an element of the toolkit of modernity and it was their very ability to authorize an official narrative that, from the 1960s, lead to their significance as many of the Gulf states gained independence (Exell 2016). Early museum archaeology displays allowed the new nations to present a deep historical legitimacy for the state and ruling families (cf. Mitchell 2001, 2002), whilst, as remains the case today, the discipline of Archaeology remained primarily in the hands of foreign archaeologists. Local encounters with the archaeological past have been limited to some private collections and these early museums, which presented the material primarily as chronological indicators according to standard European archaeological priorities. The idea of community or public archaeology (see Okamura and Matsuda 2011; Sabloff 2016), or museums as forums for debate is nascent in Qatar and the Gulf. Within such a context, the challenge for NMoQ was how to present the archaeological past in an engaging and inspirational way to audiences the majority of whom might have limited prior knowledge of archaeology or Qatar’s history, whilst engaging those that would have such knowledges. In addition, as part of a national museum, the archaeology exhibitions were tasked with authoring the nation’s archaeological past rather than overtly presenting this as an interpretation, or one possible narrative amongst several. This chapter explores how the presentation of archaeology as art, and the production of wonder and emotion in the exhibition space (Greenblatt 1991; see also Gell 1998) can effectively overcome such challenges and constraints and productively communicate with a diverse audience, encouraging active response and discussion and putting the visitor’s unique experience at the heart of the encounter.

23.2  The National Museum of Qatar in context The National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ; Fig. 23.1) opened on the 27 March 2019 in Doha, Qatar, after a ten-​year development period, marked with an opening ceremony attended by heads of state and global celebrities reported by regional and international media. This is the second national museum that Qatar has developed, opening a generation after the first Qatar National Museum in a country that has spectacularly transformed since the 1970s, in terms of wealth and global presence, and which now has a robust reputation in the world of art and culture. The first Qatar National Museum was created in the early 1970s to mark Qatar’s emergence as an independent sovereign state in 1971. In the late 1960s, Qatar took the decision to withdraw from discussions to join what became the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a federation of seven states comprising Abu Dhabi (the capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm Al Quwain, and establish itself as a sovereign state, made possible by the availability of oil in

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Figure 23.1:  The National Museum of Qatar © Iwan Baan.

the country. Commissioning the Qatar National Museum was one of the first acts of the then ruler, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Hamad Al Thani (r. 1972–​1995), and the Museum, whose content and displays were developed by the British consultant Michael Rice, opened in June 1975 in the restored palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani (r. 1913–​1949). This building, fully restored as the palace with all traces of the 1975 museum removed, forms the architectural heart of the new building designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, and the culmination of the visitor journey. The now famous new building inspired by the ‘desert rose’ crystalline formation found in Qatar’s deserts has featured in numerous media articles and dominates internet searches for NMoQ. The Instagram-​friendly architecture has become synonymous with the Museum itself and belongs to the spectacular architecture trend lead by a select group of starchitects, which includes Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, and Zaha Hadid, that blossomed during the first two decades of the twenty-​first century, in particular in China and the Arabian Gulf, where the striking architecture and signature architects (many are winners of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture prize) leant currency to cultural institutions that otherwise might struggle to gain attention (Exell 2018a). During this period, Qatar has built its global reputation in part by strategically engaging with architects such as I.M. Pei (Museum of Islamic Art), Rem Koolhaas (Qatar National Library), Jean Nouvel (NMoQ), and Herzog and De Meuron (the planned Orientalist Museum) for its cultural projects. However, in the long lead-​up to the opening of NMoQ, while international attention focused on the

460   Karen Exell architecture and the architect, Qatari nationals and residents debated how the new museum could replace the previous and much-​loved Qatar National Museum—​the lequatarian blog run by Hassan Al Ansari was a focus of these debates at the time (see Exell 2016: 32–​3)—​which had closed in 2006 to make way for the new project, and how this new project might present Qatar’s history, heritage, and future in the twenty-​first century.

23.3  The archaeological displays in Qatar’s national museums NMoQ presents the history of Qatar in 11 immersive galleries organized into three acts or chapters: the first act covers deep time and the fossil record, natural history, and archaeology; the second act, focusing on traditions and society, presents the culture of movement, life in a desert encampment, and life on the coast—​featuring the World Heritage Site of Al Zubarah; and the third act, modern political history, comprises galleries that trace the history of the peninsula from 1500 to the present day, the emergence of Al Thani as the rulers, the collapse of the pearling industry in the early twentieth century, the discovery of oil in 1939 and its impact, and the Father Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani’s visionary reign (1995–​2013) which saw Qatar become the richest per capita country in the world. The final gallery, Qatar Today, which opened quietly at the end of 2019, nine months after the gala opening, presents the event of the regional blockade which began in June 2017 and saw the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, as well as Egypt, cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, and Qatar’s positive and future-​oriented response under the leadership of the emir, Sheikh Tamim. Within these 11 galleries, archaeology features in the third (‘Archaeology of Qatar’) and sixth (‘Life on the Coast’) galleries; this chapter will focus primarily on the Archaeology of Qatar gallery. Descriptions of the first Qatar National Museum’s displays focus on the Bedouin and heritage displays, and the reconstructed rooms in the old palace (see for example, Al Mulla 2014; Blandford 1980; Raban 1987; Rice 1977; Weiner 2008) rather than on the archaeology displays. More is known of the archaeological collection which was created by the British Archaeologist, Beatrice De Cardi, in the early 1970s; De Cardi had been specifically commissioned to create a collection that provided a chronological framework to structure the past (Crystal 1995: 16; De Cardi 1978), and it is this same collection that forms the core of the archaeological displays in NMoQ, with additional material from more recent excavations, for example those lead by Qatar Museums at Al Zubarah, and by UCL Qatar in Doha under the aegis of the Origins of Doha project.1

1 

https://​originsofdoha.wordpress.com

National Museum of Qatar    461

Figure 23.2:  The Archaeology of Qatar gallery at the National Museum of Qatar showing the ‘core chronology’ with the film by Jananne Al Ani © Sylvie van Roey.

23.3.1 The Archaeology of Qatar gallery Within the linear visitor route, the Archaeology of Qatar gallery, the third gallery space, is encountered after the gallery on natural history and before the gallery dedicated to movement as central to Qatari cultural identity. The nature of the museum’s architecture results in the internal gallery spaces flowing into one another, and there is little physical indication of transitions between galleries other than a large gallery wall text at each transition point—​though the fairly narrow route into the Archaeology of Qatar gallery does, in this instance, give some indication that the visitor is entering a new chapter of the narrative. The gallery wall text connects the Archaeology gallery with the previous Natural History gallery by referencing the changing climate and habitable nature of the peninsula at different times. The text then explains the transformation of the peninsula population from hunter-​gatherers to settled populations and ends with a reference to ongoing archaeology: ‘Much is left to uncover and explore’. The visitor enters the gallery at its central point and faces a series of tall clear glass showcases which run left and right down the spine of the space presenting archaeological finds from nine periods from 8000 BCE to 1500 CE—​known as the ‘core chronology’ whilst in development but not titled in the gallery (Fig. 23.2). The finds displayed include stone tools, weapons, pots, potsherds, and jewellery items, a standard repertoire of archaeological finds lacking the spectacular, but dense with archaeological information for specialists. In the base of each showcase, at ground level, is the display information—​thematic introductory

462   Karen Exell labels with a short description of the time period and object labels that briefly present object types and provenance, and a digital screen looping contextual information in the form of illustrations of the people of the time period and objects in use. To the left of the ‘core chronology’ are full-​scale wall mounted replicas of the petroglyphs from the site of Al Jassassiya in northeast Qatar and exhibits on the history of archaeology and contemporary archaeology in Qatar—​object display cases and a digital interactive touch table where information on archaeological sites can be accessed. Towards the far left is an interactive space combining physical and digital technologies for children to explore the discipline of archaeology and key gallery objects; in the central area related to the ‘core chronology’ display are two wooden models of archaeological sites (Al Khor and Murwab) with projections providing looping information, and an exhibit presenting burial finds from the sites of Ras Matbakh and Mezruah (Fig. 23.3). Running across the full length of the opposite wall of the gallery is a film by Iraqi-​ Irish artist and filmmaker Jananne Al Ani that loops though sequences of aerial views of Qatar’s archaeological sites and micro-​close-​ups of the surfaces of some of the objects on display, blending the two into a visual meditation on Qatar’s landscapes of past and present, accompanied by a subtle abstracted soundtrack of helicopter blades referencing the aerial photography technique. The transitional exhibit into the next gallery space is called Qatar’s Early Trade Connections and displays finds from the tenth-​century shipwreck known as the Cirebon

Figure 23.3:  The Archaeology of Qatar gallery at the National Museum of Qatar showing the Al Jassassiya petroglyph replicas and exhibits on Qatar’s past and contemporary archaeology. © Sylvie van Roey

National Museum of Qatar    463 Wreck which sank off the coast of Java with a full cargo of trade goods, indicating a route from China to Iraq via the Arabian Gulf—​a cargo including Gulf pearls and ceramics similar to those found in Qatar from the same period. This theme of international connections is also evident throughout the previous Archaeology displays: for example, in the ‘core chronology’ exhibit, reference is made to contacts with the eastern Mediterranean in the period 8000–​6500 BCE, to Mesopotamia, eastern Anatolia, eastern Africa, and Yemen in the period 6500–​3200 BCE, to Bahrain (the Dilmun civilization), and Iraq in the period 3200–​1200 BCE, to Oman and the northern coast of Arabia in the period 1200–​300 CE, to the rise and fall of the distant Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanian Empires and the Greeks and Romans in the period 300 BCE–​610 CE, and to China and Egypt in the period 1100–​1500 CE. This message of international connections and a deeply embedded cosmopolitanism is taken up in the exhibits on Al Zubarah in the Life on the Coast gallery.

23.3.2 Life on the coast: Al Zubarah After passing through the galleries on movement and the desert encampment, the visitor once more encounters an element of Qatar’s archaeological past: the World Heritage Site of Al Zubarah showcased in the gallery dedicated to presenting the traditional coastal lifestyle as the preeminent preserved example of a Qatari coastal settlement. The gallery introductory text focuses on Qatar’s overseas trade connections, which resulted in the ‘vibrant, cosmopolitan communities of Qatar’, of which Al Zubarah was one. The site of Al Zubarah is exhibited through a large-​scale wooden model (c. 6 metres wide) of the archaeological site wrapped around by a film artistically reconstructing life in Al Zubarah 200 years ago, including depictions of Indian and European traders, directed by the award-​winning filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako. As with all films in NMoQ, there is no dialogue, and the film loops on repeat allowing a visitor to engage with the exhibit at any point and with no challenge of language (Fig. 23.4). A sunken showcase in front of the model presents finds from Al Zubarah from four archaeological missions (foregrounding Qatari archaeologists), with additional focus exhibits of a pearl chest, a Quran dating to 1806 written in Al Zubarah, and a book entitled Saba’ik al-​’Asjad, a history of Al Zubarah written in 1888. Elsewhere in the gallery large glass showcases exhibit a range of objects from different periods from Al Zubarah that illustrate the theme of trade and the souq (market).

23.4  Why archaeology? The allocation of a gallery dedicated to Qatar’s archaeological past and a second gallery featuring a significant archaeological site in the new museum indicates the value placed on this element of the nation’s history and identity. The expediency of linking back to

464   Karen Exell

Figure 23.4:  The Al Zubarah exhibit in the Life on the Coast Gallery © Sylvie van Roey.

the archaeological past to legitimize current leadership in new nations has been much discussed, in particular in relation to the wider Middle East and Africa after colonialism where the colonial discipline of archaeology was repurposed as part of the independence project (Crinson 2001; Meskell 1998; Mitchell 2001; Shaw 2003). In the same vein, museums as symbols of (European) modernity have been implemented in these contexts to symbolize belonging to this modernity (Bennett 2012; Cohn 1996; Preziosi 2010). While Qatar’s relationship to the colonial powers was that of a protectorate, not of colonial dominance (Fromherz 2012), the use of these symbols of modernity and independence represents a cognate desire since the 1970s for visibility and recognition for a country long omitted from narratives of modernity. The earlier Gulf national museums of the 1970s and 1980s presented the history of their nations in two broad themes: the archaeological past and pre-​oil traditional lifestyles (Exell 2016; Kazerouni 2017; MacLean 2016). The archaeology displays reflected either an established tradition of archaeological research and excavation (e.g. Bahrain, where the Danish had been actively excavating since the 1950s) or collections developed specifically for display, as in De Cardi’s work in Qatar. De Cardi had also worked elsewhere in the Gulf, for example at Ras Al Khaimah where the RAK National Museum’s (opened in 1987) archaeological displays present Ras Al Khaimah from the third millennium BCE to the eighteenth century CE from the perspective of European scientific archaeology, resulting in the prioritization of historical periods such as the Sassanian over the Islamic (i.e. of European value systems over regional, see Exell 2016: 37). The adoption of the internal logic of the discipline of archaeology, inevitable

National Museum of Qatar    465 due to the European archaeologists undertaking the work, allowed these small Gulf states by default to connect themselves to larger regional and global historical narratives as part of the national and ruling families’ legitimization project (see Mitchell 2002)—​as presented in the museums, not only did these countries have a long history, the history was of global significance to which the current leaders’ lineage was directly connected. This desire to establish a deep historical legitimacy for the contemporary nation continues to this day in the new Gulf museums; for example, the Oman National Museum, opened in 2016, dedicates a large portion of its space to its complex archaeological past in the Prehistory and Ancient History Gallery. In NMoQ, Archaeology is used in two ways: firstly, as an anchor point in the national narrative, teleologically rendering the current cosmopolitan identity of the nation as pre-​existing deep in its archaeological past; and secondly, presenting Al Zubarah through its identity as a World Heritage Site—​the Life on the Coast: Al Zubarah gallery introductory text reads, ‘Al Zubarah, in north-​western Qatar, was one of the most important Gulf cities of the 1800s. Today, Al Zubarah is Qatar’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site. This award recognises the outstanding evidence it provides for life, trade and pearling in the region.’ In terms of Qatar’s cosmopolitan identity, the tiny peninsula state is presented as having been central to circuits of international trade and exchange for millennia, resulting in a richly cosmopolitan society then and now, which reflects and justifies its current globalized identity, for example, as host to international sporting events and a diverse multicultural resident population and home to a hub airport that services 160 destinations. The museum’s emphasis on a cosmopolitan identity, which recognizes and acknowledges the positive impact of interactions with foreign peoples in the recent past, is a significant departure for Gulf national museums. It represents a shift from early national museums which invested in archaeology to locate the new nations within broader historical narratives but, as the narrative moved closer to the present, exhibited a more reductive and exclusive Arab Sunni identity as the legitimate national identity (Exell 2016; Thabibti Willis 2016). Subsequently, the region has been witness to an emerging tension in some arenas towards the increasingly dominant foreign populations (see for example, Al Khouri 2010). Leading up to the opening of NMoQ and in the context of the regional blockade, HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, Chairperson of Qatar Museums and sister of the emir, emphasized in her public statements Qatar’s long established productive international relationships and the diverse nature of Qatari society (Exell 2018b),2 suggesting that those who legitimately belonged to the Qatari nation comprise—​in conceptual terms at least, even if not bureaucratically and legally—​ a broader and more diverse population than just Qatari passport holders. In relation to the emphasis on Al Zubarah as a World Heritage Site within the NMoQ displays, emerging nations have invested in the World Heritage brand much like they

2  For example, in her keynote address to the Seventh Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, ‘Islamic Art: Past, Present and Future,’ held in Richmond, Virginia in November 2017; available on YouTube at: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=​N70945pPJvkandfeature=​youtu.be

466   Karen Exell Table 23.1: World Heritage Sites in the Gulf as of May 2020 Country

World Heritage Sites as of May 2020

Bahrain

3 (6 on tentative list)

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

5 (11 on tentative list)

Kuwait

(4 on tentative list)

Oman

5 (7 on tentative list)

Qatar

1 (1 on tentative list)

UAE

1 (8 on tentative list)

have invested in museums, as signifiers of a contemporary modernity and global legitimacy. Gaining World Heritage status now forms part of the suite of global activities defined by anthropologist, Marc Augé as central to city-​branding (Augé 2014: 54) and achieving global relevance—​the related activities include hosting world sporting championships and being elected as cultural capitals, also relevant to Qatar. The recent flourishing of World Heritage Sites in the Arabian Gulf (Table 23.1) indicates a recognition by this region of the branding benefits of the World Heritage project—​the highly politicized World Heritage Site status is exploited for global recognition (Meskell 2014; Meskell et al. 2015). Qatar as a small nation has strategically employed the World Heritage brand to raise awareness of its archaeological past, partly to contradict external assumptions of a lack of significant history (see Exell and Rico 2013) and as central to its tourism offer: Qatar Airways and Hamad International Airport offer stopover packages comprising Al Zubarah and the new museums (Ryan 2017).

23.5  Archaeology and museums, wonder, and resonance Returning to the archaeology displays themselves, given the value placed on them in terms of space allocated inside this architecturally iconic museum, it is worth reviewing their presentation and considering if they are successful in engaging with the visitors within the museum beyond broader concepts of national branding. Central to the success of any museum exhibit is its effectiveness in impacting the visitor; arguably the most successful displays and exhibitions impact visitors emotionally and provide multiple ways to access and explore the material, allowing agency and freedom in the experience (Levent and Pascual-​Leone Lanham 2014; MacLeod et al. 2012; Moser 2010). In the Gulf, which does not have a strong museum-​going culture, studies have shown that high-​context displays that do not rely on text to communicate and allow group

National Museum of Qatar    467 and family experiences are more likely to be enjoyed by the Gulf and Arab populations (Erskine-​Loftus 2013). In Qatar, the Museum of Islamic Art housed in the beautiful I.M. Pei building on the corniche has been criticized for the austerity of its displays which present challenges to engagement for the non-​specialist, with audiences in the Museum’s early days dominated by the western residents in the country and tourists; local Qatari engagement was limited (Kennedy et al. 2016). NMoQ as a national museum was tasked with engaging a local audience reticent to accept a replacement national museum designed by a foreign architect and with a limited interest in visiting local museums, as well as engaging an international audience from diverse backgrounds with differing levels of knowledge of Qatar’s history. In addition, the experience within the museum had to be equal to, or better than, the experience of the architecture, to avoid both reinforcing the external criticism that Qatar has no real history and was compensating with spectacular architecture, and the museum becoming simply an Instagram event, a one-​stop wonder. Presenting archaeology in an engaging way in the Gulf context is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks for a museum—​whilst there are many local collectors who collect fossils and archaeological artefacts, as noted above, scientific archaeology has been undertaken primarily by foreign missions. Archaeology was only recently introduced as a subject available at university level with the one-​year MA in Arabian Archaeology offered by UCL Qatar from 2013–​2018, and the notion of public archaeology or community archaeology is nascent—​for one example, see Kamel (2018) who presents a report on a small community-​related archaeological project in Qatar (for the limits of community engagement around archaeology in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, see Alrawaibah 2014). The Archaeology of Qatar gallery at NMoQ presents its narrative of nearly 10,000 years of history in an immersive space that uses multiple methods of communication that could suggest on paper a cacophonous and disjointed experience: looping large-​scale film, audio soundtrack, over 3,000 objects, large-​scale replicas, oral histories, digital interactive exhibits and looping digital graphics, a hands-​on interactive space, models, projections, text, and graphics, within an architecture that cannot be ignored. The experience of the gallery space is however tranquil due to the careful integration of the multiple elements: the visual and audio elements are choreographed to create a balanced immersive visual and audioscape while the materials and colours are complementary—​for example, pale blonde sycamore wood models complement the beige of the stuc-​pierre gallery walls and polished floors, the digital media design is deliberately muted using black screen backgrounds, and the clear glass showcases are produced through complex engineering ensuring that there is no visible structure to distract the eye from the objects or the film. The gallery is highly complex in its technical display and communication methodology, but equal attention has been paid to concealing this methodology so that what is left is simply the visitor within the experience, without distraction. Informal observation of visitors within the gallery reveals a level of engagement with the archaeological artefacts that is surprising given their intrinsically unspectacular (if archaeologically significant) nature—​visitors are drawn close to the objects in the central

468   Karen Exell chronological display cases, objects which hang apparently in space in front of the film’s gently merging land and surface-​scapes. The muted audio soundscape of pulsing helicopter blades, an abstract score that shifts in space and time, enhances the immersive moment. The film is key in creating this meditative confrontation, inviting the visitors to encounter the objects whose position at eye level encourages extended observation of their details, surface textures, and colours. Having experienced this moment of encounter, of wonder, the visitor moves on to find out more—​read the labels, explore the digital touch tables and the more didactic displays on the History of Archaeology and Contemporary Archaeology in Qatar. Whilst critics might argue that Archaeology is not a discipline that should prioritize aesthetics over didactics in its presentation—​it is not art—​it is relevant here to refer back to the objectives of NMoQ, noted above, in terms of target audiences and desired visitor experience: to attract local audiences with limited local museum-​going interest or knowledge of archaeology, to engage international audiences who may have little previous understanding of Qatar’s history and heritage, and more broadly to create an experience that was at least equal to Jean Nouvel’s extraordinary architecture. In order to engage these audiences and unlock a curiosity about the country’s past, NMoQ’s presentation foregrounds two interrelated elements: beauty—​in terms of the design, materials, and use of visual imagery—​and emotion—​joy, sadness, or hope at certain moments in the Museum’s narrative, and, throughout, the creation of wonder. Writing on the topic of resonance and wonder in relation to history and its presentation in museums, Stephen Greenblatt (1990) defines a resonant exhibition as one that provides context (through text or other means) that may communicate the precarious (and therefore culturally valuable) nature of the object, and which pulls the viewer away from the celebration of isolated objects towards implied relationships and questions; and wonder as created when ‘the act of attention draws around itself a circle from which everything but the object is excluded . . . To be sure, the viewer may have purchased a catalogue, read an inscription on the wall . . . but in the moment of wonder, all of this apparatus seems mere static’ (Greenblatt 1990: 23–​8; see also Dudley 2012). Greenblatt quotes the Neoplatonist Francesco Patrizi (1529–​1597) as saying that ‘marveling [wonder] . . . mediates between the capacity to think and the capacity to feel’ (1990: 30), and suggests that exhibitions that contain strong elements of resonance and wonder—​‘a wonder that leads to a desire for resonance’—​are more impactful, and even more so if the initial appeal is wonder (1990: 34). The emotional response generated by the production of wonder can be compared to Shaila Bhatti’s description of the response of audiences to the Lahore Museum in Pakistan, known locally as the Ajaib Ghar or ‘House of Wonder’, a museum where the public’s encounter with the objects occurs within an expectation of ‘stimulation of curiosity, imagination and sense of awe . . . in their own way of seeing, experiencing and interpreting the exhibited objects’ (Bhatti 2012: 26); note that NMoQ’s local audiences are dominated by Arab and South Asian communities each with their own culturally-​ determined ways of seeing and experiencing. As Bhatti notes in relation to the Lahore Museum, within the museum the act of viewing translates the expectation of pleasure

National Museum of Qatar    469 from other visual experiences into the space, so the objects bring with them the expectation of an embodied experience and pleasure, a demand for a ‘sensory and emotive experience of the object rather than seeing and understanding objectified knowledge’ (2012: 225). This is arguably the approach and effect of the Archaeology of Qatar gallery, which draws in visitors to a mediatic moment of encounter with the materiality of the arrowheads, potsherds, and beads, objects which may struggle to gain or hold attention in many archaeology displays, a moment of encounter and wonder created through the aesthetics of the display. A comparable experience is described by Sandra Dudley in her chapter ‘Encountering a Chinese Horse: Exploring the Thingness of Thing’ where she describes being almost moved to tears by the ‘threedimensionality, tactility and sheer power’ of the object (Dudley 2012: 1). This moment of wonder has a powerful impact on the visitor’s relationship with museum and its narrative, the effect of the object encounter creating forms of ‘linkage, resonance, sedimentation, recollection and commemoration that fold and unfold emotional relationships through the object world’ (Casella and Woodward 2014: 104), and which arguably encourage the perception that the dense information layered throughout the rest of the Archaeology of Qatar gallery and elsewhere in the museum is accessible, relevant, and freely available to personal interpretation.

23.6  Producing the contemporary archaeological narrative in the Gulf The model of museum production in the Gulf countries is one of making use of highly-​ specialized global teams with local (national) input—​local curators and experts—​for content verification and project approvals; the large specialist team that produced NMoQ (upwards of 300 specialists during the installation process) exemplifies this production method. The specialist team might include the designers, interpretive planners, content producers such as filmmakers, audio designers, artists and model-​ makers, and the many diverse specialisms involved in a museum fit-​out process, such as mount-​makers, AV hardware and software designers, and lighting designers, all of whom influence the final museum content, narrative, and visitor experience. This networked production method belies the traditional assumption of the dominant authority of the curator in an exhibition’s production of knowledge (see Longair 2015 for a discussion of curatorial authority; see Becker 1992; MacDonald 2002; and Barrett 2011 for discussions of networked approaches to artwork and exhibition production); the interaction of the diverse actors with their differing cultural and technical backgrounds results in the final gallery presentation and visitor experience, a model of complex dispersed authority rather than a single authoritative curatorial voice—​a global choir rather than a local solo.

470   Karen Exell A snapshot of the actors, nationalities, and specialisms involved in the production of the Archaeology of Qatar gallery—​and NMoQ as a whole—​also illustrates the cosmopolitan nature of the project. While senior management, stakeholders, and content experts were Qatari nationals, consultants, and contractors working on the content, and interpretation development and technical delivery were international, with team members coming from Europe (predominantly Spain, France, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands), the US, South, and East Asia (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines) and the Arab world (Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, Syria, Egypt); the client project team was equally diverse. The international–​local balance in the project team is comparable to the constitution of the Qatari population which in 2019 was 10.5 percent Qatari national, 89.5 percent foreign residents comprising more than 94 nationalities (Snoj 2019). The existence of a dominant foreign resident population has resulted in a tension in Qatar in recent decades, where the richly diverse population, essential to the country’s economy, is regarded by some as a cultural threat and is therefore underrepresented in the public realm (cf. Gardner 2010 for a similar situation in Bahrain) and tightly controlled through the kafala system of foreign resident sponsorship. It is this context of tension that HE Sheikha Al Mayassa addressed in her public statements leading up to the opening of NMoQ, noted above, which suggest an inclusive vision for the museum referencing a new approach to national belonging; it is this very contemporary vision of Qatar, as cosmopolitan, diverse, and inclusive, that is presented as central to Qatar’s identity for millennia in the Archaeology of Qatar gallery.

23.7  Concluding thoughts: Archaeology and Qatar’s future The response to NMoQ’s permanent galleries has been, by and large, positive, evident in both the high level of visitor numbers and the local and international press coverage. The visitors have been representative of Qatar’s resident populations (NMoQ records nationality for all visitors, noting large numbers of South Asian and Arab visitors) and the museum was receiving up to 7,000 visitors a day, sometimes more, throughout the first months of opening, including during the Holy Month of Ramadan which occurred shortly after the March opening (during Ramadan the Museum was only open 8pm-12 midnight; international visitors tend to decrease during this month and many foreign residents travel) and the summer months when large portions of the population, Qatari national and foreign resident, travel to escape the heat. The success of NMoQ, including its archaeology displays, is the outcome of the intertwined networks of people and cultures involved in its production, who—​if at times inadvertently—​accommodated the local subjectivity of a large sections of the audience (for example, the South Asian and Arab audiences) in the display methodology,

National Museum of Qatar    471 allowing not one single determinacy in its experience (cf. Bhatti 2012: 224), whilst retaining a depth and resonance in the exhibits. This latter is achieved through the provision of multilayered information in diverse media, whilst art films by named artists and filmmakers add a layer of significance in particular to those familiar with these artists and create an immersive experience for all. Significant is the provision of content without language (art films, large-​scale images, soundscapes, objects as art) which bypasses the challenge of effectively communicating with the multicultural audience. NMoQ is in effect globally localized, produced globally and open to the ‘fluid and multiple ways of seeing and interpreting’ (Bhatti 2012: 226) of the locally diverse audiences. This method of networked international museum production has evolved a new set of technical and creative specialisms required to produce a museum or exhibition, encompassing and moving beyond the expertise of the authoritative curator; the Gulf museums represent a newly emerging paradigm for museum production and by extension operation (as high levels of digital and AV content requires related technical expertise to maintain). In this paradigm, maintaining the visitor experience is paramount, whilst the more traditional pursuits of curators in research-​related activities will take time to evolve. These new museums are perhaps surprising exemplars of the shift in European museums from object-​facing to audience-​facing that began with the New Museology movement of the last decades of the twentieth century (Vergo 1989; Witcombe 2003). In sum, NMoQ represents in its production and presentation a microcosm of Qatar today, a cosmopolitan and globally engaged society with the resources to access and exploit the most lavish and beautiful materials, cutting-​edge technologies and world-​renowned artists, architects, and related expertise. Qatar Airways and Hamad International Airport are also key actors in this network of production, the extensive network of destinations allowing efficient and continual travel of people and resources for the project. The Archaeology of Qatar gallery embodies Qatar’s global position in its production and presentation, while the narrative of millennia of inclusive cosmopolitanism captures a future vision for the nation.

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472   Karen Exell Barker, A.W. 2010. ‘Exhibiting Archaeology: Archaeology and Museums’. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: pp. 293–​308. Barrett, J. 2011. Museums and the Public Sphere. Malden MA and Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Becker, H.S. 1982. Art Worlds. Oakland: University of California Press. Bennett, T. 2012. ‘Machineries of Modernity: Museums, Theories, Histories’. Cultural and Social History: The Journal of the Social History Society 9 (1): pp. 145–​56. Bhatti, S. 2012. Translating Museums: A Counterhistory of South Asian Museology. Walnut Creek, California: West Coast Press. Blandford, L. 1980. Oil Sheikhs: Inside the Supercharged World of the Petrodollar. London: W.H. Allen. Casella, E.C. and K. Woodward. 2014. ‘Part II: Affective Objects: Introduction.’ In Objects & Materials, edited by Penny Harvey, Eleanor Conlin Casella, Gillian Evans, Hannah Knox, Christine McLean, Elizabeth B. Silva, Nicholas Thoburn, and Kath Woodward, pp. 103–​108. London and New York: Routledge.Cohn, B.S. 1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crinson, M. 2001. ‘Nation-​Building, Collecting and the Politics of Display’. Journal of the History of Collections 13 (2): pp. 231–​50. Crystal, J. 1995. Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Cardi, B. (Ed). 1978. Qatar Archaeological Report: Excavations 1973. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Dudley, S.H. 2012. ‘Encountering a Chinese Horse: Engaging with the Thingness of Things’. In Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things, edited by S. Dudley, pp. 1–​15. London and New York: Routledge. Erskine-​Loftus, P. 2013. ‘What Are We Silently Saying? Non-​verbal Communication and Exhibitions’. In Reimagining Museums: Practice in the Arabian Peninsula, edited by P. Erskine-​Loftus, pp. 470–​517. Edinburgh and Boston: MuseumsEtc. Exell, K. 2016. Modernity and the Museum in the Arabian Peninsula. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Exell, K. 2018a. The Global Spectacular: Contemporary Museum Architecture in China and the Arabian Peninsula. London: Lund Humphries. Exell, K. 2018b. ‘Adapting Ambitions at the Time of Crisis: Qatar’s Evolving International Cultural Strategies’. In The Qatar Crisis 2017: The View from Within, edited by R. Miller, pp. 1–​17. Doha: HBKU. Exell, K. and T. Rico. 2013. ‘There is No Heritage in Qatar’: Orientalism, Colonialism and other Problematic Histories’. World Archaeology 45 (4): pp. 670–​85. Falk J.H. and L.D. Dierking. 2000. Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Fromherz, A. 2012. Qatar: A Modern History. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Gardner, A. 2010. City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain. Ithaca and London: ILR Press/​Cornell University Press. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford and New York: Clarendon. Golding, V. and W. Modest. (Eds). 2013. Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaborations. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Greenblatt, S. 1990. ‘Resonance and Wonder’. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43 (4): pp. 11–​34. Greenblatt, S. 1991/​ 2017. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

National Museum of Qatar    473 Kamel, E. 2018. ‘An Archaeology Project Connects Young Qataris to Their Past’. Al Fenar Media. Available at: https://​www.al-​fan​arme​dia.org/​2018/​07/​an-​arch​aeol​ogy-​proj​ect-​conne​cts-​ young-​qata​ris-​to-​their-​past/​ [Accessed 20 April 2021]. Kazerouni, A. 2017. Le miroir des cheikhs: Musée et politique dans les principautés du golfe Persique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Kennedy, T., J. Hargreaves, and A. Al Khater. 2016. ‘A Study of Visitor Behaviour at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha’. In Museums in Arabia: Transnational Practices and Regional Processes, edited by K. Exell and S. Wakefield, pp. 70–​91. London and New York: Routledge. Levent, N. and A. Pascual-​ Leone Lanham. 2014. The Multisensory Museum: Cross-​ Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory and Space. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Longair, S. (Ed). 2015. ‘Cultures of Curating: The Limits of Authority’. Museum History Journal 1: pp. 1–​7. MacDonald, S. 2002. Behind the Scenes of the Science Museum. Oxford: Berg. Maclean, M. 2016. ‘Time, Space and Narrative in Emirati Museums’. In Representing the Nation: Heritage, Museums, National Narratives, and Identity in the Arab Gulf States, edited by P. Erskine-​Loftus, V. Penziner-​Hightower, and M. Al-​Mulla, pp. 191–​204. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Macleod, S., L. Hourston Hanks, and J. Hale. (Eds). 2012. Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. London and New York: Routledge. McManus, P.M. (Ed). 2009. Archaeology Displays and the Public: Museology and Interpretation. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge. Meskell, L. (Ed). 1998. Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. London: Routledge. Meskell, L. 2014. ‘States of Conservation: Protection, Politics, and Pacting within UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee’. Anthropological Quarterly 87 (1): pp. 217–​43. Meskell, L., C. Liuzza, E. Bertacchini, and D. Saccone. 2015. ‘Multilateralism and UNESCO World Heritage: Decision-​making, States Parties and Political Processes’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (5): pp. 423–​40. Mitchell, T. 2001. ‘Making the Nation: The Politics of Heritage in Egypt.’ In Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism, edited by N. Al-​Sayyad, pp. 213–​39. London and New York: Routledge. Mitchell, T. 2002. The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-​Politics, Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Moser, S. 2010. ‘The Devil is in the Detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge’. In Museum Anthropology 33 (1): pp. 22–​32. Okamura, K. and A. Matsuda. 2011. New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology. New York, Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London: Springer. Preziosi, D. 2010. ‘Myths of Nationality’. In National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, edited by S.J. Knell, P. Aronssen, A. Bugge Amundsen, A. Barnes, S. Burch, J. Carter, V. Gosselin, S.A. Hughes, and A. Kirwan, pp. 56–​66. London and New York: Routledge. Raban, J. 1987. Arabia Through the Looking Glass (new edn.). London: Pan Books Ltd. Rice, M. 1977. ‘The National Museum of Qatar’. Museum International 29 (2–​3): pp. 78–​87. Ryan, M. 2017. ‘How to Get More Out of a Stopover in Doha’. The Telegraph 11 July. Available at: https://​www.telegr​aph.co.uk/​tra​vel/​visit-​singap​ore-​with-​qatar/​what-​to-​do-​on-​a-​stopo​ ver-​in-​doha/​ [Accessed 20 April 2021].

