Archaeology News: 2026.01.22

The fragment of the colorful bowl originating in China. Courtesy Emil Aladjem, IAA. Excavators with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology made an unexpected discovery while excavating on Jerusalem’s Mt. Zion: a small porcelain bowl fragment painted with a short Mandarin Chinese inscription. With the excavation team on Mt. Zion typically uncovering material dating from the Second Temple (c. 516 BCE–70 CE) through Byzantine periods (c. 324–634 CE), a Ming Dynasty (14th–17th centuries) bowl was certainly not what they expected. This is not the first early Chinese porcelain discovered in Israel, but it is the oldest to feature writing. The enigmatic inscription reads, “We will forever keep the eternal spring.” FREE ebook: Islam in the Ancient World. Explore Islam’s biblical history and sites. Email(Required) REQUEST FREE BOOK DOWNLOAD EBOOK According to Joyce Leung, a Ph.D. student at Hebrew University who was not involved in the study, the inscription was likely meant as a blessing. The act of stamping the bottom of ceramic ware with such blessings was–and remains–a common practice in China. The team determined the bowl fragment dated between 1520 and 1570, although how it ended up in Jerusalem remains uncertain. Historic writings do, however, mention close ... Continue Reading...

“John answered them, ‘I baptize with water; but among you stands one whom you do not know, even he who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.’ This took place in Bethany beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing.” —John 1:26–28 In 2015, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee added the archaeological complex at Al-Maghtas, Jordan—dubbed the Biblical “Bethany beyond the Jordan”—to its World Heritage List. The site has been venerated as the place where John the Baptist baptized Jesus since the late Roman–early Byzantine periods, when early Christians began making pilgrimages to the area. An aerial view of the remains of a Byzantine-era monastery complex on a low hill at Al-Maghtas, Jordan. This area has been venerated by Christian pilgrims as “Bethany beyond the Jordan,” the place where John the Baptist baptized Jesus, since the Byzantine period. Photo: Jordan Tourism Board. Archaeological work conducted from 1996 to 2002 in modern Jordan about 7 miles north of the Dead Sea on the eastern shore of the Jordan River uncovered a number of Byzantine-period buildings. Near the bank of the river, archaeologists excavated a series of churches celebrating the site of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. About two miles east of this church complex lies a small hill called Tell el-Kharrar or Tel Mar Elyas (“Elijah’s Hill”—early Christian tradition also associated this site with the place where the prophet Elijah ascended to heaven in the Hebrew Bible). At Tell el-Kharrar, archaeologists excavated a Byzantine monastery. Chapels, monks’ hermitages, caves and large plastered pools were also discovered in this area. On UNESCO’s website, Al-Maghtas is referred to as “Baptism Site ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan,’” and the archaeological evidence discovered there “[testifies] to the religious character of the place.” UNESCO’s addition of Al-Maghtas to its World Heritage List is not without controversy, however. Another tradition places the baptismal site on the west bank of the Jordan River—in Israel. FREE ebook: Exploring Jordan: The Other Biblical Land. Delve into a legendary land rich with Biblical history. Email(Required) REQUEST FREE BOOK ... Continue Reading...

Where is Biblical Bethsaida? One contender is the site of et-Tell, a mile and a half north of the Sea of Galilee. Photo: Duby Tal and Moni Haramati, Albatross/Courtesy of Bethsaida Excavations. The ancient village of Bethsaida is believed to be located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, but where precisely the abandoned city lies remains a fiercely-debated question among scholars. Recent discoveries at the site of el-Araj have called into question the decades-old claim that et-Tell on the eastern shore of the Jordan River is this lost Biblical city. Along with Jerusalem and Capernaum, Bethsaida is frequently mentioned in the Gospels. When Jesus was first calling his disciples, he traveled to Galilee and found there Philip, who is described as being of Bethsaida along with Peter and Andrew (John 1:43-44). The town—including its nearby shore—is identified as the location where Jesus performed some of his most indelible miracles. Here he led a blind man away from the village, restored his sight, and instructed the man not to reenter the town nor to tell anyone of the miracle he had performed (Mark 8:22–26). Bethsaida is also said to be the fishing village where Jesus fed the masses with just five loaves and two fish (Luke 9:10–17; Mark 6:30–44). Discovering Biblical Bethsaida. Could a mosaic inscription at the site of El-Araj be the smoking gun archaeologists are looking for to determine the true location of biblical Bethsaida? Read More in this BHD article. A consortium of schools headed by the University of Nebraska, Omaha, claim to be excavating Biblical Bethsaida at the site of et-Tell on the east bank of the Jordan River and have published their findings as the Bethsaida Excavations Project since 1991. For years, director Rami Arav has asserted that et-Tell’s archaeological remains sync up with historical accounts of the ancient village, including ancient Jewish historian Josephus’s report that under Philip the Tetrarch (one of Herod the Great’s sons), the town was improved, “… both by the number of inhabitants it contained, and its other grandeur” (Antiquities 18:2). In 30 C.E., Philip had renamed the city Julias after Livia-Julia, Roman emperor Augustus’s wife and mother of Tiberius, the reigning emperor at the time. Arav cites occupation and substantial growth of the town throughout the Roman period as evidence corroborating Josephus’s account.1 FREE ebook: The Galilee Jesus Knew Email(Required) REQUEST FREE BOOK ... Continue Reading...

