Museums

London is a wonderful city. It’s so full of museums that no-one can know about all of them, so you can constantly be surprised by new ones. On a recent visit a friend introduced me to Sir John Soane's museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I was enchanted. Its plan is contrary to all the rules recommended for modern museum displays, but it’s great.

Sir John Soane was a successful architect in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. He also collected antiquities and paintings. He bought three adjoining houses in a Georgian terrace and filled them with his collection. When he fell out with his son and wanted to prevent him inheriting, he paid for a private Act of Parliament which gave the houses and their contents to the nation in perpetuity, and specified that nothing in their display should be changed at all. This means that the present museum is a warren of rooms opening out of each other. Some of them are filled in every corner with objects, others remain arranged as spacious living rooms with period furniture and rather nice paintings on the walls. There is a light well in the centre which runs through the three stories of the building from a skylight in the roof to the cellar. It is lined with shelves of antiquities and has a massive Egyptian sarcophagus at the bottom. There are tiny rooms the size of cupboards, also full of objects. The collection includes Greek and Roman antiquities, a copy of the Apollo Belvedere, the Egyptian sarcophagus, and bits of English medieval stonework. They are all closely packed into every available space, jumbled together without regard to date or provenance, and there is not a single label on any of the pieces. You have to look them up online. And it works! I can’t wait to go back.

My visit got me thinking about museum displays I have seen, and which I have loved or hated for various reasons. Of course different museums are aimed at different cohorts of visitors. Some are intended to be family-friendly, some are for visitors with a more specialist interest, and some are aimed at processing huge numbers of tourist groups who are coming just to get out of the rain and don’t actually have much interest in the past. (For this last group I would recommend a converted aircraft hangar with 12 artefacts, videos all round the walls, a coffee shop and a lot of toilets, rather than an actual museum. And call it “The [name of town] History Experience”).

Having no labels either works – or it doesn’t. About fifteen years ago I visited a museum in a large city in England which had a display of artefacts from Ancient Egypt in one of its galleries. They had attached the objects to the back of a showcase covering most of one wall of the gallery. The artefacts were excellent examples of their type but they hadn’t given them any descriptions at all, not even a one-word name, just a number. Either you had to buy a catalogue or you had to use the single computer at one end of the showcase. Needless to say, the computer was being monopolised by small children playing.  And those were the days before smartphones and apps. I was involved at that time in schools work covering the Ancient Egyptians, so I found this rather disappointing. I knew what most of the objects were, but I would have liked to know how old they were and where they were found.

One of the best displays I can remember seeing was in a national museum I visited in the Far East. It had a large collection of 9^th century CE Chinese stoneware dishes from a shipwreck. They could have put most of them into storage and only displayed a few of the best pieces. Instead they solved the problem most imaginatively by putting a few representative examples into display cases with explanations, and putting the rest onto a forest of Perspex ‘stalks’ standing up from the floor. Speaking as a visitor, I thought it was great. If you wanted the basic information it was there in the showcases, and if you wanted to examine more examples you could do that without having to write to an overworked curator and book an appointment in three months’ time. The display had a most attractive overall effect, and the ceramics were extremely beautiful.

Another major museum of my acquaintance at one time (long ago) summarised the entire Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) period in Britain by displaying a single stone handaxe in a showcase with dramatic lighting. To my certain knowledge, because I had seen them with my own eyes, their basement was stuffed full of stone tools from a variety of classic Palaeolithic sites. The Old Stone Age covers just over 98% of British history. And they only showed one tool, as an art object.

When I was working I was always told that labels should be kept short and written for a reading age of twelve years old. This is apparently the reading age of the average Guardian newspaper reader.  I have learned since then that the average reading age in Britain is eight years old, that of most Sun readers. A temporary exhibition in a museum that I visited in the last few years had pages of text on the walls beside the showcases, resulting in logjams of visitors standing in front of a single case for hours, solemnly reading each label. There is a happy medium between no labels at all and a wall-mounted textbook.

