By Stacy Hackner

For humans, touch is an important way to gain information about an object. We can tell if something is soft or hard, heavy or light, smooth or rough or fluffy, pliable, sharp, irregular. During my masters class on human dentition, I learned to identify teeth by touch to get around visual biases. We spent a significant amount of time touching objects in our environment, so we tend to get angry when museums tell us not to touch the objects.

I understand the desire to touch a piece of history. There’s a feeling of authenticity you get from holding something made by ancient people, and a sense of disappointment if you’re told the artifact is actually a replica. A British Museum visitor commented that “It was just lovely to know that you could pick something up that was authentic. It was just lovely to put your hands on something.” Another said “You do think sometimes when you’re looking in the cases, sometimes I’d like to pick that up and really look closely.”[i]

Even with “no touching” signs, museum visitors continue to touch things. Sometimes it’s by accident and sometimes they get a sneaky look on their faces, knowing they’re ignoring the signs; most often, they don’t realize what they’re doing is damaging the object.

Passive conservation of an object involves creating a stable environment so that the object can continue its “life” undisturbed. Sudden changes in humidity, temperature, and light can degrade the object. Touching it introduces dirt and oils from your skin onto its surface – the same way you’d leave fingerprints at a crime scene. Additionally, the oils can then attract dirt to linger, and acidic oils can also degrade metallic surfaces.

Yes, museum professionals handle objects for research purposes. However, we attempt to handle them as little as possible with clean hands and wear gloves when appropriate. This difference between museum staff and the public is also one of quantity: it’s ok if one person does it occasionally, but if everyone touches it on every visit, the grime adds up. In 2009, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford introduced a “touchometer” that counts how many people have touched an object made of various materials. As you can see in the image below, after nearly 8 million touches, the left half of the object is severely degraded. The stone (centre) has developed a patina, the metal (bottom) has become shiny, and the cloth (left) has entirely worn away. (Also, people have scratched the frame.)

If you walk through the British Museum’s gallery of Egyptian statuary, you can clearly see the areas on artifacts that people like to touch – the corners and public-facing edges of sarcophaguses are darker than the wall-facing edges, and anything round and protruding tends to have a sheen that takes years of painstaking work to remove (hands, feet, and breasts of statues at human height are particularly vulnerable).

The Grant Museum has specific objects that can be handled, and UCL Museums have object-based learning programs to introduce students and specific groups to handling museum objects. [ii] Many other museums have touch tables or touch sessions where you can feel the weight of hand axes or porcupine quills. Don’t despair if you’re asked not to touch something in a museum – we’re not angry, we just want to make sure they’re preserved for future museum visitors to enjoy.

 

Sources

[i] Touching History: An evaluation of Hands On desks at The British Museum. 2008. Morris Hargreaves Mcintyre.

[ii] UCL Museums Touch & Wellbeing; Object-Based Learning

Conservation Advice – Handling Museum Objects. 2015. Southeast Museums.

By Kevin Guyan

 

With the announcement of the Student Engagers’ autumn exhibition, here is the first in a series of blog posts that share personal insights into the curatorial process.

 

Stress offers the student engagement team an opportunity to curate an exhibition that counters the traditional view of museums and galleries as fixed spaces that display objects that convey a message. Instead – I see this as a chance for us to experiment with bold and exciting ways to share knowledge and create a space on campus for three-way conversations between curators, objects and the public.

The inception of our exhibition first found life in the summer of 2014 during a conversation between the student engagement team and the UCL Art Museum. Over one year later and, as design ideas and draft event listings are shared via email, the exhibition at last feels like it is coming together.

As our more experienced colleagues in UCL Museums and Public and Cultural Engagement warned, ‘exhibition time’ runs significantly slower than ‘normal time’ and we now appreciate starting this project with 16 months to spare. I remember looking at action plans with distant dates and the feeling that our plans were a lifetime away. Those dates have now come and gone as we hurtle through 2015 and towards our opening night on Friday 9 October.

The meat and bones of the student engagement project is the presence of researchers in UCL’s three public museums. Therefore, one of the key hopes for Stress was to import this practice and create an exhibition where a researcher was always present, waiting and ready for conversation.

The researcher’s presence will also create a way to feed-back information from visitors into the planning of events, pre-empting many questions and queries fielded and offering a more tailored visitor experience. It further gives us opportunities to adapt the exhibition during its run. For example, conversations between engagers and visitors will inform the writing of blog articles that will then shape how future visitors perceive the objects on display.

Like our previous events and exhibitions, Movement, LandSCAPE and Foreign Bodies, the theme of Stress brings together the research interests of a diverse group of PhD students under one overarching theme. This means that the visitor experience will differ according to the researcher in the exhibition space and their interpretation of the objects on display.

I am excited to see how this works in reality – the continual presence of a researcher in the North Lodge exhibition space may prove overbearing and turn-off visitors looking for a space of solitude in busy Bloomsbury. More optimistically, the space will become a talking shop at the entrance to UCL’s campus and create a different, yet equally enriching, experience for visitors.

For me, public engagement is about more than sharing research ideas with other people. The benefits should reach far further than dissemination alone and empower researchers to enter into dialogues with people from different backgrounds. The process of sharing ideas with people unfamiliar with our own field will foster new and unexpected connections and force us to change the way we share our work, ultimately resulting in a deeper understanding for everyone involved.

We are attempting to build an exhibition with public engagement as a foundational building block and create a space that gives researchers and visitors opportunities to follow pathways unaware where they might lead. This is very much the ethos of the student engagement project – let’s see how our ideas work in reality.