The History Channel’s series Bible Secrets Revealed tackles the mysteries of the Bible. Consulting producer Dr. Robert Cargill, who is an archaeologist and assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa, has responded to Bible Secrets Revealed viewers’ questions throughout the series. Episode 3, “The Forbidden Scriptures,” aired on November 27, 2013. Learn more about the show and view a list of other episode summaries. Summary of Episode 3 by Dr. Robert Cargill Dr. Robert Cargill, professor and consulting producer This episode explores many ancient Jewish and Christian documents that didn’t make it into the Bible. Scholars refer to these documents as the “Pseudepigrapha” (books written under a false name) and the “Apocrypha” (which came to be understood as the “hidden books”). The episode asks why these books were excluded from the Bible. “The Forbidden Scriptures” Act 1: The Biblical Canon The episode begins by noting that both Judaism at the time of Christianity and early Christianity were incredibly diverse. In fact, when it came to “Scripture,” different Jewish and Christian groups revered different books as authoritative and canonical. We first explore the concept of canonization, asking how and why certain books made it into, or were banished from, the Bible. Particular attention was paid to the figure of Enoch and the books attributed to him. Enoch was an incredibly popular figure in the late Second Temple period, and yet the books attributed to Enoch were left out of what became most Jewish and Christian canons. Of course, those responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls loved Enoch and the literature associated with the Enochic tradition (like the Book of Jubilees). But many Christians do not realize that a part of 1 Enoch actually did make it into the Christian canon. Scholars recognize that verses 14-15 of the canonical Epistle of Jude actually quote from 1 Enoch 1:9. We can compare them below: Jude 14: Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones, Jude 15: to judge everyone, and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way, and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” The passage from which Jude claims that Enoch is quoting is actually a rough translation from the Book of Enoch: 1 Enoch 1:9: “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment upon all, and to destroy all the ungodly: And to convict all flesh of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” So despite the fact that the Book of Enoch was excluded from the biblical canon, it was so popular in the first century CE, that a part of it was retained in a quote from the Epistle of Jude. Because the Book of Enoch is so closely tied to events of canonical Book of Genesis 6:1-4, the episode suggests that 1 Enoch exists, in part, as ... Continue Reading...

Do the blue tzitzit strings of this traditional Jewish prayer shawl reflect the shade of blue in the Bible, called tekhelet in Hebrew? Evidence suggests the tekhelet that colored ancient blue tzitzit was sky-blue and derived from murex dye. In the Bible, a shade of blue called tekhelet was God’s chosen color for the ancient Israelites. Tekhelet drapes adorned Solomon’s Temple, and tekhelet robes were worn by Israel’s high priests. According to Baruch and Judy Taubes Sterman in “The Great Tekhelet Debate—Blue or Purple?” in the September/October 2013 issue of BAR, even ordinary Israelites “were commanded to tie one string of tekhelet to the corner fringes (Hebrew, tzitzit) of their garments as a constant reminder of their special relationship with God” (Numbers 15:38–39). The tradition of blue tzitzit still exists today. But what was the actual color of ancient tekhelet and blue tzitzit? Was it a shade of blue or was it closer to purple? Blue tzitzit and tekhelet-colored fabrics were widely worn and traded throughout the ancient Mediterranean, but by the Roman period, only the emperor could wear tekhelet. By the seventh century C.E., with the Islamic conquest of the Levant, the tekhelet’s source and method of manufacture were lost. FREE eBook: Life in the Ancient World. Craft centers in Jerusalem, family structure across Israel and ancient practices—from dining to makeup—through the Mediterranean world. Email(Required) REQUEST FREE BOOK ... Continue Reading...

