Museum Archaeology Exam Notes PDF

Museum archaeology- Exam notes Intro In an environment where ﬁeldwork in many parts of the world is increasingly problematic, museum collections may become more vital resource for future archaeological reﬂection. Where opportunities and justiﬁcations for excavation do remain, the museum- as 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 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 In museum studies there was a wider paradigm shift that was recognised in 1990s from an “old museology” too focused upon methods to the “new museology” that questioned the purpose of museums, and which has seen museums transformed from “collection driven” organization to “visitor cantered” organization. That museums exist to simply to collect, preserve, interpret, educate, and research is no longer is no longer a certainty Such core practices are historically, produced and socially embedded. Museums and archaeology Like the discipline of archaeology, there is a burgeoning and daunting corpus of museum studies scholarship. 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 Where collections more widely concerned, museum archaeology is frequently characterised 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 or how to address repatriation including human remains 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, the antiquities market, replicas, destructive analysis, community engagement, visitor evaluation, and contemporary art intervention. Archaeological collection The key pronciples of good archaeological collections management are now well established: o Standards in the Museum Care of Archaeological Collection. London: Museums and Galleries Commission. 1992 o Sullivan, L.P. (1992) Managing Archaeological Resources from the Museum Perspective. Technical Brief No. 13. Washington, DC US Department of the Interior, National Park Service o Sullican, L.P. and childs, S.T. (2003) Curating Archaeological Collections: From the Field to Repository. Archaeologist’s Toolkit Volume 6. Walnut Creek, CA” AltaMira Press The ﬁrst is acquisition o Refers to the formal process of adding a set of objects to a collection Museums and other repositories should agree and follow acquisition policies, and they should aim to obtain legal title to the objects that they acquire The next step is accessioning o Involving assigning an accession number and entering basic information for each object into an accessions register, including an assessment of the objects physical condition. Cataloguing o Follows on from this. o It means gathering together all the primary information known about each object, including details of it provenance. Objects then need to be prepared for storage and possible research, exhibition, and loan o This includes being labelled, being assessed for conservation treatment, and being tracked via inventories Strategic decisions have to be taken where objects and associated records are to be stored, taking account of access requirements and restrictions (notably over the handling and storage of human remains), environment standards, and security. Deaccessioning and disposal o Deciding to, then physically removing, objects from a collection o Are also legitimate, if unusual, steps in collections management o In such cases, strenuous eborts should be made to transfer the objects trough donation or exchange to responsible new owners (in contrast, for example, to sale on the open market to raise funds). o All of these principles are intended to facilitate the controlled use of archaeological collections by a variety of people, whilst maintaining their safety and long-term preservation. But museum principles and practise do not always neatly overlap This has become increasingly evident since the mid 1970s, when a series of archaeological curation problems (labelled as “the curation crisis”) surfaced in the UK and elsewhere. On going issues include o Large backlogs of uncatalogued collections o Extensive archives from recent cultural resources management/developer-funded projects; o Inadequate museum stabing (and training); o Increasing curation fees; substandard, overﬂowing, dispersed, and unsafe storage facilities; o Limited public access to archaeological collections; o A lack of awareness of these promblems amongst the wider archaeological community Solutions do exist, but funding (which is a constant challenge) underpins almost all of these (Nash & O’Malley 2012). Engaging with the tax-paying public is essential, and digitixation and on-line access to musem documentation is certainly one way forward towards more ebective and accountable collections management However preserving and sharing digital data bring their own signiﬁcant set of issues. State of the art archaeological research and curation centres are a curator’s dream, but usually remain so. As a consequence despite a long lived professional assumption that museum collections should be curated “in perpetuity” deaccessioning and disposal cannot now be rejected out of hand, although the process has to be managed very carefully Given these challenges, some museilogists go so far to state good collections management is an ethical responsibility of museum and ﬁeld archaeologists. They deﬁne ethics in this contect as being about making sound professional choices that beneﬁt the long-term care and use of archaeological collections. On one level, before archaeological ﬁeldwork begins, good curation planning is important, including the pursuit of rigorous infrastructure of curation facilities needs to be reviewed- critically and from a long term perspective Dynamic fund raising and outreach programs are regarded as ways forward here. Archaeological archives: selection, retention,use,and disposal Main issues of this topic: o Should archaeologists keep everything they ﬁnd? o Can the long term museum storage and care of (often large) archaeological excavation archives be justiﬁed? o Who should pay for such storage? o How can better use be made of archaeological archives? o Should some this material be disposed of, and if so how? Archaeological archives comprise funds, environmental samples, paper, photographic, and digital records, and other material arising from archaeological ﬁeld – and laboratory work and passes to museums for long term curation after their primary study and publication. This ﬂow of material has a long and sometimes chequered history, and, in order to promote closer working together of museum and ﬁeld archaeologists, and to assist museum stab in planning for the care and use of archaeological archives, successive reports, recommendations, and guidelines have been produced Nevertheless, promblems have continued. The traditional archaeological justiﬁcation for retaining such archives is that they comprise a priceless residue of :our” archaeological heritage, resulting from public – or developer- funded ﬁeldwork at now largely destroyed archaeological sites, with the potential to be of research or educational value in the future. However in an economic climate of shrinking budgets and storage space, hard decisions still need to be made about the future of archaeological archives. A response to the growing promblems faced by the curators of often neglected archaeological archives in England in the 1990s was, on the one hand, to remind scholars of their research potential, and n on the other hand, to ober suggestions as to how they might be made more accessible for the beneﬁt of the wider public. Providing on line access to digitized museum catalogues and collections was seen as an important step. The Museum of London’s London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre’ has since been regarded as a model of good practise. The Centre, which cares for the archives of some 5,200 archaeological excavations in London, hosts the Central London Young Archaeologists Club for children and teenagers, provides loans boxes of Roman material for London schools, and obers the public weekend events such as a re-created excavation using real artefacts, themes “behind the scenes” tours, and volunteer opportunities. However according to a recent survey of museums holding archaeological archives across England, many of the old problems remain at a local level, including lack of storage space geographical gaps in the collecting area of the museums, under stabing and limited public awareness and use of the archives. Documentation, identiﬁcation, and authentication of archaeological collections How should archaeological collections be documented? What range of terms should be used to describe archaeological remains? How can fakes be identiﬁed? Good documentation is essential to the ebective management of museum collections of archaeoligcal material, whether it be newly acquired, on display, in store, under study and conservation, or on loan. Widely shared (even “universal”) documentation standards are ideal – one example being SPECTRUM: The UK Museum (Documentation Standard). This approach is particularly relevant to large and widely dispersed collection – notably of Egyptian antiquities, acquired in large quantities, dispersed around the museums of the world, and caralogues in a variety of languages and databases. However, local solutions that meet the needs of speciﬁc collections and organisations are also necessary. An example case: o Standardized practises of documentation. § One example is provided by the computerized inventory system devised by stab at Laténium – the Archaeological Museum in Neuchâtel, Switzerland – to cope with the voluminous and varied excavation and ﬁeld- survey archives from the surrounding canton. § To ensure the smooth transfer of archaeological archives from ﬁeld to repository, the systematic entry of data and easy access to them, a thesaurus of standard words is shared by excavation and museum stab, a very structured and straightforward form is used for recording objects, and a single index is maintained (as opposed to separate indexes according to archaeological period). However, despite the knowledge and experience of museum documentation stab, not all archaeological materials are easy to identify correctly, particularly be eye. As a consequence, in the case of ancient marbles, for example, a combination of scietoﬁc analyses can help to diberentiate between authentic pieces and forgeries. The patina of marble can investigated using techniqies such as optical microscopy, the stones provenance (quarry) can be identiﬁed using a range of physical and geochemical techniques, the freshness of working and breaks can be evaluated under ultraviolet light, and the “burial age” or length of time an object has been exposed to sunlight can b calculated using thermoluminescence. Not surprisingly, there are advantages and limitations to all of these techniques, and their results are not always conclusive. The same is true of techniques used in the authentication of other archaeological materials, such as ancient bronze artefacts. Museum archaeological 2 Standards for collecting The museum's governing body must draw up and publish a detailed