Pliny the Elder and Civilisations

Coin of Vespasian (AD 69-79)

Following Simon Schama’s launch of the BBC’s new Civilisations series last week I am really looking forward to Mary Beard presenting the follow-up because this ought to include some Roman content. It is a great opportunity to talk about Manchester Museum’s new temporary exhibition about Pliny the Elder and Roman Natural History opening on 6th April. Pliny’s work The Natural History is the biggest work of non-fiction to survive from the ancient world. Although it is not a work of art, in summarising information about the world at that time, it has a particular relationship with Roman civilisation and civilisations more widely that is worth exploring, not least because it throws up a challenging conclusion about Manchester Museum and its collection, though I fear that will not find favour with some cultural commentators.

Pliny the Elder was born in Comum in northern Italy in about 23 AD. His wealth qualified him for membership of the equestrian class, the lesser aristocracy of Roman society.  After serving in the Roman army in Germany during the 50s AD, Pliny seems to have kept a low profile during the reign of Emperor Nero (AD 54-68). Following the latter’s death, and thanks to his earlier friendship with a fellow Roman officer, Titus, Pliny became a trusted member of the inner circle around the new emperor Vespasian (AD 69-79), who was Titus’ father. Pliny had early morning meetings with Vespasian and held a number of important administrative posts in the provinces.  He was procurator of Hispania Tarraconesis in AD 72-4, and was commanding the Roman fleet at Misenum when Vesuvius erupted on 24^th August AD 79. Pliny lost his life whilst trying to rescue people caught up in the disaster.  Although he is sometimes presented as a martyr to scientific enquiry, his nephew Pliny the Younger’s account makes it clear that Pliny the Elder died heroically trying to save others.

Plaster cast of victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in the Manchester Museum collection

During much of his life Pliny the Elder kept notes about all aspects of the Roman Empire. Some were observations he made himself, some came from other writers. He was offered a very large sum of money for his notebooks at one point, sufficient to have bought himself into the equestrian class had he not already been a member. Pliny the Elder’s working methods are described by his nephew Pliny the Younger: slaves read to his uncle at dinner and whilst he was in the bath. Pliny the Elder told the younger man off for travelling on foot when he could be carried by slaves because it was a wasted opportunity to study. Pliny the Elder’s official duties left him little time for writing during the day so he often stayed up late or got up before dawn to work. He seems to have been permanently sleep-deprived and nodded off easily. Pliny’s hard work compiling his notes created something unique. Pliny succeeded in writing nothing less than a full account, in 37 books, of knowledge as it existed in the Roman Empire during the mid to later 1^st century AD.  Although it’s called The Natural History, it’s natural history in its broadest sense: it’s a mine of information for a wide range of subjects including agriculture, architecture, astronomy, botany, geography, medicine, numismatics, zoology and the history of art.

A garum factory in North Africa (Nabeul Museum, Tunisia)

Fascinating snippets of information are scattered throughout the Natural History. One of the most memorable is an account of a giant octopus which raided the garum factories of southern Spain at night. This was where fish guts were left to ferment in brine in the sun to produce a relish or sauce that was used as a condiment throughout the Roman world. Something similar to Roman garum is used today in Thai cuisine. The workmen tried to discourage their nocturnal visitor by building a fence but without success. In the end the massive octopus – it’s said to have been the size of 15 amphorae or transport containers – was tracked with dogs and killed using tridents (what else would you use to kill a sea monster in ancient world?). The creature was then pickled and put on display in the governor’s mansion where it became a tourist attraction.

Giant octopus shown on a mosaic in the Lesvos Archaeological Museum

The story about the octopus is just one of a number of marvels that made their way into Pliny’s Natural History. Such stories were very popular at this time and Pliny sourced them from contemporary writers. Pliny claimed to have read 2000 sources by 200 different authors, although research has shown that the actual number is much greater.  The Natural History was so big it needed a table of contents. In fact it was the first work of the ancient world to feature one. Pliny intended for it to be consulted as required; he didn’t expect readers to read the whole work. He also criticises those writers who copied the work of others without acknowledging them.  As I am currently writing this blog post in a university museum it is perhaps appropriate that I acknowledge Pliny’s condemnation of plagiarism.

The Natural History could be described as the first encyclopaedia and Pliny was proud that it was something that even the Greek writers, whose works he quoted so frequently, hadn’t attempted. However, it’s not always entirely reliable and in some cases the entries are ludicrous. For example, the root of the autumn nettle is recommended as a cure for tertian fevers but only provided that when the root is pulled up from the ground, care is taken to mention the patient’s name, to say who he or she is and who his or her parents are. Folklore remedies feature large in The Natural History: iron nails from a tomb will prevent nightmares if driven into the door at the entrance to a house; give small children boiled mice with their food to stop bed-wetting; the skin of a hyena is a most effectual precaution against robberies and alarms at night; radish will kill a scorpion; or, if someone has a fish bone stuck in their throat, plunge his or her feet in cold water and it will go away. This obviously comes with the usual caveat not to try any of this at home!

I think it’s in this sense that Pliny’s work is relevant to Civilisations, the BBC’s new ‘reimagining’ of Kenneth Clarke’s  1969 series Civilisation. Pliny reveals a very different world to that which usually appears in accounts of Roman history and archaeology. Eric Dodds undermined the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism in his book The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). Similarly Pliny, albeit not intentionally, shows us that the Romans were just as liable to so-called ‘primitive modes’ of thought as any other society.

Frontispiece to the Natural History. Image(c) The Tabley House Collection

Although in print almost continuously, the Natural History fell out of favour during the Enlightenment when the wisdom of the ancient world was replaced by scientific approaches based on observation and experiment. Pliny has been criticised for his credulity but it is clear that he himself was often sceptical about some of the things he recorded: ‘It is hardly possible to preserve one’s seriousness in describing some of these recipes, but as they have been transmitted to us, I must not pass them by in silence.’

Meadowsweet from the Manchester Museum Herbarium

Sometimes Pliny has the last laugh, as for instance when he recommends a plant called ‘rodarum’ for tumours and inflammations. On applying the extract as an ointment, the patient must spit on three times on the right side. The remedy is said to be even more effective if three people from three different nations rub the right side of the patient’s body with it! This may appear farcical until you appreciate that rodarum has been tentatively identified as Spiraea ulmaria, the old botanical name for meadowsweet, which has been used to create non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. As Pliny wrote:  ‘there is nothing which cannot be affected by the agency of plants but the properties of by far the greater part of them remain unknown.’  (Book 25.5) One wonders what he would make of the felling of the Amazonian rainforest.

