Archives

The Mildenhall Treasure

Jul18

The Mildenhall Treasure is a collection of thirty-four silver objects found in a field in Suffolk in the 1940’s. This Object in Focus book by Richard Hobbs tells the story of its discovery. There was some controversy over who found what and exactly where, as well the delay in declaring the find under Treasure Trove law.

The Mildenhall Treasure comprises dishes, bowls, spoons and trays but is not a complete dinner service. The pieces have complex imagery and there are different styles. Hobbs looks at the imagery in detail to see what we can learn about who might have commissioned and used it. He also explores the sophisticated metal-working techniques used to make the pieces. It was originally thought that objects as fine as these would have been imported to Britain, but more recent archaeology suggests they could have been made by local craftspeople.

As with all Object in Focus books, The Mildenhall Treasure is a fascinating little book that uses a single object to explore history, culture and technology.

Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece

Jul4

One of the current exhibitions at the British Museum is Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece and as always, there is an exhibition catalogue which is written by James Fraser, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Henry Cosmo Bishop-Wright. As with all BM catalogues, it is so much more than that. There are beautiful photos of the objects in the exhibition and some context for what they are, and there is also an exploration of the meaning of luxury.

People convey status in a variety of ways and almost all societies and cultures have differences in status, no matter how egalitarian. The book looks at how the Achaemenid Persian empire, a highly hierarchical political system based on kingship, used luxury to communication extreme wealth and power. The possession of fabulously costly objects set royalty and nobles apart. The wealth needed to have the objects created was out of reach of almost everyone. There is also a luxury in the impracticality of many of these things. To be able to afford the inconvenience of wearing pounds of gold and gems as jewellery and clothing means that you can have others serve you, that you don’t have to carry out even the smallest task for yourself.

As the Greek city states, led by Athens, became more powerful the Greeks defined themselves in opposition to the Persians. Luxury wasn’t power and status, it was decadence and decline. Which is not to say that Greeks weren’t wealthy, just that ostentatious displays of luxury were associated with the enemy, with all the things that Greeks were not. Wealth was poured into social projects, especially temples and public architecture. Luxury was used to express the power and status of the state rather than the king and his family.

Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece is an interesting look at concepts that have always been present in societies in all ages. It provokes thought about how luxury and power are expressed and used today. The book itself is a lovely hardback with purple inside covers and gold embossing. Not quite the kind of luxury on display in the book/exhibition, but unnecessary enough to feel special.

Pagan Britain

Jun20

Pagan Britain by Ronald Hutton is an examination of what archaeological evidence can tell us about the spiritual beliefs of prehistoric peoples in Britain.

A good 50% of the book is devoted to exploring the evidence and categorizing it into time periods, so far as is possible with the dating technology available. This forensic examination of what we actually have in terms of material and the limitations on our ability to interpret and understand it is important. Alongside this categorization is a critical analysis of the history of interpretation of the evidence. Hutton shows how that interpretation changed over time more in response to contemporary pressures than to anything to do with facts. Older interpretations from the 19th and early 20th centuries reflect religious and colonial views and beliefs, those from the 1960s and 1970s reflect the cultural dominance of economic theories and feminism. This is a relatively recent book (published in 2013) and so the considerable advances in archaeological technology and processes in the 1990s and 2000s are captured. Those advances have increased our level of factual understanding of the evidence which has, in turn, challenged the interpretation of it.

Essentially, this is 400 pages of telling us that the material evidence says very little about what prehistoric, pagan Britain was like. We can assume, based on what we do know and comparison with knowledge from anthropology, that it was animist, concerned with place and time, and contained beliefs about the power of human action to influence the natural forces around them. What specifically was said and done and what the specific personifications of the entities that those human actions were directed at were, we cannot know. I found the honesty of that position refreshing. I enjoyed Hutton’s rigour in sticking to facts and avoiding the very human tendency to tell stories and create explanations.

I found myself surprised by my realization of what it means that prehistory is not a fixed time period but is the absence of written evidence. Some parts of the world were in prehistory at the same time as other parts of the world had moved into history. This is very clear in Hutton’s treatment of Roman Britain. For the core of the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean world, there had been history for a long time and we have written evidence of what people thought about things to illuminate the material evidence. There are Roman writings about Britain, but so little of it that is contemporary or informed by those living in Britain that it provides no insight.

Hutton’s treatment of modern attempts to re-create pagan beliefs such as druidry and witchcraft is empathetic and generous. While acknowledging that none of these movements have any factual basis (the available evidence just can’t tell us), he recognizes a desire to interact with our environment in a way that has been common to peoples all around the world and is free of the constraints of organized religion.