474   Karen Exell Sabloff, J.A. 2016. ‘Public Archaeology’. Oxford Bibliographies. Available at: https://​www.oxfor​ dbib​liog​raph​ies.com/​view/​docum​ent/​obo-​978019​9766​567/​obo-​978019​9766​567-​0021.xml [Accessed 20 April 2020]. Snoj, J. 2019. Population of Qatar by Nationality –​2019 Report. Priya Dsouza Communications. Available at: http://​priy​adso​uza.com/​pop​ulat​ion-​of-​qatar-​by-​nati​onal​ity-​in-​2017/​ [Accessed 10 April 2021]. Shaw, W. 2003. Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Thabiti Willis, J. 2016. ‘A Visible Silence: Africans in the History of Pearl Diving in Dubai, UAE’. In Museums in Arabia: Transnational Practices and Regional Processes, edited by K. Exell and S. Wakefield, pp. 34–​50. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Vergo, P. 1989. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books. Weiner, E. 2008. The Geography of Bliss: The Grumpiest Man on the Planet Goes in Search of the Happiest Places on Earth. London: Transworld Publishers. Witcombe, A. 2003. Re-​imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 24

Representi ng fi e l d pr actices in di spl ay The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin

24.1  Introduction Archaeology is driven by a profound curiosity about the human past (Fagan and Durrani 2016). It is a field stemming from people’s endless curiosity about the world, their self, and existence, by studying the ancient and recent human past. Communities are involved both in the curation and exploration of the archaeological practice and in its interpretation in collaboration with researchers. A challenge for archaeological museums and their exhibitions is to make the scientific background of the objects in their collections more engaging for the audience. Exhibitions, especially in archaeology, are not just about showing objects, although these might be essential in some cases; it is more about telling stories. A more conceptual approach to exhibition is needed to move beyond simply relating facts about objects. This chapter provides a practice-​based perspective by presenting the exhibition ‘The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’, opened at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilization (ANAMED) in 2017. The principal objective of the exhibition was to display the excavations and archaeological research conducted by the Çatalhöyük Research Project members for 25 years. This chapter discusses the interactive and digital display formats which enabled the audience to experience the fieldwork and scientific research through various narrative structures.

476    Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin

24.2  Representing field practices in display: The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük Exhibition Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilization (ANAMED) was founded in 2005. The Center grants fellowships to researchers specializing in Turkey’s cultural heritage, provides library services, organizes public meetings such as symposia, conferences, and workshops, hosts exhibitions, and publishes scholarly works related to Anatolian civilizations. As part of ANAMED’s mission, we prepared an exhibition to celebrate the 25th excavation season of the Çatalhöyük Research Project and the science of archaeology. The exhibition, ‘The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’, was held in June 2017. Afterward, it was moved to the Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London in the autumn of 2018. The ANAMED Gallery is a space dedicated to exhibitions focusing on archaeology, art history, and history. The gallery provides a platform for academic research to reach the wider public through its exhibitions. It neither has a collection nor is it registered as a museum. In Turkey, there is the decree that only museums that are accredited by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism can display the objects and artworks on loan from museum collections.1 Therefore, it was not possible to show original artefacts. Initially this seemed like a disadvantage, but ultimately led us to find more creative solutions. As a result, Çatalhöyük was presented through experiment-​based display features including 3D prints of archaeological finds, laser-​scanned overviews of excavated areas, and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) opportunities that brought the 9,000-​year-​old Çatalhöyük settlement back to life. Along with the object-​free display techniques, one of the primary goals of the exhibition was to immerse visitors so that they could gain meaningful insight into archaeological processes, these novel exhibition techniques accomplished this goal. The exhibition was not the first attempt of an exhibition on the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük. In 2001, an exhibition was opened in the Science Museum of Minnesota.2 As it is stated in their website: The exhibit addresses the questions that fuel the research at the site: Who were the people who lived at Çatalhöyük? Why did they choose to live together? How did they survive? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? How were their lives similar to or different from ours? The exhibit demonstrated how contemporary archaeological research produces questions as well as answers, and is shaped by researchers’ perspectives as much as by what they find. 1 

2 

Culture and Natural Assets Protection Law, Law Number: 2863. https://​www.smm.org/​catal/​ [Accessed 14 April 2020].

Representing field practices in display    477 It appears that the exhibition did not distinguish narrating Neolithic life and narrating archaeological research techniques. From their well-​documented website, it is evident that they mainly focused on life at Çatalhöyük with a brief description of the research behind the discoveries. Some 16 years after the exhibition in Minnesota, the authors were tasked with organizing the exhibition with a primary focus on fieldwork and scientific research so that visitors would understand how the results were achieved. Archaeology has a strong presence in popular culture in movies, video games, graphic novels, and TV series. In most of these media they pay more attention to clichés and archaeological facts are altered to fit the stories. In ‘The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ exhibition, the main aim was to show the various aspects of the fieldwork without reducing the scientific background. It was intended to explain that an archaeological interpretation depends on decades of collaborative work between researchers from different disciplines.

24.3  Displaying theory Çatalhöyük is located on the Konya plain in Turkey. It has been the subject of investigation for more than 50 years. Since 1993, the Çatalhöyük Research Project has recruited an international group of specialists to pioneer new archaeological, conservation, and curatorial methods on and off-​site. Ian Hodder led the Çatalhöyük Research Project, which has been shedding light on the development of one of the world’s earliest societies, the social and economic organization of the settlement, and the transformation from hunting and gathering to agriculture and civilization. In recent research, he has built theories about how human entanglement with material things draws humans down certain evolutionary and historical pathways, while at the same time constraining choices that can be made (Hodder 2012; Hodder and Marciniak 2015). In an exhibition layout, the interpretation of scientific research and theories in everyday language is of extreme importance. Presentations must be communicated in an accessible manner. There is a risk when explaining theory that it might overcomplicate the narration. The main storyline of the exhibition was the reflexive methods of the excavations from the initial phase when the trowel touches the soil to the documentation of the finds, through laboratory analysis to the transfer of information. It illustrated the work of the research team of international specialists and elucidated the various stages of the excavation project. This was followed by a section that focused on the tools, methodologies, and approaches employed at Çatalhöyük, such as priority tours, excavation diaries, a single context recording system, and Harris matrices. On the next wall, priority tour videos were displayed on a loop. Visitors were also able to choose any particular date on a tablet to access excavation diaries. By including varied content digitally, the intention was to overcome the challenge of the complicated context of archaeological theories

478    Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin and terminologies. The videos were accompanied by wall texts written in an inclusive language. In an independent section entitled ‘Ask Ian’, we aimed to interact with the visitor. To prepare this content, we invited the public from ANAMED’s social media channels to contribute to a survey of ‘What you would like to ask Ian Hodder?’ Questions were collected online, then recorded videos with Ian Hodder as he answered each question. In this section, which provided intimate one-​on-​one interaction; visitors sat in a chair and listened to the answers as if they were chatting with him. Publications are an integral part of discussing archaeological theories. The exhibition depicted the process, from the discovery of a find in the field, to the publication. More than 500 articles and books published on Çatalhöyük were compiled for the exhibition and displayed in the ANAMED Library. This created the opportunity to examine all the written sources on one of the best documented societies of its time.

24.4  Archaeology exhibition without artefacts Museums display original objects as their main method of communication. As David Dean (2002) has argued, it is possible to differentiate whether an exhibition is object or concept oriented. According to this division in exhibitions ‘The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ is concept oriented. At first sight, it might be disappointing to create an exhibit on Çatalhöyük without the chance to display the famous female figurine, widely known as the ‘Mother Goddess’, or the renowned wall paintings that are significant in terms of understanding ideas of beliefs and symbolism within Neolithic society. Preparing a conceptual exhibition that is not based on artefacts themselves led to a more experimental format of narration.

24.4.1 The role of documentation, archiving, and cataloguing when displaying Excavation archives play a crucial role when preparing the content of an exhibition. Augustus Pitt-​Rivers’ detailed excavation reports were a methodological breakthrough in the nineteenth century and his seven-​volume report demonstrated that records are as important as artefacts (Swain 2007: 27). As Peter G. Dorrel argues: ‘As long as archaeological excavation continues, and as long as artefacts are studied and conserved, there will be a need for accurate visual records’ (Dorrell 2000: 251). Through fieldnotes, records, and other forms of data recording, sites are preserved by their records as they are excavated. Additionally, they are great sources for interpretation through the analysis of these records. ‘The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ was enriched by

Representing field practices in display    479 the research value of the archives and the research database of the Çatalhöyük Research Project, and the exhibit included these archival materials in the exhibition layout.

24.4.2 Digital tools to learn and engage Interactive digital storytelling and digital tools make archaeological themes more attractive by potentially providing more effective ways to communicate than traditional static display. Digital media, artificial intelligence and machine learning, software studies, mapping and geographic information systems, information design, and 3D modelling and printing are considered as part of ‘digital storytelling’ methods that exhibitions in archaeological museums, or museums in general, may employ (Pujol et al. 2012, 2019). Although field excavation remains the primary form of investigation at Çatalhöyük, digital, experimental, and visual reconstruction methods were equally invested in, and employed to aid, research and interpretation. This legacy is reflected in exhibition displays with 3D printed replicas, laser-​scanned overviews of the mounds, and VR simulation.

24.4.3 The use of 3D models in archaeology exhibition During the project’s 25 years, excavations were carried out in eight different areas, each of which were selected for different purposes. Combined, these areas have accounted for only 7 percent of the total mound. The exhibition aimed to show a model of the settlement in order to visualize this 7 percent of the 13 hectares mound, and to show that archaeological excavations are a slow and detailed process. In fact, archaeologists do not claim to dig all of the settlement. In the exhibition, all of the excavated areas in the model of the mound were shown in the exact locations (Fig. 24.1). When visitors clicked on the buttons, they got brief descriptions and visual materials, such as team photos and videos of the areas, projected onto the wall. The boundaries of the mound and the locations of the areas were printed over the GIS plans. But the areas themselves were 3D printed using the terrestrial laser scanning data. These data were produced by the project ‘3D-​Digging at Çatalhöyük’, which began in 2009 as a collaboration between Stanford University (Archaeological Center) and the University of California, Merced. Duke University’s Dig@Lab joined the project in 2013 to enhance the digital document workflow. The scope was to record, document with different digital technologies, and visualize all the phases of archaeological excavation. Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) has been a primary remote sensing technique for disciplines related to archaeology, architecture, built heritage, earth science, metrology, and land survey. The increasing precision, range, and survey speed of TLS make this technology even more viable for large-​scale data capturing in the Age of Sensing. The 3D-​Digging project scanned both the North and South Areas with the purpose of multimodal capture workflows, semi-​automated post-​processing, online archiving,

480    Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin

Figure 24.1:  3D Printed Model of Çatalhöyük.

and online visualization and management of point clouds, with the aim to open new horizons for digital archaeology. For the Çatalhöyük Mound model, the Terrestrial Laser Scanned data of North and South areas were transferred to us by Nicola Lercari, a member of the 3D-​digging Project, based at the University of California, Merced. At that stage we encountered a problem: since the area was scanned from the surface, it was impossible to print it without processing data on wall thicknesses. The data delivered by Lercari consisted of a 29-​million-​point cloud and we had to connect all those points in order to make it printable. Fly-​through videos created from laser scans provided an overview of the excavation areas and landscape accompanied the model.

24.4.4 From laboratory desks to the gallery At Çatalhöyük, the laboratories are located next to the mound to provide a close relationship between the excavators and specialists. In these laboratories, faunal, archaeobotanical, conservational, bio-​ archaeological, pottery, clay objects, ground stone, obsidian, and micromorphological analyses are conducted. The exhibition mimicked this flow, and after visiting the excavation sections, the visitors were directed to the laboratories section which were small replicas of the real lab atmosphere. The design of the exhibition also celebrated the laboratory set up on site. Blue and red crates

Representing field practices in display    481 were heavily used at the excavation site. This was incorporated into the exhibition. Crates were used to cover gallery walls, as they pile up the excavation house’s rooms. In that section, the visitors had the chance to role-​play as specialists by using their tools and looking at the materials, like seeds, under microscopes. Some of the 3D printed artefacts were also placed on the lab tables. For instance, the fragments of what was possibly an oval-​shaped vessel, which was re-​constructed by ceramic specialists on the site, were printed. Each fragment was individually printed, and micro-​magnets were placed on these edges. This allowed visitors to have the experience of refitting the ceramic vessel by themselves. Archaeological interpretation at Çatalhöyük is produced collectively by the participation of many specialists. It is not necessary for specialists who bring a certain interpretation to be physically located in the laboratory. Therefore, it was decided to make a library of the finds in order to show both the process of this collaborative work and to give more detailed information about the artefacts themselves. When investigating the methods to best display this, the solution we found was RFID (Radio-​Frequency IDentification) technology. The RFID device serves the same purpose as a barcode or a magnetic strip on the back of a credit card or ATM card; it provides a unique identifier for that object. And, just as a barcode or magnetic strip must be scanned to get the information, the RFID device must be scanned to retrieve the identifying information. About 42 objects were selected, which represents all finds of Çatalhöyük, from seeds to the plastered skull. Then an abstract method to imitate the objects was found, a sense was embedded in each object, and these were then placed on shelves. This was the ‘Finds Library’ (Fig. 24.2). Visitors then selected these objects and brought them to a station where the RFID reader reflected the information on the screen. Such digital experiences can encourage participants to feel connected with the past, and rethink the present and future (Perry et al. 2019).

24.4.5 Virtual Reality Virtual Reality is an increasingly utilized tool in museums (Carrozzino et al. 2010). Many research projects have been conducted to offer immersive, interactive simulation of the past civilizations and to observe human–​computer interaction. (Puig et al. 2020). VR adaptations were among the interdisciplinary projects that were developed throughout the duration of the Çatalhöyük Research Project. By including the VR re-​creation of the Çatalhöyük, the aim for the exhibition was to make the visitors a part of the process and it could not be accomplished until they could feel that they were at Çatalhöyük. It would, therefore, not have been possible without Virtual reality (Fig. 24.3). Digital visualization at Çatalhöyük started in the 1990s with the early 3D computer graphics imagery produced by the Karlshure Team. Subsequently, the work of the UC Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük Team (BACH) on digital media and interactive data visualization contributed to further advances in our understanding of the

Figure 24.2:  Finds Library at the ‘Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ exhibition.

Figure 24.3:  Visitor experiencing VR at the ‘Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ exhibition.

Representing field practices in display    483 hermeneutical role of visualization in archaeology. More recently, the photorealistic approach was used by Grant Cox and the Southampton Team in rendering a highly evocative reconstruction of a Çatalhöyük building, with the well-​known name ‘Shrine of the Hunters’. These works were mostly created for archaeologists to be able to provide a digital work environment to use for educational purposes. The exhibition set out to showcase one of the VR projects but there were concerns about the user experience. Some of them had suitable content but the necessary changes could not be incorporated due to lack of access to the source material. Finally, we got in contact with Laja Pujol from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, who developed a virtual model of Çatalhöyük that was being developed in the context of the LEAP project. Although this project was also geared towards education purposes, it allowed for changes to make it user friendly for a gallery audience. Guidance for interactions available to the user had to be implemented, and transition points of the experience had to be streamlined. For instance, a ladder was added for access to the roof instead of the existing selection user interface. This provided a diegetic interface that was easier to use for the audience. This VR project presented an immersive re-​creation of the Çatalhöyük settlement. Equipped with VR headsets, visitors were transported back into a Çatalhöyük building to observe what life may have been like back then.

24.4.6 Artistic interventions for new perspectives For more than half a century, Çatalhöyük inspired artists as much as it did archaeologists. The site has been the subject of books, videos, exhibitions, artworks, songs, board games, and even fashion shows. It has inspired thousands of illustrations and photographs, and more recently, digital models, which circulate the world, sparking myths, conversations, and re-​imaginings of Çatalhöyük. Much of this visual media has been generated at the site itself, by those affiliated with the excavations that have been conducted there since the early 1960s. Artists attended residencies on-​site and were always welcome to explore new possibilities for interpreting the site. Given that art had always been a part, since excavations started at the site, artists were invited to present how the site has been subject to artistic interventions. ‘Digital art’ includes not only purely immaterial works expressed in code, software, or data, but also installations and performative works that use digital media. The term is applied to both works that primarily use digital technology as part of their method of production (as in certain forms of digital photography), and to projects in which the processual qualities of digital technology are an elementary feature of the work. Examples include generative software and works based on an interaction between the recipient and the digital systems (Kwastek 2013). In 2017, the British Museum employed digital imaging and 3D-​modelling techniques to recreate the Jericho Skull, and presented the results in the exhibition entitled ‘Creating

484    Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin

Figure 24.4:  Çatalhöyük Research Project Archive by Refik Anadol.

an ancestor: the Jericho Skull’.3 Another exhibition that adopted digital tools in 2017 was the ‘Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra’4 exhibition. The Grand Palais and the Musée du Louvre, under the patronage of UNESCO, worked together to develop a multimedia show, projecting enormous 3D photographs and videos, thereby allowing visitors to explore important archaeological sites that are now inaccessible. Although the examples of digital displays created by research teams and experts in computing are growing, artistic works produced in this area are limited. Enabling greater access of artists to all extant data to allow different perspectives interpreting the information that archaeologists, heritage professionals, or museums have collected or created, is critical to the field of cultural heritage. Data visualization is essential for scientifically oriented archaeology in that it assists researchers to develop novel ways to display and explore data, thereby improving scholarly communication of research (Mara and Bogacz 2015). Commissioned by ANAMED, renowned media artist Refik Anadol created an award-​winning media installation as part of the exhibition (Fig. 24.4). Anadol works in the fields of site-​specific public art with a parametric data sculpture approach and live audio/​visual performance with an immersive installation approach. His works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts.

3 

4 

https://​blog.britis​hmus​eum.org/​fac​ing-​the-​past-​the-​jeri​cho-​skull/​ [Accessed 14 April 2020]. https://​www.gran​dpal​ais.fr/​en/​event/​eter​nal-​sites [Accessed 14 April 2020].

Representing field practices in display    485 Anadol has visually collated 2.8 million data records belonging to 250,000 finds, discovered throughout the 25 years of scientific research conducted by the Çatalhöyük Research Project. More than 1,000 relational database tables translated into a poetic visual experience. The archive, consisting of millions of pieces of interconnected data, is also a digital resource that has been organized by specialists, including tabular records, diaries, images, and technical reports. The records include units, spaces, features, and buildings discovered during the excavations. Anadol’s work was the first time such a large volume of archaeological data from one site had been used in an artistic and aesthetic framework. By employing machine learning algorithms to sort relations among these records, Anadol transformed this knowledge into an immersive media installation that transcends research, archaeology, art, and technology. To achieve his goals, Anadol ran ten different trial scenarios. The scenarios and the scenes on display were the combined outputs of calculations that took several days each. These algorithms, used to define objects, did so with greater speed and accuracy than any human being. The background sounds were not manmade soundtracks created for immersion, but the actual audio conversion of the accumulated data on display. Kerim Karaoğlu, a composer and sound designer, used the same data and put it through a program to come up with the composition. The machine intelligence itself provides a major advantage in displaying complex entities in a form that can be observed by the audience. A second artistic intervention was a collaboration with Performistanbul, resulting in a performance project called ‘ONE’ by Nazlı Gürlek, held in September 2017. Gürlek’s project was inspired by a wall painting dated around 6500 BC, discovered in Building 80 at Çatalhöyük. She brought an archaeological find back to life and presented it to the audience from an artistic point of view. Gürlek’s project was also an attempt at an artistic adaptation of the Çatalhöyük Research Project’s archaeological methodology of reflexivity, interactivity, multivocality, and contextuality. Gürlek re-​created the ritual by bringing together three different ways of expression including painting, documentation, and movement: two 9m rolls of paper with drawings inspired by the Çatalhöyük painting; visual documentation of the excavation process showing the unveiling of the painting, and a live performance based on bodily movements of the performer. The piece was choreographed as a rehearsal, a collective ritual, and a live interpretation where the audience was invited to witness the live action on stage at all moments of its four-​hour duration.

24.5  Visitor engagement for different age groups The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük was a challenging exhibition in terms of interpretation and exhibition design. Digital, experimental tools, and visual reconstruction

486    Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin methods played a major role in expanding the audience demographics of the ANAMED Gallery. The main exhibition, which opened in Istanbul, attracted great interest among academics and researchers who use ANAMED libraries and other research facilities, as well as visitors from all age and occupational groups. The gallery is located in the centre of the city. Thanks to its advantageous location, the exhibition also attracted many tourists visiting Istanbul. During its eight-​month run in Istanbul, it was visited by more than 60,000 people. An additional 8,000 people visited it in London, where it was open for only two months. By employing digital tools, the exhibition attracted different educational groups. Archaeology departments from universities across Turkey included the exhibition in their syllabi. Additionally, education departments examined the interpretive methods of the exhibition, how it fostered critical and creative thinking, and how it visualized information to promote dialogue. It was praised by elementary and secondary school teachers for its knowledge transfer methods and many schools organized field trips to bring students to the exhibit. Children are not generally a main target group for the ANAMED Gallery. The gallery aims to reach academics, university students, and adults that are interested in the subject areas of the research centre. The interactive and educational modules, however, appealed to students of all ages, and brought groups from elementary schools both from İstanbul and from other cities in Turkey to ANAMED. We note a comment by two of the visitors: Besides improving our knowledge of a subject as fascinating Çatalhöyük, I have seen similar examples in other countries, but this is the first time in Turkey, an exhibition prepared using the various method of training and technology. In addition to mastering the content of the subject and meticulous work that adds vision to the country, their creativity in presentation, using the latest trends used in technology and scientific environments, sharing data, making working environments visible and accessible have brought success to the exhibition. Virtual reality, timeline, memory boxes that work with radio waves, visualized-​zoomed excavations (like the trip we did with our bio cube), digging logs digitized, questions of the voice-​recorded professor some of them. They do a lot of work in a narrow space and involve the visitors to the process. Science Teacher at Primary School After two years since I had given up on my five-​year study of archaeology when I saw it that made me cry next to my mother. It was a wonderful experience. Endless thanks to everyone who contributed to the exhibition for reviving my dreams. Anonymous visitor

In addition, students in art history and archaeology departments at universities in Istanbul and in London were given assignments to study both the exhibition methods and the settlement itself. Interest was so intense that the exhibition’s closing date was

Representing field practices in display    487 extended three times. It was a challenging exhibition to complete in terms of interpretation and exhibition design. However, the digital and experimental tools, and visual reconstruction methods engaged audiences in both London and Istanbul.

24.6  Conclusion Until recently, archaeological fieldwork has less frequently been the subject of museum display. Although people are often interested in visiting sites when excavations are ongoing, fieldwork processes are rarely included in many archaeological exhibitions. ‘The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük’ enabled visitors to gain a better understanding of the fieldwork carried out by archaeologists. Through the interactive excavation house set-​up, visitors could step into the shoes of archaeologists working at a Neolithic site, an experience that cannot be replicated, even at the site itself. Its combination of narration, details, and a hands-​on approach made it unique, and it contributed to both archaeology and a greater public understanding and appreciation of Çatalhöyük. Subsequently, further examples of exhibitions like this were developed to showcase both fieldwork and scientific research together with archaeological finds. This has included ‘Berlin’s Largest Excavation: Research Area Biesdorf ’ exhibition at Neues Museum, Berlin (2 October 2019–​4 January 2021) and ‘Meanwhile in the Mountains: Sagalassos’ exhibition at Yapı Kredi Culture and Art, Istanbul (27 November 2019–​23 August 2020). There is an emerging trend, therefore, to develop more creative approaches to representing archaeological fieldwork than has previously been the case, one which embraces new technologies and collaborative artistic practice in order to capture the complexities of fieldwork and its results.

References Carrozzino, M. and M. Bergamasco. 2010. ‘Beyond Virtual Museums: Experiencing Immersive Virtual Reality in Real Museums’. Journal of Cultural Heritage 11 (4): pp. 452–​8. Dean, D. 2002. Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Dorrell, P. 2000. Photography in Archaeology and Conservation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fagan, B. and N. Durrani. 2016. A Brief History of Archaeology. Taylor and Francis. Hodder, I. 2012. Entangled. An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell. Hodder, I.R. and A. Marciniak. 2015. Assembling Science at Catalhoyuk. Interdisciplinarity in Theory and Practice. Leeds: Maney Publishing. Kwastek, K. 2013. Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mara, H. and B. Bogacz. 2015. ‘A Bridge to the Digital Humanities: Geometric Methods And Machine Learning for Analysing Ancient Script in 3D’. In CAA2015. Keep the Revolution Going: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative

488    Duygu Tarkan and Şeyda Çetin Methods in Archaeology, edited by S. Campana, R. Scopigno, and G. Carpentiero, pp. 889–​ 98. Oxford: Archeopress. Perry, S., M. Roussou, S.S. Mirashrafi, A. Katifori, and S. McKinney. 2019. ‘Shared Digital Experiences Supporting Collaborative Meaning-​Making at Heritage Sites’. In The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites, edited by H. Lewi, W. Smith, D. vom Lehn, and S. Cooke, pp. 143–​56. London: Routledge. Puig, A., I. Rodríguez, and J.L. Arcos. 2020. ‘Lessons Learned from Supplementing Archaeological Museum Exhibitions with Virtual Reality’. Virtual Reality 24: pp. 343–​58. Pujol-​Tost, L. 2019. ‘Did We Just Travel to the Past? Building and Evaluating With Cultural Presence Different Modes of VR-​Mediated Experiences in Virtual Archaeology’. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 12 (1): Article 2: pp. 1–​20. Pujol-​Tost, L., M. Roussou, S. Poulo, O. Balet, M. Vayanou, and Y. Ioannidis. 2012. ‘Personalizing Interactive Digital Storytelling in Archaeological Museums: the CHESS Project’. In 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), Southampton, UK, 26–​ 29 March 2012, pp. 77–​ 90. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Swain, H. 2007. An Introduction to Museum Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 25

Archaeol o gy di spl ays i n u niversi t i e s The role of museums and archaeology displays in Ghana Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-​D zidzienyo

25.1  Introduction This chapter focuses on archaeological collections and displays in museums in Ghana, specifically the Museum of Archaeology situated in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, at the University of Ghana, Legon. The Museum of Archaeology is a teaching museum committed to the conservation, preservation, research, and display of archaeological and ethnographic materials of Ghana. Formerly known as the Gold Coast, Ghana is the first West African country to teach archaeology as an academic discipline and also establish an archaeology museum in its premier university, the University of Ghana, Legon (previously known as the University College of the Gold Coast). Thus, establishing and affirming the place of the museum in archaeological research, teaching, and learning in the university and the nation at large. The display of archaeological artefacts in Ghana originated from a colonial educational collection of artefacts collected by British colonial officers during the construction of the Achimota School in the Gold Coast (Larbi 2018: 167). The collection of archaeological artefacts together with donations and other ethnographic, geological, and botanical materials which helped enrich understanding of the people and their environment, was a catalyst in the development of museums in Ghana. The Achimota collection was an important research resource that also preserved the country’s material culture. The museum became a major aspect of the teaching facilities at the Achimota School (Larbi 2018: 167). The Achimota museum collections were later transferred to the

490   Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-Dzidzienyo Department of Archaeology (now Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies) and that formed the basis for the establishment of the Museum of Archaeology. The discussion in this chapter is structured to cover the history of collecting of archaeological materials in Ghana, display of archaeological materials in the University of Ghana Museum of Archaeology, university students’ perceptions about archaeological displays in the Museum of Archaeology, and challenges of the museum. The writer’s practical approach to discussing the roles and challenges of archaeological displays in Ghana and specifically, the Museum of Archaeology are derived from her hands-​on involvement as a curator of the museum, and as an archaeologist and museum studies lecturer at the University of Ghana. It also results from her observations, experiences, and involvement in museum activities in Ghana and visits to other museums outside.

25.2  Museum and archaeological displays in Ghana Museum display of exhibits was started in Ghana in 1927 by Charles Thurstan Shaw. Shaw, a British archaeologist and the first trained archaeologist to work in Ghana, served as the first curator of the Achimota Museum of Anthropology. He displayed archaeological artefacts from his scientific excavations as well as artefacts collected during the construction of the Achimota school. In addition, he collected ethnographic materials and, together with cultural materials that were donated, he set up a small museum. The museum display was self-​explanatory and demonstrative because most of the collections had little or no provenance information (Anquandah 1997; Eyifa-​Dzidzienyo 2014; Fogelman 2008). In 1951, the Achimota Museum of Anthropology was dissolved and in that same year, the Department of Archaeology, Legon, was also established. All the Achimota museum collections were then transferred to the Department of Archaeology for safekeeping. This transfer became the pivot on which the Museum of Archaeology and later the Ghana National Museum, which opened in 1957, thrived (Anquandah 1997; Fogelman 2008). The National Museum has a large collection of archaeological artefacts. Apart from the Museum of Archaeology and the National Museum, Ghana can also boast of Regional Museums, University Museums, Palace Museums, and Private Museums and Galleries. Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) is a national body that regulates the programmes and activities of the national and regional museums (six in number) guided by its vision and mission. It is the legal custodian of Ghana’s movable and immovable material cultural heritage. Permits for archaeological excavations in Ghana are issued by the GMMB. The Ghana National Museum and Regional Museums mainly display three categories of materials: archaeology, art, and ethnographic objects. As the legal custodian of the nation’s material cultural heritage, the National Museum is expected to keep all excavated materials and display them

Archaeology displays in universities    491 for national and international benefits. However, due to the lack of adequate storage space, trained archaeologists, funding, and many challenges confronting the institution, it is unable to do so. Therefore, the majority of the artefacts collected through scientific excavations in the country end up in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies storage rooms (see this volume: Chapters 11 and 13). Over time, the storage for the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies has also become full, with some excavated materials being kept in lofts and offices of archaeologists. There are also instances where artefacts retrieved through chance finds and unscientific excavations, such as road constructions, end up in private individuals’ collections, sometimes without the knowledge of the National Museum or the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies. Generally, archaeological displays in the national and regional museums are static and permanent without much change or updates to inform, educate, and excite museum visitors. The Ghana National Museum Gallery, which had substantial artefacts on display, was closed for major renovations in December 2015 and at the time of writing has yet to reopen. On the other hand, the Regional Museums that are in operation, and could display artefacts from archaeological excavations conducted locally, have very few objects on display although they are directly under the management of the National Museum. Arguably, archaeological collections in the National Museum storage could easily be loaned to the Regional Museums for display. This clearly points to some of the challenges the museum is confronted with when it comes to archaeological collections and their display. Key among the challenges is the inadequate number of trained archaeologists working in the national and regional museums as curators. In the past, the head of the Department of Archaeology served on the governing board of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (Anquandah 1997: 9) and could advise on archaeological displays. Before the closure of the National Museum Gallery for renovation, artefacts on display in the archaeology section ranged from the Stone Age period to the recent historical past. The archaeological and ethnographic displays in the Museum of Archaeology are therefore greatly depended on, in the construction and transmission of knowledge of the past. The museum is patronized heavily by students from the Basic, Junior High, Senior High, and Tertiary schools as well as international visitors. The general Ghanaian public does not take much interest in visiting the museum due to a lack of awareness of its presence. The Museum of Archaeology principally displays archaeological materials excavated from the various regions in Ghana by faculty and students of the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies. It also displays ethnographic collections of a variety of beads (both foreign and local) and pottery in temporary and permanent exhibitions. The displays project the history of Ghana and the identity of the people. Mostly, displays in the permanent exhibition are tailored towards the syllabus for teaching and learning archaeology as a discipline at the university. Students in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies are therefore the primary target audience of the museum. As Anquandah (1997) explains, archaeology as a pedagogic discipline developed alongside the museum institution, with numerous African

492   Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-Dzidzienyo archaeologists historically trained in museum archaeology and museums being primary employers (Kusimba and Klehm 2013). This is a pattern repeated worldwide and the display of archaeology collections has been foundational to many university departments of archaeology (e.g. see Ucko 1998). Many institutions in the global north have recently extolled the importance of collections and object-​based learning for higher education (e.g. Chatterjee 2011), after many university collections were neglected in the latter part of the twentieth century. The value of collections, however, has long been recognized in Ghana and not just for archaeologists. The storylines, the selection of artefacts, the simple display techniques, and simplified text language have proven to be very educative and resourceful for students in disciplines such as history, political science, geography, information studies, business, and theatre art. Similarly, Basic, Junior, and Senior High School students reading history also find the museum useful and visit through group tours with their teachers. This is because tangible evidence of material culture relating to some of the topics studied in history such as early human settlements, colonial encounters, and slavery in Ghana are presented in the archaeological displays (see also Chapter 10). The museum also receives students from the neighbouring countries such as Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. The contributions and professional expertise of trained archaeologists and students in the Department has been profoundly beneficial in mounting archaeological displays in the museum. The museum therefore always has something new on display for its audience.