The silphium plant on an ancient Greek coin of Cyrene. The very last living specimen was presented to the Emperor Nero during the mid 1st century AD

Pliny was clearly fascinated by the natural world. He was environmentally aware, and even something of an eco-warrior. Discussing insects in Book 11 of The Natural History  he wrote: ‘In no one of her works has Nature more fully displayed her ingenuity… Nature is nowhere to be seen in to greater perfection than in the very smallest of her works’, a sentiment one could easily imagine being expressed by David Attenborough in another BBC documentary. Pliny records the extinction of plants such as the silphium in North Africa, and regrets the disappearance of certain birds not seen since the time of the augur Mucius: ‘in the general heedlessness as to all knowledge which has of late prevailed, no notice has been taken of them’ (Book 10.5). He decries mining for minerals as so much ‘scrabbling about in the entrails of the earth’ and tells us that the Roman Senate  banned mining in Italy, whilst elsewhere an important source of copper had dried up, ‘the earth having been quite exhausted’. It brings to mind images of Roman mining sites in Spain, where the whole landscape is still marked by the scars of industrial scale extraction 2,000 years later.

Portrait of Pliny the Elder from a 17th century edition of the Natural History. Image (c) The Tabley House Collection

Despite his environmental awareness, Pliny the Elder definitely comes across as an advocate for Roman imperialism with everything that that entails. Given the circumstances of Pliny’s career and close association with the Flavian Dynasty it would be astonishing if he had been anything else. The Natural History is dedicated to his old comrade-in arms, Titus, and on a number of occasions Pliny makes it clear he’s fully signed up to the Roman imperial project. He pays tribute to Vespasian under whom peace had been restored to the Roman Empire, allowing trade,  the exchange of information and interactions between the various parts of the Roman world and beyond. Pliny tells us emphatically that the Roman Empire facilitated the movement of commodities and information about the world and this is what, in his opinion, enabled the progress of civilisation. Since the original series of Civilisation we have become far more sceptical of the claims made about the benefits of empire and are far more aware of the negative impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples, their lands, environment, culture and economy. Pliny may be a strong advocate for Roman imperialism but even so, as we read his monumental work, The Natural History, we can see that civilisation as represented by the Roman Empire was not all it was cracked up to be. The Romans faced many of the challenges we face today: sustainability, environmental destruction, extinction and globalisation. And Pliny has no better idea of how to deal with them than we do, other than to condemn over-indulgence and preoccupation with imported luxuries as un-Roman.

 

The Roman Colosseum was constructed using the loot taken from the suppression of the Judaean Revolt by Vespasian and Titus.

There is one sobering point on which to end. It’s possible to view The Natural History as just as much a product and symbol of Roman imperialism as the Colosseum. Manchester Museum’s collections, too, reflect the unparalleled collecting opportunities made possible by the expansion of another empire, the British Empire. With every discipline represented in the Museum from Archery to Zoology, are we not doing with artefacts what Pliny did with textual records? Is Manchester Museum and other encyclopedic museums to the British Empire what Pliny’s Natural History or the Colosseum were to the Roman Empire?

The Manchester Museum: a latter day Colosseum?

Many of these questions will be discussed in a new temporary exhibition at Manchester Museum that opens to the public on 6th April 2018. Drawing on Manchester Museum’s wide-ranging collections, and with loans from a number of regional museums, the exhibition explores Pliny the Elder’s life and times, and shows the important role that natural history played in Roman life.

Find out more on social media: #MMPliny @McrMuseum

A Visit to the Musee des Confluences, Lyons

I’ve just got back from a visit to Lyons, in south eastern France where I saw the Musee des Confluences, which a number of colleagues have been recommending recently. It’s on the southern edge of the city of Lyons  where the rivers Saone and Rhone meet. From afar it looks like an alien spacecraft. As you get closer you realise it’s lifted up on a huge plinth to protect against flooding.

My visit was limited to the permanent galleries numbered 21, 22, 23 and 24. The first thing to say is that there are some stunning set-pieces, including a mammoth skeleton, a huge dinosaur, and a Giant Elk. As you go round you see whole walls taken up with beautifully-lit fossils, skeletons, minerals, and mounted specimens. There is a sabre-toothed tiger skeleton on armatures arranged in a life-like dynamic pose. The galleries are visually  stunning, beautifully lit and very spacious.

You can touch some of the objects, such as a large  piece of metal – a meteorite – that came from the centre of a star.  The AVs were superb too. There was wonderful AV showing continental drift with a clock that takes you back in time to the super continent of Pangaea and then forward millions of years into the future to a time when North Africa will collide with southern Spain. Unless that is, as the rather disturbing commentary on the AV observes, we aren’t hit by a large asteroid or meteorite. Another highly effective AV shows the creation of the earth and the moon and I had to all but tear Christine away to continue our visit of the museum.

My colleagues had told me I had to visit the museum because it integrated natural sciences with human cultures. The sections on how the earth came into being are juxtaposed with objects from world cultures in the museum’s anthropology collection that illustrate creation myths.

The museum if full of attractive displays: a case full of birds arranged by family I noticed in passing had brigaded the bee eaters next to kingfishers so that visitors could see the similarities. Other breathtakingly beautiful displays show shells and large numbers of butterflies, giving a sense of the sheer range and variety of the natural world. However, this is a broad brush approach and I got the impression that finer detail isn’t covered. The big stories, such as the creation of the earth and evolution are represented and one of the first things you see in gallery 21 are some of Elisabeth Daynes’ wonderful models of a Neanderthal woman and other early humans. However, I didn’t see any reference to extracting purple dye from murex shells in the shells display, which would have been a quick and easy way of integrating the different disciplines.

The question is what level of detail is appropriate in a museum of this size? Text is kept to a minimum so the visitor isn’t exhausted by reading during the visit. A text panel for a section might have no more than fifty words, for instance. A label about 25 words. There is nothing to be gained by writing ‘a book on the wall’ as we found when we visited the Musee des Tissus in central Lyons later that afternoon. Detailed treatment of topics at Musee des Confluences is probably reserved for the temporary exhibitions. It was Lumiere or Light  when we visited though there wasn’t time to see this as well.

Any large museum or gallery has to strike a balance between what there is to see and the information about the exhibits. It is very nicely done: in a gallery that explores what happens to us when we die visitors can see a flexed skeleton accompanied by bronze grave goods and there is a mirror above to make it easier for visitors to see. Again this is beautifully lit and well designed, a real treat for the eyes and with provision for the comfort of visitors. In  the same section visitors can listen to philosophers talking about death and each recording is played back in front of comfortable chairs each with their own sound zone.

