Nick James

The Acropolis and its new museum

The new Acropolis Museum was opened in June 2009 with worldwide fanfare. For this was for the Athenian acropolis – the Acropolis. After two lower galleries, visitors reach the top floor and find what is now the worlds most exciting coup of archaeological presentation – a sudden view of the Parthenon. We stand there in the middle of a gallery that sets out the temples sculpted pediments, metopes and friezes according to the original plan. They are hung on a framework that matches the Parthenons colonnades at the same orientation and scale and on the same plan as the great temple itself (Figure 1); so that, walking along the gallery, we can imagine ourselves in the temple by just looking out at it on the Acropolis.

Repatriation, display and interpretation

The British Museum and the National Museum of Wales have lent the finds from Kendricks Cave, in Llandudno, north Wales, for display and storage at Llandudno Museum; and the British Museum has sent the famous body from Lindow Moss, near Manchester, to be shown at the Manchester Museum, 100km away in England. How should metropolitan or national museums relate to provincial museums? Should there be more such loans? The exhibition in Manchester deliberately raises another question too: how – if at all – should human remains be displayed?

Tutankhamun and the terracotta army

London is boasting two ‘blockbusters’. ‘The O2’ (formerly Millennium Dome), at Greenwich, presents Tutankhamun and the golden age of the pharaohs while The First Emperor: China’s terracotta army occupies the British Museum’s Reading Room. Both display funerary assemblages intended to provide for after-worlds like those of the living. The design of both exhibitions evokes Howard Carter’s anticipation in working his way into Tutankhamun’s tomb. What, then, can admirers learn from them about ‘ancient civilisation’? Both kings’ reigns were critical. Tutankhamun’s regime (c . 1361-1352 BC) evidently decided to reverse Akhenaten’s economic and monotheistic reform. Considering the issue of landownership, the apparent importance of religion in ancient Egypt, and the otherwise uneventful history of Dynastic iconography, the politics must have been fraught. In northern China, the ‘First Emperor’ completed the region’s unification by force but soon after he was buried, in 210 BC, his regime collapsed in civil war.

New era for Stonehenge

Provision for visiting Stonehenge was radically reorganised in 2013. Why was it so difficult to achieve? Will the new scheme work? Here we present a multi-part review of the new arrangements. Christopher Chippindale is a former editor of Antiquity and author of Stonehenge complete, which recounts the changing fortunes of the monument down the ages. Mike Pitts has excavated at Stonehenge and written about the site in Hengeworld. Chris Gosden, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, approaches the issues from a World Heritage Site perspective. The section is co-ordinated by N. James who reviews the effectiveness of a visitor centre several minutes by land train from the stones.

(Rome + Barbarians) = Europe?

The exhibition, Rome and the Barbarians: the Birth of a New World , in Venice, meditates on Europes cultural genealogy. Europe, it argues, is a concoction of disparate traditions conceived and developed by the will of admiring immigrants to the Roman world from the east and north. It raises a range of issues left latent in the gallery. How can we create an appropriate narrative for the first millennium AD, particularly with archaeological finds? How, for that matter, can Europes tradition be defined; and what prompts the issue?

Rome's zenith commemorated

Following four centuries of Roman expansion, the Emperor Trajan led the Empire to its greatest extent by annexing Dacia (Transylvania), north-western Arabia and Sinai and, briefly, all of Armenia and Mesopotamia. He bolstered imperial administration, reformed provincial government, clarified certain principles of justice and encouraged a system of welfare, the alimenta (Bennett 2001). Last year, 2017, was the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of Trajans death. The occasion was marked in various ways across Europe, and the opportunity to reflect on Trajans legacy was particularly poignant in view of the continents present troubles.

Our fourth Lascaux

Worlds most famous archaeological replica, Lascaux II was replaced in December 2016 by Lascaux IV. IV deserves to inherit the reputation, but it is already struggling to cope as it seeks to outdo IIs tally of visitors. The ironies are manifold.

Hot interpretation of battle

Tilted for us to see them straight on, 45 human skeletons were stacked in tight rows, with two more, arms out-stretched, on top of them (Figure 1). Below lay artillery and musket shot set out with equal neatness. Owing, perhaps, to such clinical arrangement, or to the unfamiliar angle, or perhaps to the sturdy frame marked ‘lützen, 6. november 1632’, or else to the gallerys classical formality, the full horror only registered later, after seeing many more bones, much finely crafted weaponry and armour, and pictures and plans of fights both modern and ancient. It was the first display in Krieg: eine archäologische Spurensuche (‘War: an archaeological search for traces’), an exhibition at the Prehistory Museum in Halle shown from November 2015 to May 2016.

Rarity and Rank in Neolithic France

The pursuit of higher social rank by possessing artefacts of rare skill or distant origin is a familiar principle (Binford 1962; Helms 1993). Signes de richesse (‘Signs of wealth’) is an exhibition of evidence for this practice during the Neolithic period in France. It opened in June 2015 at the French National Museum of Prehistory, Les Eyzies, where the usual fare is Palaeolithic archaeology (Chancerel et al. 2015: 13). The exhibitions main concepts and some of its data spring from the great ‘Jade Project’ on the acquisition, manufacture and distribution of ‘big axes’ (Pétrequin et al. 2012). The display is alluring, but the underlying argument is flimsy because the conceptual principles remain implicit. For whom, then, was Signes designed?

Maya: the quality of "cultural diplomacy"

Archaeologists and Mesoamericanists had a precious opportunity to enjoy a large exhibition from Guatemala in Paris, from June to October 2011. Shown at the Musée du Quai Branly, it was intended, of course, for an audience much wider than that; but what were less expert admirers expected to gain? The answer probably lay in the opening panel (slightly amended here from the museum’s otherwise fine English). The Maya, it declared, were ‘one of the most eminent preColumbian cultures’, with ‘monumental edifices . . . art . . . social development . . . writing, calendar and numeration’ just ‘a few of its unique contributions to the history of humanity’. Archaeology ‘has revealed’ its ‘complex . . . pre-Hispanic history’: ‘inherited from the land of the Quetzal — Guatemala’s emblematic bird’, the exhibition’s ‘Magnificent ceramics . . . and jewellery’ gave ‘an insight into the history of . . . Guatemala’, rounded out by ‘photographs . . . of the . . . Maya . . . today’, their ‘vivid . . . clothing and magnificent ceremonial practices’. Skimming the archaeology and characterising the surviving Maya as “anachronistic relics”, such glib patter belongs in the National Geographic magazine (Lovell 2000: 393–4).