acquisition and disposal policy, which must be formally reviewed at least every ﬁve years. The museum must ensure that it secures legal title to items it acquires. Every item must be acquired in accordance with the code set out in the Museums & Galleries Commission's Guidelines for a Registration Scheme for Museums in the United Kingdom. Once a decision has been taken formally to acquire items for a museum's permanent collections, there should be a presumption against disposal. If disposal of items is considered, it should be undertaken in accordance with the procedure outlined in the same document. The museum must make every ebort to be involved from the earliest stages in the planning of excavations, the archives of which may be deposited in the museum, and in particular in planning the "research design". The excavating body must ensure that the recipient museum is so involved. Guidelines and notes for collecting Acquisition policies should include reference to the geographical area from which collecting takes place, and to the collecting policies of other museums, in order to avoid unnecessary duplication and waste of resources. They should also reﬂect the limitations on collecting imposed by such factors as inadequate stabing, storage and conservation. Small museums without archaeological specialists, and particularly those without any qualiﬁed and experienced curatorial stab, should give careful consideration to the resources which, in the light of these standards, they will be able to bring to the care of archaeological collections. It may be appropriate to exclude future acquisition in this area. Many archaeological objects are acquired as casual ﬁnds, or from amateur or old excavations. Here, too, every ebort should be made to observe the museum's collecting policy and to acquire as full documentation as possible. There is still no professional agreement on the extent to which archaeological archives may or should be sampled and disposed of by excavator or museum. Caution and conservatism are therefore advisable. The Society of Museum Archaeologists (SMA) is developing written guidelines in this area (see uploaded into Teams: Society of Museums Archaeologists: Selection, Retention and Dispersal of Archaeological Collections) Museum care, consercation, and restoration of archaeological objects What are the optimum conditions for the care of archaeological collections? What are the consequences of conservation work on archaeological objects? Are minimum intervention and reversibility practicable guiding principles for archaeological conservation work? In what circumstances are conservators justiﬁed in seeking to restore to an earlier stage the appearance of an archaeological object? Despite the existence of clearly-deﬁned standards and guidelines for curation and conservation (e.g. Museums and Galleries Commission 1992), not all archaeological collections receive adequate care. For example, China’s terracotta warriors, have been discoloured and eroded by air pollution ― the impact of which is particularly high in the summer season when the temperature can reach 30 degrees Celsius and relative humidity 70 per cent. Evidently, the active and long-term involvement of conservators is essential here to establish, monitor, and maintain appropriate environmental controls. Couple of years ago, signiﬁcant negative media attention was generated when it emerged that museum stab at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo had hastily and irreversibly glued back Tutankhamun’s beard with epoxy when his gold burial mask was damaged during cleaning. What are that mentioned standards and guidelines for curation and conservation? o The museum's collections management policy should include a programme of care based upon the research, exhibition and conservation priorities of the archaeological collections. o All museums with archaeological collections should have access to the advice of a trained and experienced archaeological curator. o All collections, whether newly excavated or part of the collection, must be inspected regularly by a trained and experienced archaeological conservator. o Appropriate training must be undertaken by those responsible for the day- to-day care of the collections. It is not uncommon for small museums without specialist archaeological stab to hold archaeological collections, as indeed do many very small museums which have no paid stab at all. Every museum, however, whatever its size, has a duty to care for its collections, and at a minimum must maintain formal arrangements for them to be inspected regularly by a trained and experienced archaeological conservator. Museums without an archaeological curator on the stab should try to make similar arrangements for regular inspections by a trained and experienced museum archaeologist as well. These museums should adopt an extremely cautious approach to the acquisition of new archaeological collections. The common purpose of conservators is to prolong the life-span of an object, even though it is not possible to halt the deterioration process completely. But, in practice, conservators are faced with an overlapping array of choices of treatment, ranging from initial investigative work to establish the nature of the object, to preventive treatment and care involving the removal of damaging materials, the consolidation of remaining materials and the establishment of environmental controls to prevent further disintegration, to remedial treatment to repair or support a fragile object, to more interventive cleaning and restoration of the object’s shape and appearance. Much depends on the actual material (for example, archaeological bronzes are easier to conserve than archaeological iron), the perceived future uses of the object (for study, teaching, or display), and of course the funding available. Caution is essential and debate inevitable. Archaeology collections research What is the research potential of old museum collections of archaeological objects? In what ways can new analytical techniques improve understanding of them? What do museum curators get out of archaeological scientists’ work on their collections? How might members of the public participate in research on archaeological collections? New research on old archaeological collections has the potential to transform our understanding of those objects and their wider archaeological contexts, and also to signiﬁcantly enhance their appeal to the public. Given that museums generally have less resources to undertake this work themselves, partnerships with academics and the public can prove to be a productive way forward, particularly where research agendas and data are shared. Study case: o Perhaps the best example is the Gristhorpe Man from UK. This Early Bronze Age log-cobin burial from North Yorkshire was excavated in the early 19th century and has since been housed in Scarborough Museum. o The cobin contained a complete human skeleton accompanied by organic and inorganic grave goods. o While the museum was undergoing major renovation, an international team of archaeological scientists, led by Nigel Melton of Bradford University, used a wide range of modern analytical techniques to shed new light on the dating, diet, and provenance of the man. o Osteoarchaeological study revealed that the man was relatively tall, physically active, and right-handed, while stable isotope measurements indicated that he spent his childhood in the Scarborough area, and that his nutritious diet was relatively high in meat. o Healed fractures are suggestive of injuries sustained during martial exploits. CT scanning showed that, despite his healthy physique, he subered from a slowly developing intra-cranial tumour, which may have caused physical and behavioural impairment. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and stable isotope analysis conﬁrmed that the black material contained in a vial was correctly labelled ‘brain’. Metallurgical analysis and the lead isotope ratios of the bronze dagger blade found with the body suggest that it was manufactured in Britain using recycled Irish metal. The dagger’s pommel was conﬁrmed to be of rare whalebone. A combination of accelerator mass spectrometry, radiocarbon, and dendrochronological dating of the Gristhorpe assemblage gave a date for the skeleton of 2200-2020 BC, and indicate that the tree for the cobin was felled at around the same time (between 2115 and 2035 BC), but that the branches laid over the cobin were deposited at least 270 years after the death of Gristhorpe man – perhaps when the barrow was completed. Overall, these results support the hypothesis that the man was of chieﬂy status, born locally into an elite family, but linked to a wider social network via the sea. The new museum display is now helping to disseminate these research ﬁndings to the public. Standards for archaeology collection research The museum governing body must formally approve a policy for archaeological research, which should be regularly reviewed. The museum's research policy should preferably be written as part of the museum’s development plan or collections management policy. It should be realistic, relevant to the museum's collections, its stab and resources, and to its public role. Archaeology, ethics, and the law Legal and ethical dimensions of archaeological museum collecting and collections What is the relationship between museum collecting and the licit and illicit trade in antiquities? How can museums practice due diligence when acquiring archaeological collections? What are the limitations to existing cultural property legislation? Caution has been growing in museum archaeology towards the collecting of cultural material, especially since the late 1980s. Although not all would agree that archaeologists should think of themselves as the absolute guardians of heritage, concern has centred on the legality and ethics of collecting cultural material that might have been destructively looted from archaeological sites and then illicitly traded. In particular, concerns have been voiced by archaeologists and national heritage agencies over acquisitions of antiquities made by prestigious museums in Europe and the USA. For example, David Gill and Christopher Chippindale (Chippindale, C. and Gill, D. (2000) Material consequences of contemporary classical collecting. In: American Journal of Archaeology, 104(3): 463–511.) have documented the calamitous consequences of connoisseurs’ eastern for Classical art objects and prehistoric Cycladic marble ﬁgurines, which has driven their competitive private and public collecting, their illicit trading, the looting of archaeological sites and museums, the production of fakes, and a distortion of these objects’ contextual signiﬁcance in past societies. A good example for illicit trade and looting of archaeological sites the „Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal” Another particularly scandalous example is the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, supposedly known in the Swiss antiquities trade as the ‘museum of the