25.3  Management and operation of the Museum of Archaeology Structurally, the Museum of Archaeology is not autonomous and self-​funding. It is under the operations of the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies which is under the School of Arts in the College of Humanities at the University of Ghana. The museum does not have its own specialist staff. For this reason, over the years, a faculty member is assigned the role of a curator in addition to the normal academic roles and responsibilities. The writer was assigned this curatorial role of the museum from 2009 to date. This was after acquiring skills and techniques through a number of hands-​ on training workshops on diverse aspects of museum work. These workshops were organized by the British Museum under its Africa Programme through its partnership with the Department. Currently, the museum is managed by a team made up of three faculty members including the curator and the principal technician of the Department. The team is assisted by National Service Persons who are yearly posted to the Department. When student interns and volunteers are available, the team works with them as well. Funding for the museum comes from the Department, visitor donations, and sponsorship from individuals and partners, especially, the British Museum. From 2008, the British Museum has provided technical support, tools and equipment, and funding

Archaeology displays in universities    493 for the museum’s work through the partnership agreement. The museum is flexible in planning exhibitions which allows the display of departmental, student, and individual faculty projects depending on the availability of resources. This flexibility accounts for the improved, active, and changing archaeological displays in the museum. Sometimes, only display background colours are changed and everything looks new again. For instance, yearly, the student association of the Department (The Legon Archaeology Students Association [LASA]), with the assistance of the museum team, organize a museum exhibition as part of their week-​long celebration. The museum plays an important role in the degree programmes of the Department. At the undergraduate level, first to final year archaeology students make use of the museum displays which provide tangible material evidence for better understanding and appreciation of some lecture topics in courses such as ‘Approaches to the Study of the Past; Archaeology and the African Cultural Heritage; Human Origins and Cultural Foundations in Africa; Foragers and Farmers in West Africa’s Prehistory; Art History of Ghana; and Introduction to Human Osteology and Forensic Anthropology.’ An elective course titled ‘Introduction to Museum Studies’ is specifically structured to introduce final year archaeology students to museums, museum work, and profession. At the graduate level, for both masters and doctorate, Museum and Heritage Studies with a focus on museums and Archaeology and Heritage Studies are two separate degree programmes run by the Department. Graduate students, especially those in the museum and heritage studies programme of the Department also display their independently conceptualized projects in the museum as temporary exhibitions that enhance the permanent exhibits. These exhibitions form part of the end of semester assessment for students who enrol on core courses such as ‘Exhibition Development and Management and Curatorship and Exhibition Development.’ These students benefit from the skills and techniques of developing displays in a practical manner, becoming not just consumers of the museum, but partners in its reproduction. On display in the Museum of Archaeology are archaeological collections on human evolution, early farmers in Ghana, Akan and Koma terracotta figurines, colonial encounters, and ethnographic display of pottery and bead collections. There is also a diorama on iron working in Ghana and a hands-​on set up for archaeological excavations. In addition, there is a wall painting of the excavation process. The significant impact these dynamic displays have on visitors is accessed through comments made in the museum’s visitor book.

25.4  Students’ response on the benefits of archaeological displays in the Museum of Archaeology In April 2019, a small-​scale random survey of archaeology students’ uses and perception of displays in the Museum of Archaeology was conducted during the students’

494   Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-Dzidzienyo week celebration. The research questionnaires with closed and open-​ended questions aimed at understanding their use of the museum and the benefits they derive from it were randomly distributed. In all, 56 responses were received, and the content analysed. The respondents were first to final year students of archaeology. Although the survey respondents were few considering the student population, the results suggested that the archaeology displays in the museum were relevant to their studies and understanding of the past. In terms of the relevance of the display in the museum to students, the responses were categorized into five main areas. The displays offer insight into the past, present a better understanding of the evolution of humans, provide tangible evidence of the past, help in understanding archaeological studies, and define Ghanaian culture in terms of its material presence as preserved in the museum. Some of the views expressed by the students regarding the archaeological display under the various categories of relevance are presented. The archaeological displays in the museum offer an insight into the past as intimated in the following statements. It is useful in the sense that the items/​artefacts with their explanations give museum visitors a fair view of things. Some refer to the past and they give us information about some events that happened in the past. People are able to remember their past. It helps us to understand the things of the past and past lifeway to be able to understand why we do things today, the origin of our various culture, traditions and our ancestors. The display of colonial artefacts helps to know our history. The materials help us to understand how people were living years ago. They are useful because first of all, students and the public go there to learn and study about the past, the lifeways of people. It helps one (schooled and unschooled) to understand the way of life of a particular society from the people’s point of view. It gives us historical background of our past for the future generation. It is useful because it brings a sense of identity to us, as the archaeological materials displayed there remind us of our past.

The Museum of Archaeology display also creates cultural awareness, offer cultural education and helps in defining culture as attested to by the students in their expressions such as: It helps define our cultural heritage. It enhances one’s culture, it preserves and conserves one’s culture, and the collection and display of archaeological materials promote education of different cultures. It helped me to understand some of the cultures of some ethnic groups in Ghana. It displays the rich culture and adaptation in the past. Relevant stories like iron smelting are useful because they educate people.

Archaeology displays in universities    495 It explains the early settlement of Ghanaians in the Kintampo area and shows that before the coming of the Europeans, the African had his own way of life-​civilization. The diorama of iron smelting shows the social adaptations of the people of the past and eradicate the notion that Africans did not have a culture till the Europeans arrived.

Understanding human evolution is more complex, however, and the archaeological display of the scientific evidence of the evolutionary process in the museum puts a lot of minds at ease. Again, the students were cognizant of this and commented on that section of the display. It helps explain the evolution of human life and the material culture that helps understand human life. It also helped me to understand the evolution of humans. It tells us the origins and how humans evolved through the australopithecines bones and skeletons displayed. It tells us about the past and how people actually looked like not just from oral history. I have never seen a real and authentic ancient human skull before so it is good to see one in the museum. It is educative and nice to see the skulls, the ages attached to them makes it very surprising 1.7mya etc. It made my forensic study a bit easy. It makes the evolutionary theory more understandable.

As the only archaeology museum in Ghana, the display presents tangible evidence of the past and viewing them so closely in their cases marvels many people. The students expressed it like this: Many of the artefacts displayed are artefacts I have heard about or seen in books, thus it is great to be seeing them. It helps gives a visual explanation to the many theories we hear about day-​in, day-​out. It gives students the opportunity to see some materials they read about in books, opportunity to observe material analysis. It shows some artefacts that would not be available everywhere unless pictures on the internet. It brings to my knowledge the fact that regardless of foreign presence, Africans (Ghanaians) were artistic and well versed in arts and crafts.

The Museum of Archaeology was primarily established to foster archaeological studies and research at the University of Ghana. This is consciously featured in the display to tie in with some of the archaeological topics that are taught in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies. The acknowledgements of the students are evidence of this.

496   Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-Dzidzienyo They really have good provenance of collections for academic research or for further studies. The materials display of various artefacts like local and foreign beads, bone specimen and even picture have broadened my understanding of archaeology as a course. It has helped students of Archaeology especially to be able to relate to what they are taught in class. I think it adds to the theoretical things taught and also enable students embrace and realize the essence of archaeological findings. The Akan and Koma terracotta figurines really give the historical chronology of the makers as well as their relevance in archaeological studies.

The questionnaire enquired whether there was need for archaeological displays in the various museums in Ghana. The feedback was positive, and the following are some of the reasons that were given during the survey. So that the general populace gets to know and understand archaeology as a vital tool to national development. It helps people to understand their roots and heritage and be able to defend it. To create employment for archaeology graduates. Archaeology display helps us to trace our past, why not remind people of it. Through that, junior and secondary school students get interested in archaeology and would like to pursue in tertiary institutions. To motivate archaeologists in their work. Because archaeological display educates us on the things of the past and that will be helpful to the public. It would give individuals knowledge about the past which would inform future decisions. So that other people that cannot access the Legon Archaeology Museum would be able to access archaeological displays elsewhere to understand the past of other people.

25.5  Challenges of archaeological display in the Museum of Archaeology In spite of the museum’s ability to display archaeological findings for the education of students and the general Ghanaian public, it is fraught with a number of challenges. The most pressing of them is the limited gallery space of the museum. The museum gallery is limiting in the sense that it is a long hall with fixed immovable showcases in both sides

Archaeology displays in universities    497

Figure 25.1:  The Museum of Archaeology Gallery at the University of Ghana. Photo by author.

of the wall (see Fig. 25.1) that make it impossible to mount certain sizes and shapes of objects in the cases. This also makes partitioning of the space in the gallery difficult and takes away the exciting experience visitors would have had in moving from one space to the other. As it is, one can easily get a grasp of the entire display at a go. In a bid to save the situation, short movable showcases were constructed and positioned in-​between the fixed ones and that has also taken much of the space. The gallery space is also used as a working space when developing new displays especially for temporary exhibitions. Therefore, museum activities that should have been done behind the scenes are all done in the gallery. The gallery requires renovation and expansion to solve structural problems such as roof leakages and to also provide more room for display, storage, teaching, and working space. As a teaching museum, some practical museum studies topics, such as collection care and handling of objects, museum documentation, preventive conservation, packing and moving objects, curating a display, and techniques in making exhibition, are taught in the gallery to limit the movement of objects. Students also prepare and mount their exhibitions in the same gallery due to a lack of a temporary exhibition space. Sometimes, while one group of students will be having their practical class in the gallery, other students and visitors will be having a tour of the museum. A comprehensive museum expansion project was thought of by the Department over a decade ago but that has not seen the light of day due to a lack of funds. Architectural drawings of the proposed modification were made and even displayed in the museum with the hope of attracting the attention of the University or a generous sponsor but that has also yielded

498   Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-Dzidzienyo no results. Although the gallery has a multipurpose use, if the museum is renovated and expanded, the experiences of students and visitors would be enhanced as digital display of artefacts, 3D displays, audiovisual/​interactive presentation and improved lighting can easily be done. There would also be enough room for movement and exploration. More importantly, the museum would be in a better position to cater for people with special needs such as those with visual and hearing impairment. This is a group of people who do not visit the museum often, although some of the Archaeology students who use the museum most, are in this group. The University of Ghana assigns special assistants to students with special needs while on campus for their academic activities. Some of the students also rely on their friends for assistance. At the moment, the student with hearing impairment usually visits the museum when the class is having a group tour. As is done for lectures, the university-​assigned assistant translates the museum guide’s narrative to the student through sign language, while for the students with visual impairment, exclusive arrangement is made for their visit. A few selected objects from storage such as stone tools, terracotta figurines, and pottery are brought out for them to have a tactile experience after efforts are made to give them a descriptive narrative of the objects on display. Lack of adequate storage space with appropriate storage containers is another challenge facing the museum. Because the museum is under the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, the storage rooms are now shared due to the overwhelming volumes of artefacts retrieved from excavations from the 1960s to present. With the exception of the museum’s textile storage that is separate and managed to professional museum standards, the same cannot be said of the archaeology storage. When the storage was first developed, basic standard structures and procedures were put in place and followed. For instance, wooden and metal shelves, cupboards, drawers, and trays were provided for storage. The archaeological collections were properly labelled and arranged. Adequate documentation was done, as the museum accession book and catalogue cards prove. These measures that were taken preserved the collection and also provide evidence of the dedicated attention that was given to the museum at that time. This was the era when the Department had a policy of recruiting expatriate staff with a background in museology to manage the Department’s museum-​ laboratory-​conservation-​photography complex (Anquandah 1997: 7). However, things have changed over time. New objects have arrived, there is a lack of staff to manage them, limited availability of time, lack of interest to continue the process, and the huge volume of collection, most of which is pottery fragments, to contend with. Some of the pottery is stored in the loft of the museum. Digitization of these collections has become a very big challenge to the museum and hinders wider dissemination since they cannot be accessed outside the museum. The environmental conditions of archaeology storage are poor. The storage rooms are overcrowded; objects are congested and dusty; storage arrangement is very poor; ventilation is poor; movement is restricted; object retrieval is difficult, especially objects excavated long ago; objects are stored in boxes that are not acid-​free; and attached object labels are worn out with some objects mixing up. These factors have made it very

Archaeology displays in universities    499 difficult for some of the very old excavated artefacts to be used for research and museum displays, as their provenance information has been lost. As a result, research conducted on the old collections by archaeology students and students outside the University of Ghana is very limited. This defeats the museum principles of preservation, research, and communication all because of improper storage of collections. This also accounts for the reason why some archaeologists in the Department prefer to keep the collections in their offices and release them for display when there is need. Staffing, expanded storage space, and adequate storage furniture are essential to bring the storage to the minimum standard required to keep the materials in good shape. A previous storage decongestion exercise undertaken in 2016 did not yield the expected results. With the posting of about 20 National Service Persons to the Department in October 2021 as support staff, another storage decongestion exercise is currently in progress. Digital documentation of the process is also being carried out. Another challenge is a lack of documented working policies and principles to guide and check the day-​to-​day activities of the museum. Although the museum performs the functions expected of a museum, it does not have written policies on collection management, objects documentation, and exhibition, for instance. The number of temporary exhibitions mounted in a year depends on availability of resources and the interest of the person heading the Department. The full potential of the museum could be realized if the university would integrate it into its academic programmes by budgeting for it, and recruiting professional staff who will be on salary to direct and manage the museum. The museum is now developing a website but has recently opened a Facebook and Instagram account as a means of reaching out to the public. This, however, is not regularly managed due to a lack of a dedicated staff for this purpose. There is no database for all the collections, which make it difficult to have an inventory. Nonetheless, without documentation software, some of the collections with adequate provenance information on them, such as textiles, beads, and pottery from ethnographic contexts, have been recorded using a Microsoft Spreadsheet. Furthermore, the museum does not have a collection archive to facilitate learning and research. It also lacks publications on its exhibitions. There is a lack of facilities and resources, such as learning packs for school children. This impedes teachers’ ability to handle collections themselves with their students to explore. The museum lacks an education officer to work with school children in line with their curriculum. In spite of these challenges, the museum manages to give visitors, especially school children, hands-​on experience through handling of a few selected objects; a creative session organized with artificial clay dough where children create an object on display; and a model for archaeological excavation is set up in the museum. The model for archaeological excavation has the potential of enhancing the learning experience of visitors if it could be set up outside the museum, and if adequate and appropriate personal protective equipment such as hand gloves, nose masks, as well as working tools, are provided to visitors to experiment with. It will also increase the public interest in archaeology and archaeological displays. Lastly, visibility is another challenge of the museum. Although the museum is located in the Department, the majority of the University of Ghana students and the Ghanaian

500   Gertrude A.M. Eyifa-Dzidzienyo public who have nothing to do with the study of archaeology and history are not aware of its presence. It seems to be hidden, as sign boards, posters, and banners of the museum cannot be seen at any vantage points in and outside the university to create awareness of it. This may partly account for the lack of interest and low patronage of the Ghanaian public in visiting the museum. First-​time visitors always express surprise when they discover it, including members of the university community.

25.6  Conclusion Reflecting on the positive impact the archaeological displays in the Museum of Archaeology has on university and non-​university students in Ghana, it is evident that the displays present tangible cultural materials that heighten cultural awareness and aid in cultural identity creation. The displays also facilitate an understanding of past cultural lifeways of Ghanaians and the study of archaeology as an academic discipline. Indeed, every museum in Ghana needs to be encouraged to display archaeological collections to educate visitors. The Museum of Archaeology, through its relationship with the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, must assist in this direction.

References Anquandah, J.R. 1997. ‘Ghana Museums and Archaeology Training.’ In Museums and Archaeology in West Africa, edited by C.D. Ardouin, pp. 3–​11. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press. Chatterjee, H. 2011. ‘Object-​based Learning in Higher Education: The Pedagogical Power of Museum’. University Museums and Collections Journal 3: pp. 179–​81. Eyifa-​Dzidzienyo, G.A.M. 2014. ‘The Role of Museums in Education: The Case of the Museum of Archaeology, University of Ghana’. In Current Perspectives in the Archaeology of Ghana, edited by J. Anquandah, B. Kankpeyeng, and W. Apoh, pp. 293–​311. Accra: Sub-​Saharan Publishers. Fogelman, A. 2008. ‘Colonial Legacy in African Museology: The Case of the Ghana National Museum.’ Museum Anthropology 31 (1): pp. 19–​27. Kusimba, C. and Klehm, C. 2013. ‘Museums and Public Archaeology in Africa’. In The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, edited by P. Mitchell and P. Lane, pp. 227–​37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Larbi, K.A. 2018. ‘New Considerations in Afro-​European Museum Cooperation in Africa: The Examples of PREMA and Other Initiatives in Ghana.’ In Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe. A New Field for Museum Studies, edited by T. Laerly, M. Meyer, and R. Schwere, pp. 165–​78. Kampala: Transcript Verlag. Ucko, P.J. 1998. ‘The Biography of a Collection: The Sir Flinders Petrie Palestinian Collection and the Role of University Museums’. Museum Management and Curatorship 17 (4): pp. 351–​99.

Pa rt G

E X PA N DI N G A N D T R A N S C E N DI N G T H E M U SE UM Social issues and digital frontiers

Chapter 26

E ngaging c on t e mp ora ry so cial issu e s i n t h e museum th rou g h archaeol o g i c a l c ollect i ons Paolo Del Vesco

26.1  Introduction Museums have changed from being institutions focused on enlarging their collections and ordering the past and the world through their taxonomies. Many have considerably widened their perspective and found a broader purpose. In the early twentieth century, John Cotton Dana (1856–​1929), founder and director of the Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey (US), argued that ‘the true work of the museum as a service institution was in enriching the quality of its visitors’ lives’ (Weil 2002: 190). Yet, it is only recently that museum professionals have been increasingly concerned about the challenging social, economic, and climatic issues facing the contemporary world and the needs of museum publics in relation to these. This new trend is today reflected in the abundance of books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, and workshops that scrutinize, interpret, or simply present and disseminate, among museum professionals, the various initiatives carried out by museums as part of their role in contemporary society. In 2006, a scholarly journal entitled ‘Museums and Social Issues’ was founded with the specific aim of exploring ‘the interaction between compelling social issues and the way that museums respond to, influence, or become engaged with them’.1 The ‘compelling issues’ identified 1 

https://​icom.tand​fonl​ine.com/​act​ion/​jou​rnal​Info​rmat​ion?show=​aimsSc​ope&jour​nalC​ode=​yms​i20 [Accessed 8 March 2021].

504   Paolo Del Vesco by museum professionals include ‘race, immigration, health care, democratic process, and representation’, to which environmental destruction and climate change have recently been added. From the Memory and Migration section of the Galata Maritime Museum in Genova to the Refugee Heritage Programme of the London Museums Hub, from the Artists on the Wards initiative in the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada to the Art and Dementia programme offered by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, many in the museum sector are actively engaging contemporary social issues. It must be noted, however, that criticisms of this new trend have been aired (Silverman 2010: 3–​4). While some worry about the potential risk of alienating part of the public or the funding bodies that might have different agendas, these criticisms are mainly centred around the idea that social engagement diverts museums from the study, care, and preservation of their collections. Cuno (1997: 7), for instance, argues that the social turn of the museum sector and the opening to direct participation of different audiences in curatorial choices and narratives represents ‘the gravest threat’ to the quality and independence of scholarship, and an additional element contributing to the loss of authority and expertise already suffered by museum institutions. According to Appleton (2001: 22–​3): ‘In the people-​centred museum ( . . . ) social ends tend to take over . . . the activity of museum staff is now indistinguishable from that of a host of social health or educational services’, and people ‘become the objects of study, their interests and responses catalogued and catered to’. Museums, she argues, ‘should stick to what they do best –​to preserve, display, study and where possible collect the treasures of civilisation and of nature’ (Appleton 2001: 25). Despite such criticism, museums are ever more frequently engaged as powerful agents of social improvement with a responsibility towards contemporary society, its wellbeing, and future (Janes and Sandell 2019). Is this social vocation an intrinsic quality of museums or is it a pragmatic response to an evolving society? This chapter sets out to answer this question, exploring how the very definition of museum has changed in the last eighty years, before examining what museums around the world are doing to engage contemporary social issues. Finally, the Museo Egizio in Turin, an antiquarian and archaeological collection of Egyptian antiquities, provides an in-​depth case study for a variety of approaches relating to what Lois Silverman (2010) calls ‘The Social Work of Museums’.

26.2  Engaging contemporary social issues by definition? In September 2019, Suay Aksoy, President of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), opened her introductory speech at the plenary session ‘The Museum Definition –​The Backbone of ICOM’, held in Kyoto during the 25th ICOM general assembly, with the following words:

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   505 The role of museums in society is changing, museums keep reinventing themselves, in their quest for becoming more interactive, inclusive, community oriented, accountable, flexible and mobile, in other words for staying relevant. While preserving their primary missions: collecting, preservation, communication, research, exhibition, learning, museums have transformed their practices to remain closer to the communities they serve. ( . . . ) ICOM is changing, as museums are changing, and as does society change. The growing emphasis on the social role of museums as underlined by the 2015 UNESCO recommendation on the protection and promotion of museums and collections, their diversity and their role in society, necessitates us to closely watch the society’s trends as well as willingness, readiness to address contemporary society issues, which are very often contested and political in their nature.2

During the plenary session a new definition of museum was presented for voting. It had been elaborated by the standing committee Museum Definition, Prospects, and Potentials (MDPP), created for this purpose in January 2017, on the basis of consultations, debates, workshops, and more than 250 proposals collected worldwide from ICOM members and committees. The few lines quoted above clearly state that museums should be relevant and close ‘to the communities they serve’ as well as be ready to address contemporary social issues. A brief survey of the definitions of museum formulated by ICOM since its creation in 1946 helps clarify museums’ progressive movement towards contemporary society. The first definition (ICOM Constitution 1946) offered a rather formal clarification of the term ‘museum’ used throughout the text of the founding document and interpreted as including: ‘all collections open to the public, of artistic, technical, scientific, historical or archaeological material’. The amendments introduced by the 1951 definition (ICOM Statutes) already outlined a more complex image of the museum, going beyond its collection and incorporating its aims as an institution and even a reference to wider benefits connected to its activity. According to this definition, a museum would be ‘any permanent establishment, administered in the general interest, for the purpose of preserving, studying, enhancing by various means and, in particular, of exhibiting to the public for its delectation and instruction groups of objects and specimens of cultural value’.3 The definition adopted by the ICOM Statutes ten years later showed a slight contraction that resulted in the elimination of the references to both ‘the general interest’ and ‘the public’ and in the rephrasing of the purposes into a more concise ‘study, education and enjoyment’. In 1974, the ICOM definition acquired a more structured shape and delineated the museum, along lines that remained almost unaltered for nearly half a century, as ‘a non-​profit making, permanent institution in the service of the society and its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, 2  The video of the plenary session ‘The Museum Definition: The Backbone of ICOM’ of the Kyoto 2019 ICOM General Assembly is available at: https://​youtu.be/​fSDP​8DXd​wrA?list=​PLY14​2wUw​8BUr​ ey8p​bIB-​Cvkak0​7IRb​v4t [Accessed 8 September 2020]. 3  http://​archi​ves.icom.mus​eum/​hist_​def_​eng.html [Accessed 15 January 2020].

506   Paolo Del Vesco communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment’ (Mairesse 2019: 155). The change in how the museum was perceived is here clearly indicated by at least two elements: the addition of a ‘non-​profit making’ requisite; and the prevalence, also underlined by the order of the sentences, given to the role played by museums in society. The latter aspect was very likely influenced by the declaration that originated from the Round Table on the Development and the Role of Museums in the Contemporary World, held as a UNESCO Regional Seminar in Santiago de Chile in 1972 (Mairesse 2019: 155). The 2007 ICOM definition, although preceded by a lively debate and some innovative proposals, remained in the end unaltered in its structure (Mairesse 2019: 156) and introduced only minor changes. For instance, in the English version the order of the purposes of the museum was slightly modified—​but the French version retained the 1974 order—​so as to give ‘education’ a nuanced prominence over ‘study and enjoyment’, and the object of the museum activity was expanded from the ‘material evidence of man and his environment’ to the ‘tangible and intangible heritage of humanity’, probably in the wake of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage. Reference to intangible heritage was also included in the framework convention presented by the European Council in October 2005, commonly known as the Faro Convention. This document stresses ‘the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society’. Moving from the principle contained in article 27 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to which everyone has the right to participate in cultural life, it states that ‘the conservation of cultural heritage and its sustainable use’, two activities that might easily also summarize the basic functions of museums, should aim at ‘human development and quality of life’. The convention additionally recognizes ‘the role of cultural heritage in the construction of a peaceful and democratic society’, highlighting its political value. Although, by 2021, only 21 countries out of 47 have ratified this treaty—​and they do not include Germany, France, Spain, Greece, or the United Kingdom—​it nevertheless seems to have also informed the new museum definition that was presented for voting at the 2019 ICOM General Assembly: Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.4

4 

https://​icom.mus​eum/​en/​resour​ces/​standa​rds-​gui​deli​nes/​mus​eum-​def​i nit​ion/​ [Accessed 28 November 2019].

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   507 The radical shift in the vision of what museums should be is evident. Institutions are here intended as open political arenas for debate and for confronting the challenges of the present. The keywords are equality, accessibility, inclusiveness, and active participation. Collections are rather vaguely hinted at and remain in the background of the ideal of contributing solutions to the major problems of contemporary societies. Although most museum professionals would subscribe to the humanitarian principles expressed in the statement, and although it was supported by many ICOM members and national committees of various countries, the proposed definition was eventually withdrawn, and its vote postponed. Critiques concentrated around the fact that this definition, while claiming a universal breadth, failed to acknowledge the rich diversity of institutions worldwide, their histories, and the social, economic, and political contexts in which they operate. Above all, it mistakes museum aspiration for what characterizes them (Fraser 2019), relegating to a marginal role the collections they hold. Leaving aside the critiques, the proposed new definition surely manifests the perceived necessity for museums to reinvigorate their social role and relevance, as it was also expressed in the majority of the 250 proposals for a new definition collected by ICOM prior to the elaboration of the text presented in Kyoto.5 Yet, before collecting these proposals, the MDPP standing committee did not initially focus on the new definition itself, but on trying to understand how museums around the world are actually operating in the contemporary world (Bonilla-​Merchav 2019). In order to do so, four questions were circulated among the 37 roundtables of museum professionals organized in thirty different countries. All four questions addressed the relationship of museums to societies and their respective challenges: 1. What do you think are the most relevant and important contributions which museums can make to society in the coming decade? 2. What do you think are the strongest trends and the most serious challenges faced by your country in the coming decade? 3. What do you think are the strongest trends and challenges faced by museums in your country in the coming decade? 4. How do you think museums need to change and adapt our principles, values and working methods over the next decade to meet these challenges and enrich our contributions? (Bonilla-​Merchav 2019). In comparison with the rather idealized view represented by the new definition, the answers collected from the roundtables offer a more ‘pragmatic’ picture of what museums should be. Only 55 percent of museum practitioners thought a museum should ‘improve quality of life /​build a better society /​help fight inequality /​contribute to a more righteous and democratic society’ (Bonilla-​Merchav 2019: 169). These results are even more striking if compared with the answers given to the second 5 

https://​icom.mus​eum/​en/​news/​the-​mus​eum-​def​i nit​ion-​the-​backb​one-​of-​icom/​ [Accessed 15 January 2020].

508   Paolo Del Vesco question, according to which the main challenges faced by contemporary society, and directly affecting museums, were indeed reckoned to be globalization, migration, and inequalities, but immediately after ‘poor financing for culture and education’ (Bonilla-​ Merchav 2019: 169). The cultural sector’s economic troubles also emerged in the answers to the third question. The main concern of museums appeared to be ‘financial sustainability’ for 85 percent of the respondents. After economic concerns, the ‘most serious challenges faced by museums’, were the defence of the profession and the need to prove and maintain relevance to society. Unlike what appeared from the formulation of the new definition, then, these answers singled out the survival of the museum institution as the main priority of professionals and the enhancement of its role in society as one of the means to assure it. The question remains whether the urgency for museums to engage the complex issues of contemporary society only derives from a self-​reflective critique brought about by museum professionals themselves (see Jenkins 2010 for a similar argument in the context of museum policies regarding human remains) or from specific needs of museum audiences as well. Multiple and diverse audiences have contributed to transformation in museums, at least since attention was given to their needs and the quality of their visiting experience (Samis and Michaelson 2017). Museums need to remain open to ongoing dialogue with contemporary society. The disruptive worldwide COVID-​ 19 pandemic evidenced further the tight connection between museums and their publics. The forced and repeated lockdowns pushed almost all museums in the world to strengthen and widen their online presence, trying to maintain or extend their outreach to various audiences. Yet the pandemic only accelerated a trend that was already in place since the launch of the first museum websites in the mid-​1990s (Bowen 2010), at the very start of the ‘Internet revolution’, and continued with the creation of institutional accounts on different social media platforms not long after their initial release between 2004 and 2010. Following commercial companies, influencers, and politicians, museums too decided to go where most people appeared to be. Arguably, a side effect of the COVID-​19 pandemic was to stress the urgency for museums to reconsider their place in, and relevance for, contemporary society, to reinvent their engagement strategies and their presence in the digital world, as well as to further question their role in addressing some of the major global challenges of our times.

26.3  Museums in action The museum definition debate and the growing concern for a tighter relationship with audiences and society are rooted in the spread, since the 1970s, of the ‘New Museology’, and have been nourished since by several innovative and influential publications, and museum projects. Earlier publications and projects, in turn, often appeared as a

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   509 response, at least in the United States and the UK, to social movements from the 1960s to 1980s and the resulting implementation of governmental policies addressing social justice issues.6 Weil (2002: 94), for instance, confessed that he had been pushed into critically thinking of the role of museums within society by the 1960s–​1970s protests against art museums in New York, which he experienced first-​hand, carried out by activist artists organized in groups like the Art Workers Coalition. Artists, in an art movement that become known as ‘Institutional Critique’, requested that museums debate their relationship with society and modify their policies, especially towards black artists and other minority communities, and they encouraged them to take a stance on political issues, such as the war in Vietnam. Weil (2002) traced the theoretical framework within which museums would have been able to impact on the wellbeing of society. Starting from the question that Harold Skramstad asked at a 1996 Smithsonian symposium—​‘unless museums can and do play a role relative to the real problems of real people’s lives, then what is their point?’ (Weil 2002: 39)—​Weil identified the elements characterizing the ‘good’ museum: its purpose to make a positive difference in the quality of people’s lives, its command of resources adequate to that purpose, and its possession of a leadership determined to ensure that those resources are being directed and effectively used toward that end (Weil 2002: 63).

According to Weil, the practical skills required of museum staff in charge of public programmes should ‘include an ability to work directly with community members to assess how the museum might appropriately meet their needs; practical knowledge of how to establish productive collaborations with other community organizations ( . . . ) the knowledge of how to make appropriate use of audience research and various forms of program evaluation’ (2002: 46–​7). Weil (2002: 205) cites as a virtuous example of a museum conceiving itself ‘in terms of its ability to serve the public’, the New York Historical Society. In 1997, it organized the exhibition Before Central Park: The Life and Death of Seneca Village with the aim of raising awareness of a small town inhabited by disenfranchised groups of African American and Irish American people that was demolished to make space for the city park. The ‘museum of the near future’, Weil envisioned, will be a container of possibilities where ‘it will be the public ( . . . ) that will determine which of those many possibilities and in what combinations best meet its needs and wants. ( . . . ) The museum will still do, but this time it will be the public, in all its plurality, that determines what it does’ (Weil 2002: 213). 6  As for instance the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and the 1994, further extended in 2013, Employment Non-​Discrimination Act in the US, or the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act, the Employment Equality Regulations passed in 2003 and 2006 and the Equality Acts of 2006 and 2010 in the UK.

