Beyond the Bling: Exploring the human stories behind 4000 years of adornment
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-12-15

This paper will discuss Colchester’s Museums recent major exhibition – Adorn: Jewellery, the Human Story – the first at Colchester Castle for seven years. The Adorn exhibition was over two and half years in the making and exhibits over 300 objects from our collections, supported by museum and private loans. Although Adorn’s core content (personal adornment/jewellery) and key messages did not change, many fundamental aspects were shaped by wider museum and stakeholder agendas, which this paper will explore.

Adorn is not a simple jewellery exhibition of historic (and predominantly archaeological) objects. I will discuss two important sections: ‘Made in Essex’ and ‘Your Stories’ that were instrumental in shaping the narrative of the ‘Human Story’ around the collections. I will discuss the relevance of chronology to the exhibition and the how the power of a broader thematic approach opened up the ideas and collections that could be represented and how this has engaged our visitors.


Glynn Davis, Colchester and Ipswich Museums


Speaker biography
Glynn Davis is the Senior Collections & Learning Curator at Colchester Museums. This role manages the curatorial team in delivering all content: from events and learning to exhibitions and digital access across the museum’s three public sites: Colchester Castle, Hollytrees Museum and the Natural History Museum. Glynn previously worked for the Museum of London for over seven years where he created, developed and delivered award-winning volunteer and community projects that engaged the public with the MOL’s enormous stored archaeology collections. Glynn completed an MA in Museum Studies at UCL and has a background in classical archaeology.