tombaroli’(‘tomb-robbers’). Its former curator of antiquities, Marion True, was indicted by the Italian government in 2005, along with the American antiquities dealer, Robert E. Hecht, for conspiracy to trabic in illicit antiquities, based on evidence from a police raid of the Geneva warehouse of an Italian art dealer, Giacomo Medici, who had acted as the middleman for items purchased by the Getty, including Etruscan bronzes and Greek vases illegally excavated and exported from Italy. True resigned from the museum the following year, complaining that she had been made the scapegoat for practices that were known and condoned by the Getty’s Board of Directors. Following a series of high-proﬁle exposés of the sometimes close connection between museums and the illicit trade in antiquities, museum archaeologists are now much more aware of their legal obligations and ethical responsibilities when collecting archaeological materials. In particular, they pay closer attention 9ot he claimed provenance and recent histories of potential archaeological acquisitions, to ensure that they have not been illegally looted, exported, and sold. They are also making new eborts to educate their publics as to the destructive ebects of the illicit trade in antiquities. In the UK, this new attitude has been codiﬁed in guidelines produced by the government’s Cultural Property Unit. These state that museums should reject an item obered to them for acquisition or loan if there is any suspicion about it, or about the circumstances surrounding it, after checking that it was not illegally excavated or exported since 1970 (the date UNESCO adopted the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property). More speciﬁcally, it describes the process of ‘due diligence’. This involves examining the object, considering its type and likely place of origin, taking expert advice, determining whether the item was lawfully exported to the UK, and evaluating the account given by the vendor or donor. These worthy principles were described as ‘daunting and dibicult’ in practice by Paul Roberts, Curator of Roman Art and Archaeology at the British Museum, although he remained upbeat about the likelihood of the Museum continuing to add to its archaeological collections for the purposes of display and research. In the USA, a law and ethics revolution pertaining to museums’ acquisitions of antiquities can also be claimed to have taken place, with both the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Association of Museums adopting new ethics guidelines for acquisitions of ancient art and archaeological material. However, still fearing the loss of important unprovenanced archaeological objects to private collections, their guidelines intentionally leave loopholes for museums to use ‘informed judgement’ when the complete documented ownership history of a work is unavailable. Despite this tightening up of the legal and ethical dimensions of museum acquisitions in Europe and the USA, the looting of national museums during recent and on-going wars in the Arab world highlights the continued value and vulnerability of cultural property in ‘source’ countries. For example, in 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the chaotic fall of Baghdad, the inadequately protected National Museum in Baghdad was looted by Iraqi civilians, resulting in the loss of thousands of artworks and artefacts. One of the most valuable pieces was a headless stone statue of the Sumerian King Entemena; it was eventually recovered in the United States and restituted to Iraq. Upon reﬂection, it became clear that UNESCO’s widely ratiﬁed 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conﬂict did not explicitly contemplate civilian looting (as opposed to state-sponsored looting and destruction) and therefore does not address responsibility for preventing civilian looting. However, this has been partly addressed in the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention, which entered into force in 2004. Nevertheless, museums and their collections will never be entirely safe in times of war Archaeology, ethics, and the law Repatriation and reburial of archaeological museum collections How is ‘ownership’ understood by diberent interest groups? What is repatriation? How should museums respond to repatriation requests? What impact have repatriation requests had on museums and their collections around the world? What should be done with unprovenanced ancestral remains held in museums? Repatriation: o is traditionally deﬁned as returning a person to their place of origin. However, in the museum context, it has come to refer to the return of an item of cultural patrimony from a museum collection to a party found to be its true owner or traditional guardian, or their heir and descendants. As such, the act of repatriation can also be understood as an act of reparation – making amends for a wrong done, often by members of former colonial powers. In the USA, repatriation is now closely associated with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This was enacted in 1990, following two decades of campaigning by the Native American human rights (and associated burial rights) movement. The legislation conﬁrmed Indigenous ownership or control over native cultural items discovered on federal and tribal lands, criminalised trabicking in Native American human remains, and established a process of repatriation of material from museums and federal agencies to Native groups. Museums have consequently been obliged to compile detailed inventories of Native American remains and cultural items in their possession, and to return any material to a claimant that has established the requisite link of linear descendency, cultural abiliation, or ownership or control. It has also required museums to consult and collaborate with Native groups: to classify objects correctly and – where possible –determine their cultural abiliation. In practice, tensions have arisen over deﬁnitions of ‘cultural abiliation’, what to do with nearly 119,000 sets of ‘culturally unidentiﬁable human remains’, the level of scientiﬁc documentation to be undertaken, and the amount of time and work involved. The experience of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology obers a good example of some of these issues (see picture). But positive relations between museums and Native American communities have often been established through the restitution process. It is also worth noting that not all Native American items have been restituted, nor all restituted items reburied – some being left in the care of the original museums for the educational beneﬁt of tribal members and non-tribal researchers, many receiving more culturally sensitive care through the incorporation of indigenous curation methods, and some gaining greater visibility as part of new tribal museum collections. In the UK, obicial guidelines for good practice in responding to requests for restitution and repatriation of cultural property were published by the former Museums and Galleries Commission – the Government’s advisory body for museums – and have since been widely adopted as part of museums’ collections management policies. When considering a request, fourteen keys steps to consider are usefully deﬁned: acknowledging the request, delegating the preparation of the response to one person, informing the museums’ governing body of the request, clarifying the status of those making the request, contacting other museums to establish if they have received similar requests, understanding the reasons behind the request, gauging the cultural and religious importance of the material, checking the status and condition of the material, checking the acquisition history of the material, referring to current museum policies, considering professional ethical concerns, checking international legislation and conventions, and considering the proposed future of the material if returned. However, it is worth noting that such requests are relatively rare in the UK, and generally relate to material in ethnographic or ﬁne art collections – one classic archaeological exception being the Parthenon Marbles, held by the British Museum since the early 19th century, against Greek politicians’ wishes, who have optimistically reserved space for them in the New Acropolis Museum. The UK government and British musuem declined UNESCO’s ober of mediation. Another way forward in the repatriation debate can be found in a change of attitude towards collections mobility, encapsulated in a report published by the UK Museums Association entitled Collections for the Future (Museums Association 2005). Essentially, the report recommended that museums (including national museums) develop more partnerships with each other, and that they share ― to a much greater extent ― collections, expertise, and skills. This new dynamic attitude has played a signiﬁcant part in responding to, and mitigating demands for, the repatriation of Scottish cultural artefacts from English and Scottish national museums. A good example is provided by the Lewis Chessmen. Of the 93 pieces known to us today, 82 are held by the British Museum (BM) and 11 by the National Museum of Scotland (NMS). They are an iconic set of objects within the British Museum’s collection, and an extensive range of Lewis Chessmen merchandise features prominently in the Museum’s shop. The Celtic League, an independent pressure group championing the cultural rights of the indigenous people of Scotland and other Celtic regions has been calling for the restitution of the Lewis Chessmen and other Celtic artefacts for a number of years. Their cause was boosted in 2007 when Alex Salmond, the former leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister, began arguing for their return to an independent Scotland. Local politicians and campaigners on the Isle of Lewis responded by stating that they would certainly like some of the pieces back, particularly to help boost their tourist industry. In the context of the Museums Association’s recommendations and this political debate, in 2010 and 2011 the British Museum worked in partnership with National Museums Scotland, and with funding from the Scottish Government, to lay on the largest travelling exhibition to date (involving 30 of the chessmen ― 24 from the BM and 6 from the NMS). The exhibition opened at the National Museum in Edinburgh, then toured to Aberdeen Art Gallery, Shetland Museum and Archives, and the Western Isles Museum in Stornoway. In this way, a diplomatic solution was sought in which these special objects could be kept ‘alive’ and relevant to the modern world by being kept circulating in the public domain, while sidestepping the entrenched issue of all-out transfer of ownership. Museums and the care of ancient human remains What archaeological human remains might be retained by museums? How should these remains be treated? Should they be displayed? And who should decide? The care and display of ancient human remains in museums has been the subject of enduring and heated debate between researchers, museum