UCL Museums & Collections Blog

Conversation is an art, so they say. How to start a good one with someone you don’t know but want to? How to get going and increase momentum to the point where your partner in art starts butting in, can’t help it, has something they just have to say right now? “The thing is,” they say, “the thing is…” There we’ll leave them for now, in midflow, poised at the point of launching their urgent thoughts at you, about to spin you and them in a whirl of ideas and words.

We’re calling our new outreach experience “The thing is…” I’ve posted before about how we’re working with some excellent designers to create a space in which to engage people in conversations about an object. Recently I’ve been working with our curators to select objects around which we can have conversations with people.

First up is a bead necklace from Petrie’s Palestinian Collection, similar to the one pictured here.

I have a lot to learn about the necklace we’ll be taking out to meet people. Some basics: it is from a tomb at Tell Fara, a site on the Wadi Gazzeh along the southern boundary of the region of Palestine known as Philistia. It was excavated by Petrie’s team in the 1920s. It is from the early Iron Age, making it over 3000 years old. Aesthetically it is eye-catching, made with beautiful carnelian beads.

There will be a lot more to say about this object and its history and my hope is that we will entice people into conversations around it. Conversations, debates, discussions about the history of the region where it was found and the history of its provenance, the history of personal adornment, being buried with your jewellery…the thing is, there is never just one way to look at anything, even a simple string of beads.

From a public perspective, objects are what a museum is all about. Yet behind every object is a story, built up from a range of sources and evidence, that enables us to contextualise that artefact and give it some form of meaning. This meaning may change as scholarship advances or audiences diversify. But without that level of research, we would have little more than a lot of nice ‘stuff’ on display.

A crucial link in this chain of information comes from archival sources. The Institute of Archaeology is fortunate in having a range of original field records to support its collections, allowing us to learn more about the circumstances in which material was originally excavated. These also provide a window into the methods and practices of seminal figures in the development of archaeology as a discipline. The tomb cards written by Flinders Petrie and his staff are a classic example.
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Museum research can be like detective work – like Sherlock Holmes in a filing cabinet. (If there are any Benedict Cumberbatch fans reading this, don’t get distracted by that image). A vital part of clue finding is not to trust what you are told by museum databases.

At the moment I am working on an exhibition and events programme around a series of photographs that the archaeologist Flinders Petrie took for ‘The Committee appointed for the purposes of procuring, with the help of Mr Flinders Petrie, Racial Photographs from the ancient Egyptian Pictures and Sculptures’. In actual fact, Petrie only received £20 from them. The scientist Sir Francis Galton gave almost £300 from ‘his own pocket’ towards the expedition in 1886-87. (More on Galton in future posts. . .). (more…)