Archaeology Displays Update

Museum staff arranging metal objects ©Pitt Rivers Museum

The new archaeology displays in the Pitt Rivers Museum will be displayed by type of material, rather than by chronology or geography.  The objects for these displays have been selected and now the time has come to layout all the objects to determine their final positions in the cases.  Prof Dan Hicks was involved with the final selection, Technicians Alistair and Adrian advised regarding the placement of objects in the cases and Conservator Miriam recommended ways to support and protect the objects.

The run of 10 archaeological cases is 17 metres in length and so it is important to see the potential layout of the cases next to each other.  The team spent three days working through the the displays which will show archaeological objects made of stone, metal, bone, glass, ceramic, wood and textile.

This case contains examples of spindle whorls © Pitt Rivers Museum

We started with the stone case.  The PRM has over 10,000 archaeological objects; most of these are stone tools so we had a lot to choose from. The carved stone piece in the centre of the photograph is a fragment of limestone (1884.138.12) excavated by Lt. Gen. Pitt-Rivers himself from Caesar’s Camp near Folkstone.

A close up of objects made of wood © Pitt Rivers Museum

Organic material is less likely to survive in the archaeological record but the museum holds some interesting examples to display in the case.  This case contains an intriguing wooden mummy face (1890.25.3) from Ancient Egypt 3rd Intermediate period excavated by Flinders Petrie and a mystery wooden object, possibly a lock, from a bog in Aghabullogue, Ireland (1884.117.1).

A close up of textiles © Pitt Rivers Museum

Archaeological textiles pose a problem for the museum conservation team.  These textiles are fragile and vulnerable to UV light, high lux light levels and to museum pests.  The conservation and technical services departments are investigating methods to control light levels and protect the textiles on display.

A close up of objects made from bone © Pitt Rivers Museum

The bone case contains examples of bone, tooth, shell and horn.  This case contains many small objects.  During the layout we took the opportunity to test the case text.  We printed mock up labels and tried placing the labels along the side edges of the cases.

The Archaeology Stone case in situ © Pitt Rivers Museum

The first display was installed on the Upper Gallery in October 2016.  Keep an eye out for more appearing soon!

Madeleine Ding and Sian Mundell
VERVE Curatorial Assistants

Picking pots: an archaeology display layout

One of the first in the run of display cases of archaeology will focus on objects made of pottery from a variety of different cultures and historical periods.

The 80 or so longlisted objects, many retrieved from an off-site store, are catalogued by myself and Sian. We use a Filemaker collections database to add new information such as descriptions, measurements and photographs, and we physically assign accession numbers to objects where necessary.

Example of a database entry page for an object. Here, a Roman votive hand PRM 1896.15.28

Having photographs and measurements of objects is great, but the physical selection and layout process is crucial for helping to determine the organising schema of a display and to see if certain combinations of objects 'work' together - intellectually and visually. We brought around 80 objects to the session that included Project Curator Helen Adams, Curator for Archaeology Prof Dan Hicks, Curator for Americas Prof Laura Peers, and Heather Richardson, Head of Conservation, who checked that the objects were in a stable enough condition for display.

Museum staff select objects for the new pottery display © Pitt Rivers Museum

A mock-up of the display case measuring 100 cm x 50cm with a maximum height of 10 cm was created. Once all the pieces were discussed and the final pieces chosen, we positioned the pottery within the case to look at meaningful groupings and optimum positioning.

A mock-up case frame to help us think about layouts and groupings © Pitt Rivers Museum

It could be easy for archaeology displays to be, dare we say it, a little dull but we are really enthused by the variety of colour, shapes, cultures and techniques demonstrated in this selection. Prioritising complete objects over sherds and shards will hopefully enable the objects to speak for themselves and visitors will be able to appreciate both their form and function. Since the collections are concerned with world archaeology, not just European classical archaeology, we hope to be able to tell some new and unfamiliar stories, such as that of the Moche or Mochica civilisation of Peru (AD 100 - 800). Here is a Moche stirrup-spout jar in the form of a skeleton playing panpipes.

