Civilisations Big Saturday and Other (Big) Topics

Family enjoying the Roman artefacts at the Civilisations Big Saturday

A couple of weeks ago, Manchester Museum held one of its regular Big Saturday public events on the theme of civilisations. Intended to tie-in with the BBC documentary presented by Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, we showed objects representing a number of ancient and more recent civilisations from Manchester Museum’s rich collections. These included particular favourites of mine the Etruscans, as well as the Indus Civilisation (presented by Stephen Welsh, Curator of Living Cultures) and China. We also wanted to use this as an opportunity to publicise our new temporary exhibition Nature Through Roman Eyes, which opens on 6th April so we showed a selection of Roman exhibits. In this we were most ably assisted by two Classics undergraduate students, Lucy and Amy.

Etruscan inscription from Pompeii in Manchester Museum’s collection

I showed the Etruscan pieces, one of them an example of the somewhat rarer longer inscriptions that have survived from antiquity. Something like 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions are known, of which 4,000 are fragmentary and most of the remaining 13,000 inscriptions are short, often consisting of just a name, such as the father or the mother, his or age, the public office held and formulaic phrases. An Etruscan vocabulary, in so far as we presently understand is only 250 words long (Brian Fagan The 70 Greatest Mysteries of the Ancient World).  Added to this is the mystery of where the Etruscans came from, with plausible suggestions that they originated in what is now Turkey. The region of Etruria in northern Italy is named after them. Perhaps the story of Aeneas and the founding of Rome isn’t so legendary after all.

There is some support for this apparently from DNA evidence, similarities with languages such as Hurrian and the relatively equal role that women seem to have enjoyed Etruscan society. The Romans were scandalised that Etruscan women drank wine in public, for instance, and Pliny the Elder writes that women could be fined for drinking wine during the time of the Republic. In antiquity, the Etruscans were once powerful and influential, so much so that the first kings of Rome were Etruscan. They were particularly skilled in haruspicy, the inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals in order to divine the will of the gods. One of the last people to understand Etruscan was the Emperor Claudius (AD 41-54) who had an Etruscan wife.

Facial reconstruction of an Etruscan woman in Manchester Museum’s collection

On my table I posed the question: whatever happened to the Etruscans? Of course, they were absorbed into the expanding Roman Republic. They weren’t slaughtered or dispossessed of their lands but became allies of Rome, and gradually Etruscan, as a language, disappeared. It is a salutary reminder of the loss of linguistic diversity in the modern as well as the ancient world. An article by Paul Bignell in The Independent on Sunday  (13/12/2009) drew attention to the fact that of 6,500 languages spoken in the world, half are expected to disappear by the end of the century. Ninety-five per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by just five per cent of its population. If you take the example of the Rai tribe in Nepal – discussed in the article -children and young people are educated in Nepalese, and as the elders die off with the passing of time this ancient language will disappear. A linguist and academic at the University of British Columbia, Prof Mark Turin, has been director of the World Oral Literature Project since 2009, which aims to record threatened languages, many of them without a written tradition, before they disappear forever. Were it not for the fact that Etruscans were literate, we would have far less understanding of their language than we now have, and that is not a great deal.

I mention this because the exhibition that will follow Nature Through Roman Eyes, Heritage Futures, will look at the issue of the loss of linguistic diversity, amongst others in the autumn. Why should this matter? It’s important in a more practical way than saving languages simply for the sake of saving disappearing languages. Quoting from the Independent on Sunday article: ‘Experts now agree there is a correlation between areas of cultural, linguistic and biological diversity… Places that are diverse in species are diverse in languages and cultures.’ And to speak another language is not simply a means of communication, it is to immerse oneself in the culture of another people, to experience the world from a different perspective and even for this to influence the speaker’s world view.

