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World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: a characterization introduces the range, history and significance of the archaeological collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” – the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived. LANDE: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire. Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.
Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objectsare all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of BeninCity, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
Presents the story of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation. This title contains a philosophical and ethical inquiry into a people faced with the end of their way of life.
For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues in The Museum on the Roof of the World that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book is a powerful account of the museums created by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans and the nationalist agendas that have played out in them. Harris begins with the British public’s first encounter with Tibetan culture in 1854. She then examines the role of imperial collectors and photographers in representations of the region and visits competing museums of Tibet in India and Lhasa. Drawing on fieldwork in Tibetan communities, she also documents the activities of contemporary Tibetan artists as they try to displace the utopian visions of their country prevalent in the West, as well as the negative assessments of their heritage common in China. Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.
World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: a characterization introduces the range, history and significance of the archaeological collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. In 29 newly-commissioned essays written by a specialist team, the volume explores more than 136,000 artefacts from 145 countries, from the Stone Age to the modern period, and from England to Easter Island. Pioneering a new approach in museum studies, this landmark volume is an essential reference work for archaeologists around the world, and a unique introduction to the archaeological collections of one of the world's most famous museums.
‘Authenticity’ and authentication is at the heart of museums’ concerns in displays, objects, and interaction with visitors. These notions have formed a central element in early thought on culture and collecting. Nineteenth century-explorers, commissioned museum collectors and pioneering ethnographers attempted to lay bare the essences of cultures through collecting and studying objects from distant communities. Comparably, historical archaeology departed from the idea that cultures were discrete bounded entities, subject to divergence but precisely therefore also to be traced back and linked to, a more complete original form in de (even) deeper past. Much of what we work with today in ethnographic museum collections testifies to that conviction. Post-structural thinking brought about a far-reaching deconstruction of the authentic. It came to be recognized that both far-away communities and the deep past can only be discussed when seen as desires, constructions and inventions. Notwithstanding this undressing of the ways in which people portray their cultural surroundings and past, claims of authenticity and quests for authentication remain omnipresent. This book explores the authentic in contemporary ethnographic museums, as it persists in dialogues with stakeholders, and how museums portray themselves. How do we interact with questions of authenticity and authentication when we curate, study artefacts, collect, repatriate, and make (re)presentations? The contributing authors illustrate the divergent nature in which the authentic is brought into play, deconstructed and operationalized. Authenticity, the book argues, is an expression of a desire that is equally troubled as it is resilient.
Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook makes accessible a full range of theoretical and applied approaches to the study of material culture, and the place of materiality in social theory, presenting current thinking about material culture from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies.
Between the 1880s and 1980s, British excavations at locations across Egypt resulted in the discovery of hundreds of thousands of ancient objects that were subsequently sent to some 350 institutions worldwide. These finds included unique discoveries at iconic sites such as the tombs of ancient Egypt's first rulers at Abydos, Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s city of Tell el-Amarna and rich Roman Era burials in the Fayum. Scattered Finds explores the politics, personalities and social histories that linked fieldwork in Egypt with the varied organizations around the world that received finds. Case studies range from Victorian municipal museums and women’s suffrage campaigns in the UK, to the development of some of the USA’s largest institutions, and from university museums in Japan to new institutions in post-independence Ghana. By juxtaposing a diversity of sites for the reception of Egyptian cultural heritage over the period of a century, Alice Stevenson presents new ideas about the development of archaeology, museums and the construction of Egyptian heritage. She also addresses the legacy of these practices, raises questions about the nature of the authority over such heritage today, and argues for a stronger ethical commitment to its stewardship. Praise for Scattered Finds 'Scattered Finds is a remarkable achievement. In charting how British excavations in Egypt dispersed artefacts around the globe, at an unprecedented scale, Alice Stevenson shows us how ancient objects created knowledge about the past while firmly anchored in the present. No one who reads this timely book will be able to look at an Egyptian antiquity in the same way again.' Professor Christina Riggs, UEA
Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped behind glass cases. By focusing on the dynamic histories of museum collections, new research reveals their pivotal role in shaping a wide range of social relations. Over time and across space the interactions between these artefacts and the people and institutions who made, traded, collected, researched and exhibited them have generated complex networks of material and social agency. In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical frameworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present. Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies. This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management.