The post Sculture del Museo Archeologico al Teatro Romano di Verona appeared first on American Journal of Archaeology. Continue Reading...

The post Colour Schemes in Roman Architecture: Aesthetics, Semantics, and Regional Appropriation appeared first on American Journal of Archaeology. Continue Reading...

The post From the Palatine to Pirro Ligorio: Architectural, Sculptural and Antiquarian Studies in Memory of Amanda Claridge (1949–2022) appeared first on American Journal of Archaeology. Continue Reading...

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The post The Sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite at Syme Viannou VII: The Greek and Roman Pottery, Volume 1 appeared first on American Journal of Archaeology. Continue Reading...

 A large Roman villa was uncovered in Oxfordshire. Credit: Red River Archaeology GroupThe complex was adorned with intricate painted plaster and mosaics and housed a collection of small, tightly coiled lead scrolls. The Red River Archaeology Group (RRAG), the organization responsible for coordinating the excavation, announced in a press release that these elements suggest that the site may have been used for rituals or pilgrimages.Francesca Giarelli, the Red River Archaeology Group project officer and the site director, told CNN that the villa likely had multiple levels. The Roman villa complex, spanning an impressive 1,000 square meters (or 10,800 square feet) on its ground floor alone, was likely a prominent landmark visible from miles away.“The sheer size of the buildings that still survive and the richness of goods recovered suggest this was a dominant feature in the locality if not the wider landscape,” says Louis Stafford, a senior project manager at RRAG, in the statement.Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading...

Today, Smallhythe Place in Kent is best known as a bohemian rural retreat once owned by the Victorian actress Ellen Terry and her daughter Edy Craig. As this month’s cover feature reveals, however, the surrounding fields preserve evidence of much earlier activity, including a medieval royal shipyard and a previously unknown Roman settlement (below, first image). Our next feature comes from the heavy clays of the Humber Estuary, where excavations sparked by theconstruction of an offshore windfarm have opened a 40km transect through northern Lincolnshire, with illuminating results (below, second image). We then take a tour of Iron Age, Roman, and medieval Winchester, tracing its evolution into a regional capital and later a royal power centre.Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading...

Tom Quad, Christ Church, Oxford University – image David BeardThe Oxford Experience summer school is held at Christ Church, Oxford. Participants stay in Christ Church and eat in the famous Dining Hall, that was the model for the Hall in the Harry Potter movies.This year there are twelve classes offered in archaeology.You can find the list of courses here… Continue Reading...

‘It was killing fields as far as the eye can see’ … the Latin-inscribed slabs crossing the site of the battle, which features in the British Museum show Legion.Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian‘Their heads were nailed to the trees’: what was life – and death – like for Roman legionaries?It was the defeat that traumatised Rome, leaving 15,000 soldiers slaughtered in a German field. As a major show explores this horror and more, our writer finds traces of the fallen by a forest near the RhineIt is one of the most chilling passages in Roman literature. Germanicus, the emperor Tiberius’s nephew, is leading reprisals in the deeply forested areas east of the Rhine, when he decides to visit the scene of the catastrophic defeat, six years before, of his fellow Roman, Quinctilius Varus. The historian Tacitus describes what Germanicus finds: the ghastly human wreckage of a supposedly unbeatable army, deep in the Teutoburg Forest. “On the open ground,” he writes, “were whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees.”Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading...

Schematic drawing of the relationship between climatic change and sociological, physical, and biological factors influencing infectious disease outbreaks.Credit: Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk1033A team of geoscientists, Earth scientists and environmental scientists affiliated with several institutions in Germany, the U.S. and the Netherlands has found a link between cold snaps and pandemics during the Roman Empire.In their project, reported in the journal Science Advances, the group studied core samples taken from the seabed in the Gulf of Taranto and compared them with historical records.Researchers learn about climatic conditions in the distant past by analyzing sediment built up from river deposits. Tiny organisms that are sensitive to temperature, for example, respond differently to warm temperatures than to cold temperatures and often wind up in such sediment. Thus, the study of organic remains in sediment layers can reveal details of temperatures over a period of time.Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading...