Visually this is absolutely stunning museum but I wondered what visitors take away with them from this experience. For instance, although the museum shows the thylacene or Tasmanian tiger and other extinct creatures and talks about plastic in the oceans (this display was created well before David Attenborough’s documentary), does the museum  engage the visitor in a conversation about what  human beings could do individually and collectively to change this state of affairs? Could it have prompted a discussion about whether it would be right to bring back the mammoth or the dodo or the thylacene? Do they attempt to influence visitors’ behaviour so that the impact of plastics on the environment is reduced? Are they seeking to change opinion and behaviour in a way that benefits the environment? Or is it sufficient that they provide this kind of experience and leave the visitor to go away and reflect on it and do what they think best?

Musee des Confluences is well worth a visit in our opinion and we’d certainly go back again but it is a particular kind of visiting experience, one that’s based on a visual aesthetic.It’s well worth seeing but I asked myself afterwards what do I actually know about the creatures in those impressive displays? When I think about it not that much. And maybe I don’t need to. The displays do what they do but I couldn’t help thinking that just showing stuff, however beautiful it may be and however beautifully it’s done, without engaging visitors, without them taking something more than a passive experience away with them is somehow missing a trick.

 

 

 

Game of Thrones’ Dothraki at Manchester Museum?

Mongol coin, possibly of Uljaitu (704-716 = 1304-1316) showing hare

With the hotly anticipated seventh series of HBO’s Game of Thrones about to show it seems opportune to flag a coin in Manchester Museum’s numismatic collection with a passing link to the terrifying Dothraki horseman who began their long-awaited sea crossing to Westeros at the end of the last series. We have previously had occasion to comment on the use of ancient and medieval history and archaeology in the popular series.

The historical context for this coin is rather complicated but here goes:-

The story really begins with Yissugei, father of Jenghiz or Gengiz Khan, who was leader of one of the tribes on the northern boundary of the kingdom of China. Yissugei asserted his independence from Chinese influence and was succeeded by Temujin (the name of Jenghiz or Chinngiz Kahn). Temujin spent 30 years uniting the Mongol tribes and in 1206 AD claimed the title of ‘very mighty king’.

Map showing the extent Mongol Empire from MongolianCoins.com2016

 

By the time Jenghiz or Chinngiz Khan died in 1227 AD, aged 64, the Mongols had conquered a large part of Central Asia, and the Mongol Empire stretched from the Yellow Sea to the Crimea. The empire was created by an army of cavalry using bows and arrow but it was a force that also had access to sophisticated Chinese siege technology. The Mongols were irresistible. Their conquests have been referred to as an ‘appalling avalanche of destruction’ (J.J.Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam 1965, repr. 1982, p.171). The Mongol leadership demanded not friendship and alliance but abject submission (p.180). They are presumably the inspiration for J.R.R.Martin’s savage horse-riding Dothraki in Game of Thrones. It is symptomatic of how savage they are that when asked what is the Dothraki word for thank you, one of the characters replies pointedly, “There is no Dothraki word for thank you”.

Now I don’t know whether the Mongols  have a word for thank you but the name used for the Mongol tribes over which Jenghiz ruled is ‘the Golden Horde’, which subdivided into ‘the Blue Horde’ and ‘the White Horde’, each ruled by one of his sons. Hulagu, second brother of Mangu (with Khubilai Khan), were all grandsons of Jenghiz Khan. In 1258 the Mongols under Hulagu captured Baghdad, one of the great cities of the Islamic Caliphate, plundered it, slaughtered the Muslim population (800,000 is the lowest estimate) and killed the last Caliph, Al Mustasim, by trampling him to death.  The sacking of Baghdad put an end to 500 years of the Abassid caliphate. Hulagu was bitterly hostile to Islam. Osama bin Laden compared the US led invasion of Iraq to the Mongol conquest of the 1250s.

Of course, the Mongols were not the only people on horseback that spring to mind in relation to the Dothraki. In yesterday’s  Telegraph there was an article about the British Museum’s forthcoming Scythians exhibition, again making a connection with J.R.R.Martin’s fearsome horse riders. The Huns are another  example. However, given what the Dothraki are capable of, in terms of capturing and destroying cities and carting off their statues to their own city of Vaes Dothrak, the Mongols seem to offer the closest parallel, although all these peoples undoubtedly induced terror because of their tough way of life and their brutality.

Hulagu established a dynasty in Persia that became the Ilkhanid dynasty  – the Mongols of Persia. Ilkhan means a provincial khan. Further Mongol extension to the west was stopped by the Mamluks of Egypt at the battle of Ain Jalut or Goliath’s Spring (September 1260). Ain Jalut was one of the world’s decisive battles yet it is relatively little known in popular culture. Had the Mamluks been defeated Islam might well have been destroyed as a religion.

Coin of Uljaitu with Mongol and other script legend

In the numismatic collection of Manchester Museum is a coin known as a copper fals, issued in the reign of Arghun ibn Abaga (683-690 = 1284-1294) or Uljaitu ibn Arghun (704-716 = 1304-1316) showing a hare running to the right with the Kalima, the Islamic statement of faith (‘there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet/Messenger’). The reverse shows lines of writing. This is Mongolian with Uyghur and Phags-Pa script and can be seen on most of the Ilkhanid coins. It is a statement of loyalty to the ancestors. However, the dynasty was established in the Middle East where Arabic was and remains the daily language for many people. Arabic was used on the coins because the Mongols still found coinage useful as a medium for communicating the power of the state.

On the reverse is:-

Qaghanu (tilte of khan)

Nreber (an honorific?)

The khan’s name e.g Arghun or Uljaitu

Deledkegulug (?)

For a good diagram explaining this, See:-

http://altaycoins.com/makaledetay.asp?dil=Mg==&id=MjI=

It is often said that Islam prohibited pictorial art but it is clear that this was not enforced rigidly and attitudes were more tolerant at different times. The Mongols, certainly, would have been familiar with hares from seeing them on the Asian steppes. A hare is sometimes seen on Islamic pottery of earlier and later date. The Mongols were influenced by Nestorian Christianity in the early years but later accepted Islam as their religion. Europeans tended to regard Nestorianism as heretical for its beliefs about the nature of Jesus. Uljaitu, the Ilkhan of Persia, in whose name this coin was probably struck, may have been Christian but converted to Islam.

Bryan Sitch
Curator of Archaeology and Numismatics

Prehistoric India at Manchester Museum II: Frederick Swynnerton

Continuing the series of blog posts about Manchester Museum’s prehistoric lithics from the Indian subcontinent in preparation for the new South Asia Gallery due to open in 2020.