510   Paolo Del Vesco Among the most innovative and influential scholars who have contributed to the subject are Richard Sandell and Robert Janes. They have stressed the relevance of questions relating to the obligations of museums towards society and their accountability, or in other words their social responsibility. According to Sandell (2002: 19) museums must be well aware of the ‘meaning-​making potential’ they have, of the influence they can exert when aiming at long-​term ‘paradigmatic shifts in thinking’ and of the resulting obligations towards society. A socially responsible museum, Janes and Conaty (2005: 8–​10) argue, grounds its action in ‘the values of idealism, intimacy, depth and interconnectedness’. In other words, in a vision for a better future, in the quality of human relationships, in critical and self-​critical reasoning, and in the awareness that we live globally interconnected lives. Silverman (2010) has similarly observed that museums are becoming socially responsible, are promoting social justice and, as summed up in the 1974 ICOM definition, are ‘in the service of the society and its development’, and she has mapped what museums are actually doing in this respect around the world. According to her, museum action qualifies as ‘social work’, which is internationally defined as the profession that ‘promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships, and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-​being’. The social activity of museums, then, Silverman proposes, could greatly benefit from the theoretical perspectives and, especially, from the evaluation strategies typically used by social workers. More recently, Janes and Sandell (2019) have urged museums to engage in true activism, ‘marshalling and directing their unique resources with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises’. They criticize the modern idea of the museum as a mall, which, ‘although more audience-​focused, embodies the dead end of materialism—​over-​merchandised and devoted to consumption and entertainment’ (Janes and Sandell 2019: 2)—​and stress the obligation of museums to seriously confront the problem of climate change. In their vision, a truly activist museum ‘explicitly challenges the immorality of inaction’ (Janes and Sandell 2019: 18), constantly questions traditional assumptions, and takes a stand against the myth of unlimited economic growth. Moreover, the supposed neutrality of museums, often invoked to hide concerns about the potential loss of funding, must be challenged, as it constitutes one of the major obstacles to activism (Janes and Sandell 2019: 8–​9). Finally, it must be noted that while museums are still struggling with understanding and embracing their role as active social agents for the wellbeing of people, the debate has already moved ahead. Lynch (2021), for instance, criticizes the so-​called ‘humanitarian’ and ‘therapeutic’ approach typically applied by museums in their participatory and social inclusive projects, in favour of an institution that could be truly ‘useful’, instead of just ‘helpful’, to contemporary society. This perspective, deriving from a wide and thorough survey of social programmes carried out in museums, highlights the frequent failure of participatory practice resulting in the lack of a true empowerment of people, treated as ‘beneficiaries as opposed to active agents’, and the reluctance of museums ‘to share authority and decision-​making’ (Lynch 2021: 5). Following Boast (2011), Lynch argues that despite the best intentions ‘the inequities in the museum’s relations with others are inadvertently

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   511 perpetuated’ (Lynch 2021: 7). Even when museums champion social and environmental activism, they risk depriving people of their personal voice and agency, of their capability ‘to know, claim and activate their own rights’ (Lynch 2021: 12). A paradigmatic shift in the way museums conceive and create their relationships is therefore needed and Lynch (2021: 15–​21) proposes a way forward based on four strategic elements: a critique of museum action through ‘collaborative reflective practice’, the promotion of people’s agency and activism, the development of marginalized people’s capabilities, and ‘co-​researching’. What are museums doing, then, to engage with such complex issues as social justice, health, migration, or climate change? Social justice is intuitively connected to ideas of balance, equity, freedom, human rights, and accessibility (to resources, culture, wellbeing, etc.). How do all these elements translate into museum practice? A good example is the Anchorage Museum, in Alaska. At the core of its museum mission is the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion in relation to both its audiences and its staff. In practical terms the museum devises programmes that ‘respond to a variety of needs, ages, communities, languages and perspectives’, ensuring physical, economical and intellectual accessibility, ‘engaging community through partnerships’ and specific protocols, and ‘respecting Alaska and the Circumpolar North’s Indigenous peoples’, by recruiting, for instance, ‘indigenous curators as part of museum programming and staff ’. The interaction with different communities has increasingly become a very sensitive topic for museums, but also one of great centrality for the expression of their social agency, as it entails at the same time questions of equality, diversity, inclusivity, and participation. An example of a museum purposely created to respond to local community needs is the Anacostia Museum, opened in Washington, DC in 1967. As described by its first director, John Kinard, the museum was for ‘the life of the people of the neighbourhood—​ people who are vitally concerned about who they are, where they came from, what they have accomplished, their values and their most pressing needs’ (quotation from Weil 2002: 192). Similarly, the El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum of Chicago, and the Mexic-​Arte Museum in Austin, Texas, have all contributed to fostering awareness and appreciation of Puerto Rican and Mexican cultures through temporary exhibitions, free workshops for young people and families, and radio programmes, thus creating an almost symbiotic relationship, in which museums owe their existence to the presence of the communities and communities become aware and proud of their own cultures thanks to the museums (Zamora 2002). Beyond inclusion, collaboration, or co-​curatorship, a further step towards the empowerment of local communities is represented by museums that have been entirely designed and created by indigenous groups, such as the various Sámi museums opened between 1972 and 1998 across the northern territories of Norway, Sweden, and Finland (Webb 2006) or the ‘tribal museums’ of Native American communities along the west coast of Canada (Clifford 1991). In these cases, the communities appropriated the medium and took full control of their own representation, offering at the same time

512   Paolo Del Vesco critical perspectives on the museum institution itself from unusual angles. Museum programmes are also being designed to address questions of social conflict between different communities. This is the case, for instance, of ground-​breaking projects such as The Image of Abraham, a ‘co-​existence’ programme involving Muslim, Christian, and Jewish schoolchildren, created by the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, or the cross-​ community programmes for Catholic and Protestant children organized by the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum (Silverman 2010: 133). Several examples of museums that have been specifically created for, or that are actively engaged in contemporary social issues, including collective traumas, human rights, and migration, are to be found in Taiwan (Varutti 2012). The 921 Earthquake Museum, opened in 2001 in Wufeng, for instance, is devoted to the devastating earthquake that occurred on 21 September 1999 and to an attempt at healing this collective trauma. In 2002, the Green Island Memorial Park was created, on the site of a former correctional facility used for political prisoners, to commemorate the victims of the ‘White Terror’ period persecutions (Varutti 2012: 244). Marginalized groups, like those represented by the numerous migrant workers that arrived in Taiwan from the Philippines or Vietnam instead, were the focus of the 2007 exhibition Voyage 15840, a display that included photos taken by the workers showing—​and making visible for the first time—​their living and working conditions (Varutti 2012: 247). Other museums have been working with marginalized and socially excluded groups. An example is offered by the project Hidden Danish Stories, organized by the Danish Welfare Museum, which ‘sought to connect stories about poverty and social vulnerability across time through collaborative activity with socially vulnerable men and women living in Denmark today’ (Wichmann Rasmussen 2021: 84). Its threefold objective was to raise awareness of poverty and social exclusion, make the experiences of disenfranchised people relevant and valuable, and benefit project participants’ lives. Other initiatives include, the long-​term programme The East Sussex Archaeology and Museum Project, organized by the Sussex Archaeological Society and the Brighton and Hove Museums, which offered archaeology and museum training as well as job placements in heritage work to unemployed people (Silverman 2010: 53) or the collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the State Correctional Institution at Frankville, Pennsylvania, which entailed the implementation of practical activities and art workshops aimed at the artistical training and creativity development of the prison inmates (Silverman 2010: 63). Addressing, in museums, social issues linked to migration is a more recent focus, meaning first and foremost raising awareness, fostering acceptance of social diversity, and combating intolerance and prejudices. These have been among the aims of The Peopling of London, a project of the Museum of London focusing on the long history of London’s diverse population, which included an exhibition, a publication, and a programme of collateral events (Merriman 1997). Among the institutions specifically devoted to this issue, the Migration Museum in Adelaide, South Australia, has been working since its opening in 1986 towards the support of inclusivity and the promotion of cultural diversity. Its mission is clearly exemplified in the creation of a specific

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   513 museum space (The Forum) in which, on rotation every three months, any community group can design an exhibition, tell its story, or simply meet and debate (Szekeres 2002). Health is counted amongst the most urgent issues of contemporary society, intertwined with complex cultural and environmental factors, as well as social and economic inequalities. Growing evidence, supported by quantitative and qualitative evaluations, stresses the important role that museums can play in contributing positively to the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities (for a broad survey of health-​related museum programmes see Chatterjee and Noble 2013). Museums can help raise awareness of specific diseases and conditions or of inequalities in the public health system. They can become ‘therapeutic spaces’ (Chatterjee and Noble 2013: 34–​5) as well, and in projects like Prescription for Art of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London (UK) or Le musée sur ordonnance of the Montréal Art Museum (Canada), they can offer true ‘physical benefits’ to the visitors, by promoting ‘relaxation’ and ‘introspection’ (Silverman 2010: 43). Numerous museums around the world are also active, both inside and outside their buildings, in the creation of specific programmes targeting health issues. For example, different museum projects addressing disability have been developed across nine UK museums working together on the project Rethinking Disability Representation (Silverman 2010: 132). In France, there is a museum offering at least one health programme in almost every major city. The project Les musées à l’hôpital, active in Dijon since 2011 and based on a collaboration between the Art Museum and the surgery departments of the local hospital, entails the display of artwork reproductions, selected by the hospital staff, in the halls and corridors of the wards. In Lyon, under the umbrella project Musée et santé, which has been active for over twenty years, an array of different programmes has been devised between the local Art Gallery and the city hospitals, including specifically tailored tours for the patients, public debates on health-​related topics, practical workshops designed for patients of psychiatric centres by artists and art-​therapists, as well as group activities for people affected by Alzheimer’s disease using a full sensorial approach (auditory, olfactory, and tactile) to artworks. Climate change and environmental sustainability should also be considered relevant social issues, as they are tightly connected to intergenerational equality and to global social justice (Janes and Sandell 2019: 4), as made evident by the populations that are forced to leave their countries because of progressive desertification and famines. Mobilization on these issues is recent and expansive: museums entirely devoted to environmental or climate issues have been created (for instance, The Climate Museum in New York, The Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change in Hong Kong, and the mobile and digital Climate Museum UK), an international conference on climate change and museums was organized in 2018 at the Manchester Museum, successful exhibitions focused around the idea of Anthropocene, as the human impact on planet Earth, are designed and hosted by natural history museums (Oliveira et al. 2020), and new networks are multiplying, such as the We Are Still In initiative, the Museums and Climate Change Network, the Happy Museum Project, and the Coalition for Museums and Climate Justice (Janes and Grattan 2019).

514   Paolo Del Vesco Museums, it is here argued, can and must tackle all the above without losing sight of their founding mission of studying and preserving their collections for future generations. Quite the opposite, since artworks and artefacts can play a central role in the social agency deployed by museums, as powerful vehicles of new meanings and narratives built upon participatory processes, as intermediaries for the promotion of equality, diversity, and inclusion values, and as tools for a spontaneous and profound engagement of individuals and communities.

26.4  Action and archaeology museums This ‘return to the object’ is particularly evident in archaeology museums (Merriman 2004), which also appear to be ideally placed at the convergence between the transformations of past societies—​as crystallized in the material culture they study, preserve, and display—​and the transformations of contemporary societies in which they try to play a relevant role. Moreover, in their capacity as mediators between their audiences and archaeology, these museums could build their ‘social work’ strategies drawing on the developments within the archaeological discipline. Concern for the usefulness of archaeology and for its relevance to contemporary society has been growing amongst academic, professional, and volunteer archaeologists (see Rockman and Flatman 2013). The proliferation of new archaeologies, defined in turn as public, community-​based, indigenous, cosmopolitan, engaged, involved, or activist, clearly points towards the way many archaeologists seek to orientate their activity towards society (Little and Zimmerman 2010: 131). But how can archaeology have a beneficial impact on society? Firstly, the very production of knowledge that is at the core of archaeological research can help contemporary society address major problems such as economic crises, waste of resources, migrations, or climate change, by studying, for instance, the reasons of past failures (Djindjian 2012; Schiffer 2017). The study of archaeology may also stimulate a curiosity towards everything human, an openness to engage with the ‘different’, the ‘other’, and a critical and self-​critical reasoning that can bring to new perspectives on the world (Little 2012). A support to the development of new forms of heritage and an impulse to enfranchise local communities and stimulate economies through the creation of sustainable touristic sites are also among the potential benefits of archaeology (Little 2012; Schiffer 2017). Finally, a truly activist archaeology in favour of marginalized groups, as Zimmerman’s research on homeless people’s life has demonstrated (Zimmerman 2013), is also practicable. Archaeology museums are ideally located at the intersection between the past, archaeology, and society, and due to their vocation to interpretation and dissemination they can become important promoters of social improvement.

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   515

26.5  The Museo Egizio and contemporary social issues 26.5.1 Museums and Egypt When it comes to Egyptian antiquities, archaeologists and museum curators traverse ‘contested ground’ (Colla 2007; Hassan 1998: 213; Reid 2002, 2015; Riggs 2010, 2017). Almost all Egyptian collections in Europe were formed in the wake of the colonial expansion in Africa. They appropriated and displaced Egyptian cultural heritage, justified by the narratives of Orientalism and by social evolutionism. One of the widespread distorted perspectives that these narratives have produced is that which still today considers Egypt as detached from Africa and floating in an exotic-​mythical past serving the western need to create a ‘cradle’ for its civilization. The impact of the immense ‘material diaspora’ (Stevenson 2019: 1), the scale of which is probably unmatched by any other archaeological ‘exploitation’ of a past civilization, that dispersed Egyptian heritage across the entire globe, is still far from being fully grasped. It surely calls, however, for consideration of the responsibility of all these institutions towards Egyptian contemporary society. A series of sensitive issues confront today the curators of these peculiar archaeological collections: the illegal trafficking of Egyptian antiquities in Western markets, the looting of sites in Egypt, the urgency for the Egyptological discipline of a deep self-​critical deconstruction (Riggs 2010: 1152, 2014: 216–​17), the economic, social, health, and education improvement of communities in Egypt, which have been invariably excluded from discourses regarding their own heritage (Meskell 2000: 156, Stevenson 2015: 8–​9, 2019: 18–​20), but also the relevance of Egyptian antiquities for communities living outside Egypt, where so many collections are now located and displayed. Which of these urgent matters should museum curators consider a priority? Or should they try to address all of them? In order to exert a beneficial impact on contemporary society, Egyptian collections must strive for a very complicated balance between often opposing interests; nationalistic and universalistic, local and global, public and academic. Considering inequality, for instance, collections outside Egypt should question their very nature and existence, as rooted in the unbalanced power relations implied in the colonial expansion of western countries. And ‘inherent structural inequalities’ are perpetuated today in the disparity of economic and scientific resources available to Egyptological research conducted in Western countries, as well as in ‘training, facilities, language barriers’ often preventing Egyptian scholars from participating in the production of knowledge (Stevenson 2015: 12, 2019: 241). Yet, as argued by Stevenson (2015: 11) looking at Egyptian artefacts as ‘contact zones’, as Clifford (1997: 188–​219) did with museums, might help redress at least in part the mentioned unbalances and allow for the twenty-​first-​century

516   Paolo Del Vesco museum ‘to reanimate Egyptian heritage within fresh narratives and in partnership with new communities of practice’ (Stevenson 2015: 13).

26.5.2 An Egyptian collection in Italy In 2024, the Museo Egizio, the name by which the Egyptian museum in Turin (Italy) is known, will celebrate its bicentennial anniversary. While most collections of Egyptian artefacts outside Egypt are housed in archaeological museums or in so-​called ‘universal’ or ‘encyclopaedic’ museums, only very rarely they are kept in museums entirely devoted to ancient Egypt since their foundation. The Museo Egizio is such a museum and even pre-​dates the creation of the famous Cairo Egyptian Museum, in Egypt. The museum was founded through the acquisition of the collection of consul general of France in Egypt, Bernardino Drovetti, by the Savoy king Carlo Felice in 1824 (Moiso 2016: 40–​ 5). This initially antiquarian collection, which counted more than 5,000 objects and papyri, was then expanded through further purchases of antiquities (Del Vesco and Jarsaillon 2017: 129–​30) and the acquisition of excavation finds deriving from archaeological fieldwork conducted in 11 different Egyptian sites between 1903 and 1935, and it is today a collection of some 40,000 artefacts (for a history see Moiso 2016; Moiso and Lovera 2017). Between 2010 and 2015, the museum, which is still housed in the same seventeenth-​ century building where it was originally installed, underwent a complete redesign. The newly appointed director, Christian Greco, already held very clear ideas about the direction that the Museo Egizio would take: ‘Dr Greco, if you could condense in one word your new plans for the museum, which one would you choose? I would use the word involvement’.7 In Greco’s vision the museum is, in effect, a ‘political’ entity, according to the etymological meaning of the word, namely an integral part of the polis, and thus of the whole civil community. Similar to other archaeological collections (Merriman 2004: 547–​9), then, first important steps towards a wider accessibility of the museum were the creation of open-​storage display galleries and of a new website, including links to the online museum collection, photographic archive, and papyrus collection databases, with freely available high resolution images, to videos describing collection highlights, to digital virtual tours of the museum or its temporary exhibitions, and to downloadable documents of social reporting. At the same time, the Museo Egizio also devised initiatives and projects that might be generally described as ‘social inclusion’ programmes, aimed at involving as many diverse audiences as possible.

7 

Interview with Christian Greco by Marco Carminati for the weekly supplement Domenica of the Sole24Ore newspaper of 27 April 2014 (English translation by the author).

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   517

26.5.3 The Museum and its communities Since the museum’s re-​opening in 2015, consideration of the colonial and ‘displaced’ nature of the collection highlighted the necessity to maintain a connection with the country of origin and to open up a dialogue with the Arabic-​speaking communities living in Turin. For this reason, the interpretation texts in the galleries were translated into Egyptian Arabic. The engagement of Arabic-​speaking residents had already started before the 2015 re-​opening but was limited to free guided tours of the collection offered to groups of north-​African migrant women, mainly from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. The visits were part of Italian language, citizenship, and cultural life courses, which they were attending at a non-​profit organization with social utility, Mondi in Città, ‘Worlds in the City’ (henceforth MIC). Courses such as ‘Turin is my city’ have been taught by MIC for more than 20 years. They are specifical\ly tailored for recently arrived migrant women and include visits to the most relevant museums and cultural institutions of the city with the assistance of cultural mediators and an on-​site babysitting service for the children of the participants. Drawing on those first experiences, a group of curators decided to expand the collaboration with MIC. In 2016, a ten-​lesson course on ‘daily life of ancient Egyptians through the artefacts of the Museo Egizio’ was organized by the museum staff for a group of 11 women, who were trained as tour guides and mediators between Arabic and Italian speaking audiences. The training programme, called ‘My Museum’, ran between 2016 and 2017. The participants received a reimbursement thanks to funds secured by MIC and the end of the programme was celebrated at the museum with traditional homemade cakes and the distribution of official certificates of attendance. Some MIC team members and course participants spontaneously produced a bilingual booklet collecting their own notes and interpretation on the themes and artefacts presented during the course, which were then gifted to all the women involved in MIC activities. The 11 participants have since continued conducting guided tours both in Arabic and Italian for their families and friends, for the wider foreign resident community, and for all the people taking part in special outreach events organized by the museum, such as those connected to the annual celebration of the World Refugee Day. A further positive accomplishment of the project was that both MIC and the migrant women finally gained greater visibility in the local and national press. Alongside this, two other projects were developed between 2015 and 2017. The first, Dal Nilo al Po e ritorno, ‘From the Nile to the Po and back’, saw the collaboration of the Museo Egizio, the Museum of Oriental Art of Turin (MAO), and the Egyptian teachers and students of the Primary and Secondary School (Key Stages 2 to 5) of the Italian–​ Egyptian Association ‘The Nile’, a part-​time Arabic school in Turin, which closely conforms to the official education programmes of same level schools in Egypt. At the outset, the volunteer teachers at the school, mostly parents of the children, were given guided tours of both collections, focusing on Egyptian cultural heritage from the most remote periods, through the pharaonic, Greco-​Roman, Late Antique, and Islamic times, to the more recent family heirlooms. In the second stage, the teachers were invited to

518   Paolo Del Vesco give tours to their students, with the assistance of museum staff. In the last stage, the younger students produced drawings and short written compositions inspired by the visits and discussions back at school, while the older students were given the opportunity, thanks to funding from the United States Mission to Italy, to attend a course on video making and to document the final part of the project. As tangible outcomes of the whole programme, the US Consulate General of Milan sponsored the production of an Arabic–​Italian booklet and a video. The second project envisaged the involvement of a group of twenty Egyptian teenage students and their Italian classmates from the Technical Institute ‘L. Des Ambrois’ in Oulx, a small mountain village in the upper Susa Valley, some 70km west of Turin. The Egyptians were in Oulx thanks to grants from the Egyptian Foundation ‘Misr El Kheir’, a non-​profit institution for sustainable development that supports an education programme allowing some 300 students to attend a full 5-​year cycle diploma in Italian schools. Two visits of teachers and students at the museum involved discussions with the curators and photography training in the galleries. The material collected by the students became part of their multimedia classes during which a web-​based photo gallery was created. The students presented their results at the first semester meeting. On that occasion, the Museo Egizio curators were accompanied by Nagwa Bakr, responsible for the community outreach programmes at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) in Cairo, who was temporarily based in Turin for research. Her engaging way of presenting her personal experience as an Egyptologist and museum curator in Egypt immediately resonated with the Egyptian students, who in turn felt comfortable telling (in Arabic, and then translating themselves for their Italian classmates) their personal approach to Egyptian cultural heritage: they were extremely proud of seeing their heritage being displayed abroad and being appreciated by so many people from different countries, although most of them had never been to a museum in Egypt before. With great enthusiasm from both students and teachers the decision was taken to extend the collaboration with the Museo Egizio, and a new visit to the collection focused this time on materials, pigments, and tools used in ancient times was arranged. Unfortunately, on account of the teachers being on fixed-​term contracts and moving to different schools, the collaboration between the Institute of Oulx and the Museo Egizio came to an end. The unforeseen early conclusion of this project highlights the paramount importance of the external facilitators of any community engagement programme (in the mentioned case, the teachers at the local school). Without a middle-​/​ long-​term involvement and the availability of these valuable intermediary figures, most projects fail.

26.5.4 Engagement and politics In 2017 and 2018, a three-​month promotional campaign specifically directed to the Arabic-​speaking communities living in Turin was launched. The campaign featured banners with an image of a smiling and rather stereotypical couple, supposedly from

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   519 a north-​African or Middle Eastern country. Next to it a catch phrase, in Arabic only, read ‘Lucky who speaks Arabic’, and the accompanying text explained that one of two tickets bought by Arabic-​speaking visitors was for free. Foreigners officially residing in Turin (within the municipality alone) number almost 133,000, just over 15.2 percent of the total inhabitants. Foreigners from countries where Arabic is the official language constitute a considerable proportion (25,576 or 19.2 percent) of the total number of foreign residents living in Turin. Within this group, the most represented countries are Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia. In 2017, the campaign went relatively unnoticed by both media and politicians. The same campaign in 2018, instead, attracted considerable attention, especially from right-​wing parties, as it happened two months from the national political elections of 4 March 2018. The national leader of a right-​wing party, whose main slogan during that electoral campaign was ‘Italians first’, openly attacked the initiative in newspapers and social media inviting all party supporters to boycott the Museo Egizio. Simultaneously, another leader of a nationalistic-​conservative far-​right party called for a rally in front of the museum and defined the promotional campaign discriminatory against Italian Christian Catholics, as it ‘advantaged one specific religion and one specific ethnic group’. Critiques of the campaign came too from far-​left supporters, who highlighted the colonialist historical context in which the Museo Egizio collection had originated, and which the museum was failing to acknowledge. Moreover, they lamented that the promotional campaign paid only superficial attention to the complexity and diversity of the so-​called Arabic-​speaking community, and reinforced cultural stereotypes, such as that of veiled women (as the one shown in the campaign banners) or that of an implied paucity of museum-​goers among north-​ African or Middle Eastern people. The general commotion originated by an apparently straightforward promotional initiative once again demonstrates how political every action of a museum can be, or become, being at the same time the product of, and a response to, contemporary societies.

26.5.5 The Museum as meeting point While developing social inclusion projects and initiatives, the Museo Egizio staff also began experimenting with the idea of the museum as a place for debate and intercultural dialogue, beyond the collection it preserves. In May 2017, a festival of Egyptian movies (with Italian subtitles) from the 1960s and 2010s, entitled ‘Miramar. Due mondi uno schermo’ (Miramar. Two Worlds One Screen) was organized and hosted by the museum as a way to explore the long-​standing relationship existing between Italy and Egypt and to open a dialogue between the Italian migrants that used to live in Egypt, and the Egyptian migrants presently living in Italy. The idea of the museum as a place of encounter and dialogue was further developed for the annual celebration of the World Refugee Day. On these occasions, advertised with the catch phrase ‘I am welcome’, the visitors were invited to leave a short message on a ‘Welcome Wall’ located at the entrance in exchange for free access, and the museum

520   Paolo Del Vesco became a backdrop and stage for concerts, theatrical performances, laboratories and, more generally, encounters of people and cultures. The experience acquired through the training programme for the north-​African migrant women and the organization of the World Refugee Days, was instrumental in the planning and realization, between June 2018 and November 2019, of a series of three public workshops entitled ‘Museums and Migrants. The Tools for the Encounter’. Inspiration was also drawn from the so-​called Multaka project,8 a collaboration of four museums in Berlin which trained refugees as museum guides and created special tours designed as encounters with the stories of people and objects within a museum environment, seen as a ‘meeting point’ (multaqa in Arabic). The three ‘Museums and Migrants’ workshops, organized in collaboration with the social cooperative ABCittà, were structured as a path through various stages of reflection over the general topic of the possible relationship between museums and migrants: from the needs of the migrants and the situation of the migratory experience in Turin, to examples of European museums addressing similar issues, the tools for a multicultural dialogue and the interaction of museums, hospitals, schools, prisons, libraries, and other institutions. In April 2019, the Museo Egizio established a collaboration with the local CPIA (Centro Provinciale di Istruzione per Adulti –​Provincial Centre for Adult Education) on educational projects specifically designed for young migrants living in Turin with their parents thanks to family reunification schemes, or in foster homes or centres for unaccompanied migrant minors. These projects included Italian language courses carried out in the museum premises and based on the history or art of ancient Egypt, with programmes aimed at the development of not only basic Italian communication skills, but also the ability to describe museum artefacts. The artefacts became the focus of lessons, and associated information from the museum curators and cultural mediators were then developed and interpreted by the young participants using their preferred media (digital slides, short films, photos, or live social media sessions). The courses ended with a public event, in which the participants presented their favourite museum artefact in front of friends and relatives in their native language and Italian.

26.5.6 The Museum goes out of the museum Believing in the importance of the museum as an active agent of change, growth, and improvement, especially within its own local social environment, the Museo Egizio staff also devised projects aimed at taking the museum out of its premises and into places of exclusion, such as hospitals, prisons, and urban peripheries. Since 2014, museum curators periodically visited young patients (aged 5 to 17) of the Turin ‘Regina Margherita’ Paediatric Hospital and offered short introductions to ancient Egyptian history, art, and 8  https://​mult​aka.de/​en/​starts​ite-​en/​. The Museo Egizio officially joined in 2019 the Multaka International Network: a group of partner museums in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and England, formed after the first German Multaka project.

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   521 hieroglyphs through playful activities. More recently, they have introduced handling sessions of precise replicas of museum artefacts in order to enhance the educational and entertainment activities with the direct experience of the materiality of the objects. The replicas used at the hospital derive from another ‘Museum-​outside-​the-​Museum’ project, one that is developed in collaboration with a group of inmates of the ‘Lorusso e Cutugno’ Correctional Facility of Turin. The collaboration with the inmates started with a series of lectures about the Museo Egizio collection and the life, beliefs, and art of ancient Egyptians, delivered by museum curators inside the correctional facility. Fascinated by the topics of the lectures, some of the participants, who were also enrolled in intramural learning paths, including woodworking laboratories and art lessons, proposed, with the support of their teachers, to replicate a selection of museum artefacts as part of their programme. The project, ‘Free to Learn’, quickly grew on the enthusiasm of the inmates and led to the creation of more than 50 replicas, many of which have since been used in other museum activities and have featured in various exhibitions showcasing the project both inside and outside the museum. Feedback collected from the inmates highlighted positive aspects of the project: the special care the participants received, the possibility to directly contribute to the decisions for the project, the feeling of being helpful to the community via their replicas, the pride of producing something that could be seen and appreciated by other people and that was free to travel outside the prison, the opportunity of learning to appreciate beauty and to create something beautiful. One participant, who specialized in the reproduction of complicated funerary texts on papyri and was soon nicknamed ‘the royal scribe’, even decided to start studying ancient Egyptian language to be able to decipher the signs he became proficient in copying. One of his best productions, a faithful reproduction of the so-​called Book of the Dead of Taysnakht, became part of another ‘Museum-​outside-​the-​Museum’ project in 2019–​2020. The almost two-​metre-​long reproduction toured district libraries of the city as part of the travelling exhibition ‘Papyrus Tour. Ancient Egypt in the Library’. The exhibition was accompanied by curators’ lectures in an attempt to take the Museo Egizio to the urban peripheries and to question the still widespread assumption that museums, and what they contain, are the prerogative of a restricted social elite.

26.5.7 Critical points Since 2015, Museo Egizio staff, primarily stimulated by a self-​critical reflection on the displaced nature of the collection and by the direction impressed by director Christian Greco, has been constantly increasing attempts to engage with contemporary society. The range of social issues that have been addressed is quite wide, encompassing questions of accessibility, diversity, inclusion of marginalized groups, capacity building, participation, health and wellbeing. Yet, comparing the Museo Egizio projects, activities, and results against the theoretical framework outlined above and programmes carried out by museums worldwide, some critical points can be raised. First, many of the projects are characterized by a high degree of serendipity, which can favour and adapt

522   Paolo Del Vesco to a more spontaneous involvement of communities but might negatively impact on the success of the initiatives as well. The lack of a more structured approach to the engagement of contemporary social issues, probably due to its being not the core priority of the museum, but one among others, often leads programmes to be dependent upon the personal willingness and availability of the curators or on low levels of allocated budgets. Similarly, a few problems of consistency are evident. For example, the self-​critical reflection on the colonial past of the museum and its collecting practices that informs internal debate, is not reflected or made explicit in the display. A critical point also concerns the fact that some social inclusion projects still retain a top-​down approach in which the involved groups play a slightly subordinate role of consultancy and are unable to express themselves in a fully collaborative participation. A further challenge to social inclusion projects is linked to the risk that some of the activities or campaigns targeting minority groups might accentuate the differences instead of increasing the integration (Varutti 2012: 251). Moreover, although a survey of the impact of the Museo Egizio on the local economy, a full profiling of its audiences, and an assessment of their appreciation of the museum were conducted between 2016 and 2017, a serious evaluation of the real impact and beneficial outcomes of the social inclusion programmes of this institution has not been carried out yet. Finally, despite a sincere commitment for environmental sustainability and the efforts invested in the construction of an energetic system significantly reducing the carbon footprint of the museum building, the biggest challenge of contemporary society, climate change, has not yet been addressed by the Museo Egizio.

26.6  Conclusion Similar to almost all sectors worldwide, the COVID-​19 pandemic, besides the enormous loss of human life, heavily affected the global museum community. The social agency of museums largely relies on physical experiences, gatherings, encounters and exchanges, hands-​on activities, emotions, touch, empathy, or in one word, on direct relationships: precisely what the spread of COVID-​19 severely undermined. As museums closed, recourse to digital media and networks helped museums maintaining an open line with their audiences, but in most cases, it caused them to limit to their traditional basic functions of (virtually) exhibiting the collection, entertaining, and educating. The pandemic increased inequality and injustice worldwide to unprecedented levels, it worsened the economic conditions of already disadvantaged areas, and exacerbated the humanitarian crisis of migrating peoples, demonstrating the fragility of the global capitalistic system upon which museums, too, have been reliant. However, the rapid effects of the pandemic clearly showed the importance of seriously addressing other global threats that might also be tackled through a worldwide collaborative effort, such as the one posed by climate change. This is the time, more than ever before, for the

Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   523 ‘paradigm shift’ and revolution in museum vision so much advocated for by scholars such as Janes and Sandell (2019). Museums are called to take a stance on major social challenges, striving to play an increasingly relevant role in contemporary society, although always bearing in mind that museums ‘are not intended to resolve climate change or any other global problem, but they are in the position to help create an image of a desirable future, which is the essential first step in its realisation’.9 Archaeological museums should also consider as a social responsibility the preservation of their collections for future generations: collection and research should remain the main focus of these museums, together with a strong commitment to the engagement of contemporary social issues.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to express his sincere gratitude to Alice Stevenson for the invitation to contribute to the present volume and for her insightful comments and suggestions on drafts of this chapter; many thanks are also due to Christian Greco, director of the Museo Egizio, and Alessia Fassone, curator and coordinator for the social inclusion programmes at the Museo Egizio, for the helpful and stimulating discussions about the museum activities and the topic of the present chapter. Finally, the author would like to thank Chiara Salvador for her constant support and help.

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Engaging contemporary social issues in the museum   525 Moiso, B. and G. Lovera. 2017. ‘La Missione Archeologica Italiana in Egitto.’ In Missione Egitto 1903–​1920. L’avventura archeologica M.A.I. raccontata, edited by P. Del Vesco and B. Moiso, pp. 149–​75. Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini. Oliveira, G., Dorfman, E., Kramar, N., Mendenhall, C.D., and N.E. Heller. 2020. ‘The Anthropocene in Natural History Museums: A Productive Lens of Engagement’. Curator: The Museum Journal 63 (3): pp. 333–​51. Reid, D.M. 2002. Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Reid, D.M. 2015. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt. Archaeologies, Museums & the Struggle for Identities from World War I to Nasser. Cairo, New York: The American University in Cairo Press. Riggs, C. 2010. ‘Ancient Egypt in the Museum: Concepts and Constructions’. In A Companion to Ancient Egypt, edited by A. Lloyd, pp. 1129–​53. Chichester: Blackwell. Riggs, C. 2014. Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. London: Bloomsbury. Riggs, C. 2017. Egypt. Lost Civilizations. London: Reaktion Books. Rockman, M. and J. Flatman (Eds). 2013. Archaeology in Society. Its Relevance in the Modern World. New York, Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London: Springer. Samis, P. and M. Michaelson. 2017. Creating the Visitor-​Centred Museum. New York and London: Routledge. Sandell, R. 2002. ‘Museums and the Combating of Social Inequality: Roles, Responsibilities, Resistance’. In Museums, Society, Inequality, edited by R. Sandell, pp. 3–​23. London and New York: Routledge. Schiffer, M.B. 2017. Archaeology’s Footprints in the Modern World. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press. Silverman, L.H. 2010. The Social Work of Museums. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Stevenson, A. 2015. ‘Egyptian Archaeology and the Museum’. In The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology Online. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, A. 2019. Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums. London: UCL Press. Szekeres, V. 2002. ‘Representing Diversity and Challenging Racism: The Migration Museum’. In Museums, Society, Inequality, edited by R. Sandell, pp. 142–​52. London and New York: Routledge. Varutti, M. 2012. ‘Towards Social Inclusion in Taiwan. Museums, Equality and Indigenous Groups’. In Museums, Equality and Social Justice, edited by R. Sandell and E. Nightingale, pp. 243–​53. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Webb, S. 2006. ‘Making Museums, Making People: The Representation of the Sámi Through Material Culture’. In Public Archaeology 5 (3): pp. 167–​83. Weil, S.E. 2002. Making Museums Matter. Washington: Smithsonian Books. Wichmann Rasmussen, J. 2021. ‘Revealing Hidden Stories at the Danish Welfare Museum. A Collaborative History’. In Museums and Social Change. Challenging the Unhelpful Museum, edited by A. Chynoweth, B. Lynch, K. Petersen, and S. Smed, pp. 1–​31. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Zamora, H. 2002. ‘Identity and Community. A Look at Four Latino Museums’. Museum News 81 (3): pp. 36–​41. Zimmerman, L.J. 2013. ‘Homelessness’. In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, edited by P. Graves-​Brown, R. Harrison, and A. Piccini, pp. 336–​50. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 27

Transcendi ng a nd e x panding th e wa l l s of the m u se um Digital pivot, digital by default, digital transformation Daniel Pett

27.1  Introduction The Internet and its associated technologies have dramatically changed the way that museums and memory institutions engage with their audiences since they first went online in the late 1990s (Bowen 2010; Gaia et al. 2020; Keene 1996, 1998). Since those first steps, when hand coded HTML, FTP deployed, frame-​based interfaces were de facto methodologies, interface design has evolved, and museums have embraced technology to deliver richer, more meaningful experiences for their audiences. This rate of change and democratization of access will not diminish (see Besser 2019; Kenderdine 2013; Kidd 2018), as new technologies, techniques, concepts, and experiences are developed to enrich those shared moments of public wonder and the role of the museum adapts to the digital space. Therefore, from the start of this chapter, it should be made clear that technology will not pause, stop, or bend on command. Innovation will be overtaken far faster than a beloved papier-​mâché diorama commissioned in the early twentieth century. The world is seeing the creation of new museums with digital technologies embedded from their inception (for example, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, or Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney) or as they are gutted and refreshed (for example, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne). Retro-​fitting digital experiences into the buildings that many collections inhabit, namely neoclassical Victorian museum structures, can severely limit the outputs that can be implemented.