Heptapod orthography from Arrival

This is one version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, beautifully explored in the science fiction movie Arrival (2016). In Arrival Dr Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, will write a book called The Universal Language Translating Heptapod. Although the circular characters – non-linear orthography – look like the stains left by coffee mugs, speaking the Heptapod language affects the cognition of the speakers, allowing them to experience events in the present and in the future. In a review of the film one critic wrote: ‘we (may) live on the same planet, breathe the same air — but our perceptions of those pieces shift and change based on the words and grammar we use to describe them to ourselves and each other.’ And to return to the Heritage Futures theme, a 2010 documentary called Into Eternity dealt with ‘attempts to devise a new universal language to label underground repositories of nuclear waste – labels whose warnings have to be understood by future humans whose language has evolved away from what we know now.’ Remember too the transmission in Ridley Scott’s Alien, which is not a distress call but a warning beacon that is translated too late to stop the horrific course of events.

Vessels from the Hildesheim hoard in ‘Nature Through Roman Eyes’

Whilst I talked to visitors about the Etruscans and how little we understood of their language, Amy and Lucy meanwhile were talking to visitors about the objects from the Pliny exhibition. They showed a replica of a bowl from a large hoard of Roman silver vessels found at Hildesheim in Germany in 1868. Manchester Museum, along with other institutions, has replicas of this important hoard. They must almost qualify as antiquities in their own right because they were made by French manufacturers, Christophe et fils, during the late 19th century. We know from previous experience that sometimes replicas can be almost as important historically as the real thing. If you are wondering what the connection to Pliny the Elder is, well, it’s because he served during the mid-1st century AD in the Germanies – the provinces of Upper and Lower Germany – where he served with a fellow officer who took a luxurious dinner service on campaign:

‘And yet, by Hercules! to my own knowledge, Pompeius Paulinus, son of a Roman of equestrian rank at Arelate, a member, too, of a family, on the paternal side, that was graced with the fur (a mark of privilege), had with him, when serving with the army, and that, too, in a war against the most savage nations, a service of silver plate that weighed twelve thousand pounds!’ (Natural History 33.)

Now I’m not suggesting that the Hildesheim hoard is the silver dinner service that once belonged to Pompeius Paulinus, but it does enable us to illustrate Pliny’s anecdote. It shows the opportunities for self indulgence made possible by the Roman Empire. At the same time significant amounts of money were going overseas to pay for expensive Chinese silk and Indian spices. We might describe this as evidence of Roman globalisation. There is a moralising aspect to Pliny’s writing but it is clear that overall he thinks Roman civilisation is a good thing, even if some Romans have indulged themselves rather too much in the luxuries provided by the empire.

Illustrated capital from a Renaissance edition of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History

As I think is becoming abundantly clear, the subject of the Nature Through Roman Eyes exhibition is something of a godsend  to encyclopaedic collections such as those of Manchester Museum because natural history to the Romans extended far more widely than we would think of it today. In the 37 books of Pliny’s Natural History there are sections on every conceivable subject under the sun, including astronomy, numismatics, mining and the history of art. An exhibition about Roman natural history, therefore, has the potential to show the many different – and sometimes unexpected facets – of Roman civilisation and bring in every discipline and collection in the Museum. For years, museum curators have been urged to do more interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work and if ever there was an exhibition topic to realise this, Pliny’s your man. Added to which, Pliny himself is a marketing officer’s dream because he died during the eruption of Vesuvius  in August 79 AD.

So there you go: Civilisations, the Etruscans, Pliny the Elder and Nature Through Roman Eyes, loss of linguistic diversity, science fiction movies, Heritage Futures and nuclear waste. Working at Manchester Museum is never short of variety.

Caught Knapping

Preparation for a knap-in

Manchester Museum is holding a knap-in on 19th November and on Friday Dr Elizabeth Healy and a PhD student Ray Nilson came to talk to Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, and me about the arrangements and to see some examples of worked flint artefacts. At the event, which is limited to 65 participants and ticketed (£10, or £8 concessions)  visitors will be able to watch enthusiasts striking or knapping raw materials and making a range of implements. There will be opportunities for people to try this for themselves under supervision of course. There is a real interest amongst visitors to the Museum in discovering how people in the past made things, some of them of considerable quality and demonstrating breath-taking crafts working skills.