This is a lovely book. It’s hard work (those 400 pages are in a small font and densely written) but it’s worth it.

Arctic Culture and Climate

Apr17

There were two exhibitions just starting at the British Museum in March 2020 when the UK went into its first lockdown in response to Covid-19. One was Tantra and I read the exhibition guide for that last year. The other was Arctic Culture and Climate.

The circumpolar North has been inhabited for nearly 30,000 years. The exhibition explored this history and the ways the peoples of the Arctic have adapted to their environment, as well as examining the impacts of climate change happening now and how Arctic peoples are responding.

It starts with looking at how Arctic peoples in the past and now have arranged their lives to work with the seasons and the different weather and conditions that resulted. This involved moving with herds of reindeer or occupying specific sites only for short periods in the year. Some activities were only performed in certain seasons and some animals only hunting at certain times. The book then looks at the ways Arctic peoples used the materials available to them to produce clothes, tools and vehicles. Particularly in terms of clothes and the use of sealskin and furs the Arctic peoples were technologically sophisticated at an early age. When the Vikings reached these lands they found their clothes and tools quite inadequate.

There is consideration of the evidence for pre-historic settlement of the Arctic. Much is considered to be underwater in the Bering Strait – once a land bridge between Russia and the Americas but submerged at the end of the Ice Age. It’s also worth noting that many recent archeological finds are the result of commercial development of the sites and this has happened less in the very far North. Some have been found and the material that has been discovered is challenging the colonial view of the peoples of the circumpolar North. Whether people started in the east, in Siberia, and moved west is not clear. The finds in north-east Russia appear to be oldest, but the evidence is far from complete. Regardless, there was much communication and trade around the arctic circle, much more so than there was north to south.There is a discussion of the contact between the Arctic and the southern peoples from the sixteenth century onwards and the impacts of trade and colonization.

Lastly, the exhibition looked at the lives of the peoples of the circumpolar North as they are today. It talks about indigenous liberation movements and the campaign for rights to land and traditional hunting practices. It also looks at how traditional technologies have incorporated modern materials. The impact of climate change is particularly felt by the Arctic peoples as they are closest to some of the most dramatic effects. Loss of ice and rising sea levels affect the animal populations, hunting techniques and the land that settlements are built on. Over the last 30,000 years, there have been several periods of warming and cooling which have caused great change in the lives of the peoples living through them and it is hard from this distance to know how well people adapted. It seems that modern peoples have more ability to know what it is happening, but less flexibility to change how we live.

The book itself is lovely: a hardback book with a white cover and some gorgeous photographs of objects and landscapes. In amongst the pages covering the exhibition artifacts are essays looking at art, or specific clothes-making techniques, or one town’s experience of the effects of climate change. It’s a shame I missed the exhibition as this book made me wish I’d seen it.

A History of Ancient Britain

Mar6

Pre-Roman Britain is a bit of a mystery (to me, at least). Last year, I picked up A History of Ancient Britain by Neil Oliver. Apparently, there was a TV series, which I didn’t realise until sometime after I read the book. I completely missed the BBC logo on the front cover.

From the time of the retreat of the ice sheet that had covered Britain – or the piece of land that would come to be what we know as Britain – roughly 10000 years ago to the arrival of the Romans, Oliver looks at the archaeological finds that tell us something about how people lived during this time.

There’s Cheddar Man, the earliest complete skeleton found in Britain and about 9000 years old, who would have lived in an environment similar to ours. There are the many stone circles and barrows and structures that may have been temples, mausoleums or houses that line up with the rising and setting of the sun. There are tools which show sophisticated technology, and the remains of mining tunnels where people burrowed for tin and copper. There are decorative and symbolic objects that tell us that people had surplus wealth, but we can only speculate what these things meant.

Then there’s the boat. The oldest known seagoing boat in the world was found in Dover in 1992. It’s about 3500 years old. Reading about it in A History of Ancient Britain inspired a trip to the Dover Museum to see it in real life. The Museum is much like any small town museum: some interesting things and a high dose of oddness. The Bronze Age Boat Gallery is amazing. The boat is in a sealed glass cabinet to ensure it doesn’t disintegrate and it surrounded by documentation about it’s construction and the project to reconstruct it using tools and techniques available to people of the time. Definitely worth the trip. It’s one of those magical museum experiences where the sense of time collapses and you can feel the overlay of the past on the present.