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    527 Thick walls, legal frameworks such as listed building status, lack of wiring conduits, and the presence of asbestos can hamper roll-​out. Likewise, if there are suboptimal management processes or physical experiences within the museum space and a digital ingredient is added, it is possible to end up with a broken process or experience if the foundations are not fixed. Information and communications technology (ICT) is not a panacea for any form of business, it is a tool that underpins modern working practices and experiences and can provide a slick veneer if done well. At the heart of this chapter is the question of whether a large majority of museum digital content is a marketing exercise or whether it should be a far richer method of engagement with disparate public audiences, providing meaningful experiences. The latter of these potential characteristics is the one to aspire to, but without visitors to interact with resources, digital outputs are without value. This chapter leans heavily on the Anglophone world, but most of the concepts discussed can be used globally. All areas of the world can experience digital poverty or can harness similar technologies; the common denominator is the connected world via the Internet (whether it is slow-​paced or hyperconnected). Often academics, curators, or researchers bemoan the lack of exposure their product gets from their communications and marketing colleagues, but without visually engaging, unique, and appealing subject matter the battle will be lost. Therefore, it is hoped that the ideas discussed below will help projects or institutions on the digital pathways to viral exposure. As a consequence of the global COVID-​19 Pandemic, a digital revolution in cultural institutions began to emerge as technology and its use started to mature; technology is becoming part of an emotional and sensual response to the human condition and how we interact with our shared past. Museums are facing challenges to their own history (sometimes from within their own ranks; for example the work of Dan Hicks (2020) on collections of Benin Materials), while the questions of Black Lives Matter, of neutrality, of decolonization of collecting practices, and of other global events such as the Arab Spring and the resurgence of Nationalism and state interests in the past all permeate the museum’s physical walls and create a space for global discourse. However, are institutions stuck in a cycle of lessons that have not been learned? For instance, in 2020, the UK launched a ‘Towards a National Collection’ funding programme, but is this just a rehash of the previous Museum Libraries and Archives drive towards digital collaboration of the early 2000 period? Have lessons been learnt from previous projects such as Culture 24’s ‘Let’s Get Real’ programme (Finnis et al. 2011; Malde and Finnis 2017)? Or are we just repeating these cycles and losing sector knowledge? Fundamentally, museum digital experiences are grounded and built upon the richness of collection documentation, and it is these collections that are the reason why the public and the academy beat a path to museum doors. However, it is what museums do with these data that tells the narrative of the institution, the collection, the people, and the communities that they serve. Ultimately, digital engagement, methods, and practice, particularly in times of global unrest, are very much tied to ‘emotional labour’ (Frost 2020); uncertainty about where we are going, what the future holds, how we can harness these tools, deal with the disruptive nature of these technologies, discover and

528   Daniel Pett resource capacity for delivery, increase the availability of skills, and move away from reactionary delivery.

27.1.1 The information superhighway? In 1996, Tim Schadla-​Hall asked an important question: ‘how ready is our collections information for the information superhighway? I suspect the answer is that a lot of it is not ready for the mud track or even the occasionally trodden grassy path!’ (Schadla-​Hall 1996) Whether this statement still stands true, is something that many return to regularly. To be fit for purpose and to provide digital foundations, collections information needs cleaning, standardization, disambiguating, updating, and tending to maintain its usefulness to audiences, funders, participants, and the machine-​led computer world in which Artificial Intelligence is burgeoning (Museums Association 2020). Feedback mechanisms with researchers, the public, and machines aid this process, and we now have powerful tools from citizen science to assist with this process (see this volume: Chapter 28). In 2018, the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in the ‘Culture is Digital’ report (DCMS 2018), noted that 61% of the UK’s cultural institutions had digitized and documented up to 50% of their collections. But to what degree of granular precision? Did all records meet minimum documentation standards (Spectrum 5 in the UK)?

27.1.2 The digital divide/​digital poverty line The issue of the ‘digital divide’ or ‘digital poverty’ (Frost 2020; Malde et al. 2019; Mihelj et al. 2019; Office for National Statistics 2019), is becoming apparent at scale within the museum sector (globally), and accelerated during the pandemic, with many differing, but interlinked facets including literacy, access, connectivity, skills, and investment. Those without access to the Internet are now disadvantaged to varying degrees. Simple things like booking tickets, doctor’s appointments, and application processes are accelerating towards the digital experience. The divide is not only between hyperconnected and poorly connected continents, countries, regions, and communities, but also between institutions on a local and national scale. In the recent past, the divide focused squarely on connectivity and access to technological hardware and software, but it is evolving to interfaces, ethical considerations, digital censorship, funding streams, and access to training to deliver. This divide extends to access to digital skills, to grants for digital activity, to access to technological partners, to accessing high quality digital implementation, and to having senior leadership who believe in the potential of digital activity (Malde et al. 2019). Digital technology is a great enabler, but also a leveller, with ambition and desires often outweighing the physical capacity of organizational capability. Throughout the

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    529 below, the digital divide will be bubbling away, just under the surface of all things that are discussed. When commissioning or building a project around digital technology the following constraints are important to consider: 1. Can audiences connect easily to interventions? If the project requires a mobile signal can this be provided? If people are in areas with low bandwidth capabilities can they ever connect? 2. Does the intervention require high end equipment, and can the audience or indeed the institution afford to use it? 3. Could the equipment preclude some people from using it? Disabilities, motion sickness, phobias could all stop some members of museum audiences from enjoying the experience. Addressing these issues can be difficult for institutions on a budget, or where technical knowledge is low. Solutions include the possibility of the production of low bandwidth, accessible websites for consumption of key resources, such as optimized and compressed images, localized content delivery networks; or, in the case of physical displays that offer interactivity via personal devices (such as mobile phones, which could preclude people from joining in if the participant has no device, or is unwilling to download an app or pay for bandwidth), devices could be made available (for example the Fitzwilliam Museum’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’ Augmented Reality (Cooper and Noble 2020; Pescarmona 2020) or the British Museum’s Virtual Pilgrimage (Uglow et al. 2017) where access to museum owned mobile devices was built into exhibition design. When planning these interventions, at the back of the mind there should be that burning question of whether a digital solution is actually needed to convey meaning or enhance the experience. Quite often it may not be. A simple example of analogue Augmented Reality can illustrate this. The Heiden Tor (Heathen’s Gate) at the Petronell-​ Carnuntum archaeological park, for example, uses an etched glass panel to enrich the view of the ruined Roman construction.

27.2  Digital foundations In many institutions, technologists are now a fixture of the available human resource within Museums, but they are often working in small teams or alone, with very few institutions able to afford multidisciplinary teams to enable digital content to be produced at scale. Institutions are grappling with how to resource digital functions, where to situate them and how they fit with the mission of the organizations (James and Price 2018). Many factors can influence the formation of digital capability within cultural institutions, without exhausting these, a list is produced below.

530   Daniel Pett 1. Technical staff—​team size and role descriptions, coupled with the low levels of financial compensation offered within the museum sector seriously affect retention of staff and the technologies deployed. Too often, museum digital professionals are being asked to roll two or more job specialisms into one role. 2. Non-​technical staff—​willingness to learn new skills, adaptability in the face of disruptive technologies, rate of change that can be accommodated. 3. Relationships—​complex technological relationships within the organization; are the management and staff willing to engage in digital transformation processes or will change derail structures? Does the institution have an appetite for risk, for experimentation, for possible failure? All of these can have a significant impact on digital projects. 4. Financial foundations—​can the institution afford to invest? Can it afford a cycle of iterative improvement? 5. Planning prowess—​digital projects need rigorous planning, without this failure is, more often than not, the end result. Having those that execute the project to also manage the project, places undue stress on the end result. Follow a project management methodology and recruit project management specialists. 6. Evaluation frameworks—​projects and products must build in longitudinal evaluation to enable lessons to be learned, for strategy to be influenced. Make use of digital analytical tools to provide data for informed decisions so that you can follow the DKIM pyramid (see Section 27.2.1). 7. Connectivity—​the hyperconnected museum can deliver high bandwidth digital experiences, whereas the low bandwidth museum may struggle to provide email or provision computers for its staff. Internal networks, external connection to a service provider, mobile signal coverage (3G/​4G/​5G), and Wi-​Fi all impact significantly on what an institution can deliver for its audiences and staff. 8. External relationships—​for example, does an institution have a development/​ fundraising agreement in place that precludes using certain competitors’ technology (e.g. would one company want to implement hardware from another in a venue they sponsor)? 9. Branding and identity—​has the institution got a strong visual appeal and a logo that commands attention? Can it provide an instantly recognizable presence, which makes it easy to transfer from print to digital?

27.2.1 Digital transformation: Where are we going? The seven digital pivots defined by Deloitte (Gurumurphy and Schatsky 2019) within their digital maturity model can be seen in many institutional and funding body digital strategies, with perhaps pillars 6 and 7 being the ones of most importance at this time; a unified customer experience, coupled with business model adaptability. Multiple toolkits and evaluation frameworks are available for use within digital projects, for example the ‘Balanced Value Impact Model’ (Tanner 2012).

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    531 As the museum world becomes more astute about marketing its digital and analogue presence, reference is increasingly being made to digital strategies based on variations of the three R model (see Nielsen n.d. for example) which could be expanded to the six R model; or the use of frameworks such as the ‘brand resonance pyramid’ (Keller 2009: 144). These R factors might include these terms, and all will have actors within the audience that place greater importance on their R factor over the others. In times of global uncertainty, revenue will become the one that many boards, directors, and senior management teams will focus on: 1. Reach: total number of unique users who consume content. 2. Revenue: the income that can be attributed to digital activities. 3. Relevance: how the institution creates content that impacts on dimensions such as current affairs or the public’s emotional state. 4. Reaction: the way that the content produced creates a stimulus for reactive activity; can a social media intervention be converted beyond a ‘like’ to a membership or donation? 5. Retention: whether an audience returns for more interactions with a museum’s content and programming after their initial contact. 6. Relationships: institutional bonds, produced from the reaction to visiting, to the ties created by sponsorship deals. Those institutions that can service their customers and adapt rapidly to change in these constrained times will survive, but few museums have achieved this so far. In 2017, the British Museum tendered for a big data pipeline platform1, working towards the Data > Insight > Knowledge > Wisdom (DIKM) hierarchical model (see Ackfoff 1989; Rowley 2007), just before their digital unit was dismantled and this project was never realized. The digital medium can provide the means for a small rural history museum, such as the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading (Marshall 2020a), to become global social media museum superstars, due to the risk-​taking of their social media lead, Adam Koszary, and his eccentric use of a photo of a large sheep (the Absolute Unit2) on Twitter (2018). Koszary’s director took notice of the power of social media when the MERL reached the news pages of The Times of London (Pett 2018). The digital medium can also provide a platform for global delivery of cultural arts events, such as the live broadcast from Epidaurus’ theatre of Aeschylus’ Persians3 or the National Gallery’s tour of its Artemisia exhibition4 with its curator Letizia Treves. More localized experiences, for example, are the now closed Verizon sponsored Augmented Reality showcase (The Met Unframed) developed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum 1 

https://​www.dig​ital​mark​etpl​ace.serv​ice.gov.uk/​digi​tal-​outco​mes-​and-​spec​iali​sts/​opport​unit​ ies/​1907. 2  https://​twit​ter.com/​TheM​ERL/​sta​tus/​983​3419​7031​8938​112. 3  https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​iAF0​sxme​tPQ, first shown 25 July 2020. 4  https://​www.nati​onal​gall​ery.org.uk/​whats-​on/​artemi​sia-​cura​tor-​led-​exh​ibit​ion-​film.

532   Daniel Pett 2021), or the much-​anticipated Royal Shakespeare Company’s Virtual Reality experience, Dream (Clapp 2021). The pandemic of the early 2020s witnessed a surge of these digital interventions, an amplification of signals amongst an amorphous noise of digital programming. As museums closed their doors and shuttered their windows, a rush to deliver content was launched (for archaeology collections see for example Clerkin and Taylor 2021). Was there delivery of quantity of product versus quality of product? Much of this programming was being done pre-​pandemic in digital format (for example Vikings Live from the British Museum5) or in physical meeting rooms and theatres, but the volume of experiences being offered increased. There is now a panoply of interventions being offered over a range of video conferencing platforms (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams) which includes lectures, private tours, round tables, question and answer sessions, workshops, podcasts, short films, long films, social media driven events, and the list goes on. There were also museums that experimented with paywalled content and the freemium model of content delivery in an attempt to retain their membership base, a concept that was famously trialled by the Brooklyn Museum of Art with its 1st Fans initiative (Reagan 2009; Xiao 2012). As organizations turn to these media, the grounding question must be asked: what sets out a museum experience as being truly unique? Institutions had varied outputs, delivered experiences that missed the point, had expectations of higher engagement, whilst some sat back and bided their time to deliver new digital foundations and subsequently quality programming. Often, a cultural institution has built a new digital product and hoped that the audience would come in droves, however ‘build it and they will come, it’s not a strategy, it’s a prayer’ notes Blank (2006: 7). Thorough audience research and careful platform choice or reliance on a digital ‘venue’ becomes key to ventures. It is important to build where museum audiences are, build where the audience wants to be, build where the audience might go next, and build novel but meaningful experiences that draw visitors in.

27.3  Building the digital museum An institution that will successfully navigate the digital swamp needs several tools in place to function effectively. Museums are under great pressure to raise revenue to supplement grants and endowments, the emotive issue of charging for entry/​access (Merriman 2016; Falconer and Blair 2003; Green 2020) is now blurring the lines between the physical and digital space and the global pandemic will further increase this 5 

https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​NuL0​Q0ts​id4, first shown in October 2014 in British cinemas.

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    533 drive to monetize. A non-​exhaustive overview of what might be considered fundamental building blocks of an expanded digital presence for a museum, or memory institution as it prepares its offer to go beyond the walls of the estate are laid out in Table 27.1. This table attempts to align the facet and reasoning to the R factors mentioned above.

27.3.1 Digital maturity and the institution A simple and novel categorization model for museums in the digital age can be generated along the lines of digital maturity (Forrester Research 2017; James and Price 2018) or the technology adoption lifecycle model (Meade and Rabelo 2004). Organizations can be labelled as one that treads water, one that exists within homeostasis, one that is aspirational, one that is participatory and driven by cooperative practice, and finally the technophilic trend setter. Worldwide, many institutions have few staff to run their activities and their facilities, and these may struggle to produce a digital experience for their visitors and research audience. They may have a website, a social media profile and a simple catalogue online, or they may struggle to have just one of these and functions are fulfilled by the curator, who is also the manager, the janitor, the docent, the cleaner, and the receptionist. This type of institution could be categorized as treading water in the digital space. A step up from treading water, is an institution that inhabits the digital world in homeostasis, and is probably one of the most commonly found worldwide. The base digital presence for a museum has been achieved and is rarely upgraded until systems break and their digital budget is enough to maintain their presence and new interventions are infrequent. They may have digital artefacts that are aging rapidly deployed around the museum estate, for example screens and kiosks with aging technology. Fewer institutions have grasped the fact they can build a fully-​fledged website quickly and cheaply using free tools such as site builders (for example SquareSpace, Wix) or open source content management systems (for example Wordpress or Drupal) and generate a social media presence on all the major platforms (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook) with relatively little fiscal investment. Digital strategy will be formed to develop new digital experiences regularly and funding is sought out to enrich their digital landscape and the digitally enabled team will be small and multifunctional. These institutions are digital aspirants, they want to harness the power of digital, but are not quite mature yet in this space. Cultural heritage institutions should be based around participatory, two-​ way dialogue-​based experiences, and digital media (Simon 2010) with the opportunity for visitors, staff, and participants to create meaningful interactions with legacies. To achieve this, institutional mindset needs to be challenged and acceptance of risk to be normalized. The opportunities for digital participatory experiences are wide ranging; they can be massive impact, highly commercialized, such as the mega installations of

534   Daniel Pett Table 27.1: Applying the R factors to museum digital facets Digital facet

Reasoning

Main R factor(s)

Strong visual identity Brand awareness, patron recognition, enables the (including colour palettes, creation of eye-​catching visual designs logos, labels, design elements) and branding guidelines

Reach Revenue Retention Resonance

Semantic domain name

Reach Retention

A domain name that reflects the institution and is memorable, easy to use on marketing materials

High quality photography Impressive aesthetic images of your collection or venue will give your user an insight into an experience that they want to be part of.

Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships

Digital strategy

Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships Relevance

A strategic vision is perhaps the most vital of the building blocks of a museum’s digital presence. It must underpin everything it does in the virtual space that the museum inhabits and be built on interoperable standards to enable upgrade/​data exchange.

Coherent and unified web Often museums develop a family of websites over presence time that have no coherent branding or common platform for delivery and maintenance. A digital strategy should outline how to mitigate this and sunset or archive legacy systems when necessary.

Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships Relevance

Back of house collections system

The collection is the bedrock of digital presence. Without documentation—​visual and written—​the museum cannot present narratives or rich visitor experiences.

Relevance Resonance Reach (long tail)

Public Collections Interface (sometimes called an Online Public Access Catalogue—​OPAC)

Building on the back of the house system, the public Reach wants to view what the institution stores. With a Resonance good public offering of this information, much of the Relevance battle to provide a rich experience will be won.

Ticketing or events management system

Since the pandemic, the need for ticketing systems Revenue has been pushed to the forefront of most museum Reach management’s mind. These systems need to be low Relationships friction to integrate and easy to use for the consumer. This is one of the drivers of the 3 R model referred to in Section 27.2—​with the opportunity to build reach, revenue, and relationships.

Customer relationship management system (CRM)

To drive the R factor model, the relationship with museum patrons, visitors or customers is vital to track, develop, and maintain. The introduction of fully-​fledged CRM software will enable more effective growth and retention of a museum’s community.

Public connectivity (4G, 5G, WiFi)

The connectivity that the institution can avail itself Reach can be a driving factor in what digital engagement Revenue can be achieved. Developing countries, those in listed buildings, rural, and poorly connected urban areas will often be adversely affected by this factor.

Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships Relevance

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    535 Table 27.1:  Continued Digital facet

Reasoning

Main R factor(s)

Mobile device applications

These could be seen as luxury items in the digital ecosystem. Are they really needed when visitors might only visit once in their lifetime? What would be the museum’s unique selling point? How would it enrich their visit?

Reach Revenue Resonance Relevance

Licensing policy and open Licensing of digital assets can be key to unlocking data research funding, to encouraging reuse and to revenue streams. Institutions, including the UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, the Rijksmuseum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Cleveland Art Museum have all used forms of the open licenses from Creative Commons to encourage reuse. Note: This does not preclude an organization from licensing works for revenue.

Reach Revenue

Analytical processes/​ data informed museum processes

As referred to above, use the DKIM model to understand museum audiences and their participation in programming and events.

Reach Revenue Resonance Relevance

Partnerships

Seeking partnerships in the digital arena can aid the museum mission. Google Arts and Culture, Smartify, or others may offer a platform that can boost global audience engagement dramatically.

Reach Revenue Resonance Relevance Relationships

Social media

Social media is now driving a high proportion of digital engagement across the world. These media could be the simplest way for an institution to engage with its audience at scale, and cheaply.

Reach Revenue (maybe) Resonance Relevance Relationships

TeamLab (Demetriou 2018), the world travelling immersive Van Gogh6 (Jones 2020), or Olafur Eliasson at the Tate (Searle 2019). These institutions will often have a strong digital vision and strategy and have embraced social media, may have experimented with user-​ generated content, and possibly used citizen science to enrich their collections. At the top level of digital maturity, is the technophilic museum. This type of institution is the rarest and sets the pace for others to follow. Several institutions have stood out in this category at different periods, often with the same people to be found driving them. Several high profile examples of this level of maturity are the Wellcome Collection7 led by Tom Scott, and Seb Chan’s work at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York (Chan and Cope 2015). These institutions will often have well-​staffed digitally enabled teams, with reasonable budget allocations 6  7 

https://​vang​oghe​xpo.com/​. https://​wel​lcom​ecol​lect​ion.org/​.

536   Daniel Pett coupled with a development team that actively seeks out sponsorship and partnership in the technology sector.

27.4  Low cost, high return? As discussed above, constraints on cultural and memory institutions when producing digital meaningful experiences are manifold. However, this does not mean that high quality implementation levels are beyond the reach of projects that may not be well funded. There is a wide array of technological solutions that can be accessed by all museums if they are willing to use open source software or cheap subscription services, to experiment and to iterate in what they do. Below, a selection of digital offsite interventions is discussed at a relatively superficial level due to constraints of this chapter, but with a caveat. In this fast-​paced technological world, these services may disappear rapidly. Technology giants like Google have a poor track record for maintaining access to free services; for example, their foray into the world of 3D viewers was slated for closure in June 2021 with the shuttering of their Poly service (Matney 2021).

27.4.1 Institutional website Institutional websites are often seen as the flagship service to represent the brand of an institution and present memory institutions with a conundrum. Sometimes a divide is readily apparent on what the website is for; a marketing tool to sell the visitor experience on the one hand, with the academic, research side a second-​class digital element on the other. As mentioned above, the memory institution’s heart is centred on its collections, and they should use these as the focal point for building content, and digital programmes, around. The ideal for digital projects is to integrate collections data seamlessly with marketing, to weave rich stories with compelling narratives. This takes time, people, analysis, iteration, and an institutional mindset that does not see their website as a monolithic project that is delivered and left unattended until it breaks. Web technology is very much like a relationship, tend it and it will flourish and the product will be long lived, leave it to its own devices and the path will be very bumpy when it comes to an upgrade. Tools that can be used for this range from enterprise level software (favoured by IT departments who do not deal well with open source disruptive tech), to lightweight content management systems (CMS) used by sector exemplars. For example, the Statens Museum for Kunst8 (Denmark) website was created on the ubiquitous blogging platform WordPress which has a massive share of internet penetration with 40% of all 8 

https://​smk.dk.

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    537 websites in the early 2020s powered by this software (Kinsta 2021). The major platform upon which a lot of the cultural sector frequently grounds its web presence is the enterprise level of Drupal (with all of its problematic user experience and interface flaws (Hubbard 2020)). High profile users in the UK include the British Museum, the Science Museum, and most of the University of Cambridge academic web architecture, whilst in the USA, surveys (Steins 2019) indicated that 46% of respondents used Drupal. Other methods can involve custom builds powered by ‘headless’ CMS or Applications Programming Interface (API) driven web architecture, however a museum or cultural institution could easily run a free static HTML built website off Github’s pages architecture using Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo, or other systems; see, for example, the Egyptian Coffins website (Pitkin et al. 2019a, b). Museum websites should communicate the fundamental answers to these key questions: what do they hold, when are they open, what events are on, and what do they stand for? Long form narrative, activities, video, and enriched media can only come when you have the foundational assets and signposts in place to build the veneer on top.

27.4.2 Collections tools A good selection of commercial collections tools can be found on the Collections Trust website (Collections Trust n.d.) which comply with the Spectrum 5 standard (Collections Trust 2020), but these software vendors may be beyond the financial capabilities of organizations. Alternatives can be found by using fully supported, open source projects that might suit museum use to document and disseminate a collection. They can sometimes serve as a back of house system and to use a phrase that has withered, an Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). Examples include Omeka in either format (classic or S) that they provide (https://​omeka.org/​), Collective Access (https://​www.colle​ctiv​eacc​ess.org/​) or the Arches system (https://​www.arches​proj​ect. org/​). These collections tools provide the canvas or the foundation upon which the museum’s narrative and digital experiences can be built.

27.4.3 Social media outputs The array of social media outputs can challenge institutions with small and large skill sets and workforce, and it is bewildering to see how fast the rate of change has been in this area. Pett (2012) mentions platforms that have disappeared, services that have transformed, and the social media following of many institutions has grown exponentially (for example the British Museum has grown by nearly 1.5 million people). When addressing social media, one cannot interact with half-​hearted actions; the use of these platforms is often misconceived as a simple, free outlet (Frost 2020), yet there is often a huge hidden labour cost.

538   Daniel Pett Content generation takes planning, scheduling, and execution time, the efforts of multiple contributors throughout your organization, and an appetite for a certain degree of risk and a decision on institutional tone of voice and personality (Dornan 2017). Conversations can often be shallow, pay lip service to multivocality and diverse conversations, and sometimes may be tone deaf; they can heavily lean towards the museum broadcasting information, to post and then ghost the participants, leaving their responses unanswered, resulting in a disenfranchised audience. Different models of engagement can be taken up by museums which range from broadcast mode to playful and on-​the-​edge content production. To achieve goals on these platforms, strategy is a key driver and teams cannot deliver. Returning to the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL)’s success with the large sheep and colloquial turn of phrase, the author of this followed up in a conversation: ‘We could already have followed up the absolute unit at the MERL with a ton of great collections content if I didn’t have to set up our entire ACE9 NPO10 at the same time. Time is so important’ (Koszary 2018). Creative output requires time, and often the producers of these social interventions have extra tasks within their job description and are asking other colleagues with similar working life constraints to assist them. With a small to medium team, a museum would do wisely to consider the platforms it wishes to engage with, whether it can produce the type of content expected, with the frequency that begets followers and of a quality that the institution can be proud of. Should museums be using TikTok for instance (Gat 2019), considering its record of censorship, data mining, and irreverent outlook? Some museums have, for example the Uffizi Gallery (Marshall 2020b) and possibly divided audiences with a skew towards Generation Z.

27.4.4 Multimedia outputs: 360, 3D, Gigapixel, scientific imaging, podcasts, video Institutions have a huge array of opportunities within the digital content production realm. A panoply of visual delights can be created quickly and cost effectively as the technological barrier for skills acquisition lowers due to advances in interfaces as they become more user centred and therefore production levels and quality will increase. The use of imaging technologies provides a lens for public and academic audiences and participants to interact with the programming and visual riches of memory institutions. This cornucopia of digital visualizations brings with it Intellectual Property Rights and Licensing and Copyright implications which often leaves curators and consumers of cultural works angry and indignant (not to mention morally and ethically challenged when it comes to First Nation data). A good primer for learning more about this can be 9 

10 

ACE: Arts Council England. NPO: National Portfolio Organisation (Arts Council 2018).

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    539 seen within the ‘Display at Your Own Risk’ project (Wallace and Deazley 2016) and its huge accompanying publication which discusses many of these issues. This gamut of techniques and technologies available to us can either reduce or increase the digital divide, greatly depending on the resolution museums might be willing to capture information in. For example, the 3D imaging world is ablaze with examples of cheap DSLR led photogrammetry/​structure from motion capture techniques that can prove that digitization in this manner is relatively democratic, right up to multimillion euro imaging projects such as the automated imaging techniques used in CultLab3D (Santos et al. 2017). The Museum sector has embraced 3D dissemination, with the primary medium being Sketchfab (who have 5 million members as of 26 March 2021, fittingly announced via a 3D model11), where their cultural heritage programme of incentivized licenses and dedicated relationship manager (Thomas Flynn) has enabled easy consumption on a grand scale. The leading museum on Sketchfab has been the British Museum (18,000 followers), who set up their presence through ad hoc scanning by Flynn and Pett (Marchou 2017), with a large variety of high quality museum and archaeological examples following. Examples of 3D engagement via this platform include the Museum of Modern Art’s embedded representation of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night12’ (Heumillar et al. 2020) within their collections interface and the British Museum’s representation of the Jericho Skull featuring in a National Geographic article. The 3D revolution brings with it tricky ethical issues, for example contested heritage, digitization of human remains, reconstruction of past landscapes and monuments, and authenticity of the record (Prokop et al. 2020; Ulguim 2018; Khunti 2018). Within this type of digital output, institutions can shoot, record, edit, and produce high-​quality audiovisual products for their audiences. Quality of production does not have to be perfect, high quality content can sometimes overcome the shaking lens of the live broadcast, deal with the slightly muffled sound, and the confidence levels of the contributors. Practice will rapidly improve the quality of outputs, and the rough and ready nature of video production can sometimes pull in big audience figures on YouTube. Take, for example, the early outputs of Internet sensations such as Mr. Beast13 (55 million subscribers) or Unspeakable14 (10.8 million) and compare this to subscribers (as of April 2021) to the British Museum (452,000), Metropolitan Museum of Art (255,000), Musée du Louvre (77,500), and the Fitzwilliam Museum (1,000).

27.4.5 Citizen science Cultural institutions are severely stretched, and following global crises such as the pandemic of 2020–​2022, the world’s economy takes time to recover, during which time 11 

https://​sketch​fab.com/​3d-​mod​els/​sketch​fab-​5-​mill​ion-​memb​ers-​f2615​549f​7394​6baa​65d3​5fbc​ f9ee​884. 12  https://​www.moma.org/​col​lect​ion/​works/​79802. 13  https://​www.yout​ube.com/​chan​nel/​UCX6O​Q3Dk​csbY​NE6H​8uQQ​uVA. 14  https://​www.yout​ube.com/​chan​nel/​UCwIW​AbIe​u0xI​0ReK​WOcw​3eg.

540   Daniel Pett workforces may shrink. Citizen science provides an opportunity to harness help from beyond the museum’s enclosures, with remote volunteering in the time of restricted physical contact, providing an opportunity to be retained once measures are rolled back. They also provide a platform for participatory practice, for serendipitous interventions by the digitally enabled, and connected volunteers to change the path of research and museum thinking. A variety of platforms and projects are available to cultural institutions to produce task-​based projects quickly and easily. The best-​known platform, Zooniverse (Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium) has realized over 550 million classifications from 2.2 million volunteers (February 2021), a massive figure demonstrating cultural heritage engagement. Other platforms such as the ‘Library of Congress: By the People’15 (Ferriter et al. 2019), the Smithsonian’s Transcription Center16 (Ferriter 2016), UCL and British Museum’s MicroPasts17 (Bonacchi 2019), British Library’s LibCrowds18 (Ridge et al. 2020), and UCL’s Transcribe Bentham (Causer and Terras 2014), for example, have not had the same volume of users, but have also produced similar high quality research datasets, with projects including transcription, image annotation, 3D modelling, remote sensing, morphological analyses, and machine learning. The MicroPasts project, focused on the production of archaeological datasets and produced a wide array of open data output. For example, the power of citizen science enabled the transcription of over 30,000 archival index cards from the National Bronze Age Index; produced more than 100 models of archaeological objects ranging from artefacts from the Mary Rose to Bronze Age objects to Egyptian cartonnage from Denver Museum of Nature and Science; enabled transcription of excavation records from the Egypt Exploration Society and the diaries of Flinders Petrie, in addition to more than 250 further projects.

27.4.6  Partnerships The use of partnerships in the museum world is again indicative of the digital divide, institutional privilege, and the tensions that this brings. Digital activity carries a cachet that sponsors and philanthropists might see as a propaganda vehicle for their efforts; therefore tensions sometimes arise between projects that might be achieved cheaply with open source and the high profile, branded digital outcome. Partnerships can extend into academia, for example the National Museum of Australia and the British Library working with the Australian National University Centre for Digital Humanities’ students on placements to assist with the production of digital technologies, content, and experiences (Ho 2020; Nurmikko-​Fuller 2020; Nurmikko-​Fuller and Grant 2019).

15 

https://​crowd.loc.gov/​. https://​transc​ript​ion.si.edu/​. 17  https://​crowd​sour​ced.mic​ropa​sts.org. 18  https://​libcro​wds.com. 16 

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    541 However, not all museums can attract sponsorship from analogue or technology-​ driven businesses, and fewer still have been able to create strong, sustainable technology-​ driven partnerships with long-​term dividends. In the developed world, technology companies have forged links with national museums; for example the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s limited public access run Augmented Reality (AR) intervention was sponsored by Verizon, the British Museum has the Samsung Digital Discovery Centre (SDDC) and a partnership with Korea Air to deliver their audio guides, while Google provided the technology for the Maya casts recording project (Coughenour and Cooper 2017) and collaborated on the Virtual Pilgrimage XyFi intervention in the British Museum’s temporary display space in Room 3, found on the right as you enter from Great Russell Street (Uglow et al. 2017). From the computer games industry, collaboration between Ubisoft has seen development of large-​scale use of assets from their Assassin’s Creed franchise blockbuster games with cultural heritage organizations. They include, for example, physical collaborations with Pointe-​à-​Callière, Montréal on their travelling exhibition Reines d’Égypte (pers. comm. Maxime Durand 2020, Nile Scribes 2018), AR events such as L’expérience Assassin’s Creed aux Invalides (Musée de l’Armée 2019), and VR escape rooms in various venues globally.19 Several episodes in the series (Origins and Odyssey) have seen the introduction of educational ‘Discovery Tour’ elements, which have used assets from the game and from partner museums and archaeological organizations (see Politopoulos et al. 2019 for critical discussion; Reparaz 2018) with specialist knowledge from curators, historians, and experts being assimilated into the Ubisoft framework. These games have also created an academic conduit for analysis, with projects such as Playing in the Past20 hosting online events with leading experts in their fields discussing the gameplay. Ubisoft have also provided large philanthropic donations to cultural heritage, notably donating half a million euros to the restoration of Notre-​Dame cathedral following the catastrophic fire in 2019 (Vincent 2019). Museums with fundraising or development arms can chase these deals, but they will be beyond the reach of many small memory institutions, reinforcing the divide, and sometimes increasing this to a chasm.

27.4.7 Don’t be evil In 2011, Google created a programme for engagement with cultural heritage, initially entitled the ‘Google Cultural Institute’ and now relabelled as Google Arts and Culture (GAC). In some ways, like Europeana, GAC is an aggregator of cultural content on a grand scale, but without the former’s open endpoints for retrieval of information and with a less transparent agenda for cultural service. GAC could be seen as a cultural walled garden and open access focused museums have placed their resources

19 

20 

https://​www.ubi​soft​esca​pega​mes.com/​the-​dag​ger-​of-​time/​. https://​play​ing-​in-​the-​past.com/​.

