Faces and Places Big Saturday at Manchester Museum

Anna, Campbell and Jamie at the recent faces and Places Big Saturday

Yesterday (16th November 2013) Campbell Price and Anna Garnett, volunteer, Jamie Skuse, and I helped out at the Faces and Places Big Saturday  at Manchester Museum. The aim of the event was to promote the Koma figurines from Ghana that are now displayed in the Museum’s third floor temporary exhibition space. The faces of the figurines are very expressive and Vicky in Public Programmes set out tables in the Discovery Centre so that visitors, especially families with young children, could make their own figurines out of modelling clay. We selected objects from the Egyptology and Archaeology collections with the intention of inspiring the children’s imaginations to make figurines but they were also a popular talking point with other visitors.

Egyptian faces on the handling table

Campbell and Anna brought out some objects from the Egyptology collection: facial reconstructions of the Two Brothers, a replica of an encaustic protrait, similar to those on display in the Museum’s dedicated gallery, the lid from a Canopic jar depicting the ancient Egyptian god Imsety, busts from Alexandria and a shabti (above).

Heads from the Archaeology collection

For my part I brought out some head related objects from the archaeology collection including a late Iron Age/Romano-British stone head from Tyldesley near Manchester, a tricephalic piece from Standedge Tunnel, some replica carved stone  heads and some rather handsome carved wooden head made for an earlier Lindow Man exhibition. I suspect they are copying discoveries from the important votive deposit at the source of the River Seine at Sequana in Burgundy, France, as well as some stelae found at Rochdale (see above). Keith Sugden, the Museum’s Curator of Numismatics, kindly entrusted us with a selection of coins showing Roman emperors.

Head inspired by one of the Koma Land figurines

It was great fun recognising some of the figurines that visitors made and displayed on the table outside the Discovery Centre.

‘Sanctuary’ or ‘shrine’ showing off the clay figurines made by visitors

As part of the day I showed members of the Museum’s branch of the Young Archaeologists’ Club the facial reconstruction display in Ancient Worlds. There was even time to join Maxine’s inaugural ‘Women in Ancient Worlds’ tour which explored the topic of women and the contribution of women archaeologists and Egyptologists in the new displays. Maxine, who is a Visitor Assistant and  member of the Museum’s Front of House team, showed us the copy of Amelia Edward’s A Thousand Miles up the Nile, the Etruscan terracotta womb votive in the archaeology gallery as well as exhibits in the Egyptology gallery of Ancient Worlds.

Maxine with visitors on the Women in Ancient Worlds tour

We saw over a hundred people at our handling table and gathered some really useful feedback about how interesting visitors had found it. Jamie’s contribution went well beyond the call of duty when he kindly posed for a photograph with one of  the carved wooden figurines (below). What a trooper! As well as being a brilliant Movember photo opportunity, this makes me think there might be some mileage in a future photographic  project comparing the profiles of Roman emperors and empresses with those of modern day visitors. A great time was had by all as they say. A big thank you to everyone who gave up their Saturday to help with the event.

Jamie and carved wooden head

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.

Hairdressing in Ancient Worlds

Shall I take it bit more off the top for you sir?

Another one of those unique opportunities to record an unusual  job in the Museum came up recently when Gabby, one of the conservation placements, was putting the facial reconstructions back in the second case.  

Philip II’s hair was in a slight state of disarray and Gabby kindly reached into the display to ‘tease those tangled tresses’ back into place.

Not a problem the real king would have troubled himself over unduly, I’d imagine, as he enforced Macedonian hegemony over Greece and made plans to take on the Persian Empire.

Had he troubled more over his coiffure, might the course of history have been different? Somehow I can’t imagine him saying: “Cancel the battle of Chaeronea – bad hair day!”

Or was it only the Spartans who took pains over their hair? The study of hair in archaeology and ancient history is by no means a brand new speciality but this must be pretty well unique as a niche activity!

A Volunteer’s Experience of Working on the New Ancient Worlds Displays – Guest Blog by Caitlin Barratt

Caitlin working on the Roman glass collection at the Manchester Museum

I am very grateful to both the Roman Society and The Manchester Museum for giving me an excellent opportunity to work in such an interesting Museum and at such an exciting time: whilst completing my placement at Manchester I was fortunate enough to assist in the final stages of the opening of the new exhibition Ancient Worlds.  It was very exciting to see many of the objects and collections I had worked on a few months before finally go on display in this amazing exhibition (you can find out more about Caitlin’s work in the post ‘A Fake Lamp’ on the Ancient Worlds Blog).