By Stacy Hackner

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked isn’t about history or osteology. It’s “can you tell me what that thing is?” Many objects in the UCL Museums don’t have explanatory labels, so it’s understandable that visitors don’t know. However, it’s usually the case that we don’t know either! In archaeology, a number of excavated items are recorded with detailed descriptions of size, weight, material, but no conclusion as to the purpose of the object. The Petrie houses a number of smooth pebbles from predynastic-era graves. When those people had the technology to make wheel-thrown pottery and intricately carved stone vessels, why be buried with a simple stone? The anthropological answer is that it served a ritualistic purpose; the humanistic answer is that somebody saw a smooth stone they liked, one that felt good to keep in the hand and rub, and it became important to them. I have stones that remained in coat pockets for years, getting smoother and smoother from my touch. It doesn’t necessarily have to be “totemic”. Other artifacts are confusing because they look like modern items. One visitor asked me about a clay object that looked like a cog.

I had no idea what it was! We do have various sorts of cogs from ancient times, like waterwheels and the Antikythera mechanism, but in this case I thought I could solve the mystery quite easily. The object had a UC number, indicating its place in the Petrie catalogue. I looked it up on the web (the catalogue is open-access) and found out it’s actually an oil lamp: if you look closely, you can see traces of burning in the centre. The same goes for the Grant Museum’s catalogue – if you can find the specimen’s number, you can look up the name. Then it’s fun to Google the animal and see what it looked like with all its fur on – the tenrec is my favourite example. With only the skeleton it looks like any other small mammal, but when complete it’s like a cross between a hedgehog and a fiery caterpillar.

If you’d like to know what something is, please do ask! We may not know, but love to learn about all the amazing objects around us.

The Meaning of (Fossilised) Life or “If an ammonite swims in the sea and nobody’s there to see it…” 

Amongst the myriad forms of life that line the walls and fill the Victorian cabinets of the Grant Museum of Zoology, there lie a number of specimens that are marked out not by the strangeness of their appearance (for the Grant is a veritable archive of strangeness, from preserved, etiolated lungfish to the infamously taxonomically confusing stuffed platypus) but by their sheer ancientness. Whereas the majority of specimens in the Grant are specimens or skeletons of animals and organisms that still exist, or that existed within recorded historical consciousness (this, this, and this), these enigmatic objects come from a time before anything resembling a human being stepped foot on the Earth. These specimens, as you may have guessed, are fossils.

 

The Grant has a number of fossilised specimens in its collection and a selection of models and casts of famous fossils, the originals of which are stored elsewhere. The stories of fossils, how they come to be preserved over millions of years of geological flux, as well as the unlikely and often serendipitous ways in which they are found by palaeontologists and amateurs alike, are fascinating. Perhaps the most historically significant example is that of Mary Anning, a working-class woman from Dorset who began her fossil-finding career selling fossilized curios to seaside tourists. Over time, her skill and tenacity as fossil finder grew and led to her to the discovery of the Plesiosaurus, the Ichthyosaurus, and a number of other highly significant ancient species. Her work was in turn influential on a number of more canonical figures in the history of science such as the influential geologist William Buckland and the fossil collector Thomas Hawkins. Conversely, the pre-eminent French zoologist of the late 18th and early 19th Century, Georges Cuvier, to the detriment of his legacy, branded her a fraud.

However, there is a different type of story I want to pursue today, and it is one that might seem wilfully obscure to those of us accustomed to considering the scientific and paleontological implications of fossil finds and palaeo-archaeology more generally.

I have asked in a previous post, incited by the literary, philosophical meanderings of Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a question that seems to me to drive right at the core of what the Grant Museum endeavoured to answer in the 19^th Century: What can the structure (the anatomy, if you will) of an organism tell us about the organism itself? Robert Grant himself, in a speech delivered to his colleagues at the University of London in 1833, put it simply: ‘Comparative anatomy is that branch of physical science which treats of the structures of animals’. Ishmael, connecting us once more to UCL’s collections, asks this of the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham that now sits in the South Cloisters of the university. Bentham, according to Ishmael, conveys in his very structure the character of the utilitarian thought that he pursued in his philosophical works. For Ishmael this is the one instance in which structure and essence are undifferentiated aspects of the whole. Generally, however, he admits that ‘nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan’s articulated bones’. Robert Grant may have disagreed with Ishmael on this point; but for Melville’s narrator, the question is not so much we can know the whale, but what the limits of this knowing are.

 

Moby-Dick, being as much about the interpretation of literature and the search for truth as it is about the search for an elusive white whale asks us to consider a related question: what can the structure of a text, of a book, tell us about the text or book itself? Are there limits to our knowledge of a book or a novel? Can we ever “know” a book fully, by closely studying its parts?

We can put these questions more succinctly: What can an inanimate part (structure or skeleton) tell us about the living whole (text or organism)? Melville, via Ishmael, is circumspect about our ability to gain an accurate representation of the whole, lamenting that ‘one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like’.

Thus it is that I come finally to the question I want to pursue, a question that has been prompted by the time I spend among inanimate parts and fossilised remains, as it has by my own forays into literature and its interpretation. What does a fossil mean? What can a fossil, a part of the entire, unimaginable span of organic history, tell us about the entirety of life and history? Can it have a meaning at all? Is it the case that, as with Melville’s leviathanic skeleton, the fossil (indeed all fossils) can only tell us a limited story about the history of life on earth? And if so, what does this tell us about “meaning” as such?