Stone artefact (?) from Bombay (Mumbai) collected by Frederick Swynnerton

By far the largest proportion of Manchester Museum’s collection – about half – of the just over 300 prehistoric stone tools from the Indian subcontinent were collected in or around Bombay or Mumbai in 1893 and were presented by someone with the initials ‘F.S.’ (see label shown in photograph above). At first I had no idea who F.S. was until I noticed that on one of the labels the name was written in full ‘Frederick Swynnerton’. Who was Frederick Swynnerton? A quick search on the internet produced a candidate:

Frederick Swynnerton self portrait c.1910 (courtesy of Iain Swinnerton)

The following summary is extracted from Inigo Thomas’s blogpost At Tate Modern about his great grandfather: Frederick Swynnerton was born in Douglas, in the Isle of Man, in 1858. He was one of four sons.  Frederick had written about Manx prehistory, and on Indian themes for the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, but painting was his vocation. He learnt his art in Rome, where he lived with his older brother Joe and his wife, Annie Swynnerton, the painter, suffragette and the first woman to to be elected to the Royal Academy. He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and then went to India, intending to make a career for himself as a portrait painter. One of Frederick’s brothers, Charles, was a churchman and moved to India and became a chaplain in Delhi. Frederick married the daughter of an Anglo-Italian military family, and lived with them in Simla. Simla was the summer capital of British India and the Punjab Province before 1947.

India was an opportunity for talented painters like Frederick because portraiture had been introduced by Warren Hastings in order to reduce corruption within the East India Company. Instead of accepting ornate gifts from Indian potentates, officials were to be given pictures of those they wished to influence or rule over. However, there was a problem: in India the sitters didn’t always pay since they got nothing in return. The artists might receive nothing for their labours and Frederick’s life in India wasn’t easy. Frederick also painted what we would now call celebrities , for instance, Jemadar Jangia Thapa, of the 5th Gurkha Regiment in 1890 (National Army Museum 1955-04-20-1). Thapa was awarded the Second Class of the Order of British India in April 1897 and was selected as one of the representatives for India at the inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth in January 1901.

What strengthens the case for for Frederick Swynnerton being the donor of Manchester Museum’s Mumbai stone objects is the fact that we know Frederick exhibited prehistoric stone artefacts that he had collected. In The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain  (vol.29 for 1899, p.141) under miscellaneous business of the meeting of June 27th 1899 is a notice of an exhibition of ‘rude stone implements from the state of Gwalior in central India. By Frederick Swynnerton, Esq. Simla’. The objects are described as roughly chipped fragments of jasper, chert, lydite and other siliceous stones, some collected by Frederick from the alluvial plain on which Gwalior stands. Some of the objects came from the gravels of the Sourrka River and the alluvium on the banks to a height of at least 20 feet and also from the surface far from the river. He also showed large quartzite implements of palaeolithic type found at Raipur, 12 miles from Gwalior by C.Maries, Esq. of Gwalior.

Frederick’s interest in archaeology stretched back to his youth on the Isle of Man and in his travels in search of commissions for the portraits he painted he clearly met people who collected stone tools and he himself collected them. Frederick died suddenly in Bombay in 1918 and was buried at the Sewri cemetery and how the objects from Mumbai came to Manchester isn’t known except  that many of them have  ‘P’ numbers on them in blue paint. The numbers refer to the ‘P Register’, kept by William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929) and Wilfrid Jackson (1880-1978) and used to record geological, palaeontological and archaeological acquisitions at the Museum.

Natural stone from Mumbai

Unfortunately, whilst the objects, if that is the correct term for them, have been identified as cores, flakes, borers and knives, with a few exceptions, most of the objects appear to be natural.

Natural stone from Mumbai

Whilst this is disappointing the association with Frederick Swynnerton and the British government of India at Simla, Frederick’s  marital home, is significant. This cursory study of the prehistoric lithics collection from the Indian subcontinent has revealed a number of connections with the British imperial and colonial presence in India: a member of the Archaeological Survey of India, a Colonel in the Royal Engineers and now a portrait painter of the well-to-do based in Simla.

I am very grateful to Iain Swinnerton for sending me the image of the self-portrait by Frederick.

Prehistoric India at Manchester Museum III: the Mystery of Colonel Mayne

This is another instalment in the series of blog posts about the prehistoric lithic collections from India at Manchester Museum.

Colonel Mayne Collection label

Colonel Mayne Collection label

Colonel  Mayne Collection label – is the final eccentric capital letter an ‘E’?

Above are photos of some distinctive labels that I have come across whilst exploring the prehistoric stone tools from the Indian subcontinent at Manchester Museum. They relate to stone artefacts from Hamirpur in the Banda region or district in northern India ‘E(x) Coll(ection) of the late Colonel Mayne R (E?)’. The labels are on a stone pestle or pounder and other objects, including  ‘dabbers’ for making pottery. I am most grateful to Prof. Dilip Chakrabarti at the University of Cambridge for identifying these tools. However, I have searched long and hard to find out who Colonel Mayne was. His collection, as so often happens, was dispersed and acquired by other collectors, including Robert Dukinfield Darbishire (1826-1908) who bequeathed these objects to Manchester Museum.

Stone tools including ‘dabbers’ (left) for shaping clay to make pottery

Robert Dukinfield Darbishire (1826-1908) was a solicitor and one of three administrators of the estate of Sir Joseph Whitworth. Darbishire took a particular interest in the Whitworth Park and Institute (the Whitworth Art Gallery) but clearly had wide-ranging interests. He was a keen conchologist or collector of shells. He excavated a waterlogged prehistoric site at Ehenside Tarn in Cumbria in north western England in 1871. In 1868 he was involved in the transfer of the collections of the Manchester Natural History Society Museum to Owens College (the forerunner of the University of Manchester).  The collection had previously been offered to and declined by the Manchester Corporation. He played a similar role in the acquisition of the collection of the Manchester Geological Society, so Darbishire was a “founding father” of the Manchester Museum. A painting of R.D.Darbishire wearing his characteristic black skull cap by Mr T.B.Pennington used to be on display in the entrance to the Whitworth Art Gallery. Darbishire was made an honorary freedman of the city on October 6^th 1899.  Darbishire’s large collection of prehistoric stone and flint artefacts was transferred to the Museum in 1907-8.

When I started browsing the internet for Colonel Mayne I had precious little to go on and inevitably my researches took me down some cul-de-sacs:  a Colonel Mayne died in Cairo in 1855 but somehow seemed too young to be a collector of Indian antiquities. I tried the Dictionary of Indian Biography which yielded  two more possibilities: Richard Charles Graham Mayne (1852-1939) and his brother George Nisbet Mayne (1854-1932) but again they didn’t seem to quite fit the date range for a collection that was dispersed and some of it acquired by Darbishire during the late 19th or early in the 20th century. The trouble is there were lots of Maynes in India during the 19^th century so finding the right Colonel Mayne seemed like a hopeless task.