Glass display for the Ancient Worlds third gallery

One of the largest collections of objects I worked on came from a metal detector, and included buttons, bells, buckles, toy canons and even a large medieval key. After cataloguing, numbering and photographing this huge collection I was able to appreciate the value of donations and loans from metal detecting clubs and individuals, which bring a wide variety of finds to the Museum. This particular collection was quite extensive, though there was little information about where things came from. Coming from an archaeology background this was quite frustrating as the information the collection could offer was limited. However photographing the objects in the respective groups and then finally seeing them in the exhibition it gave me a chance to understand that the aesthetic appeal of objects to the public almost equalled their historic value to archaeologists.

I was also able to see how one collection of objects was prepared for the exhibition and added to the digital app database: the collection was a large group of Roman glass with over a 100 items including vases, flasks and drinking vessels, they came from various sites in Europe.  The artefacts were arranged in the stores and then individually examined by one of the conservation team, the iridescent shine of some of the glass was actually a result of decay and corrosion.  A mock-up of the display was created in the store and photographs were taken of each shelf and blown up to A3, which I then annotated with accession numbers. This allowed the installation team to recreate the display in the gallery without starting again from scratch and it saved time. This task required a steady hand as the glass was extremely fragile and the odd, tall shapes made it difficult to keep moving the objects safely. After recording the accession numbers of the glass vessels I added to them to a database along with their descriptions; the idea of a more digitally interactive exhibition was fascinating.  It was an excellent opportunity to see how modern exhibitions make use of current technology to cater for a new generation of visitors.

My time at Manchester was very enjoyable and this placement was an amazing opportunity for me.  I would like to thank the Society for the Promotion of Roman studies for funding me and I would like to thank Bryan Sitch the Deputy Head of Collections and Curator of Archaeology at the Manchester Museum for enabling me to experience working in the Museum and for involving me in the new exhibition.

Caitlin Barratt

A Fake Lamp

We’re recently been looking in more detail at our third gallery in the Ancient Worlds displays. In particular we’ve focusing on objects of which the Museum has many examples such as lamps, ancient Egyptian shabtis and Roman glass vessels. It’s been a pleasure to welcome back our long-standing archaeology volunteer, Caitlin Barratt, a graduate of the University of Sheffield, who has been helping us enhance the records of our lamps. Caitlin is being supported in this work thanks to a Bursary for Museum Internships from the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. The information that Caitlin is enhancing will be made available to the public via mobile devices, freeing us of the need to include reams of written text in the new displays.

Caitlin with some new friends from the lamps collection

The decoration on one of the lamps proved difficult to make sense of so I went to the library and borrowed copies of Donald Bailey’s British Museum Catalogue of Lamps. The existing description on the Museum record said the decoration showed a centaur but when we looked it up in the Lamps Catalogue it turned out to be some men struggling to restrain a bull. One of the men had been tossed in the air by the bull. What was more interesting perhaps was that this lamp was a copy or forgery made by a workshop in Naples in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. It is somewhat ironic that a workshop producing copies, fakes and forgeries should command a level of academic interest you might expect to be shown to the real thing. But if we can’t tell copies or fakes from the real thing how can we be sure what we’re dealing with? Exploring some of these questions is part of the purpose of this third gallery in Ancient Worlds.

Fake lamp from the Naples workshop

It isn’t absolutely clear whether the lamp was made to deceive anyone but it looks as though this example has gone unrecognised in our collection as being of later manufacture. Caitlin is now keeping her eyes peeled for others.

It raises an interesting question, however. There is a display of copies, fakes and forgeries in the third gallery. Should we display this lamp there or keep it with the other Roman lamps and point out in the download information that it is was made long after the Roman Empire had ended?

Our thanks to Caitlin and to the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies for supporting Caitlin with a museum internship bursary.

Predynastic Pots in Demonstration of Petrie’s Sequence Dating

Susan Martin & Suzanna working on Predynastic pots

Work on the new displays continues as we rapidly approach the opening in late October. Over the last few weeks we’ve had a couple of placements from the university’s archaeology department working with us. In this image Susan our curatorial assistant is arranging some Predynastic Egyptian pots with the help of Suzanna, one of the placements. This is a trial arrangement for one of the displays in the 1st gallery of Ancient Worlds.