Neil Oliver has an engaging writing style and the book is very accessible. Interspersed with the historical facts are vignettes about the archaeologists and researchers Oliver met while filming for his various TV series (somehow I still didn’t cotton on to the fact that there was a TV series of this book, which I only discovered while looking for a cover image for this post, but in hindsight, it all makes sense now). There are also a few flights of fancy about what life might have been like for people living in Britain thousands of years ago. They are clearly signposted as imagination and help to bring it vividly to life.

I enjoyed this immensely and would highly recommend it.

Various Objects in Focus

Feb6

Over the last year I’ve read several books from the British Museum’s Objects in Focus series. These are lovely little books that provide a bitesize history of significant objects in the Museum’s collection, often with interesting contextual information from when the object was created and when it was discovered. There’s also often information about conservation techniques and how new technologies are increasing our understanding of archaeological and historical objects. They are also the perfect length for a once a week commute. I can read a whole one in one day.

As I’ve been somewhat lax in blogging, rather than do a post for each book, I’ve collected them here.

Lindow Man

Lindow Man is the preserved remains of a man found in a bog in Cheshire. Over 2000 years old, these remains are the best preserved from Iron Age Britain. The book covers the discovery and excavation of the remains and gives insight into what has been learnt from them. The man died a violent death but it is not know if it was murder, sacrifice or execution and speculation abounds.

The Standard of Ur

Unearthed in excavations in the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq) the ‘Standard’ is a beautifully decorated hollow box. It’s called a Standard because of it’s positioning in the tomb. This is potentially misleading as it’s function is not known, if indeed it had a function beyond being art. One of the things that these Objects in Focus books allow is photos of the detail of the art that wouldn’t be possible seeing it on display in the Museum.

The Warren Cup

This is a luxury silver cup from the Roman Empire, dating to the first century AD. It depicts scenes of male lovers and, as well as being an astonishing piece of both art and artisanship, illustrates some of the social mores of Roman civilization. However, because of the nature of the scenes it languished unstudied and unappreciated. Even in 1999, when the Museum acquired the cup, there was a stir in the media.

Model of a Summer Camp

The Model of a Summer Camp is an intricate and detailed model carved from mammoth-ivory depicting a festival of the people of Sakha (north-east Russia). The model was created in the mid-19th century for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867 where it was bought for the Museum. Although the model itself is not that old, the festival it depicts goes back centuries.

The Discobolus

The discus thrower is probably one of the most recognisable classical statues and will be familiar to many people. The book talks about the impact of the eighteenth century vogue for restoring classical sculptures – by filling bits in, adding new pieces or by inadvertently combining parts from different statues. Apparently quite a lot of statues, including the Discobolus, have the wrong heads.

The Meroë Head of Augustus

This is a bronze portrait of the Roman Emperor Augustus. The book looks in detail at the metal casting techniques used and the skill with which such a life-like image could be produced. It also looks at how the production and distribution of these types of statue were used a means of demonstrating power amongst far-flung imperial territories.

The Portland Vase

A beautiful Roman glassware vase which was smashed by a drunken visitor to the Museum in 1845. It’s re-construction and subsequent re-reconstruction has enabled the understanding of how the vase was created using techniques in glass that had been lost for centuries.

A’a: a deity from Polynesia

A’a is a carved wooden deity with many other smaller figures attached to it. Like many ethnographic objects collected by missionaries in the British Empire, not much is known about what it really represents. However, study of the materials, artisanship and working with local people who still retain the skills and knowledge can illuminate some aspects of the society that created it.

Bronze Head from Ife

Thought to represent a King, the bronze head is from Nigeria. The book has an interesting look about the attitudes of European artists towards non-European art as primitive and how objects such as the Bronze Head challenged those regressive theories.

Stonehenge

Apr23

Welcome to my annual flurry of posts about books, where I realise I haven’t posted anything in months, have a few weeks of activity, and then get distracted by work and life again.

Anyway, recently I went to the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum and, as I do, I bought a book. Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill is about how Stonehenge has been interpreted, treated and used throughout the centuries. From the romantic fiction dressed up as fact of Geoffrey of Monmouth to roughly about ten years ago, Hill traces the history of our efforts to understand the ancient monument.

Particularly interesting is how the druid theory has taken on a life of it’s own. Starting as an idea based on nothing much more than a mention of druids by Tacitus, supposedly an eye witness account, and an idea that Stonehenge dated from the Roman era, it has morphed into a movement that sees druids celebrating the summer solstice amongst the stones. We know nothing about the druids as they left no written records. Everything that is said about them is a modern invention. It might be right, but we don’t know.