Debate about one of the stone implements

I got out a selection of some of the wonderful flint and other stone objects in the lithics store at the Museum. A fine ground and polished early Bronze Age stone axe-hammer (below) is a wonderful exhibit although sadly we know little about where it was found. It was transferred to Manchester by  Salford Museum some years ago and I live in hope that some day information about the circumstances of discovery will turn up in an antiquarian publication…This kind of material was the focus of research and collecting at Manchester Museum during the later 19th and early 20th centuries when William Boyd Dawkins was Curator. From the 1970s the focus shifted to Classical antiquities but now prehistory in back in fashion, not least because of changes to the National Curriculum.

Anna with early Bronze Age axe-hammer

One of the added benefits is asking the flint-knappers who are coming to the event on 19th November to make copies of stone tools that were used on Easter Island or Rapa Nui. Manchester Museum will show material from the island in a temporary  exhibition opening in early April next year. Exhibits will include a stone statue called moai Hava that was brought back to Britain by HMS Topaze in 1868 and presented to the British Museum, and a range of artefacts borrowed from a number of other museums in the UK. We’re working closely with Prof Colin Richards of the Department of Archaeology at the University who has been conducting fieldwork on Easter Island. We will recreate for the exhibition part of the quarry at Puna Pau where Prof Richards has been excavating with his team. This was where islanders carved pukao or topknots that sat on top of some of the statues or moai.

We will dress the reconstruction of the quarry in the Museum with replica tools made by the flint-knappers for greater authenticity. Large numbers of stone implements or toki have been found in the quarry where the statues were obtained as if the work was suddenly interrupted and the islanders downed tools. It is not clear whether the islanders ceased to honour the statues after ‘first contact’ with Europeans or whether the notorious ‘blackbirding’ raids to secure labourers for Chile compelled the workers to drop their tools and flee or whether discarding the stone implements tools was part of the islanders’ belief system in relation to work on the statues.  It’s a very exciting project and it’s nice to know that the knap-in is contributing to the exhibition.

Easter Island Exhibition at Manchester Museum

Moai Hava and Sam in the World Museum in Liverpool

Since returning from the Ke EMu conference in Washington on Saturday I’ve been thinking about Manchester Museum’s next temporary exhibition which will be about the stone statues or moai of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. We are in the fortunate position of being able to borrow a statue called moai Hava from the British Museum, and a selection of supporting objects from the BM and other museums. The exhibition will draw upon the results of fieldwork on Easter Island undertaken by Professor Colin Richards of the University of Manchester’s Department of Archaeology. Our ‘Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues of Easter Island’  exhibition will open in early April 2015 and run for six months in the Museum’s temporary exhibition gallery.

It is incredibly exciting to work with material from Easter Island, which must rank as some of the highest profile archaeology in the world. When Europeans encountered the island for the first time early in the 18th century they were astonished to see the statues. They found it difficult to reconcile the scale of the statues with the apparent poverty of the islanders, or RapaNui as they call themselves, and the absence of sources of materials such as timber with which to move and erect the stones. The theory that at some point prior to the European visits the great civilisation responsible for the stone statues had collapsed is present in the earliest historical accounts and much ink has flowed since then to try and explain the disaster which befell the inhabitants. During the 1970s palaeobotanist  John Flenley sampled the peat in the volcanic craters to study the history of the island’s vegetation and by studying the pollen in the cores showed that palm trees had originally covered the island. The felling of the palm trees for farmland and for timber with which to move the statues is thought to have brought about an environmental disaster leading to the  collapse of the islanders’ way of life. The large numbers of obsidian tools such as those featured in an earlier post on the Ancient Worlds blog  were thought to be evidence of the islanders’ nightmarish descent into violence, anarchy and  civil war.