Traditionally, fossils (versus the skeletons of living or recently extinct species) have acted as testaments to the vast span of organic history: subterranean monuments to the dead, which nevertheless provide us with the silent testimony of life anterior to the existence of humanity. In the case of Mary Anning, as well as the work of her detractor, Georges Cuvier, the ancient specimens they described, greatly troubled 18^th and 19^th century biblical accounts of creation which attributed thousands and not millions of years to the age of the earth. Beyond this, of course, a fossil tells us amazing stories about evolutionary and geological history. In the Grant, a large ammonite, a fossilised marine invertebrate similar to the contemporary nautilus genus, sits silently between the skulls of two elephants and model of an elephant’s heart. However, during the Mesozoic era, the ammonite was so abundant, that palaeontologists now can use it as an index fossil, a specimen so ubiquitous that an entire geological epoch can be characterised by its presence in the stratigraphic record. This tells us a tantalising story of a distant and unknowable watery past, an earth populated for thousands of years by invertebrate marine animals, a world that, unless we spend the majority of our time beneath the waves, is incomprehensible to us and was unimaginable without the material existence and fossilisation of the ammonite itself.

For some, fossils fill the blanks of our evolutionary past (the ammonite, it would seem, fills a particularly large one). If one is vigilant, one will see the intermittent appearance in the pages of newspapers and popular journals stories of “missing links”. Here, the discovery of ancient proto-human remains provides us with the supposed intermediary between our species, homo sapiens, and our primitive ancestors. Strictly speaking, there is no one missing link – evolutionary history is not linear or progressive in the way we might like to think, but fossils nevertheless are employed to supply us with a meaning that underwrites humanity’s existential legitimacy, a paleontological riposte to the larger metaphysical question: Why Are We Here? Unfortunately, fossils, even ones that seem to supply us with “missing links” to our evolutionary past do not answer this question satisfactorily. Henry Gee, an editor at Nature and the author of The Accidental Species writes witheringly of the temptation to interpret evolutionary history this way: ‘The term missing link, … speaks to an idea in which evolving organisms are following predestined tracks, like trains chugging along a route in an entirely predictable way. It implies that we can discern the pattern of evolution as something entirely in tune with our expectations, such that a newly found fossil fills a gap that we knew was there from the outset. Quite apart from the impossibility of knowing whether any particular fossil we might find is our ancestor or anyone else’s, this is a model of evolution that is at once entirely erroneous, and also rather sad’. What is ‘sad’, for Gee, is the seemingly unassailable arrogance of the human species’s tendency to understand all other evolutionary phenomena in relation to the question of its own existence. After all, we have been on this Earth for a comparatively minuscule period in comparison to the ammonite, and yet, we like to see ourselves as somehow more “evolved” or “superior”, despite the increasing climatic evidence that we are hastening the end of our tenure on this Earth due to the very arrogance that underwrites our anthropocentric view of the world.

This arrogance is perhaps no surprise. We are inescapably human, trapped within our own human minds, and unable to inhabit the minds of other species. It is no surprise then that we tend to view everything through an anthropocentric prism; we are imprisoned by it. The Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy gestured at the possibility of escaping our all-encompassing humanness in his early novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which the fossilised past irrupts into the otherwise serene life of an otherwise confident Victorian man. In a passage supposedly inspired by the mountaineering travails of his intellectual mentor (and father of Virginia Woolf) Leslie Stephen, Hardy describes the mental state of a rich gentleman, Henry Knight, an amateur geologist, as he hangs perilously from the edge of a cliff on the Jurassic Coast in Devon. As he dangles from the cliff face, he sees a trilobite embedded in the rock before him, and his eyes meet those of the ancient crustacean his mind is cast back into deep geological and evolutionary history:

‘Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines—alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development’.

Here an encounter with a fossil is the catalyst for a reverie concerning the unbearable morality of all that lives as well as the transience of humanity, its utter insignificance in the face of all that has gone before and all that will follow. And yet again, the fossil remains secondary to our own consideration, our own sense of humanness. In describing ‘an earlier band’ of monstrous animals, Hardy’s narrator does not fail to add ‘No man was there’.  Despite the fossilised animal’s complete indifference to the existence of humanity, we repeatedly project our own existence into the way we understand it. It is a foil against which we understand our own condition.

Returning to the original question, then, what can the fossil – the fragment – tell us about the whole? Not much it seems, as it is impossible to step outside our own anthropocentrism; we are unable to escape the perceptual prison of our own humanity. Thus what the fossil can tell us about the Earth, and the history of life upon that Earth is limited by our inability to be anything but human – and subjective. However, a French philosopher named Quentin Meillasoux would argue differently. For Meillasoux, the fossil is the most revealing artefact one could wish for. Not for what it tells us about the imagined ‘whole’ to which I have referred a number of times. But of what it can tell us about how we might go about knowing the nature of reality.

For Meillasoux, the pre-human fossil has a meaning that has the potential to recalibrate the nature of the philosophy of reality itself. Meillasoux’s philosophical endeavour is dedicated to solving the Gordian knot that he – and the pre-eminent French philosopher, Alan Badiou – believe was most successfully tied by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18^th Century. Kant’s philosophy, Badiou states, can be said to have ‘broken the history of thought in two’. Before Kant, Meillasoux tells us, is the period of pre-critical philosophy, and afterwards, the period of critical philosophy. What do these terms mean? [Warning: This is going to get a little technical, but I promise, we’ll get back to fossils!]