curators, and descendent communities, all of whom have asserted claims for access or control based upon their diberent perspectives. This debate has been particularly intense in the USA, where it led 12ot he enactment of NAGPRA. This has had signiﬁcant consequences for federally-funded museums holding collections of Native American and Native Hawaiian human remains and other cultural items. Leaving aside repatriation, NAGPRA and its associated regulations require federal obicials to ensure that retained collections of human remains are preserved and made available for scientiﬁc, educational, and religious uses, although recognised tribes with demonstrable cultural abiliation to the remains are generally allowed to control access to them. Public agencies and museums have also established their own policies concerning research on, and display of, human remains from archaeological contexts in their collections. In general, they allow study of human remains by qualiﬁed researchers, including destructive analysis, subject to review of a detailed research proposal and to consultation with traditionally associated peoples. By contrast, they do not allow the public display of Native American human remains and photographs of them, in order to avoid causing obense and distress to Native American people. Human remains of individuals from other ethnic groups are occasionally displayed, but only after careful consideration. Debate over the appropriate treatment of human remains in museums has also been growing in the rather diberent political context of the UK. In response to the Australian government’s request for the UK to increase eborts to repatriate human remains to Australian Indigenous communities, the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published guidance for the care of human remains in museums, including procedural guidance on the return of human remains. The report acknowledges that, ‘The vast majority of work on human remains held by museums in the United Kingdom is uncontroversial and has wide popular and academic support.’ In other words, most visitors ‘trust’ museums to be professional in how they treat human remains. But the DCMS also recommends that museums should always have a clear understanding as to why they are holding human remains, should store those remains in a designated area, treat them with dignity and respect, display them only when their presence makes a material contribution to a particular interpretation, and in such a way as to avoid visitors coming across them unawares. Some UK museum archaeologists have since encouraged debate over the question of whether or not human remains should be displayed in museums, and have experimented with the redisplay of previously uncontested human remains. This has been stimulated by the international debate, by the controversial ‘Bodyworlds’ travelling exhibition of plastinated human bodies stripped down to reveal their inner anatomical structures, and by national outrage over Alder Hey hospital’s removal of organs from the bodies of deceased children without their families’ consent. Set in the context of this debate, a temporary exhibition held between 2008 and 2009 at Manchester Museum focussed on Lindow Man, a well-preserved Iron Age bog-body found near Manchester, and invited a range of stakeholders (including curators, archaeologists, Pagans, and local people) to contribute to an inclusive and respectful exhibition that presented multiple views of Lindow Man in the light of present-day concerns. This contrasted with previous exhibitions of Lindow Man in the British Museum, which drew primarily upon archaeological research to interpret the man’s life and death in the past. At the same time, Manchester Museum took the decision to cover up three unwrapped Egyptian mummies with white sheets, in order to raise questions through public consultation about the most respectful and appropriate way for the museum to display human remains. However, this strategy provoked a strongly negative public and professional reaction, to which the museum responded by uncovering some of the mummies. Interpreting the archaeological past Critical and political perspectives on museum representations of the archaeological past of archaeology Museum displays have been critically evaluated by visitors for longer than we might imagine. IBeginning decades of the last century was an opinion from several scolars, from example D.H. Lawrence: ‘Museum, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co- ordinate and get into a ﬁxed order that which has no ﬁxed order and will not be co-ordinated! It is sickening!’. However, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as part of a broader intellectual revolution informed by critical theory, that an alliance of scholars and other commentators began to question many aspects of the museum institution, with the goal of establishing a ‘new museology’. Particular attention was paid to the conventions used to represent the past in museum displays, whose orders were found to be far from politically neutral. This led to a fundamental question: how objective can and should museum displays about the past be? What is your opinion about this question? In other words: a museum display should be amusement or educational? Examples 1. Lindow man: exhibition of the British Museum vs exhibition of the Manchester Museum 2. Introduction of the archaeological researches and results versus show the results by multiple views in the light of present-day concerns. In archaeology, some scholars (i.e: Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley) challenging the archaeological orthodoxy with a new brand of social theory which promoted a self-reflexive, critical, and political archaeology that linked the past to the present. Their key argument was that museums can misrepresent the past: distorting it through processes of selection and classification, objectification and aestheticization, revelation and signification ― processes through which archaeological artefacts are ultimately turned into ahistorical commodities and visitors into voyeuristic consumers. They also deconstructed the presentation at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York of ‘the archaeologist as hero’, in which archaeologists are portrayed as industrious scientific experts discovering truths about the past. Reacting against established modes of museum representation, Shanks and Tilley proposed a new interpretative agenda to redeem museum archaeology ― one that would embrace heterogeneity, difference, contradiction, discontinuity, and conflict. More specifically, they argued that: 1. to reflexively acknowledge how the past may be manipulated and misrepresented for present-day purposes, political content should be introduced into conventional displays; 2. to acknowledge that artefacts’ meanings change according to their specific engagements with the present, artefacts should be reordered and juxtaposed together with contemporary objects; 3. to emphasize that historical authorship is a dynamic, incomplete work- in-progress, impermanent displays should be produced; and 4. to democratize historical authorship, communities should be allowed to construct their own pasts in the museum and to use artefacts outside the institutional space of the museum. This critical agenda had a significant impact on museum archaeology, particularly within the UK. This was evident, for example, in texts accompanying exhibitions of prehistoric material in England and Scotland developed in the 1990s. Analysis of information panels and artefact labels revealed a curatorial shift away from using museum text as an authoritative aid to education and communication towards the expression of more critically-aware and easy-to- read curatorial messages. For example, the re-display of the Alexander Keiller Museum, and the new display of the Kilmartin House Museum of Ancient Culture (which, incidentally, won the Scottish Museum of the Year and the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries) were testimony to a theoretically-informed desire shared by members of a new generation of museum professionals to de-construct and re-construct archaeology. But the most contentious example was the ‘People before London’ prehistory gallery in the Museum of London, opened in 1994 and closed prematurely in 2000. Front-end visitor studies revealed the restricted prior knowledge of audiences, who often equated ‘prehistoric’ with ‘dinosaurs’, and their preference for large images over text. At the same time, Shanks and Tilley’s radical proposals were explicitly taken into account by the curators, who introduced a degree of political content into the displays, juxtaposed archaeological artefacts with contemporary objects, emphasized authorship and the historical contingency of archaeological interpretations, and encouraged visitors to construct their own pasts in the museum. For example, the first text panel in the gallery, signed by the curators, asked visitors, ‘Can you believe what we say?’, and also acknowledged that green and gender issues had been given prominence in the display, while the final panel asked, ‘Now what does prehistory mean to you?’ Although there were some dissenters amongst more conservative visitors and commentators, who accused the curators of political correctness, academic relativism, distasteful over-personalisation, and the dumbing-down of culture, summative evaluation indicated that most visitors appreciated this new approach. Nevertheless, this example also exposes a fundamental flaw in Shanks and Tilley’s agenda: unequal relations of power were still inherent in the display, whose curators still spoke for the past and manipulated the visitor, ultimately establishing a new form of curatorial authority ― one that was more subtly masked by written admissions of bias and offers of democratic learning. It is worth adding that not all museum archaeologists in the UK adopted Shanks and Tilley’s approach in the 1990s or have done so since then. This is especially the case with curatorial staff based in the national museums, where scholarly allegiance to their vast archaeological collections has traditionally been an important priority. For example, the ‘Early Peoples’ gallery in the National Museum of Scotland is dominated by artefacts from the museum’s rich archaeological collections, complemented by specially-commissioned contemporary artworks, and accompanied by texts that reassert an anonymous curatorial authority to communicate and educate – albeit in engaging, poetic language. Furthermore, according to Mark Copley’s survey of 62 curatorial staff responsible for archaeology exhibits in the UK, most staff, even if not generally trained as scientists, are largely supportive of the UK Government’s strategy to enhance the public understanding of science and of current scientific research (ranging in archaeology from dating techniques to palaeopathology). The same is probably true in the USA, where, for example, a temporary exhibition in 2001 at the Science Museum of Minnesota focussed