Obsidian mataa from Easter Island in Manchester Museum

The various theories to account for Easter Island’s decline have been hotly debated. More recently some archaeologists and anthropologists have blamed contact with Europeans for the collapse of Easter Island’s traditional culture rather than an environmental catastrophe. The spread of diseases against which the islanders had no immunity and the notorious ‘black-birding’ raids to pressgang labourers to work in Peru’s guano mines in the 1860s reduced the native Rapanui population to little more than a hundred people. What the population had been before then is anybody’s guess but at the time of the first European visits it thought to have been about 3000, and a figure as high as 20,000 has been suggested for the earlier period.

Puna Pau where a quarry face has been excavated. Photo: Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd for RNLOC.

The Manchester Museum exhibition will focus on the statues. Professor Colin Richards and his colleagues have recently excavated a stone quarry at Puna Pau where headdress stones or topknots for the stone statues were carved. We propose as part of the exhibition to supplement the original material with reconstructions of an ahu or ceremonial platform on which some of the moai or stone statues once stood, a pukau or topknot that would have sat on top of the head of one of the moai, and the quarry face at Puna Pau to show visitors the nature of the stone working on the island.

Stone statue with repositioned pukao headress and inlaid eyes. Photo: Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd for RNLOC.

As part of the exhibition we will also explore the  part  the statues have played in stimulating sculptors such as Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915). This influence can also be seen in popular culture. Easter Island statues frequently feature in comics and graphic novels for example. When I was in Washington last week I somewhat furtively visited a comics store to try and obtain copies of the Adventures of Batman, The Mighty Thor and Uncle Scrooge. Had museum colleagues seen me in there I’d have protested it was only to gather materials for the Easter Island exhibition. In The Mighty Thor (1982), for instance, the superhero battles giant stone statues from Saturn which are clearly inspired by the moai. If any readers have copies and might be willing to lend them for our exhibition please let me know.

Moai from Easter Island in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington

Another treat during the Ke EMu conference in Washington was visiting the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian) and seeing another Easter Island statue or moai from Ahu O’Pepe. An image on the label shows an Easter Island head with its eye re-inserted. We intend to recreate one of the eyes as part of the exhibition using coral and obsidian. So there’s lots to look forward to in this exhibition and there’s great excitement at the Museum as the project gets under way.

Easter Island head with inlaid eye (Smithsonian label)

Worsley Man in the News Again

Things seem to have been going slightly mad since we wrote a short piece about our re-examination of Worsley Man in the Unilife magazine of the University of Manchester last year.

The head is being studied by a team of specialists ftom the Universities of Nottingham Trent and Manchester.  With the help of Prof Judith Adams of the Manchester Hospitals we were able to scan Worsley Man, the human head that was found in a peat moss in 1958. A picture of this scan appeared in the UniLife magazine and has generated considerable interest.

All of sudden the media took notice and within a short period of time we were taking calls from the Manchester Evening News and BBC North West. I did a short filmed interview with BBC NorthWest that was released last week and there was an article in the Manchester Evening News last Thursday.

Yesterday I received an enquiry from the Discovery Channel and colleagues in marketing told me the story had been picked up by a Polish newspaper.

It’s amazing how much interest can be generated by just a short piece in the university magazine. Of course bringing together the victim of a violent murder, modern technology and forensic science is bound to generate enormous public interest as Lindow Man and episodes of CSI  have shown.

Read more coverage;

Daily Mail Article – Iron Age murder mystery as CT scan shows British man from 100AD was beaten, strangled, then beheaded in ‘pagan ritual’

Keep up with this and other stories relating to The Manchester Museum on our Posterous blog

Roman Finds Group Meeting at Manchester Museum 8th October 2014

Enamelled buckle from Barton Street, Manchester

 

The Roman Finds Group is holding its next day meeting at Manchester Museum on Wednesday 8th October 2014. The theme of the conference will be Finds from Manchester and the North West. At the time of writing we expect the speakers will include:

 