National Museums of Scotland acquired the ‘Mayne collection’ in 1859, comprising  approx. 90 items – jewellery, cutlery, earthenware, statuary, weights, measures and manuscripts – from Sri Lanka, India, China and a few Ancient Egyptian pieces from the sale of of Mr Robert Mayne’s Collection (June 1859) but if this was our man why wasn’t he called Colonel? I am most grateful to Rosanna Nicolson, Assistant Curator, Middle East and South Asia, in the Department of World Cultures at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh for this information.

Then I came across an object collected by a Swedish expedition (the Vanadis expedition) that visited India during the later 19th century. Vanadis was the name of the vessel that  left Karlskrona on 5 December 1883 on a round-the-world tour, visiting South America, Oceania, Asia, and Europe. The expedition, supported by the Swedish government and king, was of a military, economic, diplomatic, and scientific nature. The expedition was partly a training mission and partly to promote Swedish maritime and trade. Unfortunately, there was a clash of characters between Hjalmar Stolpe, the expedition ethnographer, and the ship’s captain, Otto Lagerberg, and when the Vanadis reached Calcutta in December 1884, Stolpe left the expedition, arranged for permits to travel through northern India and Kashmir for three months, and made his own arrangements for the return trip to Sweden. During his time in India Stolpe collected many ethnographical objects with the aim of providing ‘a far richer picture of the northern Indian people’s way of life and cultural position’. One of the objects was given by Colonel Mayne. I have taken the liberty of extracting this synopsis from Kristina Myrvold‘s Sketches of Sikhs in the 1880s The Swedish Vanadis expedition and Hjalmar Stolpe’s ethnographical collection from travels in Punjab (published on-line 04 Jul 2016).

The object in question is now in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm (1887.08.5357 [V.78]). According to the records Colonel Mayne, Royal Engineer, Allahabad, donated a water bottle of leather . It entered the museum collections in 1887.  Stolpe stayed with Mr and Mrs Rivett-Carnac in Allahabad on 20-24 January 1885.  It seems probable that the water bottle was given to Stolpe in Allahabad by Colonel Mayne at that time. The Stockholm information tells us that the abbreviations after Colonel Mayne’s name on the labels must be R.E. for Royal Engineers). In Allahabad too is the Thornhill Mayne Memorial (built 1864-70) which was funded by yet another Mayne, this time Mr Mayne the Commissioner or Collector of Allahabad. I am most grateful to Dr Eva Myrdal, Senior researcher at the National Museums of World Culture in Stockholm for all this information.

So that’s where things stand for the present and naturally I’d be delighted if any reader of this blog post can shed any light on the mysterious Colonel Mayne, last heard of in Allahabad in northern India during the 1880s…

Prehistoric India at Manchester Museum I: Archibald Campbell Carlyle

Cover design of British Museum occasional paper about the Carlyle collection (1994)

Manchester Museum is working on an HLF Courtyard extension project that opens in 2020, and collections curators are looking through their collections for anything that comes from the Indian subcontinent in preparation for the new South Asia Gallery. The new gallery will comprise eight ‘chapters’ ranging chronologically from prehistoric times to Partition, the diaspora  and the founding of South Asian communities in the UK, especially Manchester. All of the disciplines represented in the Museum collections are contributing to this exciting project and doubtless other curators will report in due course about what they have in their collections. In the archaeology collection it’s been an exciting journey of discovery and revelation as I began to realise how significant some of the collectors and donors represented in Manchester Museum’s collection were in the history of Indian archaeology.

Palaeolithic stone tool from the Vindhya Hills, India with a A.C.Carlyle label (Manchester Museum)

Detail of a Carlyle label (Manchester Museum)

Perhaps the most important of the collectors who gave us material from the Indian sub continent was Archibald Campbell Carlyle (1831-1897). Carlyle (or Carlleyle) was First Assistant to the Archaeological Survey of India from 1871 until his retirement in 1885.  Carlyle went to India to seek his fortune, initially as a tutor. At this time employment in the colonies offered security and career prospects. Carlyle worked in the Indian Museum in Calcutta, the Riddell Museum in Agra  and then joined the Archaeological Survey of India.  He was appointed by Alexander Cunningham (1814-1893), Director General of the Survey. The Archaeological Survey was part of the British imperial and colonial project in India, to survey, record, and catalogue the antiquities of the country in order to understand, administer and control them more effectively.  As Dilip Chakrabarti puts it: Cunningham ‘…was trying to justify the systematic archaeological exploration of India on the grounds that politically  it would help the British to rule India.’ (see Prof.Chakrabarti’s ‘The development of archaeology in the Indian subcontinent’, in World Archaeology 13.3, Feb.1982).

Upinder Sigh’s book The Discovery of Ancient India Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology (Permanent Black, 2004) and a British Museum occasional paper on The Carlyle Collection of Stone Age Artefacts from Central India by Jill Cook and Hazel Martingell (1994) provide a lot of information about Carlyle from which the following summary is extracted.

Occasional paper about the Carlyle collection at the British Museum

At a time when Cunningham and the other assistants were understandably preoccupied by ancient Indian sculpture, temples and coins, Carlyle was one of the few people making an effort to recover and record prehistoric stone tools. Jill Cook and Hazel Martingell’s occasional paper paints a vivid picture of Carlyle as a field archaeologist sleeping rough in ruined temples and upsetting the polite conventions of Raj society, on one occasion threatening an enquirer sent by the Raja of Nagod with a gun. Carlyle seems to have been rather prickly about his status, which may explain the alternative spelling of his name as Carlleyle,  to suggest he was from an aristocratic family. His ‘psyche-evaluation’ described him as ‘not ordinarily insane, but liable to outbursts of eccentric action and evil temper’ (Cook and Martingell:13).

The work took Carlyle into the landscape for long periods at a time, travelling on horseback, accompanied by servants on foot and camels to carry the baggage and surveying equipment. He was in eastern Rajastan in 1871-3, the Vindhya Hills and then northwards into the plains with seasons in Gorkhpur, Saran and Ghazipur during the 1870s. He excavated a site at Joharganj in 1879. In the early 1880s he worked in the Vindhya Hills again when complaints were made about him. As Cook and Martingell put it: ‘In 1882, a European with one servant, living rough, without bed and bedding and without a change of clothes or proper food for six weeks had to be mad.’ There is more than a hint of the Indiana Jones about him.

