Heads collected by Flinders Petrie. Credit: Kathy Aitchison

We all like to think of history as an objective study of the way people long ago used to live don’t we? Well, at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology last night Sally-Ann Ashton, of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, suggested that that isn’t always the case.

Seated among some of the museum’s 8,000 artefacts she talked about the discovery of a collection of terracotta heads by Flinders Petrie in 1907-1912 and how his personal views coloured his interpretation of the findings.

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