Paul Holder (University of Manchester) – Recent finds of Roman Military Diplomas from Britain

Norman Redhead (Greater Manchester Archaeology Advisory Service) – Finds from Castleshaw Roman Fort

Vanessa Oakden (P.A.S.) – Finds beneath our Fields: The Knutsford Hoard

Bryan Sitch (Manchester Museum) – Manchester Museum collections

Barbara Birley (Vindolanda Trust) – Keeping up appearances: the wooden hair combs from Vindolanda

Gill Dunn – Recent finds from Chester focusing on finds from the amphitheatre

Justine Bayley – Enamelled Roman objects

Matthew Ponting (University of Liverpool) – Recent analysis of Roman coins (title tbc)

Rob Philpott -(Liverpool Museums) Roman finds from Meols on the North Wirral shore

 

Brougham patera

Some details are still to be confirmed but we’re hoping to also have presentations about the Roman salt-working industry in the region, recent analyses of Roman coins, and finds from excavations in Manchester. If you missed the earlier call for papers and have something you’d like to talk about, get in touch with Bryan Sitch now as it may still be possible to fit you into the programme.

The Roman military diploma from Ravenglass in Manchester Museum’s archaeology collection

The day will start with registration and coffee from 9.30am and the first talk at 10.00am. A relatively long lunch break is planned so there will be time to see material in the reserve collection as well as exploring the museum and finding something to eat.

For more information and bookings please contact Bryan Sitch, Deputy Head of Collections, Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL (bryan.sitch@manchester.ac.uk). All bookings must be made before 3rd October but as places are limited early booking is advised. Cost: £15 for RFG members and students and £20 for others (includes tea and coffee but not lunch); cheques should be made payable to the Roman Finds Group.

The final programme will appear on the RFG website nearer the time, and will then be emailed to all those who have booked for the day.

Killer Bees

Ancient Greek pot showing swarm of bees stinging some men

Much hilarity earlier in the week when Sally in the Collection Study Centre asked if I had any bee-related objects in the collection. We have some replicas of Myceanaean gold discs which appear to depict bees but I was reminded of a visit to the bee museum on the island of Rhodes a couple of years ago.  Rhodes is one of the sunniest islands in the eastern Mediterranean and Rhodes honey is a popular product.

Poster advertising honey on Rhodes

As part of their displays telling the story of bee-keeping on the island there are some replicas of ancient Greek archaeological material including the famous bee earring from Malia on Crete.

Earring from Malia on Crete

Perhaps the most eye-catching, or perhaps I should say eye-watering, exhibit is a replica of an ancient Greek pot now in the Museum at Basle showing men being attacked by a swarm of bees and being stung in rather painful places.

When bees attack….

I sent copies of the images back to Sally but added a warning about ‘Contains Adult Content’. I think she’s going to use them in her presentation about bee-keeping as part of the Collections Bites programme which should raise a chuckle. I think Campbell’s visiting the museum in question so this may not be the last word from the Killer Bees.

Honeycomb at the Rhodes bee museum

The Rhodes bee-keeping  museum is on the road to the airport and makes a good stopping off place when exploring the island by car.

Fragmentary Ancestors Opening

Opening of the Koma Exhibition at Manchester Museum

Last night saw the opening of Fragmentary Ancestors Figurines from Koma Land exhibition. Over the last few days, with excitement building and staff working feverishly to meet the deadline, there has been a quite a buzz around the Museum. With about an hour to go before the guests started arriving the last banner was hung, the final display case window was secured and the ‘deep’ cleaning carried out.

Horse or camel rider being installed

Alan Seabright the photographer from the Manchester Art Gallery took photographs of the exhibition space, which I have to say, though I have to declare an interest naturally, looks stunning. Peter Farmer’s palette of warm reds and terracotta orange gives the space a a sense of vibrancy that does a lot to dispel the stereotypical image of Africa as a ‘Dark Continent’.