A pre-critical stance towards reality, Meillasoux states, is seen today as insupportably naïve, because it requires us to believe that, despite the frailties of human perception and its inescapably subjective character, we can gain access to the very thing in-itself, that is to say, the very thing we are observing, stripped of all subjective appearances and all perceptual distortion and ambiguity. A critical stance, the philosophical stance to which the majority of philosophers adhere today, states the opposite and this – we are told – is Kant’s doing. What did Kant tell us? Meillasoux calls Kant’s central critical thesis ‘correlationism’. Correlationism, he tells us, is ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from each other’. In other words, we can never access a thing, a being, without it being a function of thinking, or our perception. This has big implications, not only in philosophy, but in science too. ‘Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object ‘in itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject [us], but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that not would always-already be related to an object’. In short, Meillasoux is saying that, because of this critical stance we 1) can never know anything in itself without the taint of human subjectivity or 2) ever insist that anything exists outside of a person’s ability to perceive it. For many (perhaps those of a more relaxed disposition) this is not a problem; things exist and we don’t need philosophy to tell us otherwise. But for Meillasoux, and the more masochistic of philosophers, this is a big problem. He wants to know if we can know and, if so, how we can know. He is not satisfied with the stasis of contemporary philosophical thought because it tells us, like Ishmael, that anything we know is merely an approximation of the Real. And because of this he’s going to take on Kant, perhaps the single most important figure in Western philosophy of the last 500 years. And he’s going to do it with fossils.

The oldest fossil in the Grant Museum is the Ottoia Prolifica, or as has been called in a previous blog post, the ‘Ancient Penis Worm’, the reason for which will be clear for readers of Classics and Ancient Greek. This particular fossil is inconceivably old. It dates from over 500 millions years ago – a date that for Meillasoux is extremely important. It is so crucially important because it pre-dates the arrival of humankind (Homo habilis) by around 498 millions years. In other words, this unassuming looking fossil existed almost half a billion years before human consciousness was ever even able to cast its observational, subjective eye over the phenomena of the world. Yet, we have already established that the subject-object relation is constitutive of existence itself; without the subject, the object is invisible and thus effectively non-existent. The fossil, what Meillasoux will call, ‘The Arche-Fossil’ is the material evidence to repudiate the critical stance and to make us re-think correlationism: ‘”the arche-fossil” … [represents] not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar sense of the term ‘fossil’, but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality [think of the ammonites’ watery world!] or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life’.

 

The Ottoi Prolifica is a material instance of something – in itself – which existed before man could project its own identity and subjectivity upon all that exists outside itself, when all that existed were things in themselves and no human representations or approximations of these things. Meillasoux will go on to argue in a number of ways how philosophy can work towards understanding the thing in itself, to see the object and not the set of relations that constitute it for us as subjects. However, he admits that the ‘arche-fossil’ is not a solution to the problem of correlationism, but merely the material, factual evidence that correlationism is a problem. His solution to this will entail a number of manoeuvres that include arguing for a relinquishing of the orthodox notion of causality in favour of a purely contingent and chaotic world of events, as well as championing the ability of mathematics (this he gets from his mentor, Badiou) to access the primary qualities of things in themselves.

Henry Knight, the unfortunate aristocrat that Hardy has hanging from the very Devonian cliffs in which Mary Anning discovered so many important fossils could hardly have imagined that his imagined journey into the past would dramatise exactly what Meillasoux tells us could never happen. Knight is a witness to an ancestral time in which no witness existed. And yet, we know, like Ishmael, who laments his inability to know the whale from its structure, that Knight’s understanding of the ancestral past is entirely imaginary. According to correlationist thought, all of the stories we tell about our past, our environment, our evolutionary history are imaginary, in so far as we are caught within our pitifully limited human frames of knowledge, to which the ‘absolute’ or the being of the world and the universe is inaccessible. However, there sits the fossil; the Plesiosaur, the Ichtyosaur, the ammonite, and the Ottoi Prolifica, all silently and humbly acting as physical monuments to the contradiction of strictly correlationist thinking and to the potential to step outside it even if only in a speculative manner, to see, as Ishmael puts it, ‘precisely what the whale really looks like’.

So the next time you step into the Grant Museum and cast your eyes over the fossils, do not just think about our evolutionary past, or about the incredible forms of life that existed in the distant past, about tentacles and exoskeletons, pterosaurs and sea monsters; think about whether what we can ever know anything about these things at all. Think about the way their existence, for us, is defined only by our ability to construct elaborate and ultimately imaginary stories about them (albeit with some pretty great science!). And finally, think about how a 500 million year old worm gave Immanuel Kant, the most influential philosopher since the Ancient Greeks, something to think about himself.

 

Reading list:

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. by Alan Manford, New Edition (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, (London ; New York: Continuum, 2009).

Henry Gee, Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. ([S.l.]: Univ Of Chicago Press, 2015).

For more information on Meillasoux and the ‘speculative realist’ movement in philosophy, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism is available for free here: http://re-press.org/books/the-speculative-turn-continental-materialism-and-realism/

 

By Felicity Winkley

Last week I had an interesting discussion with a visitor to the Petrie museum about grave goods.

The shelves of the museum’s cases are lined with an impressive quantity of grave goods, representing a date range that covers most phases of Egyptian history. And this is hardly surprising. Of the 52 excavation locations detailed in a breakdown of Petrie’s field seasons between 1880 and 1938, over half (26) are cemeteries [1].