on science as a social process exemplified by the ongoing archaeological research at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, as part of a broader strategy to advance the public understanding of science funded by the National Science Foundation. Nevertheless, since the late 1990s, the critiquing of museum representations of the archaeological past has become more mainstream in academic archaeology, both within and beyond the UK. Shanks and Tilley’s ground- breaking ideas may be less explicitly acknowledged in the large body of literature in this area, but their impact continues to be felt in archaeological museology (i.e. the study of the history, theory, and practice of museums), if less so in museum practice. Museum displays of human origins, for example, have been critically appraised by Stephanie Moser, along similar lines to those proposed by Shanks and Tilley. Moser argues that, in the twentieth century, such visual displays created a highly formulaic and restrictive account of human evolution. Life-size dioramas in particular represented our early ancestors as ‘primitive’, with slouched and hairy bodies, recurrently associated with clubs, animal skins, and caves. As an alternative to this display canon, Moser calls for new displays of human origins that: 1. challenge the associations that are still made between our hominid ancestors and modern black African peoples; 2. challenge the traditional ‘cave-man’ iconography of human evolution; 3. replace the traditional narrative of unilinear and sequential evolutionary progress with combined chronological and thematic exhibits; 4. tell new stories – for example, about socializing or the preoccupations of juvenile hominids; 5. harness the emotional power of empathy and humour to communicate with visitors. The variable representation of Saami (Lapp) prehistory and identity in museums in Sweden, Finland, and Norway has been thoughtfully evaluated by Janet Levy. In particular, she has identified ideology-based contrasts between messages expressed by Scandinavian national and regional museums and by indigenous Saami community museums, particularly in the context of political tensions over claims to land and resources in Lapland. In the national and regional museums, an authoritative view of Scandinavian antiquity is presented, from which the Saami are largely marginalised. By contrast, in the Saami community museums, Saami history and culture are closely tied to the natural setting and climate of Lapland, and the time depth of Saami occupation is emphasized. Levy acknowledges the interpretative problems presented by both kinds of museum display, but, rather than calling for the de-politicization of archaeology, she acknowledges that representations of the past are inevitably political. Persuasive critiques of gender and age bias in traditional archaeological museum exhibitions have also been published. For example, back in the 1990s Vivienne Holgate noted that in museum displays about Roman Britain women were ‘shown performing stereotypical tasks in domestic situations, such as food production, food preparation and looking after children.’ And in Greek museums Dimitra Kokkinidou and Marianna Nikolaidou have argued that women have tended to be represented as passive or ambiguous participants in history, while female archaeologists have been rendered invisible, by displays that reflect the deep-rooted scholarly male chauvinism in Greek archaeology. As a consequence of such critiques some progress has been made in recent years over the museum representation of women in archaeology displays. However, Annika Bünz argues that further changes need to be made in order to achieve complete equity. Focussing on the ‘Prehistories 1’ permanent exhibition, which opened in 2005 at the National Historical Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, her detailed analysis reveals that women have been included in the exhibition narratives to a greater extent than in previous exhibitions but that male characters are still represented as older, more authoritative, and powerful, and women as closer to nature. Children and childhood are, likewise, often underrepresented in museum archaeology, despite the high proportion of children among museum visitors. Archaeological site museum Museums at archaeological sites and parks focus on the excavated remains and historic landscapes of particular places, but they do not exist in isolation, either museologically or socially. As a consequence, they raise many questions. o How should such archaeological museums be managed? o How should their archaeological remains be preserved? o To what extent should reconstruction be used in their public presentation? o How might they work with local urban and rural communities? Certainly archaeological site museums have multiple responsibilities: o to undertake on-site preservation, documentation, research, exhibition, and interpretation, as well as to raise public awareness of the archaeological heritage and to provide a source of economic income for local people. In contrast to regional and national archaeological museums with extensive collections, site museums have the significant interpretative and ethical advantage of being able to present the histories of archaeological remains in context – or at least close to their places of discovery. But they do not always capture the imagination of visitors, due to the removal of most significant finds to more prominent museums, or a lack of funding to revive old displays of often large archaeological collections, or because of the presence of complicated and decayed archaeological remains. A curatorial emphasis on preservation, education, and tourism (particularly at designated World Heritage Sites) can also make them feel rather heavy going. In some cases, full-scale and partial reconstruction can lead to new archaeological understandings and memorable visitor experiences, while archaeological tours, experiments, and workshops can prompt dialogues between visitors and experts. However, as with archaeological artefacts, reconstruction must be used with caution. For example, York Archaeological Trust’s painstaking excavation, multi-sensory reconstruction, and prominent marketing of the exceptionally well preserved Anglo-Scandinavian alley on the Coppergate site at the Jorvik Viking Centre has proved a great commercial success, at the same time as challenging public preconceptions of the Vikings. The centrepiece for visitors is a ‘timecar’ ride through a reconstructed street scene, complete with evocative sounds and smells. Yet, this project has been harshly criticised by archaeological theorists, who question the museum’s emphasis on empirical accuracy and the passivity of visitor experiences (especially Shanks and Tilley). Conceptual concerns could also be raised about the authenticity of the visitor experience at the replica of the famous Palaeolithic painted cave in the new Museum of Altamira, opened in 2001 in response to growing anxiety over the preservation of the original. Digital technologies now offer virtual alternatives to more permanent reconstructions, but tend to provide primarily visual experiences. The best example perhaps the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde in Denmark. This museum offers a more active experience to visitors, whilst also operating as an economically important tourist attraction. Until the early 1980s, the central asset of the museum was its well-researched exhibition of five well-preserved Viking wrecks excavated from Roskilde Fjord. But since then, as the museum has gained growing media attention for its experimental work in constructing and sailing replica ships, the museum has increased activities which involve visitors more directly. In particular, it has constructed, with the financial backing of the local municipality, a ‘Museum Island’ for a variety of experiences relating to the Viking Age and its ships, ranging from painting shields and stamping coins, to dressing up as Vikings, to discussions with professional shipbuilders, to sailing trips in replica Viking boats. This, in turn, has contributed to the wider redevelopment of the harbour area in Roskilde, and has boosted local pride and identity. Beyond Europe, managers of archaeological site museums have also sometimes tried to acknowledge local communities and cultural minorities and their socio-economic needs. For example, one of the key challenges for managers of the Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art since the mid-1970s has been to involve the local community in the programme of this site museum, which was (until recently) one of the world’s foremost international tourist destinations. Here, the museum’s strategy has been to educate the inhabitants of modern Luxor ― informing them about new archaeological discoveries and about the significance of on-going conservation work. But ‘education’ can be criticised as a one-way communication process. In Latin America, by contrast, tensions arising from growing international tourism, on the one hand, and the political articulation of the socio-economic aspirations of relatively disadvantaged local and/or descendant communities, on the other hand, have sometimes led ethically-minded site managers to develop more creative strategies. Local stewardship, consultation, public education and outreach, accessibility, and training of local people have all been tried and tested here within the context of a global economy, with mixed benefits for protecting ancient archaeological sites and for developing living local communities. Examples range from the troubled story of the San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán Community Museum in Mexico, centred on a contested colossal sculpted Olmec head, to the more positive scenario of the community site museum at Agua Blanca in Ecuador, where the local community has been enabled by a long-term archaeological project to incorporate ideas about stewardship, education and archaeological heritage into their value system and economic needs. Analogies can be drawn here with ecomuseums, dedicated to encapsulating the special nature of places, building sustainable and empowered local communities, and caring for and exhibiting their tangible and intangible heritage. But precisely why community museums have become part of indigenous groups’ identities – given the place of archaeology and the museum in colonial and Western history – raises more questions than answers. New archaeology museums architecture What kinds of modern museum architecture work best at archaeological sites and with archaeological collections? In contrast to old-fashioned, dark, and crowded museums, some new archaeology museum buildings have used glass walls, floors, and ceilings to great effect. A pioneering example is Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates’ glass pavilion, constructed in 1976 to showcase the Egyptian Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, complete with a lake representing the River Nile and a view of Central Park. (However, the