The Shefton Archive: Enhancing a Collection’s History through Object Biographies
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 27/06/2019

Professor Brian Shefton, a leading Classical archaeologist, established an internationally significant collection of almost 1,000 Greek artefacts, now displayed in the Great North Museum and seen by 450,000 visitors a year. The collection is unique in having an intact archive, which contains over 100,000 documents detailing Shefton’s collecting and research between 1955 and 2012. This invaluable body of unpublished material provides opportunities to develop new insights into how and why the collection was established and developed. Using the figured vases in the museum collection as a case-study and applying the concept of object biography, this paper will explore the potential of the archive as a lens for interpreting artefacts and re-imagining the collection’s capacity to engage museum audiences with diverse narratives of archaeological collecting. By experimenting with museum re-display and digital object biographies, this collaborative project intends to provoke public discussion of the collection’s history and legacy.

Daisy-Alys Vaughan (University of Newcastle)