The finds brought back to UCL by Flinders Petrie after these excavations comprise a diverse assemblage of items. Like those observed in contemporary cultures elsewhere, the grave goods in the early stages of Ancient Egypt consisted of a mixture of every day objects, food items and those more unique or personal accessories, including combs, jewellery and trinkets.

By the Middle Kingdom, however, small figures starting appearing in tombs – early versions of what came to be known as Shabti – meaning ‘answerer’ – figures. By the end of the Middle Kingdom, shabtis were an established funerary tradition and thereafter became prevalent amongst groups of grave goods in one form or another for the remainder of Ancient Egypt’s history. Petrie’s collection contains (at least, according to the electronic catalogue) 1,841 shabtis.

Most commonly shown mummified, the shabti figures act as servants for the deceased in the afterlife – bringing them food or undertaking labour on their behalf, often as instructed in the inscription from the Book of the Dead with which they are decorated [2]. Because of this, they are regularly depicted holding hoes and with baskets on their back for collecting the farmed food for the deceased: see UC39708, a black steatite shabti from the 18th dynasty (c. 1500-1298 BC) and UC39765, a pottery shabti from the 19th (c. 1298 – 1187 BC).

The popularity of shabtis continued on throughout the New Kingdom, when they were increasingly being manufactured in faience: something explored by artist and archaeologist Zahed Taj-Eddin in the current exhibition ‘Nu’ Shabtis Liberation, in which 80 modern shabtis have escaped their enslavement to pursue their own hobbies amongst the Petrie’s cases [2].

So the visitor and I had plenty to talk about.

Then she asked me ‘When did grave goods stop?’

Her husband promptly answered ‘When Christianity was introduced’, but in fact this answer is not quite so straightforward. Firstly, there is no neat way of prescribing a date to the introduction of Christianity, and secondly, contemporary studies would shy away from using burial practice, especially solely grave goods, as a direct reflection of culture.

In Egypt, Christianity first appeared during the Roman rule – which was established after Mark Antony and Queen Cleopatra VII were defeated by the future emperor Augustus in 30 BC (leaving Egypt annexed to Rome as the wealthiest province in its empire) – but it was not adopted seamlessly.

The conquering Romans had left Egyptian religion well alone, indeed had many even incorporated its traditions into their own belief systems, with several Roman emperors completing Egyptian temples during their tenure. Consequently when St Mark the Evangelist purportedly chose to establish the Church of Alexandria – one of the original three main episcopal sees of Christianity – around 33-43 AD, it was not to a people who welcomed it with open arms. Christians were persecuted for their faith until 313 when Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan to prevent their mistreatment within the Roman empire – but hereafter, worship of Egyptian deities still continued: archaeological evidence in the form of graffiti at the Temple of Isis at Philae shows that worship continued there into the 6th century.

In England, recent work from Prof. Christopher Scull points towards a cessation of grave goods in the Anglo-Saxon culture shortly before the end of the 7th century, but again – this is not necessarily a hard-and-fast indication that thereafter these burials were all Christian, instead this might have been a response to broader cultural or economic influences [4]. Current approaches warn strongly that there is in fact no evidence to support prescriptive definitions of either Christian or pagan burials during the Early Medieval period. Indeed by the 11th century, grave goods were commonly included in Christian internments as a way of marking out members of the religious community [5].

And so the ‘Question of the Week’ goes almost unanswered – but does give some good food for thought on our approaches to burial practice and material culture.

Lastly, the subject of grave goods is an interesting one in the context of my own research. Until the change in legislation in 1997, grave goods were not classified as Treasure as they did not display animus revertendi, the phrase used to describe an ‘intent to return’ on the part of whoever had buried the treasure in the first place. Unlike a hoard which is buried with the intention of retrieving, grave goods are donated to the dead and intended to be left intact in the grave – so consequently were not protected as Treasure Trove before the law was updated.

As such the incredible grave goods from Sutton Hoo, that nationally recognisable Anglo Saxon ship burial, were only saved for the public benefit through the benevolence of the landowner Mrs Pretty, who would have been quite within her legal rights to see the artefacts piece by piece should she have wished to. (For more on the Treasure definition, see my previous blog here [6])

 ‘Nu’ Shabtis Liberation is on at the Petrie Museum until 18 October.

[1] http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/petriedigsindex.html

[2] http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/articles/e/egyptian_shabti_figures.aspx

[3] http://events.ucl.ac.uk/event/event:k36-i0gmqt30-fs2rn/nushabtis-liberation

[4] A. Bayliss, J. Hines, K Høilund Nielsen, G. McCormac and C. Scull (2013) Anglo-Saxon graves and grave goods of the sixth and seventh centuries AD: a chronological framework. Leeds, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 33

[5] Gilchrist, R. (2005) Requiem for a Lost Age British Archaeology 84 http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba84/feat2.shtml

[6] https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2013/01/14/the-staffordshire-hoard-defining-treasure/

 

 

by Stacy Hackner

“Sharks have eyes and mouths, and we hear all about their ability to smell blood. How do they hear?” Once again, a visitor had me stumped. Despite their having only tiny holes for external ears, sharks actually have very acute hearing, I later learned. Like in humans and other mammals, the shark’s inner ear has tiny hairs called stereocilia that vibrate, which is interpreted by the brain as sound. The stereocilia are arranged in three fluid-filled tubes, allowing the shark to hear in multiple directions. (These tubes are also responsible for the shark’s sense of balance.)

