Identity of Secret Fan – Axe no Questions!

I see an old friend has been blogging about axes in the Manchester Museum collection under the nom-de-plume (or is it nom de courrier electronique?) Blingo von Trumpenstein. He is mad keen on axes and very appreciative that we showed him some material in our collection some time ago.

Stone axes are going in the Ancient Worlds displays and in fact we haven’t shown some of them for many years.  Dr Chantal Conneller of the University’s Archaeology Department will cover this topic specifically in her section and we’re putting in some of Stephen Welsh’s axes with ornate binding and rafia sleeves from the Living Cultures collection. This may be how the best ones would have been shown ‘in public’ in the British Stone Age. This ties-in with research interests of previous curators like William Boyd Dawkins and Wilfrid Jackson who collected and published axes and other prehistoric material. These former curators also feature in the new displays and incidentally are in the chapter on the archaeology collections in the Museum Guide Book which is in its final edit.

I trust it will not tease our readers too much if I say that the identity of the mysterious von Trumpenstein is known to us but we refrain from revealing his identity lest it cause him any embarrassment.

We greatly appreciate his enthusiasm for our collections but as Romanists we prefer soubriquets like Abscondius Maximus or Enibrius Robustus…