Fragmentary Ancestors exhibition

But it is the figurines, so full of character, and it seems latent power, that dominate the gallery. Some people have compared them to gargoyles but this is to do them a disservice. There is a healthy vitality about them still. They really are spectacular and Alan the technician and Irit from the conservation team have created mounts that show them to best advantage. Personal favourites are the anencephalic head, the horse or camel rider and a piece I refer to fondly as ‘Fungus the Bogeyman’ .

Head of figurine from Koma Land

They are not just inert exhibits they inspire in the viewer a desire to personalise them, to refer to them as people. The figurine with a Mohican is a dead ringer, in my opinion, for Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver! They invite these sorts of comparisons with popular culture and its going to be very interesting over the next six months to see what other comparisons are made.

Are you looking at me?

At the opening Museum Director Dr Nick Merriman, Prof Tim Insoll, Prof Ben Kankpeyeng and Mr Ben Saibu gave short speeches. The latter’s speech was a barn-storming performance that managed to reference Martin Luther King, Olaudah Equiano and Wilfrid Owen.  

Mr Saibu addressing the audience at the opening of the Fragmentary Ancestors exhibition

Prof Kankpeyeng had warned the audience beforehand that the combination of lawyer and politician was a dangerous combination and if the audience’s response was anything to go by, Mr Saibu’s party would have won by a landslide had an election been held on the day of the opening.

Celebrating the Fragmentary Ancestors opening with Mr Saibu, Mrs Aba, Sam and Ben Kankpeyeng

There is a programme of events and activities with a tour of the gallery by Professor Insoll and Professor Kankpeyeng on Saturday and a lecture on Monday afternoon before our Ghanaian guests return home on Tuesday. Fragmentary Ancestors Figurines from Koma Land Ghana can be seen at Manchester Museum  until 5th May 2014. This is the first time the figurines have been shown in the UK with the approval of the Ghanaian authorities.

Smashing Pot

Teapot from Manchester

This is a recently conserved teapot from one of the Roman Manchester sites excavated during the 1970s and 1980s by the late Prof Barri Jones. The excavators dug through through more recent Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian layers before they reached the area of Roman occupation. The later material was not a priority as part of the research aims but the objects, mostly  broken pieces of pottery, were retained and are in the Museum store. We bring out the pottery every so often for events, so that visitors can try their hand at piecing together the three-dimensional jigsaws. So popular has this activity proved that we can now boast a number of almost complete Victorian and Edwardian vessels.

This example of a teapot was rebult for us by Jenna B. who has been on a conservation placement with the Museum from the University of  Lincoln. A lot of the time-consuming work had already been done by visitors and Young Archaeologists Club members who put together like with like and joined them using sticky tape. All Jenna had to do was clean the sherds and glue them together. This was one of her final projects and what a great job she has done. It is only a pity that there were insufficient sherds surviving to enable us to attach the spout. We tried to find them in the boxes of mixed sherds but it’s rather like hunting the needle in the proverbial haystack. The teapot provides a good example for staff to use when discussing the ethics of conservation. At what point does a reconstruction become worthwhile?

Victorian teapot

The teapot has a rather interesting transfer printed pattern that I can only describe as ‘tigerish’. I wonder if this is Georgian rather than Victorian or later. Perhaps a visitor to the Blog can enlighten us?

Jenna working on the Georgian/Victorian teapot

Genuine after all?

Letters to the press

In previous emails I’ve explored the controversy over two bone points found in Holderness in East Yorkshire in northern England during the early 1920s.  The Curator of Hull Museums, Thomas Sheppard, accused the people who found the objects of being charlatans. As we have seen this was the not the first time that the Hull Curator had come across the Morfitt family. In the early 1900s he had been a regular visitor to their cottage at Atwick in Holderness. Sheppard and Mr William Morfitt had a serious falling-out at the end of 1903 and afterwards Sheppard criticised the family relentlessly. In 1922 A.Leslie Armstrong published two bone points from the Morfitt collection and argued they were Maglemosian or Mesolithic. Sheppard implied they were forgeries. Two committees of enquiry met to decide whether they were authentic but the finds were so ambiguous both Sheppard and the Morfitt family claimed victory.