Sharks can hear low frequencies much better than humans, ranging from 10-800 Hertz (for reference, humans can hear between 25-16,000 Hertz), and can hear prey up to 800 feet away. In combination with their formidable sense of smell and speed, this makes them fearsome predators. (The big ones, at least.)

Sources:

Shark Trust

Sharks Interactive 

By Felicity Winkley

Two American tourists who visited the Petrie last week spotted a pattern amongst the architectural sculpture and stelae gallery – a recurrence of a cross shaped symbol with a looped top, popping up in rows of hieroglyphs or in the hands of a god or pharaoh. They asked what it was, and what it meant? The first question is easy to answer, the second far less so.

The symbol is known as an ankh, and can be used as a stand-alone symbol or as a hieroglyphic character for the same syllable, for example in the name Tut-ankh-amun. It is widely thought to symbolise life. Therefore, in the case of Tutankhamun, the name can be translated as the Living Image of Amun, and when written you see the ankh symbol towards the end of the name, as follows:

The Ankh appears on the Rosetta Stone, the hieroglyphic content of which was translated in 1822 by a French scholar called Jean-François Champollion. In reference to Ptolemy V, it is shown in a group of three symbols that recurs frequently in or after the names of pharaohs or their households – ankh, wedjeh, seneb  – meaning life, prosperity, health.

But why was this the symbol chosen to represent life?  When Thomas Inman published Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism in 1869, he interpreted the loop of the handle as female, and the three prongs of the cross as male – together forming a union that suggested fertility and the origins of life. Since then, many scholars have relinquished the female element from the sign altogether, and solely linked it with the male sexual organ and therefore the source of life. These interpretations are strengthened by links between the ankh and similarly penis sheaths, although there are arguments about which came first, and whether indeed the effect was deliberate or just coincidental! Even Petrie himself, however, noted similarities between the ankh and a fisherman’s girdle! [1]

For Gordon and Schwabe, writing in 2004, the ankh, djed, and was symbols are derived from the importance of cattle in ancient Egyptian society, and are taken as representations of this. Accordingly, the shape of the ankh is interpreted as the cross-section of the thoracic vertebra of a bull [2]. But can this really be the case? What do you think? Why not look out for the ankh on your next visit to the Petrie Museum.

 

[1] Petrie, William Flinders (1892) Medum

[2] Gordon, Andrew Hunt and Schwabe, Calvin W (2004). The Quick and the Dead: Biomedical Theory in Ancient Egypt 

 

TAXONOMIES OF BONES AND POTS: THE PETRIE POPS UP AT THE GRANT MUSEUM

On the 13^th of February, objects and ideas from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology “popped-up” in the neo-Victorian surrounds of the Grant Museum of Zoology in an event that sought to explore some of the ways in which archaeologists and biologists both engage in the act of classification and taxonomy. I attended this event in the guise of ‘Student Engager’, with the intention of sharing with visitors my own research on Darwinian evolution and literature. More on this later, but for now, it is perhaps a good idea to examine the procedure of taxonomy itself, as it relates specifically to biology and archaeology.

Taxonomy (from the Greek ‘taxis’ meaning ‘order and ‘nomos’ meaning ‘knowledge’) refers broadly to the act of (unsurprisingly) the ordering of knowledge and to the examination of the principles that underlie these logically ordered schemata. It is this process of ordering that the proponents of both ancient Egyptian archaeology and zoology practice – albeit in subtly different ways.

Taxonomy in biology, as we understand it now, is widely considered to derive from the work of the Swedish 18^th Century naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. His seminal work in taxonomy, most famously given expression in Systema Naturae (1735), has bequeathed to us a method of biological classification, the finer details of which are now scientifically inaccurate, that to some extent lives on in popular thought (think of the game “Animal, Plant, or Mineral”) and whose basic outline persists in biology to this day. Linnaeus divided the natural world into three distinct types or ‘Kingdoms’, animal, plant, and mineral, and divided each of these into classes, with those categories dividing in turn into orders, families, genera, and species.

Regnum Animale – Systema Naturae
Click to zoom

Today, biological classification requires a more complex, nuanced system, in which there are six ‘kingdoms’, subsumed under the category of three ‘domains’ of life and take into account another category of life within this schema, the phylum. Moreover, the Linnaen classificatory system has given way to the Darwinian ‘Tree of Life’ as the dominant visual representation of the natural world, as evidenced by the current exhibition in the British Library that examines the nature of the visual representation of science: one installation in particular allows us to explore with touchscreen techonology, in great detail, the natural world through navigating this ‘Tree of Life’ and has a profoundly disorienting effect on our image of our human selves as the centre or pinnacle of the natural world. Homo sapiens in this model occupy an obscure, diminutive branch amongst the great, entangled, and monstrously abundant foliage of other species.

‘Tree of Life’ – Origin of Species, 1859

Yet despite the insistence of the dynamic, non-hierarchical schema of the Darwinian ‘Tree of Life’, the basic hierarchical ranking of Linnaean taxonomy persists (necessarily) in contemporary biology. Without this “ordering” of knowledge, with its embedded hierarchies and rankings, biological classification would be a disordered chaos. How then does this taxonomic procedure play out in other fields, distinct from biology?