542   Daniel Pett into Google’s system, providing them with a large data bank of information that can be mined, refined, and exploited by Google. GAC has been surveyed for its western cultural biases (Kizhner et al. 2021) and is frequently criticized on social media by exponents of open access in the cultural sector, for example: I HATE how @googlearts has inserted itself as the gatekeeper of art and archaeology. It’s a silo that follows no community standards. It claims to be open, but there are no licenses, no APIs. (Gruber 2018)

The mechanisms for joining and disseminating information on GAC provide another institutional overhead for many already very stretched organizations, but the end results can enable a small museum with poor digital capabilities to reach a global audience with little expense outlaid on their own digital infrastructure. Google has funded some substantial museological projects, for example the Maya collaboration21 with the British Museum and Guatemala (Coughenour and Cooper 2017), the Bagan interactive22, their 3D open data showcase collaboration with CyArk23 (Braithwaite 2018), and their Creative Lab (based in Sydney, Australia) collaborated with the author on the XyFi: Virtual Pilgrimage (Uglow et al. 2017) detailed above. As the rise in ill-​feeling towards technology has shown, mistrust and disillusionment may see a shift away from collaboration with the tech sector for those museums that aim to exude neutrality, focus on civil enrichment, climate issues, and ethical standpoints.

27.5  Conclusion Institutional privilege manifests itself in many ways; not all memory institutions and museums can, could, or should engage in all these digital methods of engagement. If a platform is not performing for an institution, they should not be afraid to sunset that service (taking backup copies) and communicate that decision clearly to its audience(s). The digital experience is now one of the fastest changing aspects of museological practice and subsequently one of the hardest for museum management teams to keep pace with. Opportunities in this arena are plentiful, but can prove to be bewildering and a strong digital strategy needs to be in place to make the most of the media that are chosen for outputs. Like the biblical parable in Matthew (7:24–​27) of the ‘Wise and Foolish builders’; if a museum’s digital presence is grounded on shifting sands, its house will come tumbling down. Institutions can take museum experiences far beyond the walls of the estate by harnessing facets of the Internet, but building experience within the means that an institution can support. 21 

https://​art​sand​cult​ure.goo​gle.com/​proj​ect/​explor​ing-​the-​maya-​world. https://​arts​expe​rime​nts.wit​hgoo​gle.com/​bagan. 23  https://​art​sand​cult​ure.goo​gle.com/​proj​ect/​openh​erit​age. 22 

Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum    543 All digital projects should be approached with this simple question: why is this being undertaken? Then it is necessary to evaluate, iterate, and sustain that digital presence and plan for obsolescence. To make institutions ready for digital evolution, investment in staff training and skills acquisition is vital so that the workforce can harness the tools of the moment. They should be given space to imagine what they could achieve, but realize the pace of change is faster than the governance models that museums seek to implement.

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546   Daniel Pett Marshall, A. 2020a. ‘Museum World’s King of Memes Brings Humor to Lockdown’. New York Times. 30 March. Available at: https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​03/​30/​arts/​des​ign/​muse​ ums-​coro​navi​rus-​adam-​kosz​ary.html [Accessed 30 March 2021]. Marshall, A. 2020b. ‘As Museums Get on TikTok, the Uffizi Is an Unlikely Class Clown’. New York Times. 24 June. Available at: https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​06/​24/​arts/​des​ign/​ uff​i zi-​muse​ums-​tik​tok.html [Accessed 30 March 2021]. Matney, L. 2021. ‘Google Shutting Down 3d Poly Platform.’ TechCrunch. Available at: https://​ tec​hcru​nch.com/​2020/​12/​02/​goo​gle-​shutt​ing-​down-​poly-​3d-​cont​ent-​platf​orm/​. Meade, P. and L. Rabelo. 2004. ‘The Technology Adoption Life Cycle Attractor: Understanding the Dynamics of High-​Tech Markets.’ Technological Forecasting and Social Change 71: pp. 667–​84. DOI: 10.1016/​j.techfore.2004.01.008. Merriman, N. 2016. ‘We’re Failing in Our Aim of Mass Participation’. Museums Journal 21 December: pp. 28–​9. Available at: https://​www.mus​eums​asso​ciat​ion.org/​muse​ums-​jour​nal/​ opin​ion/​2016/​12/​01012​017-​were-​fail​ing-​in-​our-​aim-​of-​mass-​partic​ipat​ion/​ [Accessed 31 March 2021]. Metropolitan Museum. 2021. ‘The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Verizon Launch Interactive Virtual Art Experience’. Available at: https://​www.metmus​eum.org/​press/​news/​ 2021/​the-​met-​unfra​med [Accessed 30 March 2021]. Mihelj S, A. Leguina, and J. Downey. 2019. ‘Culture is Digital: Cultural Participation, Diversity and the Digital Divide’. New Media and Society 21 (7): pp. 1465–​85. Musée de l’Armée. 2019. ‘L’expérience Assassin’s Creed aux Invalides’. Available at: https://​www. musee-​armee.fr/​au-​progra​mme/​eve​neme​nts/​det​ail/​lexp​erie​nce-​assass​ins-​creed-​aux-​invali​ des-​1.html [Accessed 30 March 2021]. Museums Association. 2020. Empowering Collections. London: Museums Association. Nile Scribes. 2018. ‘Meeting the “Queens of Egypt” in Montréal’. Available at: https://​nilescribes. org/​2018/​09/​08/​queens-​egypt-​montreal/​ Nurmikko-​ Fuller, T. 2020. ‘Using British Library Cultural Heritage Data for a Digital Humanities Research Course at the Australian National University’. British Library Blog. 26 November. Available at: https://​blogs.bl.uk/​digi​tal-​scho​lars​hip/​2020/​11/​using-​brit​ish-​libr​ ary-​cultu​ral-​herit​age-​data-​for-​a-​digi​tal-​hum​anit​ies-​resea​rch-​cou​rse-​at-​the-​aust​ral.html. Nurmikko-​Fuller, T. and K. Grant. 2019. ‘How the CDHR Digitizes Australia’s National Collections’. Sketchfab Blog. 19 June. Available at: https://​sketch​fab.com/​blogs/​commun​ity/​ how-​the-​cdhr-​digiti​zes-​aus​tral​ias-​natio​nal-​coll​ecti​ons/​ [Accessed 12 March 2021]. Office for National Statistics. 2019. Exploring the UK’s digital divide. Available at: https://​ www.ons.gov.uk/​peopl​epop​ulat​iona​ndco​mmun​ity/​house​hold​char​acte​rist​ics/​home​inte​ rnet​ands​ocia​lmed​iaus​age/​artic​les/​explo​ring​theu​ksdi​gita​ldiv​ide/​2019-​03-​04 [Accessed 12 April 2021]. Pescarmona, G. 2020. ‘Augmented Reality and Renaissance Painting: An AR Experience for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge’. In Kultur und Informatik: Extended Reality, edited by J.H. Israel, C. Kassung, and J. Sieck, pp. 229–​42. Glükstadt: Verlag Werner Hülsbusch. Pett, D. 2012. ‘Use of Social Media within the British Museum and Museum Sector’. In Archaeologists and Digital Communication: Towards Strategies of Public Engagement London, edited by C. Bonacchi, pp. 83–​102. London: Archetype press. Pett, D. 2018. ‘Tweet relating to Museum of English Rural Life’s social media’. Available at: https://​twit​ter.com/​DEJP​ett/​sta​tus/​1067​3802​5821​7836​545. Pitkin, M., D. Pett, and H. Strudwick. 2019a. ‘The Fitzwilliam Museum Egyptian Coffins Website source code (Version 1.0)’. Zenodo. http://​doi.org/​10.5281/​zen​odo.2598​492.

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Chapter 28

C o operative pl at forms for curat i ng a nd managing di g i ta l ly rec orded f i nd s data Metal-​detecting and FindSampo in Finland Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen

28.1  Introduction Managing the relationship between museums, archaeology, and recreational metal detecting is common in many parts of the world (e.g. Deckers et al. 2016a; Dobat et al. 2020 for Europe; Reeves 2015 for USA). In the case of Finland, the past decade has marked a change for recreational metal detecting. The popularity of metal detecting has led to a remarkable number of new archaeological finds requiring immediate professional management, which is the responsibility of the Finnish Heritage Agency (FHA). The change has concurrently reflected a shift in archaeological collection management and its new curatorial needs to better serve the public. Metal detectorists are a considerable group that reflect the need for institutions responsible for archaeological collections to share information with the public and to interact with them. In Finland, archaeological collections are mainly used for research and exhibitions, but since the collections are part of the national heritage, they belong to everyone. Digital technologies make it possible to share information on the collections in a new and more efficient way and to enhance their democratized use and access (see e.g. Dobat et al. 2020). Through developing information practices in archaeological collections, for example with citizen science, we can, in a participatory manner, help the public take an active and important role in collecting and documenting archaeological information.

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   549 In Finland, the Antiquities Act (295/​1963) stipulates that archaeological finds must be reported to the FHA, which has the right to redeem them for the national collections. The archaeological collections of the FHA contain approximately 42,600 identifiers, i.e. accession or collection numbers. The number of sub-​identifiers varies from one to several thousand per identifier. The objects in the archaeological collection are from the whole territory of Finland,1 as well as from the areas ceded to the Soviet Union after World War Two.2 The prehistoric era is extensively represented in the collection. The collection has mostly grown due to archaeological research activities but at present, metal-​detected finds impact the numbers of items annually accessed to the collections. Metal detecting gives people a unique opportunity to engage with archaeological heritage. The archaeological collections have great potential for taking part in, and providing, schemes to disseminate and concurrently record and document open-​ access information in cooperation with the public, researchers, and heritage managers. With digital data management it is possible to enhance digital archiving and curation practices and, in conclusion, to enable democratic access to archaeological collections.

28.2  Citizen science and open-​access data Citizen science refers to activity in which amateurs or non-​professionals voluntarily assist by observing, analysing, or collecting large datasets for scientists in cooperation with scientific research (e.g. Bonney et al. 2009; Smith 2014). A comprehensive conception of citizen science can be formed from ‘Ten Principles of Citizen Science’, a list composed by the European Citizen Science Association (2015). In 2014, the term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (Gibb 2019: 4). Although the use of the term ‘citizen science’ is recent in archaeology, cooperation with the public in some form has always been part of archaeological research. In Finland, for example, the first archaeological finds accessioned to the archaeological collections in the nineteenth century were discovered and reported by the public. Public participation in archaeological research and cooperation between non-​professional and professional archaeologists are commonly referred to with the terms ‘public’ or ‘community’ archaeology (see Skeates et al. 2012). Citizen science in archaeology can be considered as a way of conducting public archaeology (e.g. Barnes 2018). Public or community archaeology refers here to activity where archaeologists and non-​archaeologists work together in an environment

1 

The archaeological finds from Åland were mainly accessed to the archaeological collections of the FHA before the time of the Act on the Autonomy of Åland. 2  The ceded areas to the Soviet Union include the areas around Vyborg and to the north of Lake Ladoga, the Petsamo area, and parts of the northern municipalities of Salla and Kuusamo.

550    Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen of mutual respect, learning reciprocally and valuing each other’s skills and knowledge (e.g. Banks et al. 2017: 4). Another concept related to public engagement and citizen science is crowdsourcing. The method involves a large number of people outside one’s own organization or institution to obtain information and knowledge (e.g. Ridge 2013). A good example of a citizen science platform that uses crowdsourcing in archaeology, and in the cultural heritage sector, is MicroPasts in the UK. It is a digital web-​based model employing web technologies and crowdsourcing to obtain qualitative data collection and public engagement with archaeological data, including the British Museum’s collections, and cooperating with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (Bonacchi et al. 2014). Another good example is the Dutch VeleHanden platform that uses crowdsourcing to identify and classify objects, photographs, and archival documents.3 In digital time, the online environment provides new opportunities for web-​based data gathering. Using citizen science, it is possible to gather large quantities of data in different locations and over the long term (Bonney et al. 2009). Citizen science has evolved hand in hand with technological progress in which the Internet has played an important part (Sahlman 2015: 2, 7). Citizen science that relies on the Internet has been characterized as e-​citizen science (Devisch and Veestraeten 2013: 63). Mobile devices now have an essential function in citizen science as documentation tools, having led the use of citizen science to the next level (Devisch and Veestraeten 2013: 67–​9). In metal detecting, for example, mobile devices make it possible to locate the coordinates of a find, take good quality pictures, and record documentation on the web, and to do all this in real time. In the following case study, we explore these issues in relation to the citizen science SuALT project which emphasizes cooperation with different users, and which aims to engage end users to have impact on it from the very beginning. The project applies a user-​centred design approach where the needs and requirements of end users have been investigated with user experience (UX) research: questionnaires (see Wessman et al. 2019a: 344–​6), interviews, focus group meetings, and the field testing of a prototype service (Hassanzadeh et al. 2020; Wessman et al. 2019b: 7–​8). Through the citizen science approach, the project aims to foster a genuine partnership between different users, and hence at participatory heritage, reflecting here the idea of shared cultural heritage where the past is not only owned by professionals, but belongs to everyone. The platform can, moreover, function as an educational tool. In addition to the guidelines and instructions that the database should contain, it is important that the user interface is developed so that it is possible for the user to learn more about archaeology while using it. The name of the project, SuALT, translates from Finnish to English as ‘The Finnish Archaeological Finds Recording Linked Open Database’. This multidisciplinary project applies semantic computing to citizen science and develops innovative solutions to respond to metal detecting and other recreational encounters with archaeological 3 

https://​vel​ehan​den.nl/​ [Accessed 22 April 2021].

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   551 material. The goal of the project is to develop and produce a prototype of a Linked Open Data service and semantic web portal, called FindSampo (Fi. Löytösampo, Se. Fyndsampo), for archaeological finds made by the public, particularly those discovered in metal detecting. The project aims to support the FHA with an updated research infrastructure, which provides the public with a new open-​access service to report and to study and learn more about archaeological finds (see Fig. 28.1). FindSampo, based on a national semantic web infrastructure, will be part of the ‘Sampo’ series of semantic portals (Hyvönen 2020).

28.3  Metal detecting in Finland and FindSampo 28.3.1 Overview of metal detecting in Finland Recreational metal detecting started in Finland in the 1980s (see e.g. Thomas et al. 2015: 188; Wessman et al. 2016: 85) but it took more than 30 years for it to become a popular activity among the general public alongside history and archaeology enthusiasts. At the beginning of the 2010s, the number of metal-​detectorists increased considerably, as did the number of metal-​detected finds. Before the notable change, the number of finds made by the public and reported to the FHA was annually a couple of hundred (Rohiola 2014: 18–​19). With the popularity of the hobby, the number of finds grew ten-​fold. In the 2010s, the number of annually reported finds varied from 2,000 to 3,000. The popularity of metal detecting was the result of various factors. For example, over time metal-​detectors became more user-​friendly, cheaper, and the equipment more easily available. Metal detecting has been actively presented in the media, for example in connection with the grave of the ‘Janakkala swordsman’ from the Late Iron Age (YLE 2013). Because of the growing number of metal-​detected finds, the archaeological collections and heritage management of the FHA have been facing a challenge to respond to this new situation. In Finland, metal detecting is generally permitted, but detectorists have to follow certain acts of law and general guidelines. Metal detecting and especially digging are strictly prohibited at ancient monuments and other archaeological sites by the Antiquities Act (295/​1963). Detecting is also restricted in certain areas by the Nature Conservation Act (1096/​1996) that prohibits destroying and changing nature in protected natural areas. Finland’s Antiquities Act (295/​1963) requires that movable objects, such as metal-​ detected finds that are expected to be at least 100 years old and do not have any known owner, have to be reported immediately and/​or delivered to the FHA. The Lost Property Act (778/​1988) must be taken into account with finds that are less than 100 years old, and if the find is related to military debris, the Finnish Defence Forces must be contacted.

552    Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen

Figure 28.1:  Views of the FindSampo portal and its faceted search tool visualizing archaeological data (Hassanzadeh et al. 2020).

In addition, the FHA provides recommendations and guidelines for responsible metal detecting (see Maaranen 2016a). Recreational metal detecting is implicitly associated with so-​called everyman’s rights, that is, the rights of everyone in Finland to enjoy outdoor pursuits and move about in terrain regardless of who owns or occupies an area (see Ministry of Environment 2017).

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   553 An important aspect of everyman’s rights is not to damage the environment or to disturb other people. People moving in terrain must take into account the rights of the landowner. Metal detectorists are instructed to make an agreement with the landowner and if the owner prohibits the activity, this must be respected (Maaranen 2016a: 17). Metal detecting and its hobbyists are an unprecedented resource for archaeology. Avocational metal detectorists are accumulating archaeological information of their own volition. It has never happened before in Finland that such a large number of people4 have interacted with archaeological heritage. These people are interested in archaeology, and the information accumulating as a consequence is a resource that archaeologists should take advantage of. In Finland, metal-​detected finds have already added to our understanding of the settlement and interactions of Iron Age communities, for example, in the Uusimaa region in Southern Finland (Wessman 2016), Northern Ostrobothnia and the Kainuu region in Northern Finland (Hakamäki 2018), and the Northern Savo region in Eastern Finland (Rohiola 2019). In addition, some of the metal-​detecting finds represent object types that have not previously been discovered in Finland (see Fig. 28.2). While the benefits of metal detecting are noted, there are also challenges associated with this pastime. The most common unethical issues of metal detecting involve illegal excavation and plundering at protected ancient sites and the illicit trafficking of antiquities. An unfortunate example of metal detecting and illegal digging came to light in the autumn of 2017 in the protected area of Raasepori (Raseborg) Castle dating from the medieval period. This incident sparked intense reactions among both professional archaeologists (Knuutinen 2017) and the metal-​detecting community. Police investigations were initiated without delay and the issue was reported widely in the media. There was a sad example regarding illicit trafficking when an active metal detectorist sent an exceptional Viking Age silver coin to an auction room in Denmark to be sold, claiming that it had been found decades ago by his relative. In the conclusion of the District Court, the type of crime was stated as illegal exportation (District Court of Southern Savonia 2020). In Finland, various questionnaire surveys have been prepared that describe the heterogeneous group of avocational metal detectorists, attitudes and dichotomies between amateurs and professionals, and the character of this pastime (see Immonen and Kinnunen 2017; Maaranen 2016b; Siltainsuu and Wessman 2014). Archaeologists interested in metal-​detected finds actively follow new discoveries posted on social media. Related comments from archaeologists usually focus on the finds of objects but not on the ethical issues of how or where the items were found. According to the FHA, there have been some cases where professional archaeologists, not in a legal authority position, have contacted metal detectorists and asked them to deliver finds to be studied before reporting or delivering them to the FHA. Sometimes 4  While the exact number of metal detectorists is difficult to estimate, the number of registered users on the popular web-​forum, Aarremaanalla, is about 6,000. https://​www.aarrem​aana​lla.com [Accessed 30 March 2020].

554    Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen

Figure 28.2: A fragment of a silver equal-​armed brooch (KM41977:1) with a goat figure (KM42457:1). The fragment of the brooch and the goat figure were found in the same field at Ojanto in Nousiainen, but on different occasions and by different metal detectorists. The parts fit together perfectly. This type of silver brooch dating from the Viking Age has not been found previously in Finland. Photo: Ilari Järvinen, Finnish Heritage Agency.

the finds have even been kept by professional archaeologists and are not reported, which is against Finland’s Antiquities Act. There are guidelines that define ethics and interests of good professional practices (see e.g. EAA Codes of Practice 2009; FHA 2019: ‘Guidelines for archaeological fieldwork in Finland’) including the documentation responsibilities. There are sometimes, the FHA notes, cases where professional archaeologists carry out field surveys in cooperation with metal detectorists or observe the latter without sufficient field documentation. In these cases, cataloguing the found objects is also neglected. It also seems that in some cases archaeologists have not intervened and stopped a metal detectorist from digging, even when this would have been ethically and lawfully correct. These issues should be discussed more deeply and considered critically in discourse concerning archaeological study.

28.3.2 Recording finds and the SuALT project The Museum Policy Programme 2030 issued by Finland’s Ministry of Education (Mattila 2018: 12–​13) encouraged Finnish museums to develop community-​based

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   555 operations that provide participation in cultural heritage and access to different tools to utilize information on cultural heritage. At the European level, the Valletta Convention of the Council of Europe (1992: Article 9) emphasizes promoting public access to archaeological heritage, and encourages ‘the display of suitable selections of archaeological objects’. Moreover, the Faro Convention (Council of Europe 2005: Article 12) underlines public access to cultural heritage and democratic participation, emphasizing that it is important ‘to recognise the role of voluntary organisations both as partners and as constructive critics of cultural heritage policies’. Previously, finds were reported to the FHA by email and an artefact information form that included the reported find information. In early 2019, the FHA launched Ilppari, a new digital reporting service.5 The new service streamlined the reporting of archaeological finds by the public, and the first steps towards web-​based citizen science were taken. Even though the reporting became more effective and user-​friendly, the new reporting system was primarily designed to support administrative processes in the management of stray finds. The service, however, does not give access to the find data for broader public dissemination, although it was welcomed by the hobbyists and was accepted quickly as a tool for reporting the finds (see Fig. 28.3). There was the need to develop a platform that would disseminate the finds data and its archaeological information, and improve cooperation between the public, researchers, and heritage management. Without the interaction of professional archaeologists and the public dealing with archaeological material, it is not possible to improve the current situation concerning recreational metal detecting, whereby metal detectorists feel that their finds are hidden from them in the storage rooms of the FHA and researchers are finding it hard to access the data. With the help of a platform, all the different users would be able to browse and study public finds at all times, and from anywhere in the world. The platform would also be a place where the public can meet with professional archaeologists, discuss, and exchange knowledge of archaeological heritage. In that way, the platform would also function as an educational tool for the public to learn more about archaeology and find guides and instructions to obey the law (Wessman et al. 2019b: 11–​12). The SuALT project was initiated in 2017 as a response to these necessities. This project cooperates with similar international projects that have developed open databases for finds in different European countries or federal regions. In those countries, metal detecting is also legally permitted and attitudes towards avocational metal detecting can be described as liberal (Deckers et al. 2016a; Wessman et al. 2019a: 337–​8). The first one, the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), was launched in 1997 in England and Wales (e.g. Thomas 2014). Other schemes have launched in the late 2010s: Portable Antiquities in the Netherlands (PAN) (Vos et al. 2018), MEDEA in the Flanders region of Belgium (Deckers et al. 2016b), and DIME (Digitale Metaldetektorfund) in Denmark (Dobat et al. 2018). One goal of the project is to develop a Linked Open Data model that enables FindSampo to be a semantically interoperable portal with other comparable resources in Europe. The dream of a Pan-​European finds portal has been present for a long while. For 5 

www.kyppi.fi/​ilppari [Accessed 22 April 2021].

556    Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen 2718

2014

457 2900

2015

298 2533

2016

269 2098

2017

430 1958

2018

437 2247

2019

974 0

500

1000

1500

Number of individual finds

2000

2500

3000

3500

Number of collections of finds

Figure 28.3:  The number of archaeological finds made by the public delivered to the archaeological collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency in 2014–​2019. The collections of finds are the numbers of entities of individual finds delivered by different finders from various find locations. The numbers for 2019 describe the change that took place in the first year of using the Ilppari digital reporting service. The number of individual finds remained close to those of previous years while the number of collections of finds has more than doubled. This reflects the active use of Ilppari and the more convenient manner of carrying out the find reporting promptly right after discovering items.

example, Carl Fredrik Meinander (1968: 66), Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki from 1970 to 1982, had a future vision in the late 1960s of a centralized European find database recording find information from different museums from all over Europe with the aid of the telephone. Telephones have evolved into mobile phones and other devices that include mobile operating systems with Internet connections that enable the digital find recording with precise findspot coordinates and high-​quality photographs. With the Linked Open Data model, using developed metadata models and related ontologies, and by using controlled vocabularies for the recorded data, it is possible to foster the possibilities of a transnational semantic interoperability of archaeological collections. One aim is to provide the data from these collaborative schemes into the ARIADNEplus research infrastructure (Dobat et al. 2020: 5; Hassanzadeh et al. 2020; see also Ariadne 2019).

28.3.3 Open-​access data and find validation The Ancient Relics Register (Fi. Muinaisjäännösrekisteri) maintained by the FHA has basic information about the sites protected by the Antiquities Act and information about

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   557 other archaeological sites in Finland. It can be found online as part of the FHA’s Cultural environment service portal (Fi. Kulttuuriympäristön palveluikkuna). The Ancient Relics Register is based on data from archaeological fieldwork and research, including the findspots of accessioned metal-​detected finds. The sites have also been linked to other databases of the FHA such as the Find Journal of the archaeological collections (Fi. Muinaiskalupäiväkirja). The spatial data, the coordinates, and the outlined areas of archaeological sites in the Ancient Relics Register are open to all users and can be downloaded for free. The information in the register continuously increases and the aim is to enter information on ancient monuments and relics into the register without delay. Nevertheless, the register does not contain information on all known archaeological sites. The register was initially developed for heritage management purposes, but over time its utilization by researchers and public has increased. Metal detectorists are instructed to use the register to find information on the location of archaeological sites to prevent illegal excavation at sites protected under the Antiquities Act. In Finland, the Digital and Population Data Service (The Finnish Digital Agency) recommends following guidelines of the ‘Licence to use open data’ (JHS 189: 2014) when using citizen science to gather data. The licence deals with issues concerning access rights and privilege to the collected data. It recommends the use of the Creative Commons Attribute 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) international public copyright licence with disseminated material. With this licence, the user is free to ‘copy and redistribute the material in any medium and format’ and to ‘remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially’, but at the same time the user ‘must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made’ (Creative Commons 2020). For example, material of the archaeological collections of the FHA can be found on the Finna portal (museovirasto.finna.fi/arkeologia) that provides free access with Creative Commons licences to material from Finnish museums, libraries, and archives. In Europe, the main regulations on data protection and privacy are given in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU 2016/​ 679). The regulation is designed to protect the personal information of individuals and to instruct individuals, organizations, and companies handling the information of their customers. Compliance is needed when processing personal data, information related to an identified or identifiable person. The GDPR is considered as required in all services provided by the FHA, including FindSampo. The validation process of the reported finds is essential to confirm the accuracy of the recorded find data. It also enables heritage managers to ensure the protection of discovered archaeological sites, such as the findspot of a metal-​detecting find dating from the Iron Age. One of the concerns of the end-​users, especially metal detectorists, is spatial information and open access to it. Attitudes towards open information on precise findspots differs among end-​users, especially metal detectorists (see Wessman et al. 2019a: 345). It appears that metal detectorists have taken on the habit of not sharing this spatial information with other hobbyists, for example, in social media or on websites, when posting their finds for comments. The conversation seems to focus mainly on the finds, not on the findspot, or spatial location. In discussion on equal rights to archaeological information, and the notion of open-​access data, information concerning

558    Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen the spatial identification of the findspot, for example the coordinates, is commonly considered to be restricted and not open to everyone. Concern about open spatial information is connected to the threat of unethical and illegal activity at archaeological sites. This lack of trust towards the public is in contradiction with the idea of democratizing and decolonizing archaeology (see e.g. Dobat 2013), which is often mentioned in connection with so-​called liberal metal detecting. The fear of looting and sense of competition have also been reported as one of the reasons not to allow others access to the findspots among metal detectorists (Wessman et al. 2019a). As mentioned above, in Finland the spatial data containing coordinate information and the outlined areas of heritage sites is available to everyone in the Ancient Relics Register. Disseminating spatial information on the findspots of the reported metal-​ detecting and other archaeological finds made by the public is planned to be part of the validation process in the administrative section of Ilppari. The validation to publish open information in the FindSampo portal involves two levels. The first level of publishing information actualizes when the find report is received and taken into the validation process in Ilppari. At this stage, the basic information on the find, such as the name of the object and the picture of the find, is published but the spatial information on the findspot is presented, for example, only at the level of the municipality. This makes it possible for the initial information on the find data to be published in FindSampo without delay for everyone, while at the same time the protection of the find location is secured. After the first level of validation, the users of the portal are informed that the validation of the find information is still incomplete. This ensures that the users are informed and aware of the different levels of validated data. As the validation process of the find report continues, the information is checked to ensure the quality of the data. If necessary, the information on the find, for example the object name, dating, and material, is corrected and defined. At this point in Ilppari, it is possible to chat with the person reporting the find. It is also possible to invite heritage managers to join in the conversation. During the validation process, the person reporting the find is continuously informed about new information on the find and guided as to how to proceed and, if needed, to deliver the find to the archaeological collections. When the find is delivered to the archaeological collections, it is diarized with an accession number and the findspot registered in the Ancient Relics Register. The legal protection status of the find site is verified and confirmed with these administrative processes. At this point, the second phase of the validation process ends, and the validated information, including the defined find information, the accession number of the find, and the information on the find site, is published in FindSampo at the same time as the spatial location, with its precise coordinates, is made available to everyone. If the reported find is not an antiquity or relic as defined in the Antiquities Act or is one that does not need to be accessed into the archaeological collections, the second phase of the validation process is completed and the validated information is released to the public with required information to ensure protection. As mentioned above, there is the risk of misuse of open-​access spatial data that must be taken seriously, but at the same time, its openness also contains many benefits that

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   559 deserve more attention when talking about citizen science and public archaeology. If we want to emphasize the importance of spatial information, we need to talk more about it. In order to achieve this, it is essential that metal detectorists start to share information about the location of the findspots more openly, particularly with each other. In this way, we have a chance to change the metal-​detecting culture more towards the find’s context and to avoid and prevent unethical excavation at the find location and in archaeological sites or in proximity of such sites. At the same time, metal detectorists serve as peers and guides for each other, leading to more responsible and sustainable metal detecting. In addition to the abovementioned benefits, sharing open spatial information is a step towards democratizing archaeology as well as constructing the bond of trust with the public.

28.4  Digital archaeological information 28.4.1 Documentation and collection management Documentation practices in archaeological collections have evolved alongside technological change (see e.g. Huvila 2018). We can distinguish three material contextualizations where the materiality of documentation technology has been copied from an earlier one to a new archival document: (a) the museum ledger, a book with catalogued information written in ink, (b) the classified catalogue card with object information, and (c) the database, a collection management database containing information on the documented objects (Olsrud 2019: 228–​31). Finds information in paper format, such as a museum ledger or a catalogue card, may be considered a document that represents the interpretation of the object at its time of cataloguing by a cataloguer. Sidenotes can be added later to correct the information, but the paper document is principally an immutable document. In the digital age, it is appropriate to document archaeological finds information, primarily in digital format. In a digital collection management system, the recorded information can be mutable and updated. One of the further benefits of digital information is that it can be converted to interoperable systems for different user needs. In addition, digital information can be more easily disseminated to the public, especially on the web. Knowledge production in archaeology is based on the documentation and dissemination of information (e.g. Börjesson et al. 2015). In archaeological collections, it consists of metadata concerning the archaeological objects. In this case, metadata means information describing the find data, that is, the features of an archaeological artefact and its find context. A key challenge in managing digital archaeological find data is to make the content interoperable. Datasets and possible data silos should be organized in a harmonized way so that the information can be searched and mutually linked (Hyvönen

560    Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen 2012: 5). The challenge is due to the different types of metadata that have been catalogued and recorded in various ways by different persons at different times. As a result, there is the risk that information and the content may have been recorded at different levels of precision. For example, the use of vocabularies to describe similar data sets may have been different or even not used at all. In the archaeological collections of the FHA, the history of digital data is sadly brief. Owing to mixed feelings about collection management systems and their benefits, and the desire of the Curators to keep the situation static, most of the finds data is in paper format, whether catalogues of fieldwork, or of objects reported by the public. The collection management system has been used only as a logistical system, which has in a way provided a good selection of the objects that have been moving from the collections to exhibitions or for research, but is not suitable for research purposes as such. Cataloguing has varied a great deal over the years. The use of vocabularies and index words has not proceeded systematically. Paper catalogues have been digitized and published in PDF format, but a great deal of resources will be needed to automate data gathering from the scanned files. Despite efforts in recent years to make the archaeological collection more available for researchers and the public, the truth is that the unsatisfactory situation has also had a negative influence on the study of archaeological materials in Finland. The FindSampo portal publishes archaeological finds data on the semantic web as Linked Open Data. The semantic web with its new technologies provides a new layer of metadata built inside the web where syntactic metadata structures make the information on the web comprehensible and interoperable for the machines that have been constructed to work on shared semantic logic (Hyvönen 2012: 6). The semantic web as Linked Open Data enables the find data to be enriched with other data, principally of the archaeological collections of the FHA and, in addition, with online terminology banks and other possible data sources, such as the Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences (Fi. Tieteen termipankki, tieteentermipankki.fi) (Wessman 2019a: 347). Digital find information recorded by the public enables the conversion of public knowledge of archaeological cultural heritage. Many metal detectorists have expertise in finding new sites and identifying objects, their types, and dating. They are usually also willing to share their knowledge and the results of their work in finding new things about the past. One of FindSampo’s goals is to make it easier for metal detectorists to participate in enriching the find data and to give them the recognition they deserve for it (Wessman 2019b: 6, 12). When dealing with tens of thousands of objects, the FHA might not always have the resources or time to search for information as meticulously as hobbyists can. Although the validation process is something that remains to be done by a professional archaeologist, it is important to emphasize the value that the research done by metal detectorists themselves adds to the process. When FindSampo seeks to improve the user experience and make the reporting of the finds easier and simpler, it means that we also have to think about how it affects the amount and quality of the data that we are receiving. At the moment, it seems that a user-​friendly application often means that the data the user has to fill in is minimized

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   561 to a couple of fields. This does not serve the purposes of cultural heritage protection or documentation. As a cultural heritage manager, the FHA is keen on recording as much information as possible about the find and about the find site. In the Ilppari service, the user is guided through several questions about the find site, the soil, and about other observations at the site, although only the description of the object, spatial information and photo of the find are obligatory items. It appears that people are willing to record the information even though they do not have to, and, the next time they are at a findspot, they will remember that it is also important to register their surroundings. Before Ilppari, the FHA did not get any photographs from the find site, but in Ilppari around half of the reports include one or more photographs from the site. There have been discussions about the credibility of the data produced by non-​ professionals (see e.g. Freitag et al. 2016). They might not fully understand the archaeological context or they can produce unreliable data through unintended, but still erroneous, find identifications (Wessman et al. 2019b: 11). FindSampo seeks to help and guide the hobbyist by providing information and thesauri, and also possibly different software solutions, which could help identify finds, such as image recognition through artificial intelligence.

