The Curation and Care of Museum Collections

Bruce Campbell, Christian Baars, Bruce A Campbell, Christian Baars

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429958991
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Art
• Categoria: Museum Studies

Museum curators enter the profession with a specialist subject qualification and yet at some point in their career, many curators find themselves in charge of a range of collections outside of their expert knowledge. Interpreting, curating and caring for mixed collections demands of curators a wide range of knowledge and understanding. The Curation and Care of Museum Collections is designed to give curators the fundamental information and confidence they need to manage and care for all of the collections within their responsibility, regardless of their previous training and experience.

Comprising two sections – Museum Collections, and Collection Development and Care – the chapters cover archaeology, art, history, military and natural sciences collections, as well as heritage properties. Every chapter in the book is focused on one type of collection, but all chapters in the collection management section contain advice on topics such as organisational philosophy, documentation, legal issues and materials in order to provide a useful and comprehensive guide to managing collections. The collection care section is structured in the same way, considering the issues of storage; display; handling; moving; packing; housekeeping; health and safety; emergency preparedness; and pest, pollution, environmental, light and vibration management.

The contributors to this book are experienced museum professionals, each with their own specialism and a deep understanding of what it means to work in the context of mixed collections. Providing a highly practical guide, The Curation and Care of Museum Collections is essential reading for curators working in all types of museums, galleries and heritage sites, and for students of museology courses around the world.

PART I

Museum collections

1

Archaeology collections

Sara L. Wear

The nature of archaeological collections

Archaeological museum collections are gathered and documented material evidence (natural and manufactured/created) for human activity, from the earliest stone tools to more recent industrial production. Material evidence is complemented by an archive record and, increasingly, digital data. Much of the archaeological material in museums has been excavated, with varying degrees of recording and professionalism. Within this group of museum collections sits numismatics, broadly defined as the study of coins and medals.

History

For much of its development, archaeology as a subject has followed a Western European and, to a large extent, colonial model across the world. The following is a summary of some key events and personalities that have contributed to shaping the discipline and museum collections, and a description of the current context.

The landscape around us has long held the structural and visual evidence of our human ancestors. This evidence has fascinated generations who have inhabited the same sites and encountered the ruins of temples, burial mounds, remains of settlements and other often unrecognisable structures. A fascination with material culture appears to go back to the Classical world, as the Romans collected earlier Greek sculptures, copied them, took the subjects and techniques and shaped them for their own purposes and aesthetic tastes.

Humans have always looked to the past and interpreted it in their own way to align with their belief systems. Without knowing the true function or significance of ancient objects buried in the earth, they re-used or retained them. The medieval village (c. 10th century common era – ce) of Avebury in Wiltshire, UK, which grew in and around a Neolithic stone circle and associated avenues from the 3rd millennium before the common era (bce), is a case in point.

The development of archaeology as a discipline has European roots. The Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries revived an interest in Classical literature and the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Collecting of the portable antiquities of these civilisations was confined to a wealthy élite, including the Pope and royal houses of Europe, who kept their own private collections (Daniel, 1981).

Excavations for artefacts as sources of information about earlier cultures began to be more organised early in the 18th century, with the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, settlements destroyed by an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in 79 ce. The interest in exploring and recording the ancient world of the Classics and the Bible led to scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries travelling from countries such as Britain, France and Germany to the Mediterranean on so-called ‘Grand Tours’. The desire to bring back ideas and objects embodying the Classical aesthetic became the basis of both private and public collections.

Collections of ancient artefacts, the Kunstkammers and cabinets of curiosity, were amassed by private individuals through auctions, agents, what may loosely be termed excavation and even theft. Such collections became inherent constituents of early museum archaeological collections. The oldest museum in the world, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, opened in 1682, has at its core the Tradescants’ ‘Ark’ of natural and manufactured objects collected on journeys to the Americas which had recently become accessible to Europeans (Pearce, 1996).

The interests of northern European antiquarians extended across the Mediterranean to Egypt and Mesopotamia. The ancient landscape beyond Cairo and the pyramids of Giza was rarely seen by European travellers until the mid-18th century. A consequence of the Napoleonic expeditionary force in 1798 was further investigations at Sakkara and Zoser, and famously, the discovery and deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, now kept at the British Museum in London. French control and, later, British rule opened up Egypt to exploration by antiquarians and travellers, largely through scholarly institutes. Egyptology as a subject brought specialists such as Auguste Mariette, Austen Henry Layard and, later, William Flinders Petrie to excavate key sites. Others, such as Amelia Edwards, promoted scientific excavation. There was, however, also systematic robbing of tombs and removal of artefacts by more dubious individuals such as Giovanni Belzoni, whose escapades provided significant collections for many museums around the world (Daniel, 1981).

Contemporary antiquarians without the means or inclination to travel began to survey and describe the standing monuments and structures in their homelands. In Britain, the publications of William Camden (16th–17th century) and William Stukeley (17th–18th century), the latter known as the first ‘romantic British archaeologist’, represented comprehensive studies of the historic environment. It must be remembered that this work was carried out within the constraints of contemporary Christian religious perspective, the understanding of the depth of time through Biblical sources, Classical literature and folk traditions.