While the significance of taxonomy is evident (and its history well known) in biology, the taxonomic aspects of archaeology are perhaps not as widely appreciated. The case of Flinders Petrie, the founder of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, provides us with a particularly apposite opportunity to excavate the function and significance of taxonomic classification in archaeology. Amongst Petrie’s most crucial contributions to archaeology are his schematic, chronological sequences of ancient Egyptian pottery. Petrie, faced with an abundance of predynastic pottery, collected along the Nile at various locations, needed a method of placing these pots in chronological order. Unlike the distinctly un-scientific methods of some of Petrie’s predecessors for whom the act of archeology was partially mythic in its reconstruction of the past, Petrie paid specifically close attention to the morphology of the objects with which he was faced and treated these morphologies as, what we call today, data-sets. Based on the assumption that the morphologies of pottery changed over time (in an almost evolutionary fashion), Petrie was able, via a complex mathematical process, to systematize and sequence the chronological order creating, in effect, a taxonomical method of dating pots. Both Petrie’s skill as a mathematician and diligence as an archaeologist is underlined here as, today, this statistical approach is undertaken using computers only – the complex arithmetic required simply taking too long for humans. The consequences of Petrie’s methodology – what is now called seriation – on the discipline of archaeology were and still are profound. The process is an important method in contemporary archeology and, in particular, it revolutionized our understanding of the timeline of Egyptian history, all through his taxonomic analysis of pottery.

https://twitter.com/LatentLaziness/status/434023358943207424

It was these very histories and methods of taxonomy in biology and archaeology that provided the crucial link between the Petrie and Grant Museums, and in turn provided the subject matter and theme of the event which I attended. Visitors were invited to engage in a number of taxonomic activities: reconstructing the shattered sequence of Flinders Petrie’s classification of pots, re-connecting and correctly identifying the scattered skeletal remains of a gorilla, and placing ancient Egyptian pots in their correct chronological order. These acts of reconstruction and identification, of the re-assembling of broken sequences and structures, stress the importance of taxonomy and classification in both biology and archaeology – disciplines whose methods, goals, and data-sets overlap in the fields of anthropology and osteo-archaeology. Moreover, it invites the participant to engage in the very ordering of knowledge out of disorder that underlies the procedure of taxonomy (albeit without the complex statistical mathematics). By the same token, taking part in a re-construction allows us to consider the implications of breaking up and disrupting these structure, of the deconstruction of systems of ordered classification.

My own research as a PhD student in UCL explores the way in which reading the work of Charles Darwin can provide us with new critical and theoretical insight into works of literature – and how reading works of literature have a reciprocal effect on our readings of Darwin. I referred to the Darwinian ‘Tree of Life’ earlier in this blog and it is to this I return now. Previously, I suggested that the tree model of life provided us with a more nuanced and dynamic method of ‘ordering’ our knowledge of the natural world than that of the Linnaean classificatory system. This view of the natural world, I stated, was profoundly decentring: homo sapiens are removed from our self-appointed place at the top of the hierarchy of species. And yet, does Linnaeus specifically place humans at the top of a hierarchy? Looking at the table of species published in Systema Naturae, there is a distinct echo of the deliberate subordination of all animals to the supremacy of man that has occurred in older visual and conceptual models of the natural world. Linnaeus’ table puts us (‘anthropomorpha’) at the top of the table, bestowing us with the title of “Number 1”. This repeats the schema that has been passed down through Western thought since Aristotle in the Scala Naturae, or the “Chain of Being” in which humans existed only below God in the grand hierarchy of all species. In this context, Darwin’s arboreal structuring of the natural world, with the human race being afforded no greater a position than a mouse or a mollusc is defiantly radical, shunning the accepted wisdom of all naturalist and biological thought since Ancient Greece. Moreover, the categories in Darwin’s model of life, the taxonomic leaves that sit upon the branches of genetic connection, are themselves unstable and subject to constant change.

Chain of Being – Rhetorica Christiana 1579

 

Darwin himself, writing in The Origin of Species in 1859 wrote:

 

“Naturalists try to arrange the species, genera, and families in each class, on what is called the Natural System. But what is meant by this system? Some authors look at it merely as a scheme for arranging together those living objects which are most alike, and for separating those which are most unlike; or as an artificial means for enunciating, as briefly as possible general propositions …”

 

Darwin, it seems, wishes to question the very substance and authority of this natural system, inaugurated by Linnaeus. For him, it is a necessary evil – an unwanted and ‘artificial’ ossification of the dynamism and change inherent in biological life that is nevertheless required for order and brevity in biology.

 

Yet, he goes further in his critique of classificatory systems:

 

“…we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species…”

 

The term species for Darwin is an arbitrary linguistic imposition on an organic form that by definition is never stable and always in a state of flux. He, like those who criticize the worst vagaries of cultural, linguistic, and philosophical postmodernism, sees in this biological relativism something to be maligned – a state of existential flux that results only in the melancholia of unstable and incomplete knowledge. Yet, in this he sees the prospect of an end to a “vain search”: the search for “essence”, linguistic, philosophical, and biological. Rather, Darwin would assert, we should instead attend to the ‘entangled bank’ of differences, to which he refers towards the end of Origin of Species, that make up the natural world rather than vainly trying to categorise and essentialise all of organic existence.