28.4.2 The Ontology of archaeological object names Because FindSampo uses semantic technology and Linked Open Data it was necessary to create an ontology for archaeological objects that are recorded in FindSampo. The ontology is a machine-​readable, hierarchical group of concepts, where concepts are referred to by individual identifiers (e.g. Frosterus 2013). The work had to be started basically from scratch, because there were only limited vocabularies available for Finnish archaeological objects, owing to the situation mentioned above. The ontology project was led by the FHA, but the expert terminologist for the work was provided by The Finnish Terminology Centre TSK (Fi. Sanastokeskus ry). The terms were gathered from collection management systems and from various different materials. The terminologist then attached the terms to the existing Finnish ontology for the Museums and Applied Arts (MAO/​TAO). It was decided that the best way to go through the suggested ontologies was to divide the work into different archaeological time periods, and consequently expert groups for Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, and historically recorded times were formed. They consisted of two to eight archaeologists who were object-​research oriented. The working method was simple. When working with the terms, the terminologist asked questions that had arisen from the term list and the project group then discussed the subjects and decided on the best answer. The questions varied from easy to very interesting: ‘Is x some kind of y?’, ‘Is it possible to give a more specific main category for the term? ‘Is this the best category for the term?’, and even ‘What does this mean?’. The groups worked enthusiastically, and conversation was lively. The experts enjoyed dealing with the terms and felt that the work was useful for everyone. The published work can

562    Ville Rohiola and Jutta Kuitunen be found in the Finto Finnish Thesaurus and Ontology Service.6 Work defining the concepts is an equally crucial task, but also a very time-​consuming part of the work. The goal in FindSampo is that the person reporting the finds selects the appropriate object name, dating, material, and even the name of the find site from the ontology. In that way all the data will be interoperable and commensurable. The reliability of the data is also improved by providing the person reporting the find with defined options to choose from. There has been some discussion on the specificity of terms to be chosen, since, for example, object type identification is not always simple or clear. That is why it is important to give the possibility to choose from different levels of the hierarchy. If one only knows that an item is some kind of object, that has to be enough, but if the specific type is known, one has also to be able to choose it from the ontology. For the collections to fully benefit from the data produced by the public, it is vital to build connections to the collection management system or to make sure that the data can be imported to the system. Otherwise, the benefits that are gained are easily lost when having to do some of the work twice or even several times. These connections have not been planned in the development of FindSampo, which means that the work remains to be done after the project to employ the full potential of the system from the point of view of collection management. One question here is how to preserve in the metadata the fact that the information, for example object type identification, has come from a citizen scientist, while following at the same time the regulations of the GDPR. The archaeological collections of the FHA have traditionally consisted mainly of finds from scientific archaeological fieldwork. The fieldwork data is gathered from a specific site and context by professional archaeologists. More and more individual objects with limited context information found by non-​professionals are now being catalogued in the collection. There have been varying opinions about the value of these individual finds for research (see e.g. Deckers et al. 2018; Hardy 2017). The fact remains, however, that finds made by metal detectorists have in some regions changed our notions of the prehistory of the region, as mentioned above. One goal of the projects and of making find data accessible is to enable the study of these new kinds of data. The data open up possibilities for new kinds of research questions. For example, in England and Wales, the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) has contributed to a substantial degree to more than 150 PhD-​level studies and 180 Master’s degrees (PAS Research 2020). Within this project also the FindSampo data will be tested by the subproject of the University of Helsinki in order to see how well it is suited for scientific research.

28.5  Conclusions The constantly growing number of finds in archaeological collections that have been made by the public has changed the character of the collections. It was previously 6 

www.finto.fi [Accessed 22 April 2021].

Cooperative Platforms for Finds Data   563 maintained that the collections were only for researchers and museums making archaeological exhibitions. Access to the collections was highly limited and only a small proportion of the objects was available for the public in exhibitions or on the web. Avocational metal detecting has changed the perspective of the public regarding the collections; the archaeological heritage is our public property, and it belongs to every one of us. The public are participating in researching our past. FindSampo offers tools to make participation easy and rewarding for citizen scientists and professionals alike. One challenge of the project has been a clash between the world of academic research and the work of the state antiquarian authority. It has proven to be very challenging to make them work together since their goals are different. The research side tends to be more conceptual, whereas the authority seeks to find solutions to a very practical problem. Academic research focuses on sharing the results via academic writing but, in the work of the authority, this is not the main goal. For example, when the authority launches a system, it has to be ready and work fully, also in relation to the processes of cultural heritage management, and the outcome of the project cannot create more work or complicate existing processes. When dealing with the continually diminishing resources of cultural heritage management, these highly concrete requirements can be hard to achieve within the framework of project funding. Avocational metal detecting is developing fast in Finland and in many other parts of the world. To strengthen the bond between metal detecting and archaeology, the environment for cooperation needs to be coherent and reciprocal. It is important that the attitudes between the different actors—​metal detectorists, researchers, and heritage managers—​are free of negative assumptions. When we share the same interests and aims to protect our shared cultural heritage sustainably, we have the chance to achieve collective benefits. The future brings changes, such as the reform of Finland’s present Antiquities Act that came into effect in 1963. It will have a great impact on how metal detecting will evolve in the future. It will no doubt ensure the protection of cultural heritage, but at the same time it will lay down rules for responsible metal detecting.

Acknowledgements This chapter is an output of the research project ‘SuALT —​The Finnish Archaeological Finds Recording Linked Open Database (Fi: Suomen arkeologisten löytöjen linkitetty tietokanta)’, which is a consortium project funded by the Academy of Finland, decision numbers 310854, 310859, and 310860, based at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University, and the Finnish Heritage Agency.

References Antiquities Act. 295/​ 1963. (in Finnish) Available at: www.finlex.fi/​fi/​laki/​alkup/​19630295 [Accessed 22 April 2021].

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Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number 3D-​Digging at Çatalhöyük project 479–​80, 480f 3D imaging 539 3D micro X-​ray computed tomography (μ-​CT) 388 3D printing 438–​39, 479–​80, 480f 3D viewers 536 921 Earthquake Museum, Taiwan 512

A Abadiano, D. 300–​1 Abadiano, E. 300, 302–​3, 320f Abadiano family 299–​302 Aboutaam, H. 92 Absolute Unit on Twitter 531–​32, 538 accessibility for dis/​Abled people 144–​46, 147 Achimota Museum of Anthropology 490 Achimota School 489–​90 activism 508–​14 actor–​network theory 378–​79, 381 Administrative Measures for the Protection of Local Cultural Heritages and Historical Sites, The 425 Administrative Measures on the National Archaeological Site Park (Trial) 431 Administrative Measures on the Transferring of Archaeological Excavations 426, 429 Advisory Council, Iraq 163, 165 Aeginetes Hall 316–​18, 317f affective museums 9 Brazilian Amazon 102–​4 affective practice and emotion 68–​7 1

history 46–​50 of repatriation 67 Africa colonialism 249–​52 restitution in 256–​60 African diaspora 197–​204 contested claims about history 204–​9 exhibitions 209–​11 agency 378, 381 Aitchison, K. et al 141 Akoto-​Bamfo, K. 211 Aksoy, S. 504–​5 Al Ani, J. 462 Al Ansari, H. 459–​60 Alder Hey Hospital 77 Al-​Hussainy, A. and R. Matthews 161–​62 Al Jassassiya, Qatar 462f, 462 Allen, V. 444–​45 allochronism 115, 118–​19 Al-​Pachachi, A. Q. 161 Al-​Quntar, S. et al 158 Al Thani, Sheikha Al M. bint H. 465 Al Thani, Sheikh A. bin J. 458–​59 Al Thani, Sheikh K. bin H. 458–​59, 460 Alzate, J. A. 299 Al Zubarah, Qatar 463, 464f, 465 Amazonian archaeology 101, 102–​4 collections in the home 104–​9 American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA) 233–​34 American Museum of Natural History 335 Anacostia Museum, Washington DC, US 511 Anadol, R. 484–​85

570   Index ANAMED see Research Center for Anatolian Civilization, Turkey ancestry, in the media 203–​4 Anchorage Museum, Alaska, US 511 Ancient Greece 175–​76 Ancient Mexico exhibition 292–​93 Ancient Middle East 435–​36, 440–​42 Ancient Near East (ANE) gallery 443f, 443–​52, 448f Ancient Relics Register 556–​57, 558 Ancona, L. 125 Andrews, J. 61, 62 Anhui Provincial Museum, China 426 Announcement on Further Standardizing the Construction of Archaeological Site Parks and Appraisal of the Second Group of National Archaeological Site Parks 432 Anomabo Fort 210–​11 Anquandah, J. R. 491–​92 anthrax 411 Anthropocene 513 anthropology collections 15, 437 connection to archaeology 375–​76 anthropometry 52 Antikensammlung, Berlin 311–​12, 313–​14, 322 Antiquities Act (1906) 222 Antiquities Act (Finland; 1963) 549, 551–​52, 553–​54 antiquities market 9, 87–​88 museums as influencers 91–​93 museums as receivers 88–​91 Antoine, D. 412 Antone, C. 58–​59 Appleton, J. 504 Applications Programming Interface (API) 537 appropriate museology 10 archaeoacoustics 330 Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act (1974) 222–​23 Archaeological Archives Group Conference (CIfA 2017) 281 Archaeological Collections Consortium (ACC) 230–​31, 233–​34 archaeological context 5–​6, 15, 353–​54, 357–​60, 561 in archives 275

in associated records 227 definition 6 ethnographic collections 377 findspots, spatial information on 557–​59 metadata 559–​60 in photography 313–​16, 318 Archaeological Heritage Office for Trento 144 Archaeological Investigations Project (AIP) 274–​75 Archaeological Museum of China 429 Archaeological Repository Map 233–​34 Archaeological Resources Protection Act (1979) 223 archaeological site museums 180–​81 approaching 191–​92 see also site museums archaeologists, attitudes towards storage 228–​29 Archaeology and Me project 39–​40 Archaeology Data Service (ADS) 237, 277–​78 ‘archaeology of museums’ 41 Archaeology of Qatar gallery 461f, 461–​63, 462f, 467 Arches system 537 architecture 36–​37 aural 339, 343 ecologically sustainable 235–​36 meaning-​making 7, 32 Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth 187 National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) 459f, 459–​60 archives 13, 271–​72 accessibility 274–​79 costs 274–​75 digital dissemination 277–​79 digital preservation 279 digital technology 277–​79 engagement with 283–​85 exhibitions 282–​83, 478–​79 photographic collections 319–​23 research 280–​82 standardization and quality 272–​74 storage 275–​76 use 279–​85 see also collections; repositories areas of interest (AOIs) 364–​65, 365f Argyropoulos, V. and C. Kanari 148 artefact (object) biographies 5–​6, 378, 436–​37

Index   571 artefacts collections 363 connections with people 382–​83 context 15, 353–​54 groupings 437 interactions between objects 380 preservation see preservation of artefacts scientific analysis see scientific analysis typological method 357–​60 Arthes, F. 296 Arts Council England (ACE) 276 Art Workers Coalition 509 Asantehene Prempeh I 205 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK 16–​17, 18, 333, 435–​36 Ancient Middle East collections 440–​42 Ancient Near East (ANE) gallery 443f, 443–​ 52, 448f challenges 445–​46 Asisi, Y. 318 Assassin’s Creed franchise 541 assemblages see collections assemblage theory 378, 379–​80 associated records 227–​28 Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) 90 Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers (ALGAO; UK) 274–​75 Atkinson, H. 58 audiences see visitors to museums audience testing 445, 446–​48 audio tours 335–​36 Augé, M. 465–​66 Augmented Reality showcase, Metropolitan Museum of Art 531–​32, 541 Australian Aboriginal peoples 73–​76, 381 Ancestral Remains 48–​50, 53 emotional affects 47–​48 Australian National University Centre for Digital Humanities 540 authenticity 32–​33, 70, 213–​14 autoarchaeology 211–​12

B Bagan interactive 542 Baker, M. 292

Bakhtin, M. 119 Bakr, N. 518 Balam, R. 123 ‘Balanced Value Impact Model’ 530 Banpo Museum, China 430 Barakat, S. 159 Barbalet, J. 47 Barker, A. W. 437 basketmaking practices 379–​80 Baxter, K. et al 272, 273 BBC radio broadcasts 335, 341f, 341–​42 sound recordings 338 Before Central Park: The Life and Death of Seneca Village exhibition 509 Beierwaltes, L. & W. 92 Belk, R. W. 99–​100 Bell, G. 161 Belzoni, G. B. 296–​97 Benin Bronzes 260–​63 Bennett, G. 51 Bennett, S. V. 52 Bennett, T. 30, 52, 375 Berger, S. 411–​12 Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük Team (BACH) 481–​83 ‘Berlin’s Largest Excavation: Research Area Biesdorf ’ exhibition 487 best practice 67–​68 Beurden, J. van 255–​56 ‘Beyond the Return: A Decade of African Renaissance’ initiative 203 Bezanillas, C. 303 Bezerra, M. 105, 109 Bhatti, S. 468–​69 Birdsell, J. 62 Bismarck, O. von 249–​50 Black Lives Matter 67–​68, 527 Blank, S. 532 Blesser, B. and L.-​R. Salter 329 blue pigment 125–​29 Blumenbach, J. F. 50, 51 Boast, R. 116, 510–​11 bodily remains see human remains Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK 441 bones, preservation 403, 408–​9 Booth, N. et al 279–​80

572   Index born digital collections 6–​7 Bourdieu, P. 90 Boyland, P. J. 181 Brazil 101, 102–​4 collections in the home 104–​9 Brenna, B. et al 290–​91 Brettell, R. 404–​5 Brighton and Hove Museums 512 Bristol City Council 279 Bristol Museum and Art Gallery 262, 283–​84 British Library 540 British Museum 118, 125–​29, 262 artefacts from living communities 376 Clothworkers’ Foundation Conservation Research Fellowship 412 collaboration with Guatemala 542 crowdsourcing 550 Data > Knowledge > Insight > Wisdom (DKIW) pyramid 531 Department of Collection Care 414–​15 Department of Egypt and Sudan Reading Room 353–​54 digital technology 483–​84, 539 Gebelein mummies 412–​17, 413f, 414f, 416f Google Arts and Culture Program 303 London Missionary Society 381–​82 MicroPasts project 277, 540 Museum of Mankind 437 sponsorships 541 Virtual Pilgrimage project 529 workshops 492–​93 bronze figures 315f Brookes, J. 50–​51 Brothwell, D. 74–​75, 76–​77 Brown, A. 407 Brown, C. 442 Brown, D. H. 272–​73 Bruce, R. 120 Bubaris, N. 329, 339 Buddle, R. 48 Budge, W. 412–​13 bulk finds 11–​12, 224–​25, 226 Bullock, W. 292–​93 burial practices 257, 404–​5 Burke, E. 53 Byrne, S. et al 107–​8, 378

C Cadolzburg Castle museum, Germany 338–​39 Calendar Stone (pre-​Columbian monument) 292–​93, 294, 299–​300 Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 262 Cambridgeshire County Council 275–​76 Campbell, Sir T. C. 54–​55 Cangueiro, L. 334 cannons 212f, 213 capacity-​building programmes 159 Cape Coast Castle 205, 206, 209–​10 Capela dos Ossos, Portugal 402–​3 Carducci, G. 252 Castañeda, Q. 122 Cast Court 303 Caste War (1847–​1901) 121–​22 castles and forts 197–​204, 198f contested claims about history 204–​9 exhibitions 209–​11 Çatalhöyük Research Project 475 cataloguing 319, 478–​79, 537, 559–​61 Caton-​Thompson, G. 353–​54, 355–​59, 360f, 362–​63, 365–​66 cemeteries 77–​78 ceramics 388, 389f certified reference materials (CRMs) 396 Chan, S. 535–​36 Chapman, R. and A. Wylie 3–​4 Charnay, D. 290, 292, 294, 295–​96, 300, 301f Chartered Institute for Archaeology (CIfA) 281 Chatham Islands 48 Chen, R. 427–​28 Chen Yi, General 430 Chester, Rev. G. 441 Chicago Exposition 301 children 486 China exhibitionary cultures 16, 423 ‘three major museums’ 426 Chorography museums 427–​28 Christiansborg Castle 205, 211–​12 cannon excavation 212f Christy, H. 292–​93 chronology of archaeology 6–​7 chronotopes 119

Index   573 Cipriani, L. 297–​98 citizen archaeology 19–​20, 539–​40, 549–​51, 557 Clarke, L. and S. Marsh 138–​39 Classic period 117, 118–​19 classification exercises 98 Clavijero, F. X. 299 Clay, L. T. 88–​89 Clifford, J. 116, 515–​16 climate change 513 Clothworkers’ Foundation Conservation Research Fellowship 412 CNIGP (National Register of Safeguard and Research Institutions) 108–​9 Coalition for Museums and Climate Justice 513 Coatlicue (pre-​Columbian art) 300–​1 Coatlicue (pre-​Columbian monument) 292–​93, 293f, 294, 299–​300 Collaborative Doctoral Partnership schemes 280–​81 collecting 99–​100 as affective practice 47 and colonialism 375 and donations to museums 88–​90 emotional affects 48–​49 seen as theft 68–​69 see also collectors collections 100 accompanying documents 379 aids for finding 231 decolonization 439–​40 ethics 8, 56–​60 excavations and destinations 101 in the home 104–​9 importance to archaeology 4–​5 information on 528 location 10–​12 media 12–​13, 14, 307–​8 organisation 31–​32 ownership 227 private vs. museum 100–​1 registers of finds 548–​49, 555–​59 stakeholders 230 statistics 556f typological method 31 validation 556–​59 see also archives; repositories collections management 5, 6–​7, 14–​16

associated records 227–​28 attitudes of archaeologists 228–​29 collections management systems (CMSs) 277–​78 cooperation and communication 232–​34 costs of storage 225–​26, 237 curation crisis 221–​29 databases 226, 231 deaccessioning 231–​32 digital technology 527–​28 documents 559–​61 education programmes 230, 233 government agencies 234–​36 lack of storage space 226, 275–​76, 498 ontology of archaeological object names 561–​62 prioritization 232 professional standards and policies 228 raising awareness 229–​32 Collections Trust 277–​78, 537 Collective Access 537 collectors 100 of ethnographic assemblages 377 in local communities 101–​2 non-​archaeologists as 101 see also collecting colonialism 30, 51, 60, 249–​52 in Ancient Middle East collections 440–​42 collecting of artefacts 489–​90 effect on Egyptian collections 515–​16 linked to ethnographic collections 375, 376 missionaries 250, 381–​82 Combined Prehistoric Expedition 359–​60 comfort 447 commercial activity 101 community archaeology 259, 284–​85, 458, 549–​50 comparative archaeology 31–​32, 33–​34 composite biographies 13–​14 concept oriented exhibitions 478–​85 conceptual site museums 178 condition surveys 411–​12 Conn, S. 367–​68 conservation 157–​58, 181 heritage 165–​66 of human remains 407–​17 Iraq 161–​62, 167

574   Index conservators 157–​58, 409, 410–​12 contact zones, museums as 116 contemporary art 18 inspired by Çatalhöyük 483–​85 interpretative functions 36–​37 sound based 329, 337–​39, 344–​45 content management systems (CMSs) 536–​37 contested heritage 251–​52 context (archaeological) 5–​6, 15, 353–​54, 357–​ 60, 561 in archives 275 in associated records 227 definition 6 ethnographic collections 377 findspots, spatial information on 557–​59 metadata 559–​60 in photography 313–​16, 318 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) 506 Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York 535–​36 core chronology 461f, 461–​63 corporate responsibility 88, 93 private governance 93–​94 Council for British Archaeology 284–​85 COVID-​19 pandemic 179, 508, 522–​23 effect on digital technology 527, 532 Cox, G. 481–​83 Cox, R. 337–​38, 344–​45 craniometry 52 see also skulls Creative Lab 542 creator communities 107–​8 Crip Theory 10, 137, 140–​41, 142 cross-​community programmes 511–​12 cross-​cultural interaction 379 crowdsourcing 550 Crystal Palace, London 333 CultLab3D 539 cultural consumption 90, 91 cultural diplomacy 160 cultural heritage 506 calls for restitution 253 community 158–​60 tourism 202–​3, 204 ‘Cultural Heritage First Aid Action Framework’ 158 cultural relics 423

cultural resources management (CRM) 223, 230, 233–​34 Cultures in the Crossfire: Stories from Syria and Iraq 18 Cunningham, D. J. 48–​49 Cuno, J. 504 ‘Cupid and Psyche’ project 529 curation crisis 11–​12, 109, 221–​29 associated records 227–​28 attitudes of archaeologists 228–​29 collection ownership 227 costs of storage 225–​26, 237 lack of storage space 226, 275–​76, 498 professional standards and policies 228 steps to prevent 236–​37 curators 17 responsibilities 5 Curious Case of Çatalhöyük, The 17–​18, 475 CyArk 542

D Dal Nilo al Po e ritorno ‘From the Nile to the Po and back’ project 517–​18 Daming Palace Site Park 431 Dana, J. C. 503–​4 Danish Welfare Museum 512 Daston, L. and P. Galison 52 Data > Knowledge > Insight > Wisdom (DKIW) pyramid 530, 531 database design 358–​59, 363–​66, 397–​98 databases 226, 231, 559–​61 ontology of archaeological object names 561–​62 pre-​Columbian art 303 data collection 396 data visualization 484 David Bowie Is… exhibition 335–​36 D’Clark, R. S. 138–​39 deaccessioning 231–​32, 235 Dean, D. 478 debate 458 De Cardi, B. 460, 464–​65 decolonization 116, 256–​57, 258, 439–​40 definition of museums 102–​3 paradigm shift 2, 19, 103 Delaporte, L. 291 Deloitte 530

Index   575 Den Gamle open-​air museum, Denmark 178–​79 Densmore, F. 333–​34 Denver Museum of Nature and Science 540 Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) 402–​3, 406–​7, 410, 528 Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Ghana 490–​93, 495, 498 Department of the Interior (DOI) 233 Desert Fayum, The (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner) 357–​59 Desert Fayum Reinvestigated, The (Holdaway and Wendrich) 361–​63 Desvallées, A. and F. Mairesse 102–​3 Detroit Institute of Arts, US 336–​37 Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany 335 Deve Hüyük, Syria 441 development-​led archaeology 11–​12, 274–​75 Diaz, J. 295–​96 Dig@Lab 479 Digital and Population Data Service, Finland 557 Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) 237 digital art 483–​85 digital dissemination 277–​79 digital divide/​digital poverty 528–​29 Digitale Metaldetektofund (DIME), Denmark 555 digital museums 532–​36 digital preservation 279 digital reporting services 555 digital technology 19, 188, 192 as aid to curation crisis 236–​37 archaeological information 559–​62 associated records 227–​28 citizen archaeology 539–​40 collections management 527–​28 collections tools 537 costs and benefits 536–​42 digital maturity 533–​36 in exhibitions 283 future directions 530–​32 information superhighway 528 interactive digital displays 477–​78, 479–​87 multimedia outputs 538–​39 necessity for 542–​43 in newly built museums 526–​27

partnerships 540–​41 resources 529–​32 R factors 531, 534t sharing finds 548 for storing archives 277–​79 web-​based data gathering 550 Dilly, H. 310 Dimbleby Report 272–​73 Dincer, F. et al 148 Dion, Mark 18 Directory Board, Iraq 163 Disability Discrimination Act (1995; UK) 141–​42 dis/​Abled people 10, 136–​38 Crip Theory 140–​41 language use 138–​40 museum projects 513 and museums 144–​46 as visitors to museums 137–​38, 146–​48 discourse 68–​69 ‘Display at Your Own Risk’ project 538–​39 displays 16–​18, 41 art in 18 challenges 496–​500 in Ghana 490–​92 interactive digital 477–​78, 479–​87 in the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) 460–​63, 466–​69 of photographs 316–​19 sensory 213–​14, 437–​39, see also soundscapes storytelling 16–​17, 436–​37, 448–​52 of theory 477–​78 using films 463, 467–​68 diversity 453, 470–​7 1, 512–​13 Diyabanza, M. 256 documents 379 on conditions of human remains 411–​12 digital 498–​99 in exhibitions 478–​79 scientific reports 397–​98 donors 88–​90 Dorrel, P. G. 478–​79 Dream (Royal Shakespeare Company) 531–​32 Drovetti, B. 516 Drupal platform 536–​37 Dudley, S. H. 438, 469

576   Index Duke University, Dig@Lab 479 Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 513 Duncan, C. 328–​29 Dyer, J. 125

E Earll, R. E. 300 Early Peoples gallery 18 East Sussex Archaeology and Museum Project, The 512 e-​citizen science 550 ecomuseums 10–​11, 177 education programmes 283–​84 in collections management 230, 233 Fundamentals of Heritage Conservation Program 164–​66 in Ghana 491–​93 Iraqi Institute 164 in the Museo Egizio, Turin, Italy 517–​18, 520 Nimrud Rescue Project 164–​65, 166–​67 Smithsonian 160, 164–​65 university degrees 466–​67 Edwards, E. 322–​23 Edwards, R. (Edwards report 2014) 276 Egypt 353–​54, 355–​63, 356f, 360f dispersal of artefacts 515–​16 excavation work in 332 Gebelein mummies 412–​17, 413f, 414f, 416f Museo Egizio, Turin, Italy 504, 516–​18 soundscapes 334–​35 Egypt Exploration Society 540 Egyptian Foundation 518 Egyptian Mining Resources Authority (EMRA) 363 Egyptian Museum, Cairo 335, 341f, 341–​42 Egyptology 331–​32 Elbra, A. 94 Elmina Castle 205, 206, 209–​10, 214f El Museo del Barrio, New York, US 511 Emancipation Day 202–​3 embroidery 122–​24 emotional affects 8, 39–​40, 40f, 68–​7 1 documentation of 54–​57 history 46–​50 personal accounts 54–​55, 58 in repatriation 67

vs. science 73–​76 of slave trade in Ghana 206 Émotions patrimoniales project 39–​40, 40f empathy 8, 77–​79 employees in museums 276, 530 dis/​Abled people 146 Front of House (FOH) teams 148 Enabled Archaeology 10, 137, 138 in fieldwork 141–​43 Enabled Archaeology Foundation (EAF) 142–​43, 149, 150 entanglement theory 378, 380 environmental archaeology 11–​12 environmental issues 513 Epidaurus’ theatre 531–​32 epistemic collections 108 Erbil, Iraq 162 ‘Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra’ exhibition 483–​84 ethics 66–​67 of accepting illicit donations 88–​91 of collecting 8, 56–​60 and colonialism 250–​51 of handling human remains 406–​12 and repatriation 75 in sound recordings 342 ethnographic collections 374–​75 definition 375–​78 future of 380–​83 related disciplines 378 as ‘supplementary’ to archaeological surveys 377 theoretical frameworks 378–​80 ethnographic comparisons 31–​32, 33–​34 ethnographic exhibitions 35–​36, 120–​21 ethnographic studies 120 Eurocentricity 290–​94, 303 Europe, restitution of artefacts 252–​53 European Citizen Science Association 549–​50 Evans, A. 441 excavation reports 15, 355–​56, 366–​67 Desert Fayum, The (Caton-​Thompson and Gardner) 357–​59 excavations 212f, 354–​55 in Ancient Middle East 442 exhibitions of 282–​83 Kom W, Fayum, Egypt 360f

Index   577 soundscapes of 342–​43, 343f work with photographs 310–​12 see also fieldwork exhibitionary complex 30 exhibitionary cultures 16–​18, 423 art in 18 storytelling 16–​17, 436–​37, 448–​52 exhibitions of archives 282–​83 concept oriented 478–​85 as ‘market makers’ 91, 92 at MuLPE, Jordan 187–​88 soundscapes in 331–​32 of transatlantic slave trade 209–​11 experience for dis/​Abled visitors 146–​48 immersive approach 339 on site museums 178–​79 exploitation 296–​97 exportation 9, 87–​88, 553 Exposition universelle d’art et d’industrie (1867; Paris) 32, 35–​36, 294, 295f

F fakes 32–​33 Fane, D. 301–​2 Faro Convention (2005) 506, 554–​55 Fash, B. W. 303 Fayum, Egypt 353–​54, 355–​63, 356f, 360f federal collections 234–​36 Feld, S. 338 Feldman, J. D. 297–​98 Felice, C. 516 Fell, C. 336 Ferreira, L. G. 104 Ferreira, M. de M. 101 Fiebig, G. 338–​39 Field Museum, Chicago, US 336, 442 field recordings 333–​34 field surveys 15, 353 fieldwork 274, 354–​56 dis/​Abled people in 137–​38 displays of 477 Enabled Archaeology 141–​43 in Fayum, Egypt 353–​54, 357–​60 future of 366–​68 raising awareness of methods 230–​31

soundscapes of 332 see also excavations films 463, 467–​68 FindSampo 19–​20, 550–​51, 555–​56, 560–​61 ontology of archaeological object names 561–​62 open information 558 portal 552f Finds Library 481, 482f Finland metal detecting 548, 551–​54 see also FindSampo ‘Finnish Archaeological Finds Recording Linked Open Database’ see SuALT project Finnish Heritage Agency (FHA) 548–​49, 550–​51, 556f Finnish Terminology Centre TSK 561 Fitzpatrick, A. 136, 141 Fitzwilliam Museum 529 Flynn, T. 539 Fort Prinzenstein 210–​11 forts and castles 197–​204, 198f contested claims about history 204–​9 exhibitions 209–​11 Foster, E. et al 290–​91 Foster, N. 459–​60 Foster, S. and S. Jones 13–​14 Foster, S. M. 291–​92 Fraser, M. 137 Frederiksen, R. and E. Marchand 290–​91 Frere Report 272–​73 Fritsch, A. 335 Froggatt, W. 56–​57, 61 Front of House (FOH) teams 148 Fundamentals of Heritage Conservation Program 164–​66 funding 181 for Ancient Near East (ANE) gallery 444–​45 for permanent galleries 435–​36 sponsorships 541 Furtwängler, A. 314–​16

G Galata Maritime Museum, Genova 503–​4 Gall, F. J. 50–​51 Gallo, G. 104 Gardner, E. 353–​54, 356–​59, 362–​63, 365–​66

578   Index gas chromatography mass spectroscopy (GC-​MS) 388, 404–​5 Gates, H. L. 203–​4 Gebelein mummies 412–​17, 413f, 414f, 416f Gehry, F. 459–​60 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 557 genocide 251 geochemistry 388, 391 Gerhard, E. 307–​8 German Museum Association 406–​7 Ghana 11, 197–​204, 198f, 489 contested claims about history 204–​9 exhibitions 209–​11 museum displays 490–​92 Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) 201–​2, 206, 208–​9, 490–​91 Ghana National Museum 490–​91 gallery 491 Ghor as-​Safi, Jordan 187–​88, 189f, 189–​91 Giuntini, L. 296 ‘global contemporary’ age 2 Goldsworthy, Andy 18 Goode, G. B. 300 Google 536 Google Arts and Culture Program 303, 541–​42 Google Maya project 118 Gosden, C. and Y. Marshall 5–​6, 378 government agencies 234–​36 Graham, I. 296 Graham, R. C. 291–​92 Grand Palais 483–​84 Gran Museo Maya de Merida 122–​24 Grant, M. 75–​76 graves, theft from 47–​48, 57–​60 Great Game, The. Archaeology and Politics exhibition 38 Great North Museum, Newcastle, UK 262 Great Site policies 425, 430–​32 Greco, C. 516, 521–​22 Greenblatt, S. 452, 468 Green Island Memorial Park, Taiwan 512 Grew, F. 272–​73 grey literature 278 groupings of objects 437 Gruber, E. 542 Guatemala 542 Guggenheim Museum, New York 333

Gulf museums 464–​65, 469–​70 Gundungurra people 74 Gürlek, N. 485

H Hadid, Z. 459–​60 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict 247–​48 Halealoha Ayau, E. 65, 72 Haley, A. 202–​3 Hamilakis, Y. 2 handling objects in museums 437–​39 handover ceremonies 79 Happy Museum Project 513 Harrison, R. 355–​56, 381 Hart, S. M. and E. S. Chilton 101–​2 Harvard Peabody Museum 303 Haus Der Musik, Vienna, Austria 334 Hawaii 71–​73 Hays-​Gilpin, K. and R. Lomatewama 382–​83 hazardous substances 411 Hazelius, A. 176 health and wellbeing initiatives 19, 513 hegemonic distribution 66 Heiden Tor (Heathen’s Gate) 529 Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies (HSNES) 184, 185–​86, 187–​88 Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences 560 heritage 259 and local communities 101–​2, 104 heritage communities, Iraq 10 heritage conservation 165–​66 heritage diplomacy 160 Heritage Emergency National Task Force (HENTF; US) 158 Heritage Gateway 277–​78 Heritage Health Information Survey (HHIS) 224–​25, 228 Heritage Information Access Strategy (HIAS) project (Historic England) 278 heritage management 122 Heritage Preservation 224–​25 heritage sites, castles and forts as 201–​2 heritage tourism 202–​3, 204 Herzog and De Meuron 459–​60 Hicks, D. 376, 527

Index   579 Hicks, D. et al 280–​81 Hidden Danish Stories project 512 Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) 280–​81 Hill, J. D. 407 Hinsley, C. M. 292 historical context 7, 29–​30, 33–​41 contested claims 204–​9 Historic England (HE) 276, 277–​78 Historic Environment Records (HERs) 278 Historic Sites Act (1945) 222–​23 History of China Exhibition 427–​28 Hochschild, A. R. 68 Hodder, I. 6, 380, 477, 478 Hogarth, D. 441–​42 Hoggett, P. and S. Thompson 69n.1 Holdaway, S. J. and W. Wendrich 361–​63, 365f homes, archaeological collections in 104–​9 Hopi artefacts 382–​83 Horniman Museum, London 334 Huang, C. 428 Hubert, J. 58–​59, 72–​73 Hudson, K. 177–​78 Humann, C. 311–​12, 313–​14, 314f, 319–​21 human remains definition 47–​50, 65–​66, 251, 402–​3 documentation of 411–​12 emotional affects 8, 46–​50, 70–​7 1 emotions about 417 Gebelein mummies 412–​17, 413f, 414f, 416f hazards of working with 411 legislation on the treatment of 223, 406–​12 preservation 15–​16, 403, 407–​17 scientific analysis 50–​53 studies of 404–​5 uniqueness 405–​6 see also Indigenous Ancestral Remains Human Tissue Act (2004; UK) 406–​7 Humboldt, A. von 299 Hunterian Museum, London 338 hybridization 379, 381–​82