And disabled-friendly doesn’t just mean installing a stair lift. There are other disabilities. I have seen lengthy explanatory text, not just a few names in large font, on the wall behind a wide table-top case. “Visually impaired” visitors, i.e. anyone old enough to need reading glasses, had to keep putting their glasses on and off, or worse, switching from reading to distance glasses, as they tried to look at the objects and then find out about them. I saw one visitor bending over the showcase to get near enough to read the text, leaning their weight on the glass top… 

I think the best panel text I have ever seen was in the on-site museum at Skara Brae, the Neolithic village in Orkney. Their labels differentiated clearly and simply between different kinds of evidence about each artefact.  What the object was; what evidence, such as C14 date or food residues could be obtained from it; and what could be deduced from this evidence, such as date or diet, were stated in different sizes of type. I wish more museums would do that so that the general public could understand how we learn about the past from archaeological evidence, what is fact and what is an educated guess.

My research continues. Museums of the world, I'm still out there. Watch this space…

Reader, when you hear the word ‘pottery’, what do you think of? A tasteful piece of Clarice Cliffe on the Antiques Roadshow? An archaeologist telling us how Grooved Ware has overturned all our ideas about the Neolithic in Britain? Well, I think of rats.

Long ago, when my son was young, we kept guinea pigs. In summer, they had a run on the lawn, but in winter they lived in the garden shed, well supplied with hay and guinea pig food. After a while I noticed that the bottom of the shed door had been gnawed until there was a hole there. There were clear tooth marks. Rats! A common pest in suburbia, where people feed the birds and aren’t always careful about what they put on the compost heap. Of course it was only to be expected that they would enjoy guinea pig food, which is mostly grain. I wasn’t surprised by their efforts on the wooden door, but I was impressed by their determined work on the lid of the plastic bin where we stored the food. Did they actually swallow shavings of red plastic and did it really do them no harm? This incident got me thinking about pottery. They couldn’t have knawed through that. If I had stored my grain in a thick-walled ceramic bucket with a stone lid on top the rats wouldn’t have stood a chance.

And that got me thinking about how easy it is to make pottery, if you are not too particular about what it looks like, or its fire-resistant and water-retaining properties.  Although you can improve a leaky piece of ceramic by burning a bit of milk inside it.

I was once employed by a local authority which was having a family day in a country park. At that time I was known to be working on medieval pottery at a museum nearby and they wanted me to run an activity making pots. They supplied a shed and a pile of timber offcuts and I sourced the clay. The families spent the morning kneading this clay and mixing in various tempering materials such as sand and crushed shell and chaff, which I obtained from the local pet shop. They made pinch pots and in the afternoon we put the pots into a haphazard heap of wood and set light to it. As the activity only covered one day we didn’t even have time to dry the pots first, which is normally regarded as vital. If you don’t dry them out thoroughly the pots have a tendency to explode when tiny pockets of water reach boiling point.

The wonder of it was that after only a few hours in that inadequate bonfire some of the pots had actually fired (some had only fired in parts). Clay has to be heated to a temperature of at least 500 degrees C to make the irreversible change to ceramic, albeit rather grotty ceramic. If we had had twice as much wood and twice as much time I think our pots would all have fired into real ceramic vessels. They probably wouldn’t have been suitable for boiling porridge over a fire, but they would have kept the rats out.

And what do you do in areas without trees, like the Northern and Western Isles? Well, if you don't have wood for the firing you can use peat. Derek Hall in " The Scottish Medieval Pottery Industry: a pilot study" (Tay & Fife Archaeological Committee 2016) considered that peat was a perfectly likely fuel for medieval pottery kilns in Scotland. According to a Wikipedia entry, peat was used to fire pottery kilns in the Netherlands, which was another area without trees. For example, the potteries established at Gouda in the 18^th century used peat as fuel.