Ceramic stirrup-spout jar in form of a skeleton playing panpipes; 1947.7.14 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Now the Conservation team will work on the 36 pottery pieces to clean, stabilise and conserve them. Finally the Technical team will look at the pieces to see how they should be displayed in the case and create mounts to support them. Look out for the new display in the Upper Gallery later this year.


Helen Adams (VERVE Project Curator) and Madeleine Ding (VERVE Curatorial Assistant)

Kintsugi-woogi

Each year the VERVE project hosts a Visiting Maker (a micro Artist in Residence scheme). In the autumn of 2015, Muneaki Shimode and Takahiko Sato came to Oxford, all the way from Kyoto, to demonstrate and teach the Japanese method of ceramic repair known as Kintsugi.

Muneaki Shimode and Takahiko Sato © Pitt Rivers Museum

Kintsugi can be roughly translated as 'Gold Joinery' and involves the repair of broken ceramics with Urushi lacquer, and then applying gold powder to the surface before the lacquer dries. Rather than disguise or hide the damage, the cracks and chips are accentuated with raised gold lines, celebrating cherished or valuable ceramics, and allowing them to be used once more.

This approach to repairing ceramics is very different from the usual European methods where any signs of damage are hidden away and disguised with near-invisible joins.

Although only here for 10 days in November 2015, Muneaki and Takahiko managed to pack in a huge amount including an evening event looking at Japanese Ceramics in Oxford (Fired Works Night), staff and public talks, and three taught workshops for 60 people to learn hands-on kintsugi repair techniques.

Muneaki and Takahiko also carried out kintsugi repairs in the museum galleries using damaged ceramics kindly donated from the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum. This allowed members of the public to see the process up close and allowed Muneaki and Takahiko to share their expert knowledge and answer questions.

Kintsugi public workshop © Pitt Rivers Museum

Due to the materials and chemicals used in kintsugi, the workshops were restricted to adults, however a Children’s activity – ‘Marvelous Mending’ - explained the ideas behind the technique to a younger audience. A small case display was also installed to document the residency and showcase some of the work. All in all, no part of the museum was left kintsugi free!

So a little more about the artists: Muneaki Shimode works as a Maki-e artist, using various Urushi lacquers, pigments and gold powders to decorate Buddhist temples and altars. He does not describe himself as a professional kintsugi artist as there is no such profession in Japan. However it is common for Maki-e to carry out kintsugi as a sideline to their main work as they have the skills of using Urushi, extremely precise brush-work and handling gold powders.

Takahiko Sato is president of a family business producing the various forms of Urushi lacquer. Urushi lacquer is the refined sap of the Urushi tree, a tree native to SE Asia and a member of the poison ivy family. In its raw state, the sap is a translucent brown colour and can cause painful burns if it comes in contact with the skin. However, in the presence of oxygen and high humidity, the sap slowly hardens after which it can be handled safely.

Although Muneaki and Takahiko have now returned to Kyoto, they have not entirely left the museum.  Two of the ceramics they worked on and samples of the materials they used have been accessioned into the museum collection. These are very interesting pieces, as they both come from the first firing of the ‘Dragon Kiln’ built as part of the Oxford Anagama project at Wytham Woods. This is a special type of traditional wood fired Japanese kiln originally from the Bizen area of Japan, which has been built by a team of Japanese and UK master potters.

A repaired plate will also join the Museum’s handling collection where it will be used in future education and outreach activities to allow visitors to pick up and handle the plate and see how the repairs look and feel.

Having these objects in the collection, repaired in this traditional way, gives the museum a very unique link between traditional crafts in both Oxford and Japan and the craftspeople themselves.

Watch our short film where Muneaki and Takahiko explain the philosophy and skill behind the craft, whilst following the journey of a single broken dish - and its owner - through the repair process:

  Kintsugi at Pitt Rivers Museum from Pitt Rivers Museum on Vimeo.

Our many thanks go to everyone who volunteered their time and helped with planning and organizing events, activities, workshops, breaking plates, donating ceramics and all the visitors who came and made the project a success.

Thanks also must go to the Heritage Lottery Fund, the principle supporter of the VERVE project, and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, who provided funding to bring Muneaki and Takahiko over from Japan. The greatest thanks of all must go to Muneaki and Takahiko themselves, who were so willing to share their knowledge.