I illicit transfer of artefacts 9, 87, 88–​90 and metal detecting 553 museums as influencers 91–​93 museums as receivers 88–​91

Ilppari digital reporting service 555, 556f, 558 Image of Abraham, The project 511–​12 ‘Images of Elmina Across the Centuries’ exhibition 210 imaginary museums 106 imaging 388 immersive approach 339 imperialism 289–​90, 292–​93 decolonization of collections 439–​40 and exploitation 296–​97 Imperial War Museum (IWM), London 338 inclusion 453, 512–​13 digital divide 528–​29 Indigenous Ancestral Remains 8 colonialism 51 emotional affects 58 history of emotional affect 46–​50 scientific analysis 52, 53 see also human remains Indigenous heritage 70 Indigenous peoples 9–​10, 115 before and after ‘civilization’ 118–​19 artefacts collected from 376, 377 connections with artefacts 15 as curators and researchers 382–​83 field recordings 333–​34 as labourers 296–​97, 297f relationships with missionaries 381–​82 inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (IC-​MS) 388–​89 industry, presentation of 31–​32 inequalities 7–​8 in accounts of emotional affect 55 for dis/​Abled people 136 information superhighway 528 Institute of Archaeology CASS 429 Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) 224–​25 Institute of National Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) 109n.5 institutional websites 536–​37 instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) 388–​89 intangible heritage 506 interactions 380 sensory displays 213–​14, 437–​39 interactive digital displays 477–​78, 479–​87

580   Index Interim Procedures for the Investigation and Excavation of Ancient Cultural Sites 424 Interim Procedures for the Management of Ancient Sites and Graves Research and Excavation 424–​25 International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH) 167 International Centre for the Study of Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (ICCROM) 158 International Committee for Museums of Archaeology and History (ICMAH) 177–​78 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 19, 102–​3, 176, 177–​78, 180, 406, 504–​7 new definition of museums 2 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) 180, 181 International Museum Day (18 May) 183 interpretation 30, 36–​37, 98–​99, 181, 213 accessibility for dis/​Abled people 144–​46 based on experiences 437 in context 353–​54 Iraq 10, 442 cultural and heritage diplomacy 160 museums and conservation 161–​62 post-​war recovery 158–​60 Iraq Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP) 162–​63 Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage 157–​58, 160, 162–​65 Fundamentals of Heritage Conservation Program 164–​66 Iraq Museum, Baghdad 161 Italian–​Egyptian Association 517–​18

J Jacinto Canek rebellion 121–​22 Jácome, C. 108 Janakkala swordsman 551 Janes, R. R. and G. T. Conaty 510 Janes, R. R. and R. Sandell 510–​11, 522–​23 Jarvis, K. 296 Jericho Skull 483–​84, 539 Jesus College, University of Cambridge 262

Jiménez, C. 122–​23 Johnson, J. S. et al 164 Jones, S. 291–​92 Jordan see Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE), Jordan Jordanova, L. 98 Jorvik Viking Centre, York, UK 336 Jost, J. T. 68, 78–​79 Jurandir, D. 105

K kafala system 470 Karanis, Egypt 334–​35 Karaoğlu, K. 485 Karlshure Team 481–​83 kaumaha 71–​72 Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Michigan, US 334–​35 Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, UK 439, 453 Kern, O. 319–​21, 321f Kersel, M. 109 Kinard, J. 511 Kingsborough, E. K., Lord 292–​93 Kirton, J. and T. O’Mahony 138 Klaatsch, Dr H. 47–​48 Knell, S. 2 Know Your Place (KYP) project 279 Koç University, Research Center for Anatolian Civilization, Turkey 17, 475, 476–​77 Kom W, Fayum, Egypt 355–​63, 356f, 360f Koolhaas, R. 459–​60 Kopytoff, I. 107–​8, 353, 366–​67 Korea Air 541 Koszary, A. 531–​32, 538 Kotonski, V. 414f, 414–​15 Kourbaj, Issam 18 Kowalski, T. 181 Kow Swamp remains 73–​76 Kozlowski, J. K. and B. Ginter 360f, 360–​61 Kreps, C. 437 Krone, H. 316–​18, 317f Kudrow, L. 203–​4 Kurdish Textile Museum, Iraq 162 Kurdistan National Museum, Iraq 162 Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) 162–​63

Index   581 L LaBelle, B. 337–​38 Labelle, J. 109 labour 295–​99, 297f, 319–​21 Lacandon Maya people 120–​21 Lahn, J. 75 Lahore Museum, Pakistan 468–​69 landscape archaeology 6–​7 language Arabic 518–​19 associated with slavery 208–​9 bilingual displays 447 labels on photographs 319 in the Museo Egizio, Turin, Italy 517 of objects 31–​32 and the Social Model of Disability 138–​40 Latchford, D. 89–​90 Latin America 117 Latour, B. 380 Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics 423–​24, 426 Law Pezzarossi, H. 379–​80 Lawrence, T. E. 441 Layard, A. H. 160, 296–​97, 441 LEAP project 483 Lebanon 92 Leeds City Museum 331–​32 legacy 60–​61 legacy collections 14 Legon Archaeology Students Association (LASA) 493 Leiris, M. 249–​50 Le musée sur ordonnance project 513 Lending, M. 290–​91 Le Plongeon, A. and A. 294 Les musées à l’hôpital project, Dijon, France 513 Levy, S. and H. Young 140–​41 Lewis, G. 247–​48 L’expérience Assassin’s Creed aux Invalides 541 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) perspectives 3–​4, 140–​41 LibCrowds 540 Libeskind, D. 162 ‘Library of Congress: By the People’ 540 Liddle, P. 284–​85 Life on the Coast gallery, National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) 463, 464f, 465

Lima, H. P. et al 101 Linked Open Data 19–​20, 555–​56, 560 Lisbon, Portugal 342–​43, 343f little Turk 319–​22, 321f living communities, artefacts from 376 local authorities, storage of archives 275–​76 local communities engaging with excluded groups 104 heritage 101–​2, 104 Lombardy Archaeowiki project 144 London Archaeological Archive Research Centre (LAARC) 283–​84 London Missionary Society 381–​82 London Mithraeum 337 London Museums Hub 503–​4 looting 9, 87–​88 in Brazilian law 107 and colonialism 249–​50 ethics of 8, 56–​57 of Iraqi museums 157, 161 Maya pottery 88–​89 public relations issues 92 Lopez, G. 295–​96 Lost Landscapes initiative 281–​82 Lost Property Act (Finland; 1988) 551–​52 Lot’s Cave 186–​87 see also Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE), Jordan Lowenthal, D. 437 Lowest Place on Earth see Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE), Jordan Lynch, B. 510–​11 Lyons, S. 143

M Macdonald, S. 79 MacKinnon, D. 331 MacLeay, W. 56–​57 Macron, Emmanuel 30, 254–​55 Madrid Historical American Exposition 301 Magnesia, Maeander River, Turkey 311–​14, 312f, 314f, 319–​21 Mairesse, F. 505–​6 Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment (Historic England) 277–​78 Manchester Museum 513

582   Index Māori peoples 48 Mao Zedong 426 mapping projects 279 Marajó Island, Amazonia 104 Marchioness disaster 77 market makers 91, 92 Marquardt, W. H. 223–​24 Marquardt, W. H. et al 221 Martin, R. F. 291–​92 Mason, O. T. 300 Matsuda, D. 101–​2 Matthews, P. 303 Maudslay, A. P. 118, 290, 292, 294, 295–​97, 297f, 298 May, L. 125 Maya Blue: Painting from Past in the Present project 125–​29 Maya civilization 115–​16, 117–​19, 121–​29, 542 blue pigment 125–​29 casts recording project 541 cultural identity 122 embroidery 122–​24 information on 120–​21 Maya pottery illicit transfer of artefacts 88–​89 material 126–​27 Mbow, M. 253, 255 McAnany, P. 122 McCooey, H. J. 74 McKeown, T. 59 McLaughlin, W. 300 McMillen, R. and F. Alter 148 meaning-​making 7, 17, 32 using soundscapes 339 ‘Meanwhile in the Mountains: Sagalassos’ exhibition 487 Measures for the Administration of Special Funds for Great Sites Protection 430–​31 MEDEA, Belgium 555 media 12–​13, 14, 307–​8 Medici scandal 9 meeting places 519–​20 Méhédin, L. 294 Meinander, C. F. 555–​56 memento mori 50n.3, 52 Mendoza, N. (Mendoza Review 2017) 276, 279 Mercer, J. 78–​79

Merriman, N. 18, 276 Merriman, N. and H. Swain 271, 279–​80 Mesquita, S. and M. J. Carneiro 148 metadata 364, 366, 559–​60 metal detecting 549, 554f cataloguing finds 560 challenges 553 Finland 548, 551–​54 regulations 551–​52, 553–​54 use of mobile devices 550 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 92, 334, 531–​32, 541 Mexican Fine arts Center Museum, Chicago, US 511 Mexican Museum, San Francisco, US 511 Mexic-​Arte Museum, Austin, US 511 Mexico Abadiano family 299–​302 see also pre-​Columbian art Mickel, A. 296–​97 micropalaeontology 388 MicroPasts project 277, 540, 550 migration, as a social issue 512–​13 Migration Museum, Adelaide, Australia 512–​13 Mijikenda people 257, 260 Military Museum of Chinese People’s Revolution 426 Miller, D. 100, 106n.3 Miller, S. 303 mineralogy 388 Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts 201–​2 Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MoTA; Jordan) 183–​84 missionaries 250, 381–​82 mix tapes 340–​41 mobile devices 550, 555–​56 Moche clay whistles 330–​31 Modena museum, Italy 33–​34, 35f Modern Mexico exhibition 292–​93 Mondi in Città ‘Worlds in the City’ (MIC) 517 Montréal Art Museum, Canada 513 Moolman, H. J. 178 Moore, G. F. 54–​55 Moore, L. 88–​89 Moraes, I. P. 104

Index   583 Morgan, J. 439, 453 Morton, A. 70 Moser, S. 368 Mosul Central Museum, Iraq 161, 167 M Shed, Bristol, UK 282–​83 Mulvaney, J. 73–​75, 76, 77–​78 mummification 403, 407–​8, 412–​17 murder 56–​57 Musée de l’histoire du travail 32 Musée de l’Homme, Paris 35–​36 Musée de Sculpture Comparée 291 Musée des Monuments Français 291 Musée du Louvre 483–​84 Musée du quai Branly–​Jacques Chirac, Paris 35–​36, 118, 256, 303 Musée et santé project, Lyon, France 513 Museo Civico Archeologico Etnologico di Modena 33–​34, 35f Museo Egizio, Turin, Italy 504, 516–​18 critical points 521–​22 engagement with Arabic-​speaking community 518–​19 as a meeting place 519–​20 outreach projects 520–​21 museography 179 of MuLPE, Jordan 186–​89 museology 99, 103 models 116–​17 of site museums 179 Museo Nacional, Mexico 294, 299, 300, 301–​2 Museu da Música Mecânica, Pinhal Novo, Portugal 334 Museu do Marajó 104 Museum (periodical) 176–​77 Museum Association (UK) 100–​1 Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE), Jordan 10–​11, 182, 183f, 192–​93 concept 183–​86 museography 186–​89 name 185 settings 189–​91 stakeholders 184 Museum Definition, Prospects, and Potentials (MDPP) committee 505, 507 museum employees dis/​Abled people 146 Front of House (FOH) teams 148

Museum of Archaeology, Ghana 489, 490, 491–​92, 497f display challenges 496–​500 management and operation 492–​93 student survey responses 493–​96 Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), Reading, UK 531–​32, 538 Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, US 88–​89 Museum of London 272–​73, 281 Archaeological Archive Research Centre (LAARC) 283–​84 Peopling of London, The project 512–​13 Museum of London Archaeology 337 Museum of London Docklands 282–​83 Museum of Mexican Antiquities 294 Museum of Modern Art, New York 329, 539 Museum of Oriental Art of Turin (MAO) 517–​18 Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) 14, 339–​44 Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, US 336 ‘Museum-​outside-​the-​Museum’ project 520–​21 Museum Policy Programme, Finland 554–​55 museums definition 2, 19, 102–​3, 504–​8 and dis/​Ability 144–​46 layout 443f, 444, 445–​46, 448–​49, 448f marginalization in archaeology 3–​4 as meeting places 519–​20 as musical venues 333, 334–​35 perceived as ‘silent spaces’ 328–​29 Museums and Climate Change Network 513 ‘Museums and Social Issues’ journal 503–​4 ‘Museums of Archaeology and History and Historical Sites’ committee 180 Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (MPEG), Amazonia 103 music, in museums 333 musical instruments 330, 334 trumpets from tomb of Tutankhamun 335, 341–​42, 341f Muzio Egizio, Turin, Italy 19

N Napoléon III 32, 180 narration 16–​17, 436–​37

584   Index narrative literatures 119 National Archaeological Museum of St Germain-​en-​Laye 180 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 203 National Bronze Age Index 540 National Conference of Preservation Education (2018) 233 National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) 232–​33 National Gallery, Canberra, Australia 503–​4 National Gallery, London 337–​38, 531–​32 National Health Service, UK 138–​39 National Historic Preservation Act (1966) 222–​23 National Museum, US 300, 301f National Museum of Anthropology 300 National Museum of Australia 540 National Museum of Chinese History 426, 427–​28 National Museum of Chinese Revolution 426 National Museum of Denmark 31–​32, 33–​34 National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) 518 National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) 16–​17, 18, 457, 459f Archaeology of Qatar gallery 461f, 461–​63, 462f, 467 displays 460–​63, 466–​69 future of 470–​7 1 Life on the Coast gallery 463, 464f, 465 National Museum of Scotland 18 national museums, decolonization 439–​40 National Museums of Kenya (NMK) 260 ‘National Parks and Forests and Nature Reserves and Trailside Museums’ committee 180 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) 274 National Register of Safeguard and Research Institutions (CNIGP) 108–​9 National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, UK 339 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) 59, 65–​66, 223, 382 Native American peoples 232–​33

natural sites 189–​91 Nature Conservation Act (Finland; 1996) 551–​52 Navarrete, T. 145 Nelson, M. C. and B. Shears 231 Nesyamun, voice reconstruction 331–​32 networks 378 Neues Museum, Berlin 36–​37, 37f, 316–​18, 487 Newark Museum of Art, US 503–​4 ‘new museology,’ vs ‘old museology’ 2 New Museology 103, 508–​9 New York Historical Society 509 Nile Valley, Egypt 357, 359–​60 Nimrud, Iraq 160 Nimrud Rescue Project 164–​65, 166–​67 Nipmuc, New England, US 379–​80 ‘Nkyinkyim installation’ 211 non-​visual site museums 178 Nora, P. 100 Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums (NODEM) award 283 Northern Arizona Museum 382–​83 Notre-​Dame cathedral restoration 541 Nouvel, J. 458–​60, 468

O Oba of Benin 260–​63 occupational therapy 142 Olafur Eliasson, Tate Gallery, London 533–​35 ‘old museology’ vs ‘new museology’ 2 Olympia 316–​18 bronze figures 315f O’Mahony, T. 138, 139, 141, 142–​43, 150 Oman National Museum 465 Omeka 537 Online Access to the Index of Archaeological Investigations (OASIS) project 278, 281–​82 Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) 537 ontology of archaeological object names 561–​62 open-​access data 549–​51, 556–​59 open-​air museums 10–​11, 176, 178–​79 Opoku, K. 255–​56 orphaned objects 90, 227 ossuaries 402–​3 Oulx, Italy 518

Index   585 outreach projects 520–​21 Overall Planning for the Protection of Great Sites 431 ownership 39, 227 documentation of 237 of federal property 234–​35 of heritage 248 Oxford University Laptop Orchestra (OxLOrk) 333 Oxley, J. 49–​50

P Paardekooper, R. 181 Palenque Palace 296, 297f palygorskite 126–​27 Pan African Historical Theatre Festival (Panafest) 202–​3, 206 Paolozzi, Eduardo 18 Papua New Guinea 376, 379 paradigm shift 2, 19, 103 Paris 1867 exhibition 32, 35–​36, 294, 295f partnerships 540–​41 patrimonialization of history 34–​36 Patrizi, F. 468 Pearce, S. 100–​1 Pearson, M. 77 pedagogy 18 using digital technology 19 Pei, I. M. 459–​60 Peñafiel, A. 301 Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 18 people-​centred museums 504 Peopling of London, The project 512–​13 Pereira, D. 108 Performistanbul 485 Pergamon Museum 318, 320f permanent galleries 435–​36 challenges 445–​46 flexibility 439 funding for 435–​36, 444–​45 Perry, S. 19 personal experiences, voiced in displays 447–​48 Perth, Australia 54–​55 pesticides 408 Petch, A. 34–​35

Petrie, W. F. 307–​8, 540 Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology 332, 334–​35, 359 Petronell-​Carnuntum archaeological park 529 Pett, D. 537, 539 Philadelphia Museum of Art 512 Phillips, T. and R. Gilchrist 141 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A (Burke) 53 Phoenix Ancient Art 92 phonographs 335 photographic collections 14, 308 archives 319–​23 cataloguing 319 displays 316–​19, 317f future of 322–​23 uses and handling 311 as working collections 308–​9 photographs 315f, 320f annotations 311–​13 of findspots 560–​61 labourers in 296–​97, 297f, 319–​21 people as markers in 319–​21 of plaster casts 292 retouching and cutting 313–​16, 314f photography, epistemic function 309–​11 phrenology emotional affects 50–​51 scientific analysis 52 pigment 125–​29 pilgrimages 212–​13 Pingret, E. H. T. 294 Pitt-​Rivers, Gen. Augustus Henry Lane Fox 34–​35, 478–​79 Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK 6–​7, 34–​35, 333–​34, 376, 378 planning policies 274 plaster casts 289–​90 by the Abadiano family 299–​302 databases 303 displays 298 Eurocentric approaches 290–​94, 303 face masks 297–​98 production of 295–​99 Playing in the Past projects 541 podcasting 335–​36

586   Index poetry 52 Pointe-​à-​Callière, Montréal 541 points of interest (POIs) 364–​65, 365f political campaigns 518–​19 Politis, K. D. 184 Pollard, M. et al 396 Poria, Y. et al 145–​46, 148 Portable Antiquities in the Netherlands (PAN) 555 Portable Antiquities Scheme 550, 555, 562 post-​colonialism 381–​82 post-​war recovery 157–​60, 166–​67 post-​war salvage projects 222–​23 Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia 535–​36 Pratt, M. L. 116 pre-​Columbian art 289, 293f, 302–​4 databases 303 plaster casts 292–​94 Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology, fifth Congress (1871; Bologna) 33–​34 prehistoric industry 31–​32, 33–​34 Prescription for Art project 513 preservation of artefacts 15–​16 current practices 410–​12 effect on information 409 human remains 403, 407–​17 legislation in the US 222–​23 and restitution 257 private governance 93–​94 processual archaeology 11–​12 Profiling the Profession report (Aitchison et al) 141 Prott, L. V. and P. J. O’Keefe 252 provenance 33, 91–​92, 451 public 17, 39–​40, 99 public archaeology 259, 284–​85, 458, 549–​50 public engagement 283–​85 public relations, problems of looted artefacts 92 Pujol, L. 483 Pyburn, K. A. 104

Q Qatar 460 cosmopolitan identity 465, 470 World Heritage brand 466

see also National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) Queensland Museum 53

R Raasepori (Raseborg) Castle 553 racial science 440–​41 racial stereotyping 67 radio broadcasts 335 radiocarbon dating 404 Radio-​Frequency IDentification (RFID) 481 Raman spectroscopy 388–​89, 404–​5 Ramsay Smith, Dr W. 48–​49 Ras Al Khaimah 464–​65 reburial issue 72–​74 recording culture 333–​34 Reddy, W. M. 47, 68–​69 Reel 2 Real event 333–​34 reflected and transmitted light microscopy 388 Reggio Emilia museum, Italy 33–​34 Regional Museums, Ghana 491 Regional Research Frameworks 281–​82 registers of engagement 70 Reines d’Egypte exhibition 541 renovation projects 33–​34, 36–​37, 37f repatriation 12, 257–​58, 380–​83 as affective practice 47, 68–​70 calls for 8, 57–​58, 65–​66 of Hawaiian remains 71–​73 scholarship on 65–​67 replica artefacts 13–​14 see also plaster casts reports, scientific 397–​98 repositories 225 aids for finding 231, 233–​34 closures 226 costs 225–​26, 237 deaccessioning 231–​32 government owned 234–​36 positive actions 236–​37 professional standards and policies 228 see also collections rescue archaeology 5 research, archives for 280–​82 Research Center for Anatolian Civilization, Turkey 17, 475, 476–​77, 484–​86 Research Excellence Framework (REF) 281

Index   587 research missions 250 restitution 12, 30, 248–​49 in Africa 256–​60 debate 252–​54 of plaster casts 298 refusal to engage with 255–​56 Sarr-​Savoy report (2018) 254–​56 restoration, of Ghanaian castles and forts 206 Rethinking Disability Representation project 513 ‘return to the object’ 514 ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ campaign 160 Reykjavík 871±2: The Settlement Exhibition 283 R factors 531, 534t Rice, M. 458–​59 Richards, J. D. 277–​78 Richardson, R. 70–​7 1 Rico, T. 159 Ricoeur, P. 119 Riggs, C. 331–​32 risk assessments 411 Rivers, A. H. L. F. P. 307–​8 Rivet, P. and G.-​H. Rivière 35–​36 Rivière, G. H. 177 Robertson, H. A. 381–​82 Roots (Haley) 202–​3 Rose, G. 310 Rosenwein, B. 47 Round Table on the Development and the Role of Museums in the Contemporary World 505–​6 Roviana, Solomon Islands 380 Rowe, S. 414–​15 Royal Pavilions and Museum, Brighton, UK 262 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 531–​32 Ryan, N. 338

S sak lu’um 126–​27 Salisbury Museum, UK 281 Sámi museums 511–​12 sampling 394–​96, 395f Samsung Digital Discovery Centre (SDDC) 541 Sanchi gateway 303 San Clemente, Rome, Italy 343f, 343

Sandell, R. 510 Sandell, R. and C. Ingram 145–​46 Sanxingdui Museum, China 430 Sarr, F. 254–​55 Sarr–​Savoy report (2018) 12, 254–​56 Savoy, B. 254–​55 scanning electron microscopy (SEM) 388–​89, 393 Schadla-​Hall, T. 528 Schafer, R. M. 330–​31 Schild, R. 359, 360f Schlachter, H. 338–​39 Schofield, J. 330 School for Advanced Research 233 Schreiber, M. 337 Science Museum, London 335, 336 Science Museum of Minnesota, US 476–​77 scientific analysis 15, 387–​88, 389f apparatus 389f, 390 benefits and risks 391–​93 choosing the technique 390–​91 data collection 396 displaying theory 477–​78 vs. emotional affects 73–​76 future of 398–​99 of human remains 404–​5 invasive techniques 393–​94 methods 388–​89 permissions 393–​94 reports 397–​98 sampling 394–​96, 395f in situ 390f, 394–​95 Scientific Commission of Mexico 294 Scott, T. 535–​36 Scullin, D. and B. Boyd 330–​31 ‘Seeing the Light of Day’ project 273–​74 Semmerling, L. 333, 337–​38, 344–​45 sensory displays 213–​14, 437–​39 in the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) 467–​68 see also soundscapes Serpent’s Head cast (E. Abadiano) 320f Shandong Provincial Museum 427 Shan Jixiang 431–​32 Shanks, M. and C. Tilley 3–​4, 7–​8 shared heritage 204, 253 Shaw, C. T. 490

588   Index Shaw, W. 100 Shelton, A. A. 437 Sheridan, A. et al 376 significance 272 silence in museums 328–​29 Silva, M. A. da. 106 Silverman, L. 504, 510–​11 Simandiraki-​Grimshaw, A. et al 290–​91 Singh, K. 303 Sissako, A. 463 site museums 10–​11, 103, 175–​76 approaching 191–​92 archaeological 180–​81 in China 430–​32 definition 176–​79 MuLPE see Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth (MuLPE), Jordan Siyu Wang 430 Skansen Open-​air Museum, Sweden 176 Sketchfab 539 skulls emotional affects 50–​51 scientific analysis 52 Slave Route Project 201–​2 slavery 197–​204, 249 Christiansborg Castle 211–​12 contested claims about history 204–​9 exhibitions 209–​11 Slave Trade Act (1807) 79 smallpox 411 Smith, J. G. 106, 108 Smith, L. 70, 72–​73, 77–​79 Smith, L. T. 68–​69 Smithsonian educational programmes 160, 164–​65 Nimrud Rescue Project 164–​65, 166–​67 Smithsonian Institution recording culture 333–​34 Transcription Center 540 social benefit 67–​68 social inclusion projects 521–​22 social issues 503–​8 museum activism 508–​14 social justice 511 social media 188, 499, 508, 537–​38 small museums going viral 531–​32, 538 Social Model of Disability 137, 142

Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 230, 233–​34, 271–​72 Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) 230, 233–​34 Society for Museum Archaeology (SMA; UK) 272, 273–​74, 275–​76 Society of Museum Archaeology (UK) 4–​5 sonic engagement 339 Soros, G. 255–​56 Sotheby’s 9 sound archaeology 330 sound art 337–​39 sound objects 336 soundscapes 14, 328, 330–​31 audio tours 335–​36 as displays 336, 447–​48 field recordings 333–​34 of fieldwork 332 future of 344–​45 Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) 14, 339–​44 in museums 334–​35, 336–​37 reconstruction through display 331–​32 source communities 382 South Kensington Museum see Victoria and Albert Museum, UK Southport Group 275–​76 Spanish Conquest (1521) 117, 121 Special Planning for the Protection of Great Sites 432 spiritualism 122–​24, 126–​27, 260 sponsorships 541 Spurzheim, G. F. 50–​51 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 308–​9, 314f, 322 stable isotope studies 404 Staley, D. P. 101 Stammitti, E. 142–​43 standardization, of archives 272–​74 Stanford University 479 State Administration of Cultural Heritage, China 423, 425, 430–​32 State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) 162, 166 State Correctional Institution, Pennsylvania, US 512 Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark 536–​37 Stearns, P. N. and C. Z. Stearns 47

Index   589 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 335 Steinhardt, M. 92 Stevenson, A. 368, 515–​16 St. Louis World’s Fair 301 Stobiecka, M. 17 stone tools, from living communities 376 storage of archives 275–​76 associated records 227–​28 attitudes of archaeologists 228–​29 collection ownership 227 costs 225–​26, 237 curation crisis 11–​12, 221–​29 environmental conditions 498–​99 lack of space 226, 275–​76, 498 potential 12, 236–​37, 271–​72 professional standards and policies 228 regulations 222–​23 of scientific preparations 398–​99 storerooms 103 storytelling 16–​17, 436–​37, 448–​52 interactive digital displays 479–​87 Strathern, M. 380 Stringfellow, E. 285 Stuart, B. H. 396 SuALT project 550–​51, 554–​56 Su Bingqi 429 sublime, according to Edmund Burke 53 subsistence diggers 9, 101–​2 Suleymania museum, Iraq 162 Sullivan, L. P. and S. T. Childs 222 Supreme Council of Antiquities 363 surveys 224–​25 Sussex Archaeological Society 512 Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, UK 403 Swain, H. 4–​5 Sweden, open-​air museums 176 Symes, R. 92 Syriac Culture History Museum, Iraq 162

T Taiwan 512 Tallbull, W. 59 Tatic, D. 145–​46 Taylor, M. 139 teaching 18 using digital technology 19

TeamLab 533–​35 technophilic museums 535–​36 Temple of Zeus 316–​18 temporary exhibitions 428–​29, 445 ‘Ten Principles of Citizen Science’ (European Citizen Science Association) 549–​50 terminology banks 560, 561–​62 Terracotta Army 390f Terracotta Warriors Museum 430 Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) 479–​80 theory, displaying 477–​78 therapeutic purpose of museums 19 thin section petrography 388, 391, 393 Thomas, T. 380 Thompson, E. H. 300 Thompson, E. L. 438–​39 Thomsen, C. J. 31–​32, 33–​34 Three Age system (Thomsen) 31–​32 ‘three major museums,’ China 426 TikTok 538 Tilden, F. 144 time narratives 119 Tindale, N. 62 Tixier 359–​60 touching objects in museums 437–​39 tourism 11 cultural heritage 202–​3, 204 Ghanaian castles and forts 205–​6 souvenirs 206, 207f ‘Towards a National Collection’ programme 527 Tozzer, A. 120 Trafficking Culture Network 9 trailside museums 176–​77 transatlantic slave trade 197–​204 contested claims about history 204–​9 Danish 211–​12 exhibitions 209–​11 Transcribe Bentham 540 Transcription Center (Smithsonian) 540 transformative justice 255 Transplant and Life exhibition 338 Treu, G. 316–​18 Treves, L. 531–​32 Tribal Historic Preservation Offices 233 tribal museums 511–​12 Trocadero hill 35–​36

590   Index Troncoso, F. del 301 Trusted Digital Repositories 279 Tulane University 303 Tunnel: The Archaeology of Crossrail exhibition 282–​83 Turkey 476 see also Curious Case of Çatalhöyük, The Twitter 531–​32, 538 typological method 31, 357–​60, 368–​69

U Ubisoft 541 Ucko, P. 6–​7 Uffizi Gallery 538 Ulster Folk and Transport Museum 511–​12 Unboxing Photographs: Working in the Photo Archive exhibition 313, 318–​19 UNESCO 1970 Convention 9, 87–​88, 90, 247–​48 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) 506 definition of site museums 176–​77 ‘Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra’ exhibition 483–​84 General Conference of State Parties 253 ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ campaign 160 Round Table on the Development and the Role of Museums in the Contemporary World 505–​6 Slave Route Project 201–​2 World Heritage Sites 465–​66, 466t ‘In Writing’ (Suleymania museum, Iraq) 162 unique identifiers (UNIDs) 364 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 458–​59 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 506 Universal Design 147 Universal Exhibition (1867; Paris) 32, 35–​36, 294, 295f universal museums 12, 247–​49, 250 Universal Transverse Mercators (UTMs) 364 University College London (UCL) 540 university museums 18, 440–​41 see also Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK; Museum of Archaeology, Ghana University of Aberdeen 262 University of Alberta Hospital, Canada 503–​4

University of California, Merced 479, 480 University of Delaware 163 University of Ghana 18, 489, 497–​98 see also Museum of Archaeology, Ghana University of Nottingham 339 University of Oxford 442 see also Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK unmovable cultural relics 425 US (United States) collections management 229–​34 curation crisis 221–​29 government agencies 234–​36 user experience (UX) research 550 Ussher Fort 211

V Valletta Convention (1992) 554–​55 value assessment by locals 107 created by museums 91–​93 vandalism 181 Van Gogh exhibition 533–​35 3D imaging 539 Vanuatu 377, 381–​82 Vaugh, A. 452 Vaz, R. et al 145–​46 Velehanden platform 550 Vermillion Accord 76 Veterans Curation Program 233 Victoria and Albert Museum, UK 291, 303, 335–​36 video conferencing 532 vigango 257, 260 violence 56–​57, 251 Virtual Pilgrimage project 529, 541, 542 virtual reality (VR) 476, 481–​83, 482f, 531–​32 escape rooms 541 visagens 105, 106–​7 visibility 499–​500 visitors to museums 17 audience testing 445, 446–​48 comfort 447 different age groups 485–​87 on digital platforms 532 dis/​Abled people 137–​38, 146–​48 National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) 467–​68

Index   591 sense of wonder 468–​69 senses and imagination 213–​14, 437–​39 site museums 179 visual impairment 145–​46, 148 visual media 307–​8 visual site museums 178 Vocational Archaeology Research Group (VARG; West Kent College) 142–​43 voice reconstructions 331–​32 Volunteer Inclusion Programme (VIP) 283–​84 Voss, B. L. 109 Voyage 15840 exhibition 512

W Wainwright, T. 338 Walters, D. 145–​46 We Are Still In initiative 513 websites 533 collections tools 537 institutional 536–​37 Weil, S. E. 509 Weld-​Blundell, H. 442 Wellcome Collection 535–​36 Wendorf, F. 359, 360f West, I. 58 West Kent College Vocational Archaeology Research Group (VARG) 142–​43 Wetherell, M. 68–​69 Whitley, J. 4 Whitney Museum, New York 333 Whitridge, P. 374–​75 Wilfong, T. G. 334–​35 Wills, B. 414–​15 Wiltshire Museum, UK 280–​81 Wingfield, C. 3–​4, 377, 381–​82 Winter, T. 160 wonder, sense of 468–​69 Wood, E. and K. F. Latham 436 Woolley, L. 441

WordPress platform 536–​37 Work Digital/​Think Archive project 279 workshops 492–​93, 520 World Archaeological Congress (WAC) 65–​66, 76 1986; Southampton, UK 58–​59 world archaeology 289–​90 World Archaeology (journal) 330–​31 World Heritage Sites 465–​66, 466t world museologies 116 World Refugee Day 517, 519–​20 World’s Fairs 292, 300, 301 Wraggs Farm, Cambs, UK 404–​5 Wynne, J. 338

X Xochicalco Pyramid 295f X-​radiography 388–​89 X-​ray diffraction (XRD) 388 X-​ray fluorescence (XRF) 388–​89, 394–​95

Y ‘Year of the Return, The’ 203 York Archaeological Trust 283–​84 YourDig: Converge project (York Archaeological Trust) 283–​84 Yu, H. 427 Yucatan 120–​21, 122 blue pigment 125–​29 embroidery 122–​24 Yuwaalaraay country 62

Z Zehrt, C. and J. Cooper 118 Zhao, H. 427 Zhiqiu, W. 428 Zimmerman, L. J. 514 Zisiou, M. 329 Zooniverse 540