And you really don’t need an elaborate kiln. My crude bonfire has historical parallels. In the Hebrides, 19^th century housewives made a type of pottery called ‘craggan’ or ‘crogan’ ware in the cooking hearths of their crofts. They used local clay, tempered simply by leaving in the sand and fine gravel which it contained naturally, and only removing larger stones. The pots were handmade, coil-built, sometimes with simple impressed decoration, and left to dry for twenty-four hours. Incidentally, you don’t need sun to dry them either: a craft potter in the Orkney island of Westray told me that he found a strong wind dried his products quite adequately. Then the craggans were fired in the ordinary cooking hearth in the centre of the farmhouse, with burning peats put inside and around them. When they had been fired for long enough to turn them into ceramic, milk was poured over them inside and out to seal the porous surfaces. They were usually used for liquids (beer, water, buttermilk and so on) and had a neck over which a piece of sheepskin could be tied as a lid.

From the mid-19C until the 1930s, at the small village of Barvas on Lewis in the Hebrides, a peculiar ware was made by the same process but copying the forms of the factory-made china tea sets which were starting to appear in Scotland. It was known as Barvas ware. It may have been made largely for tourists.

Pottery can be an exquisite and subtle art form, requiring great skill and technical knowledge to reach perfection. From Chinese porcelain and Japanese tea bowls to Wedgewood and Bernard Leach, it rightly fills our museums and art galleries today. But remember that if you just want to keep out rats, it’s  fairly simple to make.

The early prehistoric rooms in Orkney Museum are on the ground floor of the building, leading off one another. When you have been past a caseful of exquisite polished stone axe heads, whale vertebrae made into bowls, and some of the famous Grooved Ware pottery (Neolithic), you come into another room where steatite burial urns from Bronze Age cists and eagle claws from the famous Tomb of the Eagles catch the eye. But my favourite object in that room is a small flat trapezoidal piece of dull black stone, rather inconspicuously displayed on the top shelf of the showcase in the centre of the room. It is part of a Bronze Age necklace.

I like it because it is an interesting intellectual exercise. It is one of those finds where only a small part of an object has been found, but you can tell what was there originally if you know how to recognize it. I did a lot of that during the years I worked writing reports on medieval pottery, recognizing London Ware pitchers from a small piece of the spout, or St Neots Ware bowls from a fragment of an inturned rim. That’s archaeology. An awful lot of the time you are dealing with small broken pieces of  the original artefact. To display them to the public in a museum case does take a certain amount of creativity.

This little piece of black stone comes from the peat moss at Grind, Tankerness, in the East Mainland of Orkney. That is to say, it was recognized in a peat which had come from that moss, by William Mitchell, who donated it to the Orkney Antiquarian Society. Unfortunately I have not found a record of the date it was found, but since it was published in 1934-5 it must have been found before then ⁽¹⁾.   It is one of  the spacer plates from a Bronze Age multistrand necklace. If you tip it sideways you can see that there were four holes bored through it to hold the strings of the necklace. Its shape was designed to hold the strands in the right position to give the necklace a crescentic outline. It has geometric decoration punched into the flat surface. None of the rest of the necklace was found – imagine trying to find small black beads in black peaty soil –  but the presence of a whole 4-strand necklace can be inferred from this small object. 

It is referred to on the label as jet, which carries the implication that it was imported from Yorkshire, which is the nearest source of jet. William Kirkness, who published it, believed it to be lignite or cannel coal, both of which can be found in Scotland. However without scientific testing, which as far as I know has not been carried out on this piece, it is not possible to distinguish jet from albertite. Albertite was used for jewellery in the Bronze Age in Orkney. There are beads from Skara Brae and Swandro on Rousay, and a V-bored button-shaped object from the Tomb of the Eagles believed to be made of albertite. The Swandro bead material has been confirmed by several different methods of scientific analysis. There is a deposit of albertite at Dingwall, just north of Inverness, and in Orkney on the NE shore of Stronsay there is bed of rock which apparently resembles albertite in composition ⁽²⁾.  So the spacer plate might be jet, but it might be any of these other rocks.

So what did the necklace look like? My drawing is based on a number of complete and partial Bronze Age ‘jet’ spacer-plate necklaces found at various places in Scotland such as Poltalloch, Killy Kiaran and Mount Stewart. The carved design on the Poltalloch necklace is said to have retained traces of a white substance which would have made it stand out more against the black background. They appear to have been worn by women, and the similarity of their shape to gold lunulae has been noted. Most are now in the National Museum of Scotland, and their online collections database has images of some of them.

