Museum collections

2020 ◽  
pp. 1171-1186
Author(s):  
Campbell Price
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Trade Network ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Audience Awareness ◽  
Antiquities Trade ◽  
Material Record

Egyptological museum collections are the principal means of interacting physically with pharaonic material culture. Such collections of objects have a partial, often fragmentary, nature and are usually biased in favour of monumental and funerary sources. This chapter delineates the background to the acquisition of objects and the formation of museum collections—notably through the elaborate antiquities trade network rather than through archaeological ‘discovery’. The resulting museum representations of ‘ancient Egypt’ attempt to elide many gaps in the material record to form a coherent (but often simplistic) narrative. Museums attempt to balance conservation, accessibility and research, while utilizing the popular appeal of ‘ancient Egypt’ to engage with a wide audience. Awareness of these factors is important in understanding Egyptology’s reconstruction of pharaonic civilization.

scholarly journals Digitalization of Ukrainian Cultural Heritage`s Objects in Poland: Collections of Ethnography and Art, Photo Libraries, Archives

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Olena Kozakevych ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Culture Heritage ◽  
Long Time

The large numbers of material culture`s objects that originate from Ukrainian territories of the late XIX — mid XX centuries are preserved in Polish museum and archival institutions. The main groups can be distinguished: museum collections of ethnography and art, archival documents and photo libraries (negatives and photo prints). Polish specialists, who have been digitizing such collections for long time, also deal with Ukrainian material, often involving Ukrainian scholars for attribution. A large part of the material is posted online (sometimes as separate projects), which provides an opportunity to get acquainted with Ukrainian cultural heritage of wide audience (most often associated with ethnographic Hutsul and Bojko Regions), for example, photos of Hutsuls and Hutsul life by Gonsiorovsky, Poddembsky, Dutkevych, Senkovsky. Most digitized objects are stored on institutions' servers, and scientists are given access to information during their research. Further usage of these documents by scientists is regulated by the legislation of the European Union and the relevant institution. Within the framework of Polish-Ukrainian cooperation, digital copies are transferred to Ukraine. In this way, the objects of Ukrainian cultural heritage become available for knowledge to the wide audience. Keywords: Ukraina, Polish, Polish-Ukrainian cooperation, culture heritage, collection, archives, photo, ethnography, art

Material Culture and Healing Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Art History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract The practice of medicine and healing is always accompanied by a range of paraphernalia, from pillboxes to instruments to clothing. Yet such things have rarely attracted the attention of historians of medicine. Here, I draw on perspectives from art history and religious studies to ask how these objects relate, in practical and symbolic terms, to practices of healing. In other words, what is the connection between medical culture and material culture? I focus on craft objects relating to medicine and healing in Lanka during the Kandyan period (ca. 1595–1815) in museum collections in Canada and Sri Lanka. I ask what the objects can tell us, first, about early modern Lankan medicine and healing and, second, about late nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct tradition. Finally, I explore what studying these objects might add to current debates about early modern globalization in the context of both material culture and medicine.

Tracking Cahokians through Material Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven L. Boles
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Trade Network ◽  
Cultural Centers ◽  
Pros And Cons

Discussions on the rise and fall of great cities or nations typically entails a list of contributing factors leading to and from florescence. What is often lacking in broad discussions is the tracking of people to and from such cultural centers. In this article, I focus on Cahokia, the largest prehistoric city north of Mexico, and explore the various types of recognizable Cahokia artifacts found scattered in all directions from the site. While I weigh the pros and cons of using these items, I argue that flint clay figurines and pipes were likely associated with the migration of Cahokian religious leaders. This notion counters the oft-cited trade network or exchange of elite goods theories assumed to account for the disbursal of such items outside greater Cahokia.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Religion ◽  
Material Record ◽  
Everyday Religion

By combining the study of early modern everyday religion and the study of material culture, new light is shed on daily religious beliefs, practices, and identities. This chapter examines what the material record discloses about everyday religion in the light of new theoretical developments in material culture studies and studies of material religion in anthropology and sociology. It sets out how detailed, qualitative analysis of inventories and objects provides access to the inner devotional lives of Prague burghers. The analysis is embedded in a broader discourse of religion and material culture across the early modern world. It situates the study in a wider context by comparing and contrasting seventeenth-century Prague to milieus elsewhere in Europe.

Egyptian Antiquity, Imperial Politics, and Modernity

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-280
Author(s):  
Billie Melman
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Art Deco ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
Politics Of Archaeology ◽  
First World

Chapter 8 draws the web of relations between Egypt’s antiquity, empire, modernity, and internationalism from the outbreak of the First World War to decolonization. It focuses on the era between Britain’s unilateral granting of formal independence to Egypt in 1922 and the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1936, and sets the imperial preoccupation with ancient Egypt in national and international contexts. The chapter fills a lacuna in the historiography of Egyptology and Egyptomania which has focused on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 and has largely overlooked the internationalist angles of the interwar obsession with ancient Egypt. The chapter maps the expansion of interest in Egypt beyond the pharaonic past and considers its extension to prehistoric Egypt. It relates Egyptology to the modernization of travel and speed technologies, and to popular representations of Egypt as a centre of globalized travel in a connective empire. The chapter further considers the roles of the global media in mediating between discoveries and transnational audiences. Following on the theme of the internationalization of Egypt’s past, it considers the presence of Egypt in material culture, particularly in eclectic styles and design which were associated with modernity, such as Art Deco architecture and fashion. One main argument of the chapter is that the interwar discovery of Egypt’s multiple pasts was characterized by an internationalization apparent in the politics of archaeology, the spread of the new regime of antiquities and cooperation between Egyptian nationalists and internationalist bodies, and in the mass production and consumption of Egyptiana.

