OBJECT HABITS: TRANSCULTURED COLLECTIONS FROM BRITISH EXCAVATIONS IN EGYPT
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-12-11

From the 1880s until the 1980s British excavations in Egypt benefitted from the principles of partage, by which means a share of the material recovered by archaeologists was allowed to be exported abroad. British-led work was a transnational undertaking, funded by variable interests around Egyptian antiquities fostered in a variety of contexts in Europe and worldwide. A recent project, ‘Artefacts of Excavation’, has mapped the scale of this endeavour: over the course of a century an estimated 350 institutions across 27 countries in 5 continents materially benefitted. There is simply no other endeavour in world archaeology that is comparable in terms of its scope and material legacy. Attitudes to such artefacts, or ‘object habits’, are not, however, defined simply by the museum as an institution or archaeology as a discipline, but in the full agency of the world. Therefore, this paper will situate artefact distribution more broadly within wider political, social and cultural attitudes to material culture over time. In so doing, I will argue that the integrity of museum collections can constitute a barometer of how archaeological materials are valued and mediated by society. This will be demonstrated through case studies drawn from Victorian England and Europe through to the fragmentation of the British Empire in the 1950s and in new contexts of collecting in post-colonial Ghana.


Author(s): Stevenson, Alice (UCL)