Roche building has now fallen out of favour with the Museum’s Trustees, who in 2015 selected David Chipperfield to replace it with a new design.) Other outstanding examples include Norman Foster’s Great Court in the British Museum in London, and Bernard Tschumi’s new Acropolis Museum in Athens. More local European examples are Patroklos Karantinos’s Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Henri Ciriani’s Arles Museum of Antiquity, Philippe Chaix and Jean-Paul Morel’s archaeological museum at Saint-Romain-en-Gal, Tschumi’s archaeological visitor centre at Alésia, and Holzer Kobler Architekturen’s paläon museum and research centre dedicated to the 300,000 year old Schöningen spears and their golden-clad Nebra Ark visitor centre at Wangen. Glass makes their galleries seem bright, spacious, clean, and cool. It illuminates objects with natural light, it enables visitors to walk over and look down on excavated remains, and it sets up visual dialogues with adjacent archaeological sites and landscapes. Such glittering architectural designs can be stunning, but we should not suspend our critical faculties regarding their underpinning Modernist aesthetics (sometimes combined with Classical gestures), for this often comes with a museological tendency to transform ancient, broken, and decayed, objects into sterilized artworks to be appreciated visually, without the clutter of contextualization. An alternative trend has been towards the burial of new archaeological museum buildings, to minimize their visual impact above-ground and to enhance the protection of archaeological collections housed within them. For example, the Museum of the Yang Emperor Mausoleum of the Han Dynasty at Xi’an is an entirely underground structure, designed to be quake- proof , insulated from outside temperature fluctuations, illuminated by natural light, and masked by a roof lawn. Henning Larsen Architects’ new Moesgaard Museum of prehistory and ethnography near Aarhus in Denmark is also partly submerged 21nt he side of a hill, and features a sloping roof covered in grass, moss and flowers. But the desire for iconic architecture (albeit now with eco-friendly credentials) will continue to outweigh more humble curatorial concerns, if current architectural proposals are anything to judge by. For example, Coop Himmelb(I)au’s project for a new Archaeological Museum in Egypt, to be situated near the excavation site of Tell el-Daba, envisages a landmark pyramid-shaped building, accessed via a large spiral ramp and powered by the sun. And in Turkey, where a policy of museum renovation is currently underway, numerous new archaeology museums are being constructed in a variety of bold architectural styles. Restoration of old museum buildings is less fashionable, but can be effective, particularly in the case of David Chipperfield’s restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin, which intentionally retains the spirit of the war-damaged ruin. Designing archaeology display What are the most effective ways to display archaeological collections in museums? What key concepts underlie the designs of museum archaeology exhibitions? How can such displays offer more enjoyable and engaging experiences for visitors? When it actually comes to mounting archaeology exhibitions, a series of competing constraints and considerations have to be negotiated. These include: o the nature of the archaeological objects themselves; o available space; o proposed curatorial narratives; o designers’ visions; o conservation, security, and safety concerns; o exhibition budgets; o and the attitudes of visitors. In response, it is now well-established that having an aim, a plan of action, close collaboration, compromise, clarity, knowledge of one’s audience, and evaluations are all essential. Building an archaeology exhibition around an attractive theme or story-line also helps. Traditional themes tend to be rather ‘archaeological’ in focus, including: o typology/chronology, o finds from major sites, o production techniques/technology, o food and cooking, o imports/trade, o ethnic groups, s o ocial relations (including gender and power) in the past, o archaeological site formation processes, o and the work of archaeologists. By contrast, more popular focal themes used by the museums in recent years have included: o a personality (such as an emperor or a leader), o beauty, beliefs (held by past people), o discovery (of the past), o warfare and violence, o exotic journeys (that visitors can be taken on), o sex, o and death. But archaeology exhibitions also present some persistent challenges, not least of which is how to represent the duration and passage of time, particularly to visitors whose sense of time-depth may not extend much beyond their grandparents. One published example of a thoughtfully designed archaeology display is the Port Royal Project, which created a combined artefact-based and interactive virtual reality exhibition about the archaeology of Port Royal in Jamaica – the major English colony in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. Its main aim, informed by constructivist theories of learning, was to arouse the curiosity of schoolchildren and other visitors to the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California. It involved collaboration between many Institutes. Due to time and budgetary constraints, a student in Art History at UCLA took on the key roles of chief modeller and researcher for the project, with expert information provided by a variety of sources. The resultant computer model offered public visitors the opportunity to ‘walk’ through and explore the town of Port Royal, and middle school children the opportunity to ‘swim’ within the underwater archaeological site in search of the real artefacts exhibited alongside the computer equipment, together with text panels – all housed in a replica shipping crate. Evaluations showed that the interactivity of the computer model helped make the Port Royal story relevant to visitors, and helped them understand how archaeologists employ technology to record sites. It was especially appealing to teenage students. However, it is hoped that a new, user-friendly, public interface will be added to the exhibit, because visitors can only navigate the model with the assistance of the Institute’s staff or volunteers. There is always room for improvement, and recent research is offering new insights into what makes effective object-based displays in museums. Conspicuous objects tend to be attractive to visitors. Egyptian mummies, for example, whose material qualities (such as size, colour, shape, symmetry, and texture) and non-material attributes (age, iconicity, and familiarity), easily attract and hold the visitor’s attention. However, research by Francesca Monti suggests that inconspicuous ‘silent’ objects, such as Egyptian figurines (or ‘shabtis’), can also be displayed effectively, particularly when exhibition designers take account of the key factors that encourage visitor interaction with the displays. These include: o uninterrupted sight lines, o strategic positioning of objects, o moving images, o striking colours, o sound, o graphic (as opposed to text-based) display of information, o moving images, o opportunities for personal discovery, o selection of communicative objects, o and the use of varied, multi-sensory media. Visitor-focussed factors have informed, for example, the recent re-display of the Tomb-chapel of Nebamun gallery in the British Museum. The design of this room generates a fresh and relaxed atmosphere, being relatively light and spacious, with sky-blue walls and case interiors and a limestone-coloured floor and ceiling. Its careful layout echoes that of an ancient tomb-chapel. Large fragments of eleven beautiful paintings from the ancient structure are displayed, with graphic panels below drawing attention to and explaining details. The scenes in these paintings (which represent the lives of elite and ‘ordinary’ Eyptians) are complemented by an even distribution of spectacular and inconspicuous contemporary objects. Eye-catching large photographs of Egypt, drawings, and a 3D video (without an intrusive soundtrack) also help to contextualise and reconstruct the tomb- chapel. Evaluations have confirmed that this gallery has a relatively high ‘holding power’, with many visitors slowing down to concentrate on the exhibition, and consequently learn from its messages about ancient Egyptian life and death. Teaching and learning through museum archaeology What and how should museum visitors learn through archaeology? Lifelong Learning – for not only kids Although the public can encounter archaeology across a wide variety of contexts and media, museums with archaeological collections remain an important place for teaching and learning about archaeology. Here, museum education programmes seek to cater for a variety of audiences, although young visitors – and school groups in particular – are a key target. The museum educators’ aim has become not simply to teach people about the importance, techniques, and ideas of archaeology, but (in line with constructivist theory) to empower them to develop to their own experience and knowledge of the past through engaging with its objects – both ‘real’ and replica. In practice, a wide variety of formats are used to deliver such educational programmes. The standard approach of museums, and the least-costly in terms of staff time, is to invite the public to access their collections through self-guided tours of permanent or temporary exhibitions, which inevitably contain explanatory text panels and labels, sometimes supplemented by traditional worksheets for children. But deeper engagement is usually achieved in less restricted situations involving more direct interaction with museum collections and staff. Guided tours or lectures can be interesting and informative, particularly for adults. But children learn best by doing rather than looking and listening, and for museum educators this usually means ‘hands-on’, demanding as it is in terms of staffing. The scope of ‘hands-on’ possibilities is broad, ranging from handling and recording ancient artefacts to making and trying out replicas and models, and having the potential to stimulate not only touch but all the senses for the benefit of visitors with differing degrees of sensory and learning ability. Museum archaeologists have been particularly successful in using hands-on experiences to capture the attention and imagination of younger visitors, especially by involving them in active and enjoyable problem-solving. Tasks can include sorting mixed assemblages by material and reconstructing complete objects from fragments. The prime objective of the archaeological activity area and its friendly staff is to allow visitors of all ages and abilities to learn more about how people lived in the past through handling and sorting archaeological finds and experimenting with different crafts and technologies, such as stitching together copies of one-piece Roman leather shoes. Active visitor participation is the key concept