Category: Old Curatorial Archive

Archive of Tehmina Goskar’s curatorial posts, including on museum studies, ethics, and some of my PhD research (2005-9).

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Old Curatorial Archive

Finding history in material culture

Being an historian of material culture isn’t easy. It confuses, it contradicts and it doesn’t categorise elegantly. When does material culture become more than just pretty pictures to illustrate your otherwise colourless prose? This has been something that I have been bothered with for as long as I have been working with objects and their interpretation. Doing this from the discipline of history has certainly caused moments of ‘it is a bird, is it a plane, no, it’s an artefact!’. But it has also been alluring and affirming, a bit like catching a glimpse of a colourful jay in your garden amongst the usual blackbirds, sparrows and magpies. You remember they exist and actually have been around and part of the scenery forever. Embracing material culture enables you to treat history as a genuine continuum of undulating change accented by sharper contrasts (evolution and events). Our material worlds are what has made, and continue to make us human. Our creation, destruction and manipulation of material things set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom that does not embrace the permanency of arte-fact quite like we do. There is a reason why monastics and ascetics feel compelled to eschew the things that remind them of ‘worldliness’. So, isn’t this worth more attention than a bookcover?

Part of the difficulty of explaining my approaches has been that there is never a short one. I wish I could say I work on Saint Not-Appearing-in-this-Blog, or on the Unusual Family Papers of a Private Library. It would be easy, people would give an approving nod as something they expect an historian to say they did, and we could then move on to complaining about our positions of privilege. I ought now to gently dismount from my high horse and do some explaining of what my approach to history and material culture actually comprises.

I use close-object analysis in equal measure to archives, photographs, illustrations and the raw data of an object record. Deconstructing technique and materials is as important as ascertaining the economic, social and cultural contexts of what necessitated / desired creation. Materials-based enquiry also allows me to throw off the shackles of periodisation. While there is nothing wrong with studying the material culture of a particular time span, the richness of information I can glean from studying a particular object or material over a longue dureé, e.g. copper working technique from the hearth to the factory. I want to know how and when changes in prospecting, mining, smelting, alloying, casting, beating, drawing, rolling, plating and recycling changed over a period 10,000 years. Extending the idea of object biographies to life cycle and spans of materials.

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Old Curatorial Archive Old Heritage Archive

A history of Welsh copper in 29 objects: displaying the Latin American connection

Monkey puzzle tree, Chile
Monkey puzzle tree, Chile

On Thursday 16 December at 4pm I shall be giving a paper to this title for the Centre for the Comparative Study of the Americas (CECSAM) at Swansea University.

This will be the first time I have delved into a brand new region’s material culture since my foray into medieval southern Italy for my PhD. My learning curve has been steep and I hope that I do justice to the work of scholars of Latin America on which I will be heavily relying. However, this paper will not be about Wales’ relationship with Latin America during the boom years of the world copper industry in the middle two-thirds of the 19th century, but will rather suggest how this relationship can be interpreted through objects. Through the project I am currently working on, the Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper, I am tasked with doing just this. It isn’t just the Latin American connections that need to be made tangible through the objects and illustrations we will feature in the forthcoming exhibition at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea in July 2011, but those closer and farther from Wales such as Australia, South Africa, Anglesey and Cornwall. How can this story be told through the things that remain to us? Copper wasn’t the only thing that connected Latin America to Wales. The well-known Monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana, previously known as Chile Pine in Britain), native to Chile and Argentina, came to the British Isles in the 1850s and a handsome specimen was planted in the estates of Singleton Abbey, previously the home of copper magnates the Vivians, now the core of Swansea University. Did the copper connection bring this particular one to Swansea?

This paper will give me the opportunity to talk about my intellectual approach to choosing objects for exhibitions (and for history writing) and provide a discrete case-study to do this. To be a little out of my comfort zone with a new region’s history will sharpen, I hope, my questions and improve my answers. The title is in homage to copper’s elemental number, 29, and my expectation that 29 key objects can tell the story of the world of Welsh copper.