It reminds us that Orkney was important in the Bronze Age as well as the Neolithic or the Viking age.  Many people don’t know about the existence of the beautiful sheet gold discs from the largest barrow at the Knowes of Trotty, or the remains of an amber necklace from the same grave, because they are in the National Museum in Edinburgh. Perhaps someone could donate some really good replicas to the museum; after all there is a replica of the Tankerness Hood on display in the Iron Age gallery.

1. Kirkness, William  (1934-5) ‘Note on the discovery of a plate from an early Bronze Age necklace', Proc Orkney Antiq Soc, vol. 13, p.41 & Fig.2
2. British Regional Geology: Orkney and Shetland  1976, Natural Environment Research Council; Institute of Geological Sciences, Chapter 8 Old Red Sandstone of Orkney, Page 80

Well, yes, it may very well be an inside job. But not in the sense you are imagining. Those finds could quite well still be somewhere in the museum. It’s just that no-one knows where. Consider the following totally fictional narrative, fictional in the sense that I made it up. But it is based on my personal experience of what can happen any day in any museum somewhere in Britain. And I do mean any, I have personal experience of several so this isn't aimed at any particular museum.

…Once upon a time, in the 19^th century, there was a British soldier. He went to India to serve his queen and country, and before he came home again he bought a little gold ring with a ruby set in it. It was a very thin circle of low-carat gold, and the ruby was no more than a tiny chip because he didn’t have much money. However, his sweetheart was delighted with it and they got married and lived happily ever after, and so did their daughter and her daughter after her. The ring passed from mother to daughter until the early 21^st century and then things changed. The current holder of the ring didn’t want to wear an old cheap ring. Her husband was rich enough to buy her an expensive and stylish modern one. However it seemed disrespectful to just sell the family ring on EBay or give it to the charity shop, so they decided to donate it to the local museum.

The museum didn’t really want it, but the family had lived in the area since the soldier went to India so it had local associations, and they didn’t want to offend a pillar of the local Rotary Club, and anyway it was very tiny and wouldn’t take up much room. So they accepted it. The couple brought the ring to the museum on the appointed day, and filled in the forms with the person on the front desk and handed the ring over and went home. The person on the front desk filed the paperwork in the proper file, and put the ring, wrapped in a screw of acid-free tissue inside a small plastic box inside a brown paper envelope, on the appropriate curator’s desk (their office was kept locked). The desk was cluttered with paperwork and objects awaiting attention. The curator was too busy to do anything with the ring that day, so it got moved to the edge of the pile. During the days that followed, everybody was totally wrapped up in the redisplay of one of the main galleries. And then there was a water leak in the main store. And then there was an urgent meeting about funding. And then…  well, you get the idea. So the ring got forgotten. It sat on that desk for a while and then got put on a shelf in the cupboard in the office along with a rusty box iron and a glazed brick and a George VI coronation mug and a piece of tasteless embroidery, because the curator had to tidy the desk for a visit by the leader of the Council. And then they left. The replacement curator knew nothing about it. The ring sat in the cupboard. For a number of years.

One day, though, the donor’s grandson was doing a school project about his ancestors and they had the idea of taking him to the museum to see the Indian ring. When they didn’t see it on display, they asked where it was. The new curator (a very new curator) got a bit flustered but assured them that it would be found. They did it by the book, or rather by the database. Every museum has a collections database listing all the objects which legally belong to the museum (loans and enquiries go in a different place). All the objects have a unique number. The new curator searched that collections database every which way: ‘ruby ring’, ‘ring’, ‘gold ring’, ‘Indian ring’ and by the name of the family and by the year that the family claimed to have handed it over. No joy.

