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Date: | Thu, 4 Dec 1997 14:15:24 EST |
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It is impossible in the 1990s for anyone (unless they do so in total
ignorance) to work on artefacts without making extensive use of information
that was gleaned from unprovenanced collections or compiled by
collectors/dealers who have often been the foremost scholars for many artefact
categories- you do it every time you identify/date a piece of creamware or
tin-glazed ware or lead glass or pewter or even open a copy of Noel Hume's
Artifacts of Colonial America - it wasn't all based on excavated material. If
you visit any major museum collection of ceramics such as Stoke on Trent most
of the material by its very nature is unprovenanced except that it was
probably made in Staffordshire (or perhaps Shropshire). Mush of it was
probably bought or given by collectors. How do you think most museums started.
When people began work on excavated English artefacts in 1940s and 1950s they
stated with the antique literature and often poorly provenanced museum
collections because that was the only source available. It is just that many
archaeologists are not aware of their own subject's early history. Obviously
collectors and treasure hunters pose complex ethical problems for
archaeologists and even the scholary ones have biases of approach very
different to us though total denial or contempt for them are often counter
productive. In Britain we have had a major problem with metal detectorists.
However, large bodies of information we would not otherwise have obtained have
been gained by encouraging them to report their finds to museums. We have
whole artefact categories we only know exist from collections made by
"mudlarks" on the Thames watershore and brought into the Museum of London for
identification. Refusing to do this work would not have stopped the collecting
but would have lost valuable insights into the past, for, example the large
numbers of medieval metal toys which form one nail in the coffin of the
fashionable thesis that parental affection for children is a modern invention.
paul courtney, Leicester, UK
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