One of the committees noted in its report that the evidence on which Thomas Sheppard’s  judgement was based ‘was no longer verifiable’. This was rather mysterious and it would be some eight years before the truth emerged. The comment was picked up by Armstrong who responded: ‘Mr Sheppard’s charge of forgery is based upon certain evidence said to have been given him by a person now dead – therefore unverifiable’. (1923). Who was this dead person and what had they said? It was only after the last member of the Morfitt family had died that Sheppard revealed ‘The Maglemose harpoons were made by Mr B. Morfitt in the presence of his sister who was spending a weekend with Mrs Sheppard and I and told us how it was done’.

Charlotte Morfitt

The sister was Charlotte Morfitt who died in 1914. Sheppard claimed to have held back this information out of sensitivity to old William Morfitt’s feelings. William died in 1923, Beaumont died in 1929 and Sheppard revealed the source of his information – and why he was so certain that the Maglemosian points were forgeries – in 1930. Perhaps surprisingly Sheppard tried to acquire the Morfitt collection for Hull Museums when the future of the collection was under discussion. However, Hornsea District Council planned to put the collection on show though nothing ultimately came of this proposal and in the end the collection was transferred to the Yorkshire Museum, where it still is.

When the bone points were bequeathed to the British Museum after William Morfitt’s death, Thomas Sheppard obtained casts and put them on display in Hull Museum’s ‘fakes and forgeries’ cabinet. It looked as though Sheppard had had the last word. Or had he?

Another barbed point was found amongst ‘moor log’ dredged from the bed of the North Sea on the Leman and Ower banks off Lowestoft in 1931. In 1932 a bone point was found on Hornsea foreshore but it was not published until after the Second World War.  Sheppard retired in 1941 and died in 1945. No less than thirteen – thirteen! – were found in the vicinity of Brandesburton, not far from Hornsea, during gravel extraction. Some of the latter were reported by J.B.Fay, Assistant Director of Hull Museums, who, like Sheppard, spent most of his life working for the institution. In 1956 Clark and Godwin wrote ‘In view of an old controversy it may be added that close examination of the Skipsea and Hornsea specimens alongside those from Brandesburton can leave no further doubt as to the genuineness of the earlier finds.’

If the bone points were authentic what are we to make of Sheppard’s accusations and his motivation? Sheppard made much of the fact that the circumstances of discovery of one of the points seemed non-sensical. It’s in the entertaining poem quoted in an earlier blog:

‘Til Mr Morfitt passed one day,
With iron rod to find his way.
And fourteen feet it penetrated
And then it stopped; or so ’twas stated.

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt. Beaumont is standing on the right. Is he holding the iron rod he used in prospecting?

How could Beaumont (the Mr Morfitt in question) have inserted an iron rod into peat deposits and then dug down to recover the object he had detected by probing? It doesn’t add up, does it? It doesn’t if Beaumont was standing  on the ground surface and digging down. But what if was standing at the base of a cliff that had been eroded by the sea? Beaumont could be fourteen or more feet below the ground surface as measured from the top of the cliff, but still be standing on the foreshore and probing the deposits horizontally. See photo below. The object Beaumont found would be a depth of fourteen feet relative to the top of the cliff  without Beaumont having to dig down to reach it.

Skipsea Withow

And what of Sheppard’s statement that no peat had been found at Hornsea (in which the Hornsea example was said to have been found)? In August 1902 the Hull Scientific and Field Naturalists Club visited Hornsea to see a section exposed during the erection of a new gasometer. Beds of gravel, shell marl and peat (my italics) were observed, recorded and published in the Naturalist (1902, p.366) by none other than Thomas Sheppard!