My last post was a review of the excellent and very interesting exhibition Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia’ at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend on sea. The exhibition provided a fascinating look at the archaeological, landscape and life of southern Egypt and norther Sudan, prior to Lake Nasser. Although the accompanying information panels included a wealth of interesting archaeological details I did note one possible misidentification in the paintings. Painting number 45 shows a place named ‘Marea’, with vaulted ruins overlooking a watery landscape and a riverbank in the background. The painting and associated information are presented below: Sorrell’s painting number 45, identified as Marea, near Alexandria (Author photograph). “It is thought that this scene depicts Marea. Marea was a bustling port city and pilgrimage centre near Alexandria, thriving during the Late Antique and Early Islamic periods. Excavations have revealed as well-preserved basilica, bathhouses, wine-presses and a necropolis, highlighting the city’s importance as a hub of trade, religion and daily life.”Sign for painting 45 at the Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia’ exhibition, Beecroft Art Gallery , Southend on sea, 2025. The location of the Alexandrian Marea, on a peninsula in Lake Maryut (Mareotis). The label suggests that this paintings shows Marea, a town near Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. The Alexandrian Marea has recently been excavated by a Polish-Egyptian team and based on the report of Babraj (et al. 2014), the site is located on the south side of Lake Maryut (Mareotis) about 45 km south-west of Alexandria. The outline of the excavated buildings are clearly visible in the Google satellite imagery. Today the site is on an oddly right-angled peninsula projecting into the lake, but water levels and the lake extents are likely to have changed over time. Sorrell’s painting number 46, Marea, note the Nubian-style decoration on the buildings in the background. It proved impossible to remove the glare while keeping all the features of the painting visible (Author photograph). It would be quite surprising if Sorrell had painted the Alexandrian Marea. Most of his paintings relate to southern Egypt, almost a thousand miles away. Although the vaulted ruins in painting 45 could easily be Late Antique, the landscape behind them is not particularly Alexandrian. The desert is rather arid. I would expect more vegetation on Lake Maryut, and the colours of the landscape are darker. The buildings in the right background of painting 45 have the pointed corners also seen on Nubian houses in, for example, Sorrell’s painting (number 50) of Dabud. The Nubian-style buildings appear much more clearly in painting 46, which is also labelled Marea. The signage describes painting 46 in Sorrell’s words as ‘a posting-station on the riverbank’, which is unusual phrasing if he painted the Alexandrian Marea on the lakeshore. Sorrell’s location map, showing which paintings came from each site. ‘Maria’ is marked between Sabagura and Kalabsha. Unfortunately it was not possible to improve the image. (Author photograph) The solution appears in Sorrell’s map, which shows a place named ‘Maria’, associated with paintings 45 and 46, ... Continue Reading...

The Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend-on-sea, is currently showing an exhibition of paintings by local artist and archaeological illustrator, Alan Sorrell. Alan Sorrell featured in my earlier blog post and a small selection of his paintings were included in Southend Museum’s Wunderkammer exhibition, which I reviewed separately here. The new Beecroft Art Gallery exhibition is a much more extensive review of Sorrell’s Nubian paintings, created in southern Egypt and north Sudan in 1962 when he was commissioned by the Illustrated London News to record the UNESCO International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, in advance of the flooding of Lake Nasser behind the recently constructed Aswan High Dam. As a result the paintings in this exhibition reveal a long-vanished past. Although many of the temples were moved and can be visited in locations similar to their original position, their environment has inevitably changed. View of the facades of both temples at Abu Simbel, with the Great Temple of Ramesses II in the background and the smaller temple of Queen Nefertari, dedicated to Hathor in the foreground. (Author photograph). I visited the exhibition in June 2025 and its a fantastic exhibition of paintings that are rarely seen, but represent an important aspect of the history of archaeology. If you want to visit, the Beecroft Art Gallery is on Victoria Avenue, a short walk from Southend Victoria station (Liverpool Street Line) and a slightly longer walk from Southend Central station (Fenchurch Street line). The monuments of Nubia The exhibition begins with an introduction to Alan Sorrell and the UNESCO campaign, accompanied by a map made by Sorrell, showing the sites along the Nile from Thebes (Luxor) down to Semna in north Sudan. Each site name accompanied by a small sketch and numbers indicating which paintings came from there. The exhibition is organised as a down the Nile from south to north, beginning with an interesting painting identified as the temple of Hatshepsut from Semna West. I included the famous sketch of the outer defences of Buhen in my previous post about Alan Sorrell and his work, but this exhibition features another fantastic sketch of the walls of Buhen, this time from the external ditch (image below). Even in its damaged state, after over 3000 years of history, I would not like to mount an assault upon those walls! Sorrell’s painting of the walls of Buhen from the ditch. (Author photograph) The roll of famous sites continues with a series of watercolours of Abu Simbel, poster-child for the UNESCO campaign (top image). There are some fantastic paintings of the interior, and a matched pair of paintings of Abu Simbel in the daytime and Abu Simbel at night. There are two particularly fine images showing water lapping against the entrance of Derr temple and the Wadi es-Sebua temple pylon, so different from the relocated temples high above the lake. Wadi es-Sebua also represents the multi-layered history of the region, with a painting of the temple interior showing the Ramesside court and pylon, with its ... Continue Reading...

It’s been almost a year since I posted. A family crisis and intensive work have filled my time, but things are easing and I am intending to publish every two months going forward. In the last year I’ve been adapting to ArcGIS Pro, so expect some posts and videos about that in future. I’ve also been working on the Egypt Exploration Society’s Delta Survey Online web-map, which you can go and interact with at https://www.ees.ac.uk/our-cause/research/delta-survey.html. Just follow the last tab to the ‘Delta Survey Online’ (scroll down to the bottom of the page if you are on a handheld device) and view the data in the embed, or click through to the ArcGIS Online map to explore, analyse and export. The Asyut Region Project The location of the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi in Middle Egypt. (British War Office Survey of Egypt 1:25000 scale map of Asyut, from the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL), Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago). In 2017-19 I worked on the Asyut Region Project, looking at the archive of David George Hogarth’s excavations in 1906-7 at Asyut. I continued this research independtly after the end of the project and a paper from this work has recently been published. My 2024 article in Interdisciplinary Egyptology, ‘Resurrecting the Archive: Revitalising records of Hogarth’s excavations in the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi necropolis, Egypt 1906–1907’, proposes approximate locations for the tombs Hogarth excavated on the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi in 1906-7, based on his sketch-map, the descriptions in his Notebook and Diary and some judicious satellite-imagery-based detective work (Pethen 2024). You can read all about it at https://doi.org/10.25365/integ.2025.v4.1. During the course of this research and while working on my previous article on the Hogarth’s pottery corpus (Pethen 2021), I noted that it was possible to track Hogarth’s movement across the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi from the combination of his Diary and Notebook entries and the approximate locations of the tombs he excavated. It was not possible to visualise the progress of the excavation in the published articles, but it can be visualised in an ArcGIS Story Map. The sketch map of Hogarth’s excavations at the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi. British Museum Dept of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, Correspondence 1907 A-K, 321 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence). Dating Hogarth’s tombs by discovery or excavation date Before creating a Story Map showing how Hogarth moved across the Gebel between December 1906 and February 1907, it was necessary to cross-reference the records in Hogarth’s Notebook and Diary to determine when he first found each of the tombs in the sketch-map. I used the earliest dated reference to a tomb in either document. Given the somewhat variable nature of Hogarth’s recording (for more details of which see Pethen 2021; 2024), this means that the date associated with the tombs is sometimes the date that Hogath first noted the tomb, and sometimes the first day of the excavation. The table below shows the dates first associated with ... Continue Reading...