An enhanced version of my slideshow presentation will now form a part of the 2011 Swansea Latin American Association (Asociación Latinoamericana de Swansea Swansea Latin American Association) festival at the Dylan Thomas Centre where people will be able to learn about the Welsh-Latin American copper connections.

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Old Curatorial Archive

The Science of Noah’s Ark

Noah's Ark from Marxchivist
After ages, a meaty debate has been developing on the Group for Education in Museums Jiscmail list. It centred around an initial post by Richard Ellam on the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom (CLOtC) decision to award their quality badge to Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm. On balance the response from list members has been hostile towards CLOtC’s decision, and highly critical of the educational value of Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm. The gist being that, although much of the publicity about Noah’s Ark claims to offer the learner/visitor the opportunity to both consider creationism (perhaps that should be Capital C Creationism?) and evolution as theories/evidence for the origins of Earth, humans and other animals, Noah’s Ark’s real agenda is to promote Creationism over science (perhaps that should be Capital S Science?) or worse, to give the illusion that Creationism is Science. You can read the responses here and other responses here.

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Old Curatorial Archive

Textile Conservation Centre finds a new home in Glasgow

Clearly much continued to happen behind the scenes by the TCC Foundation before and since its closure in Winchester. A press release was made last week announcing a new home in Glasgow for many of its activities, particularly in research and education. I have taken the liberty of reproducing the press release in full below:

Press release issued by the University of Glasgow on 24th March 2010

New conservation centre preserves the fabric of the nation

Preserving the fabric of the nation’s treasures for future generations, a new textile conservation centre is to be established at the University of Glasgow.

The Textile Conservation Centre Foundation (TCCF) and the University of Glasgow have agreed to found the new teaching and research facility – the only resource of its kind in the UK – in the University’s Robertson Building.

Professor Nick Pearce, Director of the Institute for Art History and Head of the Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow, said: “This is a tremendous opportunity both for the University and also for the conservation profession in Scotland, the UK and internationally. Expertise, facilities and the wealth of the collections make Glasgow the ideal place for the kind of interdisciplinary research and study which the centre will promote.”

Peter Longman, Deputy Chairman of the Textile Conservation Centre Foundation said: “There was such concern over the closure of the Textile Conservation Centre in Winchester that over the last 18 months we have been approached by several institutions anxious to work with us to continue aspects of its work. We have considered a number of options, but the combination of Glasgow with its world class University and History of Art Department and the unrivalled collections in and around the City proved an irresistible location.

“This is a unique opportunity to build on the UK’s reputation in textile conservation training and related research; we look forward to contributing to its future success in Glasgow.”

The new centre for Textile Conservation, History and Technical Art History will focus on multidisciplinary object-based teaching and research that encompasses conservation and the physical sciences as well as art history, dress and textile history. It will be the first time that conservation training has been undertaken in Scotland and, combined with the University’s recent developments in technical art history, the new centre will have national and international impact.

The new Centre will inherit existing library intellectual property and analytical equipment from the TCCF, so that staff and future students will be able to draw on the key physical and intellectual assets built up over more than 30 years. Students will also have the opportunity to work with some of the best textile collections in the world held by Glasgow Museums, the National Museums of Scotland and the University’s own Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery. New academic posts will be created and the Centre will work closely with the Foundation to establish a global research network in textile conservation, textile and dress history and technical art history.

The first student intake is planned for September 2010 offering a 2-year Masters in Textile Conservation and a 1-year Masters in Dress and Textile History as well as opportunities for doctoral research. These new courses will join the existing Masters programme in Technical Art History, Making and Meaning, as part of the Centre. The Foundation is also offering a limited number of bursaries in the first years of the textile conservation programme and a fundraising campaign is already underway to raise further funds for the new development including additional studentships and new research projects. Potential students who would like to receive updates on the development and course details should email Ailsa Boyd at the University of Glasgow at: a.boyd@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk or t.mccabe@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

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Old Curatorial Archive

Medieval sacred textiles in Germany

Just a quick note to disseminate this excellent resource listing sacred textiles in German collections by Amalie on the Adventures in Historical Tablet Weaving blog.

List of the contents of Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters.