The main point of evidence – that Charlotte Morfitt told the Sheppards that her brother had made the bone points as a joke at the expense of their father could not be verified because Miss Morfitt had passed away in 1912. Elijah Howarth of Sheffield Museum said that ‘Beaumont was always fond of a joke, and had a very entertaining fashion of humour but there was no shadow of deceit about him’. There were some curious lengths of bone with crudely-forked ends and an incised groove apparently for winding string in the Morfitt collection. They are illustrated in Hull News (1/2/1902). William Greenwell refers to them in his letters to William Morfitt though he did not know what they were. Is it possible Charlotte saw her brother making them and told the Sheppards and that these fabrications became confused with the bone points that were genuine? If on all other grounds the Holderness points or harpoons are to be considered authentic, might this confusion or misunderstanding explain the controversy? Or was there a darker motive?

Sheppard’s bruising encounter with William Morfitt in 1903 changed the nature of their relationship. Having been humiliated in this way, did Sheppard allow his personal feelings to colour his judgement? No matter what the Morfitt family found, I suspect that Thomas Sheppard would have found some way to cast doubt on it or belittle it. The Morfitt family was eventually vindicated but archaeologically the controversy may have been more damaging. The mesolithic site at Star Carr is rightly famous for the preservation of a range of organic and other evidence, including the oldest dwelling. Had the discoveries along the Holderness coast at Skipsea and Hornsea been taken seriously, is it possible that this kind of evidence might have been found many years earlier? Might we be talking about Skipsea as the type site for mesolithic archaeology? We’ll never know of  course because sadly the sea has long since washed the deposits where the bone points were found away.

Guest Blog about the ‘Future Curators’ placement by Anna Garnett

 

Anna decanting one of the cases in the Ancient Worlds galleries.

The second part of my HLF-funded British Museum ‘Future Curators’ placement began in spring 2013 when I started working as a curatorial trainee at Manchester Museum with the Curator of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Dr. Campbell Price. I’ve been very lucky to have had the opportunity already to work on a wide range of projects including outreach and education, museum tours, and object research; recently I helped out with the refreshment of the Discovering Archaeology gallery (see photo above), when I gained valuable experience of object handling as all of the objects were temporarily removed from the gallery while the work was going on.

This particular job wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds: some of the objects were very heavy or very fragile for example, and it was very important to ensure the safety and security of all the objects as they were moved to and from the museum store, but it was very enjoyable – it’s not every day that you get the chance to handle beautiful Bronze Age gold jewellery or Roman coin hoards!

I will be here in Manchester until December 2013, so I’ve still got a bit of time left to make sure I gain a well-rounded curatorial experience! The third and final round of the Future Curators programme will be advertised shortly and I highly recommend that you apply if you too dream one day of being a museum curator…

Condition checking objects on loan from the British Museum in the touring ‘Pharaoh: King of Egypt’ exhibition

The ‘Future Curators’ Programme gives five trainees, with a range of different specialisations, the opportunity to spend six months working and gaining curatorial skills at the British Museum, then a further 12 months working as a curatorial trainee in one of the British Museum’s UK Partner Museums, using those practical skills in the workplace. This programme is a unique opportunity to gain first-hand practical curatorial experience which is ideal preparation for a future career as a museum curator; this year trainees specialised in the areas of Middle East, Asia, Prehistory & Europe, Oceania, and Egypt and Sudan.

From June-December 2012 I worked in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum – a place I’ve wanted to work since I was a child! – assisting the Assistant Keeper of the Sudanese and Nubian collection, Dr. Derek Welsby. During this time I had the opportunity to work on many different projects including gallery redevelopment, collections care, object documentation, and exhibitions and loans.

Learning how to mount objects by pinning

For example, I was involved in the organisation and installation of a long-term loan of Sudanese material from the British Museum, including pottery, stone axes and jewellery, which was requested for Manchester Museum’s newly-refurbished Discovering Archaeology gallery. This was an exciting project for which I was asked to choose the objects for loan, to write the label, to help with the loan documentation and to actually come to Manchester and install those objects in their new case, which you are able to see today.