Prof. Kelsey and other scholars, primarily classicists also sought artifactual evidence for daily life, the economy and the administration of the Empire during the period of transition from the Roman to the Byzantine empires. Consequently, University of Michigan collections are strongest for the early Byzantine period. Collectors, as individuals and as institutions, attempt to conserve evidence of cultural developments. Thus, the activity of collecting is more than the hunt for rare and precious items, and more than their discovery and subsequent maintenance. Collecting is also a process that can involve the selection of facts, the elision of the unknown or disturbing, and the shaping of a particular version of history.
Collections represent the past by displaying and explaining specific, tangible remains.
Our curiosity does not diminish merely because relatively few of such basic questions find answers. Despite the efforts of collectors, curators of collections, and other scholars whose work explores material survivors of the past, the past remains irrevocably distant, in need of preservation, further research and fresh imaginations. Return to Table of Contents or continue .