It reminded me that in Bamberg Cathedral’s treasury there is meant to be a cloak that belonged to Duke Melo of Bari from his time of exile at the court of Emperor Henry II.

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Old Curatorial Archive

Catalogues of medieval coins

Half follis of Justinian, Portable Antiquities Scheme
Of real benefit not just to numismatists but to medievalists who deal with material culture, economy, politics and more, are the three catalogues of Byzantine and medieval coins (including those of Ostrogoths, Vandals and Lombards, plus later coins from Thessalonica, Trebizond and Nicaea) by Warwick W. Wroth (see my delicious links on the right hand side). They are all now well out of copyright and you can at least read them via the Internet Archive which leads you to Google Books. They are allegedly available for download but I cannot seem to achieve this. I wonder if there is some residual rights problem as facsimiles of these volumes have also recently been published? However, you can at least consult them here. The quality of the reproduction is at least as good as the originals and so perfectly suitable for research purposes:

Catalogue of the imperial Byzantine coins in the British Museum (1908), vol. 1

Catalogue of the imperial Byzantine coins in the British Museum, vol. 2 (1908)

Catalogue of the coins of the Vandals, Ostrogoths and Lombards, and of the empires of Thessalonica, Nicaea and Trebizond in the British museum (1911)

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Old Curatorial Archive

Shared cultures in the medieval Mediterranean

View to the Mediterranean from Bari, Apulia
View to the Mediterranean from Bari, Apulia

I am currently writing up a paper based on two pieces of research which compares material culture from southern Italy with that of its central and eastern Mediterranean neighbours (e.g. Sicily, Greece, Egypt, North Africa). It is based on a conference paper I gave last July, at the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean conference at the University of Exeter, on the shared cultures of dress and textiles in the eleventh to tweflth century, and on a research paper I most recently gave on earrings in the Mediterranean, mainly dating to the seventh to eighth centuries, to the Islamic Art and Archaeology seminar at SOAS. Both papers problematised the idea of using the Mediterranean as an heuristic device (a framework for investigation) for studying material culture and both attempted to use basic anthropological techniques to question whether the elements of description and style we identify as being similar would have been recognised by those who made and wore these items. Do our typologies and philological designations do justice to the variety of experience and taste that objects held for their contemporaries?

Of particular inspiration has been the work of anthropologist Michael Herzfeld and the conceptual masterpiece, The Corrupting Sea by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell. Whether or not you agree with the latter’s approaches to Mediterranean history, there is no doubting its importance in making scholars question their own disciplinary boundaries. From a medieval southern Italian viewpoint, it has been quite liberating to centralise the region in this geo-historical space, rather than fight against its peripheral situation in the wider historiographies of medieval Europe, Byzantium and even the early Islamic world.

I am thinking of calling it ‘Material Girls in their Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its Mediterranean Neighbours’. You’ll just have to read the paper when it is out, for more.

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Old Curatorial Archive

Textile Conservation Centre continues online

Following the closure of the Textile Conservation Centre, until recently, part of the University of Southampton, the staff of the TCC and the TCC Foundation have set up a website to keep people in touch and retain a presence in the world of conservation, culture and heritage. Here, you can also keep in touch with recent staff and people.

www.textileconservationcentre.co.uk/

It is good to see that online methods of communication will keep some essence of this excellent institution alive.

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Old Curatorial Archive

Some loose thoughts on the Staffordshire Hoard

Sword hilt collar from the Staffordshire Hoard / www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/
Courtesy of www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/

The reaction to the news of the recent discovery of an immense hoard, rich in gold and silver, has been predictably varied, both from the academic and museum communities and the general public. The Staffordshire hoard was announced on 24 September 2009. The story of its discovery by metal detectorist Terry Herbert and its subsequent reporting to the Portable Antiquities Scheme and recovery archaeology at the understandably secret site is well covered in the press and can be read in the press statement on the hoard’s website. Here is a brief reflection I recently left on the Early Medieval Forum mailing list and the full thread with reactions from other medievalists can be accessed in September’s archives and October’s archives.