In July’s post, I reviewed The Telegraph’s assertion that the Pitt-Rivers Museum had been ‘hiding’ objects that women were not supposed to see. You can find an archived version of the original Telegraph article here. The article is superficially about the exclusion of an object from public display (including digital display in collections online) to explicitly prevent a certain group (in this case women) from seeing that object. It’s main argument has been largely refuted in this article by the Pitt Rivers Museum, and in two threads about digital and in person access byMadeline Odent (@oldenoughtosay), on the platform formerly known as Twitter. In my previous post, I looked at the misunderstandings about museums that underpinned The Telegraph’s article. A careful reading of the article reveals that neither women’s access to the Igbo mask, nor the somewhat more philosophically interesting subject of who should be able to access taboo or sensitive objects, is its real theme! It’s primary purpose is to denigrate the Pitt Rivers Museum’s policies on cultural sensitivity, and the decolonisation process of which they form a part. So far so boring and predictable, but what is interesting about this article are the methods it uses to manipulate the reader. Reverse Outlining To take a really close look at the Telegraph article, I printed it out and numbered the paragraphs. Then on the left side of the paper I noted the points of each paragraph, and on the right side, details that jumped out at me about how the article was written. If you want to see what that looks like, I’ve posted images of the results below. I have blurred the human remains in two of the images so those who do not wish to see are not accidentally exposed. Annoyingly, the final sentence of the article has strayed onto a fourth page, but it is functionally the end of the previous paragraph. For copyright purposes please note that I reproduce these images of the marked-up article here, without ‘alt-text’ of the article content, as a means to criticism and review. They are not meant for in-depth reading, but merely as a visual guide to how I analysed the article. For those with an interest in academic writing techniques, I used a process known as ‘Reverse Outlining‘ in analysing the Telegraph article. If you want to see more about how it works, you can follow the previous link to Pat Thompson’s incredibly useful patter blog, or this article by Rachael Cayley. First page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article. I have blurred the image of the tsantsa. Second page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article. Third page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article. I have blurred out the human remains in the photograph at the top. The fourth page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article, only includes one sentence from the article. Womens rights The article is framed as an expose of a threat to women’s rights in the form of restrictions placed on the public display ... Continue Reading...

In my previous post, I discussed a Telegraph article, published on 17 June 2024 which criticised the Pitt Rivers Museum for ‘hiding’ objects that women were not supposed to see. You can find an archived version of the original Telegraph article here. While Madeline Odent (@oldenoughtosay) on Twitter and the Pitt Rivers Museum (in this article) rebutted most of the claims made by the Telegraph, it would not have been nearly as effective without certain gross misunderstandings of what museums are and how they work. I previously wrote here about how the redisplay of certain Wellcome Museum galleries was subject to similar misunderstandings in 2022, but it seems these misunderstandings continue. They may even be more intense in Wunderkammer-style museum, like the Pitt Rivers, which is as Madeline Odent puts it, ‘somewhat unusual among modern museums in that it has largely kept to its Victorian roots of ‘cram as many artefacts as possible into each display case’. If you’re unfamiliar with the PRM, it’s somewhat unusual among modern museums in that it has largely kept to its Victorian roots of ‘cram as many artefacts as possible into each display case’— madeline boOoOoOodent (@oldenoughtosay) June 25, 2024 Madeline Odent’s thread about visiting the Pitt-Rivers Museum, with her succinct description of its ‘Wunderkammer-style’. What is a museum? Museums, especially archaeological museums, often combine the function of object warehouse, educational institute, and art gallery. As I described in my post about the Wellcome Museum, the latter two functions are what we experience when we visit the museum galleries, or an exhibition of objects from the museum (either in the same building or elsewhere). The publicly open galleries and exhibitions do not constitute the whole Museum. They are simply the part of the museum that is prepared for public visitation with carefully curated objects and relevant signage. This is more obvious when we visit a museum with a limited number of artefacts carefully displayed, but even then I suspect many people assume that that which is on display constitutes the entire museum. In this respect, the Wunderkammer-style of the Pitt Rivers, is a disadvantage, because the very large number of items on display itself suggests that the entire collection is visible. In fact, the visible artefacts in publicly open galleries and exhibition spaces only ever constitute a relatively small proportion of any museum’s holdings! The Igbo mask, the focus of the Telegraph’s article, has not been ‘hidden’. It was never on display, along with much of the rest of the collection! The Collection The majority (exact proportions vary) of any museum’s holdings are held in storage. Together the objects in storage and those on display are described as the museum’s collection. Some of these objects are not on display because they are fragile or would be at risk in some way. Some are sufficiently similar to objects on display that including them would clutter display cases without adding further interest or value. Others are simply extremely boring to any but dedicated specialists. The holdings ... Continue Reading...