scholarly journals THE ORIGINS OF TRADESCANT’S ‘INDIA OCCIDENTALI’ WOODEN CLUBS:14C DATING, MATERIAL IDENTIFICATION AND STRONTIUM ISOTOPE STUDIES

2018 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 187-218
Author(s):  
Joanna Ostapkowicz ◽  
Alison Roberts ◽  
Jevon Thistlewood ◽  
Fiona Brock ◽  
Alex C Wiedenhoeft ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
French Guiana ◽  
Strontium Isotope ◽  
Wood Identification ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
14C Dating ◽  
Isotope Studies ◽  
Isotope Analyses ◽  
Material Study

This paper focuses on the material study (radiocarbon dating, wood identification and strontium isotope analyses) of four large ‘India occidentali’ clubs, part of the founding collections of the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, and originally part of John Tradescant’s ‘Ark’, in Lambeth (1656). During the seventeenth century, the term ‘India occidentali/occidentales’ referred not only to the ‘West Indies’ (its literal translation), but to the Americas as a whole; hence, the Ashmolean clubs and, indeed, thecforty examples of similarly large, decorated clubs known in international museum collections had no firm provenance and lacked even the most basic information. Previous attempts at attribution, based on stylistic comparisons with nineteenth- to twentieth-century Brazilian and Guyanese clubs, have proved inconclusive given the unique features of this club style, raising the intriguing possibility that these may be exceptionally rare examples of ‘Island Carib’ (Kalinago) material culture, particularly as images of such clubs appear in seventeenth-century ethnographic accounts from the Lesser Antilles. This paper provides new data for these poorly known objects from early collections, revealing not only the type of wood from which they were carved (Platymisciumsp. andBrosimumcfguianense) and their probable dates of manufacture (c AD1300–1640), but also their possible provenance (strontium results are consistent with a possible range from Trinidad south to French Guiana).

Anarchy: War and Status in 12th-Century Landscapes of Conflict

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Creighton ◽  
Duncan Wright
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Stephen King ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
New Research ◽  
Material Record

The turbulent reign of Stephen, King of England (1135–54), has been styled since the late 19th century as 'the Anarchy’, although the extent of political breakdown during the period has since been vigorously debated. Rebellion and bitter civil war characterised Stephen’s protracted struggle with rival claimant Empress Matilda and her Angevin supporters over ‘nineteen long winters’ when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘Christ and his Saints slept’. Drawing on new research and fieldwork, this innovative volume offers the first ever overview and synthesis of the archaeological and material record for this controversial period. It presents and interrogates many different types of evidence at a variety of scales, ranging from nationwide mapping of historical events through to conflict landscapes of battlefields and sieges. The volume considers archaeological sites such as castles and other fortifications, churches, monasteries, bishops’ palaces and urban and rural settlements, alongside material culture including coins, pottery, seals and arms and armour. This approach not only augments but also challenges historical narratives, questioning the ‘real’ impact of Stephen’s troubled reign on society, settlement, church and the landscape, and opens up new perspectives on the conduct of Anglo-Norman warfare.

scholarly journals Modeling a primate technological niche

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan S. Reeves ◽  
Tomos Proffitt ◽  
Lydia V. Luncz
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Tool Use ◽  
Short Distance ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Evolutionary Success ◽  
Distance Transport ◽  
Material Record ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThe ability to modify the environment through the transport of tools has been instrumental in shaping the evolutionary success of humans. Understanding the cause-and-effect relationships between hominin behavior and the environment ultimately requires understanding of how the archaeological record forms. Observations of living primates can shed light on these interactions by investigating how tool-use behaviors produce a material record within specific environmental contexts. However, this requires reconciling data derived from primate behavioral observations with the time-averaged nature of the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record. Here, we use an agent-based model to investigate how repeated short-distance transport events, characteristic for primate tool use, can result in significant landscape-scale patterning of material culture over time. Our results illustrate the conditions under which accumulated short-distance transport bouts can displace stone tools over long distances. We show that this widespread redistribution of tools can also increase access to tool require resources over time. As such, these results elucidate the niche construction processes associated with this pattern of tool transport. Finally, the structure of the subsequent material record largely depends on the interaction between tool transport and environmental conditions over time. Though these results have implications for inferring hominin tool transports from hominin archaeological assemblages. Furthermore, they highlight the difficulties with connecting specific behavioral processes with the patterning in the archaeological record.

scholarly journals Museums and indigenous memory: the Katxuyana’s collections and the contemporaneity of musealized material culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-509
Author(s):  
Adriana Russi ◽  
Astrid Kieffer-Døssing
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Indigenous Memory ◽  
Ethnographic Collections

Currently, ethnographic collections are at the center of a debate about the new meaning of museum collections, which questions the actuality of the preserved material culture. These issues also refer to the promotion of otherness and protagonism of the ‘collected people’ in museums, which trigger the interest of both researchers and indigenous people. The same is happening with the collections of the Amerindian Katxuyana. These collections count more than 700 objects collected by different expeditions at different moments in time and the collections have been preserved for more than 50 years in European and Brazilian museums. Despite this long timespan the objects are material records from everyday life, rituals and festive moments, and they reveal a little about the life of this people in the first half of the twentieth century. Some parts of these collections have been the source of dialogical experiences between researchers and Katxuyana in order to evoke memories and knowledge. This paper describe a bit about this course of approximation between Katxuyana and the collections.

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