In the new displays we explore various aspects of archaeology and on the first table we look at Manchester’s contribution to the story. Right from the start we wanted to show that archaeology and Egyptology, though separate collections in the Museum, are part and parcel of the same discipline.

The first table with its focus on Manchester allows us to highlight the fact that the fieldwork of famous Egyptologist, William Mathew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) was financed in part by Manchester businessman Jesse Haworth (1835- 1921). We’re also trying to show how people find out about different aspects of life in the past and our rich collections allow us to show Petrie’s serial or sequence dating technique. You can get an idea of what we’re trying to do by looking at the diagram on the Petrie Museum’s website

Petrie knew that  the style and frequency of the objects he found in graves changed over time. His seriation technique enabled him to chart those changes and to tell whether any given grave group came earlier or later in the sequence. At the time he was working there weren’t techniques like radiocarbon dating so this relative dating method was useful, especially if the sequence was anchored by a later date.

In the case of the Predynastic pottery the material changed over the thousand years leading up to the unification of Egypt about 3100 BC. By laying the pots out in advance as an example of Petrie’s sequence dating we can test whether everything fits and get an idea of how things will look. Our thanks to Suzanna for helping us with this work.

An arrangement of Predynastic Egyptian pottery

Forensic Documentation at the Manchester Museum

As a volunteer at The Manchester Museum you are faced with numerous challenging and interesting tasks, and each week offers a new experience. In the past few weeks myself and a fellow volunteer have been working on a large, diverse group of objects for Bryan Sitch, Deputy Head of Collections and Curator of Archaeology. The objects include Roman tile fragments, pieces of glass, mortarium fragments, nails and even the handle of an amphora.

Unlike other artefacts in the museum collections these items only have partial or non-existent accession numbers.  An accession number is the unique number assigned systematically to individual (or sometimes groups of) objects. The accession number and object details are recorded on the Museum’s documentation system Ke Emu and older collections are recorded in the accession registers.

These objects came from an old education handling collection, but there were no records or lists of the objects used. Often the accession number was either completely absent or only visible in part. The task was to recover all the numbers. This involved using the old record books, the Ke Emu database and some of the Roman Manchester publications which have illustrations of the material.  We quickly established that the majority of the objects came from two excavations – Deansgate in Manchester (1970s) and the Gayton Thorpe Roman villa in Norfolk (1920s).

As some objects had clearer accession numbers than others they could be immediately identified, labelled and added to the computer records. I double checked by trawling though the large accession register volumes.  This process was particularly useful for the Gayton Thorpe Roman villa collection, but for pieces from the Deansgate excavation the accession number was not written on the object. Instead the date of the dig (e.g. MC’72) and a set a numbers relating to the site stratigraphy or layers was written on the objects. The site stratigraphy numbers were listed under the accession number entries in the accession register. I found it was easier to add the stratigraphic reference I could see on the objects to the on-line database, so that I could then search on the computer using the specific site stratigraphy numbers, which then gave the accession number.  Think of it as a kind of concordance.  This was a successful method even if manually adding all the numbers to the online system to begin with was laborious!

Finding the accession numbers was a long process, particularly as many of the objects were found to be lacking a number. It would appear they were either part of a group of items like broken pieces of pottery under one accession number or they were parts of objects which had got broken during previous handling.

It is incredibly satisfying to find an object with only a partial or non-existent number. For example the handle of an amphora or storage jar was found by looking in the publication of the Deansgate excavation. We recognised it by its maker’s stamp; this then lead us to a context number which we could search for on the database,  which then gave us an accession number.  When we looked the number up in the accession register we found a sketch of the stamp and we knew we had correctly identified the number of the amphora. Following a scattered paper trail in this way was rather like ‘documentary forensics’, or ‘forensic documentation‘.  In its way it’s as exciting as any episode of CSI.

The objects are still being identified and will subsequently be photographed, weighed, measured and re-labelled. All this work is creating a more complete archive and there is now the possibility of some of these fascinating objects being used in the new displays or as handling objects in the new galleries. Now we have numbers on everything protected with varnish it should be much easier to keep tabs on what the Museum has in this collection.

Caitlin Barrett,

Volunteer at the Manchester Museum