DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO EXPERIENCING PREHISTORY IN EUROPEAN MUSEUMS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 06/12/2020

This talk is based on my PhD research, looking at the narratives used to convey the Mesolithic to the public. I will present two contrasting approaches to presenting the Mesolithic to the public by museums. One the one hand we can present a personal story to engage visitors in past people. On the other hand we can try to convey a sensory experience of the past. Each of these focuses on one aspect of narrative, one on characters we empathise with and the other on a mimetic storyworld we can transport our minds into. The museums studied were distributed across Britain and the rest of northern Europe from Sweden to the Netherlands. A variety of approaches was seen to the introduction of characters and presentation of sensory experience. Personification of displays varied from including people by showing their absence, having individuals placed within displays, by having characters ‘speak’ directly to the visitor, by having named characters as part of the interpretive labelling and by developing an explicit character-led narrative to go alongside the exhibition. Sensory engagement included the simulation of smells or provision of sound, the creation of simulated natural environments in both indoor and outdoor settings, and the exploitation of real natural environments as part of the visitor experience. I will attempt to say why I think some of these approaches work better than others.


Author(s): Henson, Donald (University of York)