What if anything, does this literary critical digression of mine have to do with the taxonomical procedures of Flinders Petrie? Or, indeed, with his chronological series of pots? It might be worth asking, instead, what do Petrie’s series of pots tell us about the humans that made them? Or indeed about the relationship these humans had to the form of the pots that they created? It is my job as a literary critic to focus on ‘difference’ in literature and art; to attend in detail to the specific and subjective detail of single works of culture and their relationships with history, with other works of art, with texts, and with the individuals that created them. Taxonomy, the ordering of knowledge, on the other hand has a tendency to subordinate difference at the hands of “order”. On an instrumental level, this ordering process is vital for biology to operate – we could not simply throw our hands up give in to the desire to say that, say, tigers are contingent and temporary balls of matter in a state of constant flux and, therefore, should not be named! Yet, when it comes to the creative products of human hands and minds, there is an ethical dimension that should be attended to: to subordinate difference in art and culture is to subordinate individual difference in human life.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, and a colleague and acquaintance of Petrie, who worked at UCL in the early 20^th C saw in the science of taxonomy, underlined by a misreading of Darwinian evolution and heredity, the potential to categorise and order human society according to his terms. He differentiated between the European races and the ‘lower races’ of man, creating, in effect, a taxonomy of human life. Not only is this scientifically incorrect, but the very act of naming and of creating order in doing so does a violence to those whom it names – restricting their existence to a category in which variance and difference within that group cannot be registered and asserting an unquestioned hierarchy of races, similar to that of the Systema Naturae. A distinctive passage from Galton’s work Hereditary Genius elucidates his views on the hierarchies of life:

“The natural ability of which this book mainly treats, is such as a modern European possesses in a much greater average share than men of the lower races. There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races”

Galton is considered to have inaugurated the pseudo-scientific practice of eugenics, a discipline which espoused the improvement of human ‘stock’, the creation of a ‘race of sane men’, through selective breeding and other methods, the very name of which, today, can only be used in pejorative terms due to its racist foundations and invidious implications in the 20^th Century.

These are the dangers of taxonomy when applied, misguidedly and without reflection, to human culture. Certainly, it is not my argument that taxonomy or order is inherently wrong. It was, however, my intention at the event held in the Grant Museum on the 13th of February to try and disrupt and disorder the usual ways in which we think about taxonomy in all fields.

Interestingly, Darwin, a scientist, like Galton, gives us an elegant means of resisting the worst vagaries of taxonomical essentialism. However it is only through a detailed and sensitive reading of Darwin’s writing that this can emerge from his texts. In other words, in order to see Darwin as holding ambivalent and philosophically interesting views on taxonomy and classification, it was necessary to ignore the taxonomical classification of Darwin as “Scientist” and “Biologist” and instead attend to the specific literary detail of his work.

Works cited and further reading (in no particular order):

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. by Gillian Beer, New edition (OUP Oxford, 2008).

Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, (London: Macmillan, 1892).

Debbie Challis, The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (London: Routledge, 1989)

Movement: An Interdisciplinary Experience

Friday, May 23; 18:30-20:00 

UCL Art Museum & Other Spaces

Movement: through time and space, across landscapes, inside our bodies. Join the Student Engagers for an evening exploring aspects of movement inspired by the Octagon Gallery’s Knowledge in Motion exhibit. Using UCL’s gallery and museum spaces, we investigate movements internal and external, mental and physical, historical and contemporary. Drinks and discussion to follow.

This event is free but places are limited. Please book here.

By Felicity Winkley

A visitor to the Petrie Museum recently asked me how the Egyptian working class men would have shaved. There are various razors in the Petrie collection, including UC40657, a copper alloy razor with a loop in the shape of a goose head, and UC3065A and B, two copper alloy razors from Saqqara, the principal cemetery in Memphis; the oldest recorded on the Petrie’s resource Digital Egypt date to the Old Kingdom, around 2686-2181 BC. But would the working classes have had access to metal blades like these? And if not, would they have found an alternative way of shaving?

As with much of the archaeological record – particularly where we rely upon contemporary written or art-historical accounts of societies – the working classes are under-represented in favour of the material cultures of the elite. In dynastic Egypt, we know from artefactual and art-historical evidence that the elite devoted a lot of energy to maintaining their appearance, with laborious cosmetic routines, and even curled their hair. By contrast, the priestly classes were often totally clean shaven, taking a razor to their bodies as well as their heads. Rahotep, an official during the Third Dynasty (around 2600 BC), is unusual in being pictured on official statuary sporting a moustache, some 5000 years before Movember was established!

But would everyone have had access to metal razors? It is widely acknowledged that there were professional traveling barbers working in ancient Egypt, so perhaps this was how most men were able to keep their beards trimmed, either by being visited by a barber or attending a barber’s shop, rather than owning their own personal razor.

For evidence of practices amongst those without access to metal, it might be useful to look at contemporary ethno-archaeological evidence from tribal communities, however the records are sparse. Flint or obsidian tools would have been an option should Stone Age man have wished to remain clean-shaven, and the fact that – as with most blades struck from a prepared core – they would have needed to be discarded after only a few uses puts me in mind of the disposable razors used by many today! Meanwhile, Roman textual evidence suggests plucking was an option for some men, perhaps used in combination with an exfoliant, as suggested in Martial’s Epigrams 9.5.4. in which he describes a male wine-server who his master wishes to be ‘kept a boy even though he is a man …who is kept beardless by having his hair smoothed away or plucked out by the roots’ (cited George 2002).

Lastly, we should return to the Petrie collection, in reference to UC40665 – a razor which has been interpreted as a ladies’ razor, with a handle shaped like the hippo goddess TaWeret, who represented childbirth and fertility. Evidently shaving was also considered a part of the cosmetic routine for women in ancient Egypt as well as men, and any consideration of the role of shaving in ancient society should not overlook them!

Cowley, K. and Vanoosthuyze, K. (2012) Insights into shaving and its impact on skin, British Journal of Dermatology 166 (Suppl. 1) pp. 6–12

George, M. (2002) Slave Disguise in Ancient Rome, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 23 (2) pp. 41-54