If you missed their visit and would like to see the repaired ceramics, they are currently on display on the Museum’s Lower Gallery until 24 April 2016.

Display of Kintsigi repair on the Museum's Lower Gallery 

Andrew Hughes
VERVE Conservator

We've Got Mail

We are selecting objects for a new permanent display of metalwork on the first floor (Lower Gallery). Whilst searching through the museum's reserve collections at our off-site storage facility  we found this wonderful board mounted with different types of mail armour. Mail is often referred to as 'chain mail' - terminology introduced by Sir Walter Scott in his 1822 novel "The Fortunes of Nigel".

This assemblage was collected - and possibly arranged - by General Pitt-Rivers himself. Pitt-Rivers collected from many sites in London during the 1860s, often as part of early 'salvage archaeology' excavations during groundworks for civic construction projects such as the London Underground and the Victoria Embankment.

C17th-centruy mail with rounded jumped (butted) rings and f
lat, welded rings. 1884.31.41. 5 © Pitt Rivers Museum

The pieces of mail are described in an early catalogue of 1874 as "Twenty fragments of Chain armour. European and Oriental". The hand-written labels date some of them to the XVII (17th) century, and several are recorded as being recovered from the "Thames Embankment". The board has clearly been put together as an exhibit rather than a cataloguing or storage device. We have no record of whether it was ever displayed at the Pitt Rivers Museum but it may well have been displayed in Bethnal Green Museum (now the V&A Museum of Childhood) and South Kensington Museums (now the V&A) where the General's archaeological and ethnological collection was first shown to the public in London from 1874-1878 (Bethnal Green) and from 1878-1882 (South Kensington), before being donated to the University of Oxford in 1884.


The board was arranged to show a variety of different types and gauges of linkage variations within the single category of 'mail armour' - a neat demonstration of Pitt-Rivers's concept of 'typological' arrangements. Some samples are of butted or 'jumped' mail, arranged in alternating rows with solid welded rings. Butted rings were the cheapest type of mail to make and buy, though the most vulnerable to a well-placed thrust from a sword or spear. Each ring is linked to four others in the European '4-in-1' style.

There were also examples of what seemed to be imitation rivets - perhaps to give the illusion of quality or strength - plus large-gauge hooked mail with spiral links, which may have been worn by horses in conjunction with solid barding armour.

Mail with possible imitation rivets (left) and hooked mail, possibly for horses (right)
1884.31.41. 15 and 1884.31.41. 13 © Pitt Rivers Musuem

The different pieces of mail were fixed to the painted wooden board with metal staples. Many of the metal rings were suffering from corrosion and rust and some links were missing. When the items were sent to our Conservation lab, our conservator Andrew rearranged tangled links and cleaned the metal with a sponge and stiff brush.

Of the twenty small pieces, a handful demonstrating the different mail types were chosen for the new Metalwork display. One substantial piece of fine mail was arranged flat on the left side of the board, rather like a half-folded T-shirt, but in fact consisted of a tube that opened out into a flat piece. Perplexed, we consulted the experts. Staff at the Royal Armouries were very helpful and Thom Richardson, Keeper of Armour and Oriental Collections, suggested it was part of C17th-century pajama zereh (mail trousers), worn by an Indian Mughal warrior.

Half riveted mail armour, identified as being part of Indian pajama zereh (mail trousers), India. 1884.31.41. 3
© Pitt Rivers Museum

Next, Andrew considered how to create a mount that would both support the mail for display and illustrate how it would be positioned on the body. Using a template from the armour, and based on his own leg, he made a liner out of calico, and filled it with polyester wadding. After padding it out to form a rough leg shape, he then tacked the mail to the calico with cotton thread. Research indicated this is not too dissimilar to how the armour would have been worn, as it would originally have been sewn to fabric trousers. Mail armour can adjust to many shapes and is very heavy, so this mount should support most of the weight and hopefully help visitors understand how it was worn.

Andrew at work in the Conservation lab making a new display mount for the pajama zereh leg armour
© Pitt Rivers Museum

You can see just how much work has to go into preparing just a few objects. You will be able to see the mail armour, alongside up to 200 other objects, in the new Metalwork display on the first floor this summer. In the meantime, you can still find examples of full mail shirts, plus various other armours (plate, lamellar, brigandine) upstairs on the Upper Gallery or here on our Arms and Armour site.