Charles Seidler’s letter in Manchester Museum

When Cunningham proposed that the Archaeological Survey be disbanded, Carlyle lost his job and came back to Britain in 1885. He was 54. Living in straitened circumstances in London,  Carlyle disposed of his archaeological collection by sale or by donation to a number of  museums and individuals. A dealer in antiquities, Charles Seidler, wrote letters to collectors including Sir John Evans, and Canon Greenwell,  antiquarian societies, and the Manchester Museum. David Gelsthorpe, Curator of Palaeontology, found some archive correspondence from Seidler relating to the sale of prehistoric stone artefacts from Carlyle’s collection (see image above). The slips of paper that accompany the letter give details of the objects and where they found. Presumably, the various objects were wrapped in these slips of paper. This information was used to compile the entries in the Manchester Museum accession register (the ‘O’ register) and from these we learn that some of the flints came from a very important site called Morhana Pahar in Mirzapur District, Uttar Pradesh. Bridget Allchin identified this as one of a group of sites in the Vindhya Hills escarpment overlooking the Ganga Valley about five miles north of Hanmana village near Bhainsaur. Carlyle excavated the site but didn’t publish it in full (B.Allchin and R.Allchin -1982 –The Rise of Civilisation in India and Pakistan, p.82). He may have kept the information to himself, thinking he would go back some day to investigate it in detail but his ‘retirement’ prevented further work.

Chariot rider ambushed by bowmen at Morhana Pahar. It appears that Carlleyle painted over the original red pigment with white paint in order to capture the details photographically. Photo: courtesy of Prof Ajay Pratap, Head of Dept of History, Banaras Hindu University

The cave or rock shelter site at Morhana Pahar yielded thousands of worked flints and there were cave paintings or mural art. Some of the images must have been painted later in prehistory because they show men driving chariots being ambushed by men on foot using bows. Carlyle’s notes  described them as showing ‘in a very stiff and archaic manner scenes in the life of the ancient stone chippers, others represent animals or hunts of animals by men with bows and arrows, spears and hatchets…’ They seem to depict people living a hunter-gather lifestyle confronting chariot-drivers of the Indian Iron Age, so there must have been considerable overlap of what might be considered chronologically distinct material cultures. Chenchu hunter-gatherers in India were photographed during the 1930s, showing how resilient this way of life is (see Allchin and Allchin p.85). Carlyle seems to have been the first to propose that the cave art was undertaken by people in prehistory. When he was working it was commonly supposed that cave paintings couldn’t have survived for such a long time, and it was only the discovery of Altamira later in the 19th century that opened people’s eyes to the existence of prehistoric cave art. It is a shame that so far we  have not been able to find a photograph of Archibald Campbell Carlyle. Over to you gentle reader….

Carlyle Collection microliths from Morhana Pahar in the Vindhya Hills, in northern central India

The flints from Morhana Pahar are known as microliths and include lunates or crescent shaped artefacts, rhomboids, trapezes, trapezoids triangles, bladelets, drill points and so on. Some of them were mounted in wooden shafts to create barbed weapons. Some were found still ‘glued’ in position in their wooden armatures using bitumen at the prehistoric site of Mehrgarh in Pakistan. The tools are very small and some archaeologists assumed that the people who made them must have been themselves of small stature or pygmies, hence the name for the tools: pygmy flints. They are very similar to the stone tools found on the Pennines around Manchester and during the early 2oth century an associate of William Boyd Dawkins at Manchester Museum, Revd Gatty, argued that northern Britain had been settled by so-called pygmy people from northern India! The flints date from the Mesolithic period, c.9,000-4,000 BC.

Other material includes more microliths from Gharwa Pahari,  Baghe Khor and Likhneya Pahar, Palaeolithic implements and Neolithic axeheads from Marfa in Bundelkhand, and other stone artefacts, including a Madras type hatchet from the Gaur River.

As a footnote to this discussion I might also add that the list of museums holding Carlyle material in Cook and Martingell’s occasional paper in 1994 does not include Manchester Museum. So far 82 artefacts that Carlyle collected have been catalogued, one of the largest of the collections after the British Museum and National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh).

I leave the last words to Carlyle:

‘The question now, therefore, is not -‘where are stone implements to be found?’ but rather – where are they not to be found?’ For so far as my own experience goes, they appear findable almost everywhere in India.’

Dilip Chakrabarti (1999) India an Archaeological History Palaeolithic Beginnings Early Historic Foundations (O.U.P.), p.95

Next time: Frederick Swynnerton.

 

See also The Mystery of Colonel Mayne

 

 

Exploring Ancient Cyprus in UK Museums: a workshop at the British Museum 15th June 2017

Exploring Cypriot collections at the British Museum

This workshop was organized by Thomas Kiely, Curator of the Cyprus Collection at the British Museum, and Georgia Mallin, of the UK partnerships team, with the intention of promoting interest in ancient Cyprus and supporting curators around the UK with Cypriot collections that they wish to develop but who may not have access to specialists to study or display them. This preliminary meeting was intended to gauge the level of interest and support for setting up something like an SSN for Cypriot collections in the same way that a successful SSN has been set up for numismatic collections.

Georgia and Thomas welcomed curators from a number of regional museums in the Greece and Rome study room, and, after an introduction from Lesley Fitton, Keeper of Greece and Rome Department, Thomas Kiely gave an overview of collecting in Cyprus during the later 19th century and introduced some of the British Museum’s collections, collectors and earlier curators. Thomas showed how it was possible to recognize material dispersed to regional museums during the late 19^th century using sketches of tomb groups in the BM archives. Thomas referred to the thrill of finding treasures amongst misidentified objects in collections, saying “I love bad data”. Duplicate material from excavations at Amathus, for example, was distributed to regional museums by the British Museum.

Another source of Cypriot material was the large collections acquired by the Cesnola brothers, American diplomats who spent time on the island during the later 19^th century. Alessandro Cesnola (1839–1914) built up a large collection with a view to selling it to a major institution and a large and expensive photograph album was published to promote interest. The V&A also transferred material that was considered insufficiently aesthetic to warrant its retention as art. This appeared to be symptomatic of the occasionally snooty attitude that was taken to Cypriot collections in the past in comparison to Greek, Roman and Egyptian collections. Yet it was clear from what a number of curators said that the somewhat rough-hewn appearance of Cypriot objects made them more accessible to audiences than Classical material, and Cypriot ceramic figurines seem to be very popular with children.

Elephant or anteater? Cypriot ceramic figurine at Manchester Museum

Lindy Crewe, A.G.Leventis Curator, spoke about resources of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia. Lindy was in the midst of moving to take up her duties in Cyprus. Having previously worked in Manchester as a Museum and Academic Joint Appointment (MAJA), she is very familiar with Manchester Museum’s Cypriot collection.

Local people involved in Liverpool Museum’s excavations at Kouklia

Anna Reeve, PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, talked about her work on Cypriot object and collection biographies. She uses object biographies to trace the networks of collectors through whose hands the material passed and is finding shared links in her study of collections in Leeds, Harrogate and Hull. Jenny Durrant from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum found sources of funding enabling conservation work on Cypriot pottery that had suffered damage. Chrissy Partheni talked about her work on the Liverpool collections, in particular Kouklia. It was great to see some social history photographs of the excavations of the sites too. Vicky Donnellan from the British Museum discussed the results of her survey of Classical collections, including Cypriot material, in the UK.

