Narratives Against Forgetting: The archaeology of unloved objects
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-02-07

While dealing with and curating archaeological objects with absent provenances and missing archaeological evidence deposited in a small communal museum in South Wales, it became more and more obvious that misplaced objects are in bigger danger of being forgotten. This paper describes the project and processes involving the literal and cultural (re-)discovery of forgotten ancient Egyptian artefacts in Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, led by the author. Most of the artefacts had once formed the private collection of Harry Hartley Southey (1871-1917), son of a local newspaper magnate, and were bequeathed to the museum in the 1910s and 1920s. However, many of them spend the time forgotten and unresearched, undervalued, and in some cases uncared for until 2011. 
The cultural (re-)discovery aims to bring these objects back to life by accepting the time they lay dormant, creating different simultaneous types of cultural representations via different media (academic outputs, exhibitions, story-telling, and a museum of lies collecting fictional stories inspired by the items) for different audiences. This whole project is focused on ‘unpacking the collection’, to trace the ‘networks of material and social agency’ (Byrne et al. 2011). In order to do that, participants are creating academic object biographies – making them available for Egyptologists – and telling stories around these artefacts which both satisfy the audience of the museum as well as other involved communities. This two-tier approach will connect these neglected objects with the identities of the several communities in which they are placed: the local community of Merthyr Tydfil in rural Wales – where the museum is situated and the collector originated from; students of UWTSD in Lampeter (about 75 miles to the West) who are becoming involved in primary research; and the community around Lampeter. Here, annual exhibitions have been held since 2011, curated by the author with the help of heritage students and programmes involving ancient Egypt. These are accompanied by workshops with local school children on art and afterlife as part of their curriculum as well as home-schooled children. 
This shared cultural unearthing proves to be simultaneously a chance of secondary archaeology, an investigation into the selective processes of memory shaping, an exercise in establishing local identities, as well as an experiment in new methods of archaeological teaching. The not deliberate, though more pragmatic act of forgetting helped these objects to survive as recent cultural interests (creation of local, Welsh identity) and academic approaches (the material turn, New Materialism, social aspects of material culture) are beneficial towards these particular collections which combines objects which are not equally presentable as golden mummy masks but easy to relate to from a daily life perspective. Following our project, the perception of the objects evolved from the thought of ‘what shall we do with these?’ in the 1920s to being the public magnet in several communities of practice in the present. The radically different perception of them opened new chances to understand their archaeological primary life cycle. Their apparent absence and their omission in the last 100 years opened the way of a narrative which brings the objects back to life. Forgetting was necessary to remember. 

Katharina Zinn (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)