Hill covers the ownership of Stonehenge, mostly private and the campaigns to acquire it for the nation. Some of those owners chose not to allow any archeaological digs, which given the damage some of the early ones did is probably a good thing. More recent digs have discovered burial mounds, human remains, and evidence of the age of Stonehenge and that it was built in at least three stages.

Stonehenge has inspired art, literature and poetry for centuries. Hill’s explores how it has been used as a canvas for the spiritual and philosophical ideas of the age. She shows how the more bloody, sacrificial interpretations are comnected to times of civil unrest.

This is a thoughtful and engaging book, well researched and constructed. Definitely worth reading.

Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds

Mar28

Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds is the exhibition book from the British Museum‘s Sunken Cities exhibition. I went to the exhibition in 2016 and picked up the book in the sale somewhat later. It has been my breakfast book for the past couple of weeks. The ones with lots of photos take much less time to read.

The cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion were important trading and cultural centres on the Nile delta for hundreds of years. Then a series of disasters between 200BC and 800AD meant they were lost to the sea. A combination of rising sea levels (1.5m over the last 2000 years), earthquakes and liquifaction caused the cities to sink. Liquifaction is what happens when you build massive stone temples and colossal statues on water-logged clay. Eventually, it’s just going to collapse. Over the last twenty years there has been extensive underwater archaeology off the coast of Egypt to recover them and to understand how the inhabitants of the cities lived.

The book is beautifully presented and is full of the most amazing photography of the underwater excavations and the objects in situ. There’s a good chapter on the techniques of underwater archaeology and the challenges of working in this way. The book explores the mentions of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion in historical writings and gives some political context for the time the cities were thriving. Much of the book is photographs of objects and explanations that put them in context. It’s essentially the text that is on the labels when you go to the exhibition. Which for me is good, because I don’t really read the labels when I go to exhibitions. I just wander around and look at things and absorb the visuals. Occasionally I might read about something that particularly catches my eye, but mostly I get bored with shuffling along reading every single label. In book form, it’s much more accessible for me. It was nice too, to read the book with the memories of the lighting and sensory effects of the exhibition.

The Gayer Anderson Cat

Jan21

The Gayer Anderson Cat by Neal Spencer is part of the British Museum’s Objects in Focus series. So far, I’m enjoying the series immensely. There’s something very satisfying about a short book packed full of stuff I didn’t know before.

The Gayer Anderson Cat is the familiar, well-known cat statue from Ancient Egypt. I was surprised just how much isn’t known about the statue. It was acquired by Gayer Anderson, an art and antiquities collector in the early 20th century, who purchased objects from dealers on a regular basis but no information about where it came from or what it was for came with it. Thousands of cat statues were created in Ancient Egypt: there is evidence of workshops churning these things out and the book covers the excavations of some of these workshops. How they were used and who by is more mysterious. The Gayer Anderson Cat is the finest example of the type in existence so an assumption is made that it was paid for by someone wealthy and dedicated in a temple, but that is still conjecture.

New technology can tell us a lot about how it was made from the casting technique to the effects of the chemical composition of the metal. It can also reveal more detail on the surface of the object than is visible to the naked eye. The book goes into this in some detail. X-rays have revealed that there are repairs around the head and show how they were made.

These books are delightful. I like the intense focus on one small thing and what it tells us (or what we have projected on to it) about the lives of people who lived thousands of years ago.

The Sutton Hoo Helmet

Jun4

The Sutton Hoo Helmet is the second of the British Museum Objects in Focus series that I’ve read. There’s seven of them in the series so far.

It is an in-depth look at an iconic object in the Museum’s collection, and is another of my favourites. The Sutton Hoo helmet is a finely crafted helmet, both fully functional as armour and exquisitely decorated with gold and garnet.

The book talks about the excavation of Sutton Hoo, which was not straightforward, and the effort involved in discovering the treasure hoard. The helmet was in many tiny pieces and putting it together took years. Indeed the first attempt was later decided to be wrong and it had to be taken apart, carefully, and reconstructed again. Putting the helmet in context with similar finds across Northern Europe, based on the decoration and shape, gave the scientists a better idea of what it would have looked like.

And, of course, the best bit is the model of what it is now thought to have been, made by the Royal Armouries in the 1970s. This is also in the Museum alongside the reconstructed original.

Finally, the book covers the candidates for the occupant of the tomb. It is made difficult because dating the helmet can only give an approximate date within a hundred-year range. These are fascinating little books and I’ll be getting another one as soon as I next get to the Museum.