In the bowels of the British Museum with Cypriot collections

After lunch Thomas took us on a tour of the Cypriot gallery in the British Museum and then showed us Cypriot collections in store. Only a small proportion of the collection is on display at any one time. The final part of afternoon was given over to free discussion. It was clear that there is support for keeping in touch, and for holding a more formal meeting about Cypriot collections. At this public meeting curators could make longer presentations about their collections, with the potential ultimate aim of creating a touring exhibition of BM and partnership museum Cypriot material.

Cypriot White Ware vessels in the British Museum store

I proposed broadening the scope to include Turkish and Ottoman material, coins and even contemporary objects, although we were reminded that anything earlier than 1850 constitutes an antiquity in Cyprus. From the perspective of Manchester Museum with its thematic collecting project, Cyprus serves as a fascinating case study in migration, acculturation and integration because the island is located at the crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean and was settled by Phoenicians, Greeks, native Cypriot people, Romans and people from Asia Minor and the Levant, not to mention movement of people during the later Medieval and modern periods. Anja Ulbrich, A.G. Leventis Curator of the Cypriot Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, pointed out although subtle differences are seen in assemblages from different parts of the island, it is difficult to distinguish them because of the widespread popularity of ancient Greek cultural material on the island and in the Levant.

I got a lot out of the day and I suspect the other curators did too and I look forward to a future meeting, perhaps in the North West, where interest in Cypriot material can be developed further.

 

Bryan Sitch
Deputy Head of Collections

Manchester Museum’s Monuments Men

Eric Peet (1882-1934)

In the recent film The Monuments Men (2014) starring George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray, a task force is assembled to rescue art masterpieces from the Nazis and return them to their owners. Far from being an invention of Hollywood, it transpires there is some basis in history for this story, and staff from Manchester Museum, including Eric Peet and Arthur Randall Jackson, were monuments men during the First World War.

Eric Peet was born in 1882 in Liverpool and was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford. From 1909 onwards he conducted excavations in Egypt for the Egypt Exploration Fund (now the Egyptian Exploration Society). From 1909 to 1913 Peet worked on the dig at Abydos with Swiss Archaeologist Edouard Neville where he was instrumental in pushing for more scientific methodology to be used. From 1913 to 1928 he was a Lecturer and Curator in Egyptology at  Manchester University and the Manchester Museum.

Peet, against the advice of friends and colleagues, made the decision to enlist, which he saw as his patriotic duty. He was commissioned in October 1915 into the 14^th Battalion of the King`s Liverpool Regiment, an infantry regiment from his home town. However, the Egyptian Exploration Fund considered him so important to their work that their controlling body agreed to pay him a retaining fee on top of his army salary to ensure his return to Egyptology after the war!

In 1917 Peet was serving with a unit of the Army Service Corps with the British Expeditionary Force on the Salonica Front. In this mountainous region formally Alexander the Great’s Kingdom of Macedonia and straddling the border between Greece and Bulgaria, a combined British, Serbian, Greek and French force faced Bulgarian, German, Austrian and Turkish troops. The front line consisted of trenches and mountain top strong points. Troops digging in here soon discovered that the area was rich in archaeology!

Edmund Barrett of the 12^th Lancashire Fusiliers noted that “…you could hardly turn a shovel of earth without a piece of old pot coming out…..” At first the soldiers on the ground dumped the objects into sandbags without further thought, although the more enterprising would pocket items they felt of value to sell to local traders or their officers later. A drawing of an almost complete pottery vessel found whilst digging a well at Gallipoli in Manchester Museum collection provides a glimpse of what soldiers were finding during active service.

Turkish pot from Gallipoli

It wasn`t long before a number of men and officers with pre-war archaeological experience realised the importance of what was being found and alerted head quarters. In order to protect these potentially valuable finds and as much to mollify a sometimes hostile Greek Government as to further historical knowledge, both the British and the French forces decided to set up specialist archaeology units whose job it was to locate, catalogue and save these artefacts.

The British unit was initially under Lieutenant Commander Ernest Gardner, a leading archaeologist who established ‘B.S.F H.Q Museum’, as the unit became known. Manpower was provided by the Royal Engineers who also ran a Museum to hold finds, while field teams were formed to retrieve and record finds. These were commanded by officers with archaeology backgrounds recruited from units in theatre.

Peet with his huge experience was originally recruited as a field section commander. However, in 1917 Gardner was recalled to London and Peet took over command of the Unit. One of its major finds was a battlefield site found by the 7^th Royal Berkshire Regiment while digging trenches in the “Birdcage Line” when Private Reg Bailey literally put his pick through an ancient oil lamp before turning over ‘…bones with ancient armour and helmets…’. Amongst the finds the field team involved discovered the finest example of a 5^th century BC Greek helmet ever discovered. At the end of the War General Milne the British Commander negotiated with the Greek government for its transfer to the British Museum, where the collection resides to this day, a lasting reminder of Peet and the work of this unique wartime unit.

Peet himself remained a highly patriotic soldier who believed the war must be won but this was not without pangs of sadness for friends lost on both sides. German academics were well-represented in archaeology before the war and many were co-workers at the University and on excavations at sites such as Abydos. Former academic colleagues found themselves on opposite sides in the fighting. A letter home still in procession of his family reveals Peet’s dilemma when the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology recorded the death of a German Egyptologist serving with the German Army. This prompted some anger amongst two officers sharing the trench who thought it wrong to show regret for the death of a German soldier. Peet while understanding this animosity from men who had lost friends and brothers to the Germans could not at the same time bring himself to hate an old colleague. “…Both asked me how my paper could……print obituaries of slain Germans with …..expressions of regret for their deaths. I had no answer.”

Demobbed in 1919 and declining a post with the Egyptian Exploration Fund, Peet returned to the University and in 1920-1 was involved on the Amarna excavations in Egypt. This would be his last major excavation as he began to concentrate on academic research. He became a noted expert and author on Egyptian military campaigns, and in 1933 he was appointed Reader in Egyptology at the University of Oxford. He died in February 1934 aged 52, leaving a wife and daughter only weeks after taking up his new post. The Queen’s College, Oxford houses the University’s Egyptology library, and it is named the Peet Library in his honour.