Helen Adams

VERVE Project Curator

Hides and Heels: work starts on new leatherwork display

With the new displays of masks and carvings in the ground floor Court now finished, we are turning our attention upstairs to the middle floor of the Museum - the Lower Gallery. The project's target area, on the left wall as you enter the gallery, is home to some rather dilapidated, fifty-year-old displays of traditional crafts. Our plan is to retain these themes but give the whole area a facelift with new displays featuring more objects - better mounted, better lit, and better labelled.

The first case we are working on will contain artefacts made of skin, hide and leather. We have decanted a large case full of headrests (these will be displayed elsewhere) to free up this much larger space for the new display. This will allow us to unite the various shoe- and saddlery-working tools that were in a smaller, previous leatherworking display with a diverse range of objects from storage, many never before displayed. 

Left: the old leatherworking case dating to the 1950s (some items were
nailed directly on to the backboard!) and the existing display of headrests,
now emptied to make way for the new Skin, Hide and Leather display. 

The VERVE team spent many hours trawling the Museum's collections database and visiting the off-site stores to identify suitable material. More than 200 objects have been carefully selected, retrieved and catalogued to show the diversity of uses, animal sources and methods of manufacture, and are now being worked on by our Conservation Department.

Boxes of leather and hide shoes (right: North American moccasins) in storage

Currently there is no special display in the Museum dedicated to footwear and it was always envisaged that the new display would provide the perfect opportunity to showcase some of the Museum's fantastic shoe collections (some of these were recently loaned to the Oxfordshire County Museums Service for an exhibition entitled 'Head Over Heels'). However, working on this case led us all to appreciate a much larger range of objects in this category; our original conception of a 'leather' display has quickly grown to incorporate membrane, skin and hide too - to tell a more complete story about human beings have worked and utilised animal skin products. We have found everything from a leather drinking tankard to Japanese shoes made from salmon skin to an English leather violin.

Leather violin 1938. 34 648 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Salmon skin shoes 1900.78.35 © Pitt Rivers Museum

The violin is full size and resembles a normal wooden one, but the body is entirely made of leather. We have been trying to find others, so far with no success, so please get in touch if have ever seen anything like this before. 

The salmon skin shoes are called Chep-kere which literally means “fish boot”. They are from Hokkaido in Japan and were used by the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. The shoes were soaked in water before wearing to mould them to the wearer’s foot. The salmon skin was cut and used in one piece with sewing at the toe and heel. The skin has a scaly texture, providing a good non-slip surface. This type would have only been worn in winter on the snow and may have been stuffed with grass or worn with a sock for insulation.

We also came across this fantastic pair of boots!

Gambadoes 1888.12.1 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Each foot is more than 30cm long and after an initial reaction of "giant's boots!", it became clear that these are gambadoes. They are open boots or gaiters worn whilst riding to protect their legs and trousers from mud and bushes, popular from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The buckles at the top attached to the saddle and they doubled as stirrups. This particular pair were worn by farmers in the West of England. They are made from very thick, strong leather and look very functional at first glance, but upon closer inspection they are actually decoratively stitched around the top, with moulding near the side opening and brass furniture tacks around the base.

We were fortunate and delighted to coordinate this stage of the project with a visit from the Archaeological Leather Group (ALG) to the Museum. Their group included scholars, curators, conservators, archaeologists and leather-workers and they spent several hours examining the material, helping us understand various aspects of leather-working, advising on techniques and provenance, and suggesting intepretive themes. For ALG members, it was a rare opportunity to get up close to museum collections and have personal input into the project. We had a very informative and enjoyable day and swapped several contacts to take the discussions further.

Members of the ALG examine a selection of boots, from Inuit sealskin
'wellies' to Chinese boots for bound feet, to a pair of women's boots
from Poland c. 1900 with bright pink laces © Pitt Rivers Museum

ALG members discuss an 'alum tawed' saddle and cushion from India
1966.1.1316 © Pitt Rivers Museum

We have focused on a 17th-century leather shoe-boot as our Object of the Month for June. Work will begin on designing and installing this case this summer so if you visit the Museum in the autumn, do keep an eye out for it!