here. However, Janet Owen, commenting on hands-on activities connected to museum archaeology displays in the UK in the 1990s, has argued that such learning experiences can actually remain passive and intellectually closed: their outcomes being pre- determined and stage-managed, with little encouragement to think further (and critically) about the archaeological objects and alternative interpretations of them. Constraints and opportunities to exploring the past in new ways are presented by the necessity to make museum education programmes relevant to school curriculums (ultimately, to ensure their attractiveness to visiting school groups). A good example is provided by the re-display of the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury, UK in the 1990s. The World Heritage Site of Avebury, with its cluster of important prehistoric monuments, is a popular venue for school visits, especially those with children in the 7 to 11 age range. When the time came to re-display its archaeology collection, the English Heritage team recognised the importance of connecting the new exhibition to the National Curriculum. This was not easy, since none of the core units of the history curriculum (then) covered any prehistoric period. Nevertheless, connections were made to the curriculum’s target to introduce students to the use of historical sources, including the fragmentary nature of historical (archaeological) evidence and the subjectivity of interpretation based on such evidence. At the same time, the team tried to respond to the results of a survey of the interests of local school children regarding the monuments’ builders. They wanted to know about things central to their own world, such as: o where did they go to the toilet and what did they wash with, o what clothes did they wear, o what were their houses and weapons like, o what animals did they have, o how did they die, o did children go to school, o and what games did they have? Despite the difficulty of answering many of these questions, the team came up with some innovative solutions, which sought to be interesting, educational, and fun. For example, they included a life-size Neolithic human figure in the display, but one that was presented in two ‘schizophrenic’ halves – one side showing a ragged person, the other side showing a more sophisticated individual (painted, tattooed, with well-made clothes and jewellery) – and with a caption below acknowledging that archaeologists are unsure about what people really looked like in the Neolithic, although they are sure that they did not look like stereotypical cartoon cave-men J. Museum educators’ determination to demonstrate the relevance of their collections to schools can also be seen in the development of outreach activities, aimed both at enhancing access to museum collections and at extending the reach of the museum into the classroom. The Museum of London, for example, developed a series of 200 ‘mini-museum’ boxes of Roman archaeological material, suitably packed and presented, to be lent to a large number of schools in the Greater London area. They used modified metal tool boxes with drawers, which combined durability with display potential. Real objects (including fragments of pottery and building tile), from old collections of limited archaeological value, were packed in polystyrene boxes. Replica objects (including a samian cup, a clay lamp, a bronze manicure set, a glass perfume bottle, a writing tablet and stylus, coins, and a figurine head) were set into foam recesses. Each box also contained a graphic panel about the Romans, the Museum of London, and archaeology, and teachers’ resource packs. But museum outreach does not need to end in the classroom. Penrith Museum in North West England, for example, successfully established a two-way process connecting the museum to local schools through outreach projects designed to complement their special exhibitions in 2002 and 2006 on prehistoric rock art in Cumbria. Importantly, a museum visit by each school was a condition of participation in the project, which then involved one-day school-based workshops led by a professional artist to create new artworks inspired by the rock art, and culminated in the incorporation of the new works in the museum exhibitions, which proved to be two of the most popular ever held there. Although young visitors and school groups are the key target for museum education programmes, there is an other important target: o the adult groups. The museum education offers various programm- packages or opportunities for them. These include the so called Lifelong learning. Public engagement in, and perceptions of, museum archaeology Who is ‘the public’ that visits (or does not visit) museums with archaeology collections? What do these people want from museums with archaeological collections, what preconceptions do they bring to such museums, and what do they take away from their encounters with archaeology? How can museum archaeologists make such encounters more effective? And how might traditionally alienated groups be persuaded to contribute to the work of museum archaeology? Archaeological curators traditionally served the needs of the archaeological community: o allowing their museums to be used in particular as repositories for excavated artefacts and in general for archaeological collection, o preservation, o interpretation, o education, o and research. Museum archaeologists now recognize that they should also serve the needs of a wider, culturally diverse, and (often) tax-paying public. This ‘turn towards the public’ has taken many forms in the work of museum archaeologists, some of which have been discussed earlier, including hands- on exhibits, more culturally inclusive exhibitions, behind the scenes tours, and loan boxes. Another example is that of digital access to museum archaeology, including the digitization of museum collections and related information and the creation of new opportunities to explore and interact with them both within museums and via the Internet. Despite an initial reluctance by some museums, particularly towards virtual reality technologies, this field has expanded enormously during the early years of the twenty-first century and will continue to do so in ever more creative ways. The British Museum’s extensive website, for example, provides information on visiting, the work of the museum and how to support it, the museum’s research projects and exhibitions, access to the museum’s collections online, educational resources for different kinds of learners, curatorial blogs with space to post comments, and a shop. It also offers short videos of curators introducing potential visitors to the objects, thinking, and work underpinning current exhibitions. Another example was earlier the Burke Museum’s ‘The Archaeology of Seattle’s West Point’ interactive online exhibition. This exhibit tells the story of the archaeological investigation of a prehistoric site in Seattle’s Discovery Park and of the people who lived there 4000 years ago, using text, images, and audio-visual videos. A third example was the website of the Shandong University Museum in China couple of years ago. This makes use of several multimedia technologies to present its archaeological collections, including a searchable database, interactive texts, audio commentaries, photographs, video, virtual reconstructions of artefacts, animations, and a virtual tour of the museum. But we still need to understand more about the people who (physically and virtually) visit museums with archaeological collections. The most of curators have some idea of what works best for visitors. For example according to a survey of visitors to museums in Japan with archaeological collections, intended to ascertain which museum activities people find interesting or most useful in learning about archaeology and the past, members of the public prefer a more participatory, practical, and ‘hands on’ experience at a museum. Examples include working together with archaeologists on excavations, and joining in with experimental activities, such as pottery making, fire starting, and making stone tools. It works especially at site museums. We also know that visitors bring not only prior knowledge to archaeological exhibitions, but sometimes also misconceptions and prejudices. Research undertaken for the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, designed to explore the nature and limits of the public’s fascination with Ancient Egypt, found that focus groups (of varying ages and knowledge of Egypt) generally understood Ancient Egypt through a self-contained and self-satisfying set of popular myths and stereotypes, which included pharaohs, slaves, pyramids, tombs, buried treasure, and the mummy’s curse. They were positive in their view of archaeology, seeing it as a virtuous search for artefacts. By contrast, they had very limited understanding of, or interest in, how ordinary people lived in Ancient Egypt, or in its African context, its chronology and transformation over time, and its relation to modern Egypt. Black participants, however, were more critical, feeling, for instance, that Ancient Egypt had been appropriated as part of white history. Similar findings emerged from a more recent study undertaken by Gemma Tully, who asked members of an Egyptian community about their opinions on the British Museum’s plans to re-display the tomb-chapel paintings of Nebamun. They wished to see new, peopled, daily life narratives that would challenge stereotypes and enable audiences to make connections with their own lives. As Sally MacDonald points out to the curators of Western museums with collections of Ancient Egypt, ‘The challenge is to exploit the subject’s popularity while questioning some of the assumptions on which that popularity is based.’ In Egypt itself, the appropriation of Ancient Egypt by foreign archaeologists and tourists has also led to the alienation of local communities. For example, Madline El Mallah, Director of the Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art, acknowledged some years ago: ‘the museum constitutes nothing of value to the townspeople’. However, a study suggests that a postcolonial museum tradition has now been established in Egypt, which has redefined and reclaimed Egypt’s indigenous heritage for an increasingly local audience. This perspective has also informed a museum exhibition in the UK dedicated to ‘Re-imaging Egypt’ in 2013, which involved close collaboration with an Egyptian contemporary artist whose work actively commented on the archaeological collections and on past and present-day societies. History of Museums Museum (ICOM definition) A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing. Categories of Museums General museums. Museums with indoor exhibitions and permanent location. I.e. British Museum or Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Open-air museums. Actually they are outdoor museums. Their exhibitions usually consist of buildings that recreate architecture from the past. Including farm museums, historic house museums, and archaeological open-air museums. It first opened in Scandinavia near the end of the 19th century. I.e. Karnak temple complex in Luxor, York Castle Museum, Hungarian open air museum (Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum) in Szentendre Mobile museums. o Museums that have no specific strict place for exhibiting. o This type bring the museum to the people rather than vice versa. o Typically they can be in trucks that drive to schools, libraries and rural events. o I.e. Art Explora Pop-up museums. o Nontraditional museum institutions. o Made to last short and often rely on visitors to provide museum objects and labels, while professionals or institutions only provide themes. o Popup museum means actually a temporary museum exhibition in a non-traditional location Types of Museums General (multidisciplinary) museums. o General museums hold collections of more than one subject. Some of these museums hold a number of important specialized collections that they could be groups in more than one category. Natural History and Natural Science museums. o They focus on the natural world. o Their collections may contain birds, mammals, insects, plants, rocks, minerals, and fossils. Science and Technology museums. o They are concerned with the development and application of scientific ideas and instrumentation. o Some science and technology museums focus on demonstrating science applications and give visitors an opportunity to participate in interactive displays. History museums. o Museums that present information in a chronological perspective, or deal with a specialized time in history are considered History Museums. o These will sometimes include archaeological materials, ethnographic (culture) viewpoints, items which attempt to preserve urban and rural traditions, historic houses, items that commemorate historical events, and portrait galleries. Military and war museums. o Museums specialize in military histories and are usually organized from the point of view of one nation and conflicts in which that country has taken part. o They collect and present weapons, uniforms, decorations, war technology, and other objects. Art museums. o A building or space that displays art, provides opportunities for cultural expression, exchanges, and host activities. o Some of the art on display is owned by the museum, but many times collectors will loan their art to a museum for others to view it. Etymology The word museum has classical origins. In its Greek form, mouseion, it meant “seat of the Muses” and designated a philosophical institution or a place of contemplation. Use of the Latin derivation, museum, appears to have been restricted in Roman times mainly to places of philosophical discussion. Thus, the great Museum at Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I Soter early in the 3rd century BCE, with its college of scholars and its famous library, was more a prototype university than an institution to preserve and interpret material aspects of one’s heritage. The word museum was revived in 15th century Europe to describe the collection of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, but the term conveyed the concept of comprehensiveness rather than denoting a building. By the 17th century, museum was being used in Europe to describe collections of curiosities. The first public museums The Ashmolean museum The first corporate body to receive a private collection, erect a building to house it, and make it publicly available was the University of Oxford. The gift was from Elias Ashmole; containing much of the Tradescant collection, it was made 31nt he condition that a place be built to receive it. The resulting building, which eventually became known as the Ashmolean Museum, opened in 1683. (The Ashmolean later moved to another new building nearby, and its original building is now occupied by the Museum of the History of Science.) The British museum The 18th century saw the flowering of the Enlightenmentand the encyclopaedic spirit, as well as a growing taste for the exotic. These influences, encouraged by increasing world exploration, by trade centred on northwestern Europe, and by developing industrialization, are evident in the opening of two of Europe’s outstanding museums, the British Museum, in London, in 1759 and the Louvre Museum, in Paris, in 1793. The British Museum was formed as the result of the government’s acceptance of responsibility to preserve and maintain three collections “not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public.” These were housed at Montagu House, in Bloomsbury, specially purchased for this purpose. The collections had been made by Sir Robert Cotton, Robert Harley, 1st earl of Oxford, and Sir Hans Sloane. The Cotton and Harley collections were composed mainly of manuscripts; since 1998 these have been housed in a separate building, the British Library. The Sloane collection, however, included his specimens of natural history from Jamaica and classical, ethnographic, numismatic, and art material, as well as the cabinet of William Courten, comprising some 100,000 items in all. Although public access to the British Museum was free of charge from the outset, for many years admission was by application for one of the limited number of tickets issued daily. The Louvre Museum It was a matter of public concern in France that the royal collections were inaccessible to the populace, and eventually a selection of paintings was exhibited at the Luxembourg Palace in 1750 by Louis XV. Continuing pressure, including Diderot’s proposal of a national museum, led to arrangements for more of the royal collection to be displayed for the public in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre palace. However, when the Grande Galerie was opened to the public in 1793, it was by decree of the Revolutionary government rather than royal mandate, and it was called the Central Museum of the Arts. There were many difficulties, and the museum was not fully accessible until 1801 The collection at the Louvre grew rapidly, not least because the National Convention instructed Napoleon to appropriate works of art during his European campaigns; as a result, many royal and noble collections were transported to Paris to be shown at what became known as the Musée Napoléon. The return to its owners of this looted material was required by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Nevertheless, the Napoleonic episode awakened a new interest in art and provided the impetus that made a number of collections available to the public. Museums in Rome The extensive collections of the Vatican also saw considerable reorganization during the 18th century. The Capitoline Museum (now comprising several buildings and called the Capitoline Museums) was opened to the public in 1734, and the Palazzo dei Conservatori was converted to a picture gallery in 1749. The Pio-Clementino Museum, now part of the museum complex in Vatican City, opened in 1772 to house an extensive collection of antiquities. The Neoclassical architecture of this building set a standard that was emulated in a number of European countries for half a century Other Museums in Europe From the end of 18th century, a number of new collections were available to the public in Europe. Many of these resulted from royal and noble patronage, while others were created on the initiative of public authorities. The Prado Museum in Madrid dates from 1785, when Charles IIIcommissioned the erection of a new building to serve as a museum of natural science. Construction was interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, and when the building opened in 1819 it instead housed an art gallery to display part of the royal collection. In Prussia Frederick William III had a picture gallery built in Berlin to house some of his collection, and the gallery was opened to the public in 1830. This was the beginning of a complex that developed over the next century to house various portions of the national collection on a single site, now known as the Museuminsel. The Royal Museums in Brussels originated by royal warrant in 1835 in the interests of historical study and the arts. In the Netherlands a national art gallery was opened at the Huis ten Bosch in 1800; it was later moved to Amsterdam and eventually became the Rijksmuseum (State Museum). The National Gallery in London, founded on the personal collection of the merchant and philanthropist John Julius Angerstein, opened initially at Angerstein’s house in 1824. In 1838 it moved to purpose-built premises on Trafalgar Square. The Hermitage in Russia was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The spread of the European model Before the end of the 18th century the phenomenon of the museum had spread to other parts of the world. In 1773 in the United States the Charleston Library Society of South Carolina announced its intention of forming a museum. Its purpose was to promote the better understanding of agriculture and herbal medicine in the area. Another early institution, the Peale Museum, was opened in 1786 in Philadelphia by the painter Charles Willson Peale. The collections rapidly outgrew the space available in his home and were displayed for a time at Independence Hall. After a number of vicissitudes the collections were finally dispersed in the middle of the 19th century European colonial influence was responsible for the appearance of museums elsewhere. In Jakarta, Indonesia, the collection of the Batavia Society of Arts and Science was begun in 1778, eventually to become the Central Museum of Indonesian Culture and finally part of the National Museum. The origins of the Indian Museum in Kolkata(formerly Calcutta) were similar, based on the collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which commenced in 1784. In South America a number of national museums originated in the early 19th century: the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires was founded in 1812, and Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which owes its origin to a selection of paintings presented by John VI, exiled king of Portugal, was opened to the public in 1818 (a fire destroyed much of the collection in 2018). Among others are the National Museum in Bogotá, Colombia (1824), and the national museums of natural history in Santiago, Chile (1830), and Montevideo, Uruguay (1837). Museums and national identity By the early 19th century, then, the granting of public access to formerly private collections had become more common. What followed for approximately the next 100 years was the founding, by regional and national authorities throughout the world, of museums expressly intended for the public good. Museums in Central Europe Contributing to the establishment of museums in the early 19th century was a developing national consciousness, particularly among the peoples of central Europe. In 1807 the National Assembly of Hungary founded a national museum at Pest from collections given to the nation five years earlier by Count Ferenc Széchenyi.

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