I read Alex Burghart’s review with great interest. As demonstrated in the article, the questions such exceptional finds raise are as important for the understanding of the past (whether ‘history’ or ‘archaeology’) as any answers that might be yet be put forward. Rather than the rather tired debate about whether such things inform history, or whether history informs them, I found the last sentence of most interest:

Not much certainty is likely to come of this, but when faced with this collection of strange, undiminished beauty, certainty is hardly the point.

What makes this find so intriguing, to me, above all the detail and analysis, whether of the inscription or the workmanship or the materials, is the effect it has already had upon a the popular consciousness of the early Middle Ages. If any of you followed the story on twitter, or indeed take a look at some of the comments left on its flickr pages, you would see what I mean (even overlooking the odd and downright bizarre).

I wish I had had the chance to go up to Birmingham and hear what others were saying, what they were expecting and what indeed it made them think about. The hoard will now be studied by (hopefully) a large cohort of scholars of all persuasions and will enter into lectures and seminar discussions, even if it might start on the legendary ‘booty of Penda’ question. This is only to be encouraged, even before any consensus might be reached about why and how.

We have to give a voice to our texts to get answers, and so do we to our objects. I hope that discussion on the hoard doesn’t get stuck on this issue, nor, I hope does its study become too fragmented between specialist scholars who will all find their own areas of interest in it but not readily come together or share. These finds could be used to create a museum in their own right, in the landscape in which it was found, and with the myriad other finds, texts and images from here. Perhaps if they were all put together, we might feel more certain about its role in the past, and its role today.
/ends

Since then, I have discussed the hoard with other people and kept half an eye on the hoard’s website, still trying to digest it all. What went into that work on the millefiori stud? How long would it have taken? And so on. Of particular interest is Emeritus Professor Nicholas Brook’s first impressions which raise the important issue of such objects having been heirlooms in their own time. I look forward to hearing more from Dr Kevin Leahy in his lecture to be given at the British Museum on 26 November (Tickets £5 and £3 concessions). His outwardly facing agenda for the hoard and its interpretation, in other words, working to put as much ‘raw’ information out to tender as it were, is something to be commended as I have alluded to above. I know of at least one undergraduate student who has already chosen this as his dissertation subject. British Archaeology Magazine’s recent coverage (issue 109 November/December 2009) of the hoard and its discovery is to be similarly commended. Its pure and simple descriptive analysis just states things as they are and doesn’t seek to make comment in order to appropriate some position on it or another or to make pointlessly bold statements about the how the hoard will irrevocably change our understanding of the ‘Dark Ages’… (of course it will only do so through a completely new mode of collaboration, debate, assimilation and dissemination of information).

I now come to a point where I feel that I want to understand better the relationship of one object to another in the haul, more than say, workmanship, techniques, dating, kingdoms and associated historic events. Something about this feels deeply personal. Can’t quite put my finger on it. In the meantime I can only look forward to its imminent arrive in London.

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Old Curatorial Archive

What makes a medieval topic important?

As another academic year turns, so do I. This time, to emerge from the provinces and from behind my charters and museum objects, and join in London’s medieval scene. This evening’s first seminar of the European History 1150-1500 series was a discussion led by David Carpenter and Miri Rubin entitled What Makes a Medieval Topic Important? A very keenly attended seminar, we all squeezed in anticipation into the modest Low Countries Room at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, in Bloomsbury.

Prof. Miri Rubin began with the most deft and breathless exposé of intellectual movements that have had great impacts on medieval history writing. From the Annales School establishment of social and economic histories of the longue durée to the Marxian approaches of late Prof. Rodney Hilton and the history of peasantry, to radical gender historians of North America, historians of ethnicity, identity and the mandala of fields and sub-fields which have resulted from these, we were reminded that it was this question, what is important? that has been asked over and over by historians who have wanted to change our thinking of the past, and by extension, of us today. All of this was gold-threaded with the idea that historians in the last century began to want to know more about European ‘peoples’ than its institutions. In other words, those affected by big decisions, rather than the decision makers. In in a current climate of political activity on ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeans’ (and the prospect of a President Blair–Il presidente del popolo, presumably) this point was made even more apposite.

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