The human past as framed by Classical, Biblical and medieval literature was the focus for many archaeologists, who were preoccupied with fitting their excavated sites within established chronologies. There was, however, a growing body of enthusiasts for the more ancient past. ‘Prehistory’ was evidenced by monuments which did not fit the Roman and Christian narratives, such as Stonehenge in Britain or Newgrange in Ireland, but by artefacts made of stone, copper and bronze. These objects, and the structures in which they were discovered, suggested that the widely accepted chronologies confining human activity to 6000 years (the age of Earth based on biblical calculations) may have been incorrect. Archaeologists in Britain, France and Denmark began questioning these ideas, and the ‘Three Age’ system for prehistory was proposed (Daniel, 1981). The person who first began to order and classify museum prehistoric collections within the sequence of stone, copper/bronze and iron was the 19th century curator of the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities in Copenhagen, Denmark: C.J. Thomsen. This system soon became accepted by both museums and field archaeologists. Although modified considerably since, it still influences current prehistoric classification and interpretation.

Evolutionary ideas and classifications, developed in the middle of the 19th century, were soon reflected in archaeological investigation and displays. In Britain, General Augustus Pitt Rivers, like many people interested in the human past in the mid-19th century, espoused Darwin’s evolutionary ideas. Pitt Rivers adapted evolutionary classification systems to the archaeological record as he investigated sites on his inherited Dorset estate of Cranborne Chase (Pearce, 1996). The artefacts resulting from Pitt Rivers’ excavations, along with ethnographic collections acquired through the agencies and travels of Victorian explorers, formed the basis of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. As with other museums of the time (and, arguably, until recently) Pitt Rivers’ vision for the ordering and narrative of his displays were based on a colonialist philosophy, one where the white European sat above other ethnic groups. Today’s museums acknowledge how societies across the world were previously misrepresented (Bennett, 2004).

The focus on the excavation and investigation of major and ‘famous’ sites across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, carried out often by ‘celebrity’ archaeologists, continued through the late 19th into the early 20th century. The most well-known examples are Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy in the 1870s, and Arthur Evans at Knossos in the 1890s. On the other hand, Schliemann, Evans and other archaeologists of late 19th century initiated the beginnings of professionalism within the discipline, not only in their excavation techniques, but in their methodical and reasoned analysis of the artefacts they discovered.

The development of archaeology as a professional discipline in the United States of America and Canada largely followed the European model through its early history. As European museums acquired artefacts from the Ancient World, especially from Egypt, with excavations being enabled through sponsorship, so too did collectors and museums in North America, for example the Smithsonian Institute.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, some individuals, including future President of the USA, Thomas Jefferson, began to consider the origins and composition of some structures found in the landscape. Surveys and descriptions were undertaken which were as detailed as those of European antiquarians, but contemporary interpretation ascribed these structures to Canaanites, Danes or Spaniards (Daniel, 1981). Only much later were they attributed to the First Nation peoples. More recently, the wealth of archaeology of the First Nations found within National Parks resulted in the parks becoming centres for research and interpretation.

In the southern hemisphere, colonial philosophies dominated. Archaeologists focussed on the material culture of white communities, such as whalers and missionaries. The native populations of Australia, New Zealand and the islands of the Torres Straits were described as apparently ‘lesser beings’ and often attributed to natural history collections. Until recently, the archaeology of their cultural heritage was largely ignored.

The antiquarian narrative also exists in China, although distinct differences in the origins of interpreting the past resulted in a non-Western perspective. For many centuries, epigraphy, the examination of inscriptions on objects, was the motive for collecting artefacts and formed the beginnings of antiquarianism. During the latter part of the Song Dynasty (960–1279 ce), this grew from being the pursuit of intellectuals to an elite yet scholarly pastime. A type of antiquarianism on the Song model lasted through Confucianism to the early 20th century. This included the excavation of inscribed bronze vessels from archaeological sites, though archaeology did not emerge as a separate discipline at that point. The focus on epigraphy and historiography waned after the Song Dynasty, to be revived towards the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). Chinese archaeology interested European scholars in the first half of the 20th century, focussing on the excavations of key sites (Miller and Louis, 2012). Chinese scholars increasingly engaged with the growing body of evidence. With the founding of the People’s Republic of China, formal institutions took archaeological studies into their control.

Globally, for first half of the 20th century, archaeological investigation and interpretation did not grow much beyond the techniques of the previous century. However, the dominance of the Three Age system was waning. Scholars recognised the contemporaneous development of technological innovations in geographically separate societies in non-Roman controlled regions. This realisation manifested itself in archaeological theory and excavation as a focus on ‘cultures’ – distinct groups with recognisable material culture, settlements and funerary practices, such as the Iron Age ‘Arras culture’ of Yorkshire (c. 500 bce–70 ce). Concordant was an alignment of archaeology with contemporary studies in anthropology and human geography.

Two world wars halted active fieldwork in many countries, but some advances were beginning to be made in excavation techniques and material culture studies from the 1930s onwards. Personalities such as Sir Mortimer Wheeler, with his first wife Tessa Verney Wheeler, excavated initially in Britain, at sites including Maiden Castle and St Albans, and, later, in India. Often, major excavations were undertaken by museum directors and university academics; investigations by scholars and enthusiasts highlighted past communities across the chronological spectrum, providing a comprehensive body of evidence. Examples include fieldwork on Anglo-Saxon and Viking sites (5th–10th century ce) in Britain and Scandinavia, including the Sutton Hoo and Oseberg ship burials.

Since the 1960s, much of the archaeological material acquired by European museums has been generated through excavation of sites and monuments, often from within the local area of the institution. The beginnings of ‘rescue’ archaeology in the UK, often involving excavation of large areas of land, stemmed from significant urban development, such as road and housing construction, and allowed investigation of sites prior to their destruction. Res...