Capt. A.Randall Jackson (1877-1944)

The second of Manchester Museum’s ‘monuments men’ was Dr Arthur Randall Jackson, sometimes known as the “Father of British Arachnology”. Born in Southport in 1877 he studied Medicine and Zoology at Liverpool before setting up a practise originally in Hexham but moving to Chester in 1905. As a GP he was noted for his accuracy in diagnosis. He described himself as a ‘…cyclist, spider hunter and bird watcher.’  He was a distinguished amateur scientist and became an acknowledged expert on British spiders, discovering 47 new species. He wrote a number of papers and books on the subject and won the Charles Kingsley Medal for his work.

On the outbreak of the Great War Jackson enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was appointed a Captain and the Medical Officer of the 9^th Seaforth Highlanders with whom he served in France and Flanders from March 1916 until the end of the war. He was noted by his men for his jokes and stories as well as what some of them considered his eccentric habit of collecting natural history samples in the front line. In this Jackson was like Francis Buckley who collected Palaeolithic artefacts from the Red Trenches at Coigneux in northern France during the First World War. In late 1917 Jackson was awarded the Military Cross for ‘… conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty….in his efforts to get in casualties, repeatedly going forward through enemy barrages…’ (Edinburgh Gazette March 11^th 1918).

His links to the Museum came through his membership of the Cheshire and Lancashire Natural History Society and a long standing friendship with the Museum Director Walter Tattersall. Jackson seems to have been donating samples to the Museum from long before the War and is fleetingly mentioned in the 1915 Museum year book. He sent samples from the trenches back to Manchester Museum and kept up a lively correspondence with the Museum`s temporary wartime Director Thomas Coward. These letters reveal his passion for collecting and study even in the midst of war. Some of his personal feelings are revealed in an excerpt from a letter to the Museum dated September 1918:-.

“Imagine Tattersall hasn’t been over yet! I am awfully tired of it, but there is no escape, nor home service for the likes of me. Whether I shall have any Natural History work when I return I don`t know. My practice at Chester has vanished and possibly I may have to move elsewhere or even emigrate. Anyhow all my old habits have been broken up and retired and physically and mentally I`m not what I was three years ago.”  (Manchester Museum Collection)

(Tattersall was the Director of Manchester Museum, then serving in the Royal Garrison Artillery.)

After the War however Jackson didn`t emigrate but re-built his practice and became a keen gardener and a collector of art and antiques. On his death in 1944 he donated his personal collection to the Atkinson Museum, Southport, in memory of his son who was killed with the RAF in World War 2. The items he sent back to Manchester Museum from the trenches are still extant and form part of the Natural History Collection alongside some of his wartime letters.

This blog post is a slightly shortened version of an article sent me by Michael Whitworth, Head of Commercial Operations at Manchester Museum, which has drawn upon information kindly provided by Clare Lewis at UCL, as well as  excerpts from letters in the possession of the Peet family. Deepest thanks to both for sharing this for Ancient Worlds.

Bibliography

Clare Lewis (2014) Peet,The JEA And The First World War – Journal of Egyptian Exploration Society
Alan Wakefield (2013) Archaeology Behind The Lines – “Mosquito” The Journal Of The Salonica Campaign Society
Manchester Museum Annual Report 1915

The Art of Easter Island

Decorated envelope

Manchester Museum’s exhibition about the statues of Easter Island Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues from Easter Island has been receiving some good feedback from the public and is even inspiring some visitors creatively as the image of the hand-decorated envelope above from a Belgian enquirer shows. In this respect the exhibition is stimulating people in a similar way to the Lindow Man temporary exhibition a few years ago. The latter prompted an artistic outflowing of poetry, drawings and even 3D models that showed people’s deep-seated need to respond in very personal ways to topics that either inspire or move them.

Since opening in early April visitors have left a lot of complimentary and constructive comments about the exhibition and many of them, especially but by no means always children, have added  drawings and doodles showing the moai. The drawings perfectly capture the enigmatic quality of Easter Island statues and I am now kicking myself for having used lined paper in the visitors’ book. We only touched briefly upon the inspiration that Rapa Nui’s statues gave to a generation of modern sculptors, including Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), Henri Gaudier Brzeska (1891-1915) and Henry Moore (1898-1986). One visitor to the exhibition commented “The heads remind me of Anthony Gormley’s statues on Crosby Beach in Liverpool – very interesting. Fab exhibition. Keep up the good work.”

Perhaps the strong appeal they make to our artistic taste is because we have already been influenced by seeing European works-of-art inspired by them. They reflect back onto the statues the aspects of modern art that grew out of exposure to the so-called ‘primitive’. This would explain why  some visitors embellish their drawings of the statues by adding a surrealist moustache with curled over tip or show the statue smoking a joint.

It is perhaps not so surprising that there are so many sketches of the heads: lots of simple line-drawing profiles express the visitor’s appreciation of the Museum’s work.

Moai by Josh

Some children who have been to the exhibition on a school trip have since come back with their families. Take the Davies family who left the comment: ” McKenzie visited with school on Friday. He loved it and so he’s brought us back to teach us what he has learnt” (25/05/15).

Birdman Race competitor?

It’s not just about the statues, however. The exhibition explores the deeper meanings the different kinds of stone had for the islanders and we show samples of volcanic rock. This clearly struck a chord with one visitor, as the photo below shows.

Volcano fan

 

Young Archaeologists Club Meeting: Rapa Nui

Young Archaeologists’ models of the statues from Rapa Nui or Easter Island

The subject of April’s meeting of the Young Archaeologists Club at Manchester Museum was the latest temporary exhibition Making Monuments on Rapa Nui: the Stone Statues from Easter Island. After showing the children around the exhibition we set up a creative session. The children made models of the moai or Easter Island statues using grey self-drying clay for the volcanic tuff of the heads and bodies and red for the scoria of the pukao or hats. The line-up in the photograph above shows how engaged the children were, and, for adults, it provided a then topical satyrical side-swipe at the line-up of candidates involved in the debates leading up to the General Election…

Making moai

Forming the heads and bodies out of the grey self-drying clay was challenging but the pukao were easier because they could be rolled out and then cut to size. They always remind me of the coconut sweet in the Liquorice All-Sorts packets (the cylindrical one with liquorice down the centre). The children used pieces of plastic drinking straw to attach the heads to the bodies to hold them in position until they dried (otherwise the heads sag). The children captured the long ears and noses of the statues and some even made separate eyes to insert in their statues, using the red clay for the irises.

Making moai

As leaders we always find that the best sessions are those that have a practical activity of some sort. The children are more interested and engaged than if we spoke to them as part of a presentation. At the end we lined up the various models to copy the moai that can be seen on the ahu or ceremonial platforms on Rapa Nui or Easter Island.

Making moai at Manchester Museum

The Young Archaeologists Club meets at Manchester Museum on the second Saturday of the month but children have to registered with us in advance before they can attend for insurance reasons and each session has to be booked separately beforehand because we have more members than we can accommodate all at once.