The curator wondered if they were trying it on, so they went to the file with the entry records and searched through them. And there was the record for the ring. There was no question, that ring had entered the museum. So, where was it? Had someone stolen it? How? Who? Searching the entire museum for one tiny ring was an impossible job. Like most museums, the place was full of drawers and cupboards and shelves and niches and nooks and cardboard boxes, and although most of them contained exactly what they were supposed to contain, there was always the possibility of the ring getting into the wrong place by mistake. Human beings do make mistakes, especially when they are in a hurry. The staff did their best and searched all the most likely places and contacted the previous curator and the retired front-desk person, but they couldn’t find it.

The angry family wrote to the local newspaper and their MP and it got into the national news: “Ruby Ring Goes Missing from Museum”; “Who has Stolen Heirloom Jewellery?”; “Disgrace of Museum” etc. The fact that the ring was so small that it was barely worth stealing was of course not mentioned.

Just as things were getting really embarrassing, the curator finally got around to clearing out the last cupboard in their new office. And there was the ring, which of course had never got as far as being listed on the collections database. This was done in a great hurry and the ring was put on display in the Victorian gallery in a place of honour (which it would never otherwise have attained), and the local paper had a front page picture of the grandson proudly standing beside it.

It can happen. Many different kinds of find can appear to go missing for many different reasons. Boxes of medieval pottery can go missing because the member of staff who wanted to study them didn’t leave a note or fill in the right field on the database when they moved them out of the store to their office. They never leave the museum, they just get moved so nobody knows where they are. Of course sometimes they do leave. Boxfuls of bronze artefacts can disappear and only reappear again when the specialist to whom they have been sent for a report dies of old age and his next-of-kin finds them in the downstairs toilet. A PhD student who has been doing research on the collections might smuggle something out in their briefcase to use in their evening class, fully intending to return it next week. Records which have been digitised in a hurry in the past using an old database can be incomplete, so that you can’t find things when you search. For example, if you search for ‘urn’, how do you tell which of the 200 urns that come up are Roman burial urns and which Victorian garden furniture if no-one has filled in the necessary field? Keeping track of hundreds of thousands of objects (yes, literally) is no joke. Especially if there are not really enough staff to do the job properly.

So the next time you see a dramatic headline about objects going missing from a museum, yes, they may well be valuable pieces that really have been stolen. Or they may still be in there somewhere…

I wonder how many people quite realise the number of remarkable archaeological finds that have been made in Orkney over the last 150 years. Many of them are not on display in Orkney museum and can easily be overlooked. In fact many of them are apparently not on display in the National Museum in Edinburgh either, although that is where they are kept (see their collections database). Some are objects of national significance, and some are there because Orkney Museum didn’t open until 1968 and it didn’t have a full-time curator until 1976. There was nowhere to safely store or display finds in the islands. The Treasure Trove laws also come into it, and they are different in Scotland from those in England. Among these special finds from Orkney is a group of silver dirhams, Arab coins found with a hoard of Viking silver.

Silver dirhams were coins used throughout  the Islamic world at that time. They are a fascinating reminder of how far Viking contacts reached in the 10^th century. Vikings traded from Scandinavia to the Irish Sea, where the ircity of Dublin was probably the richest port in Western Britain at that time. They travelled to Russia and as far as Constantinople to the east and south, to Iceland and Greenland to the west. And Orkney lay in the middle of these, ruled by a Viking earl.

Several hoards of precious metal from this period have been found in Orkney. The Skaill hoard, which weighed 8kg, was found in March 1858 in sand dunes near St Peters Kirk at the Bay of Skaill. It was buried in a stone cist and contained not only hack-silver (chopped –up silver objects intended for recycling), but brooches, arm- and neck-rings, ingots, three Anglo-Saxon coins, and twenty-one Arab dirhams. Only one of the Arab coins is complete. The dates of the coins suggest that the hoard was buried in the 10^th century CE:  the latest of the dirhams was struck at Bagdad in 945CE, and the latest Anglo-Saxon coin was dated to c.925.

The hoard contained a number of silver brooches of probably Irish or Manx origin which have attracted much more attention. They are beautiful. But somehow I find these coins with their graceful writing even more beautiful, and coming from so much farther away, more exotic.