Methods & Aims in Archaeology

by W. M. Flinders Petrie

This system enables us to deal with material which is entirely undated otherwise; and the larger the quantity of it the more accurate are the results. There is no reason now why prehistoric ages, from which there are groups of remains, should not be dealt with as surely and clearly as the historic ages with recorded dates.

Conservation.

Yet another all-important matter for the systematic archaeology of the future must be here mentioned, especially as it greatly affects the future schemes of field-work. The first requirement for systematic work of study is material sufficient to work on. And to provide this there must be both discovery and conservation. During the last century there has been a gradual growth of archaeological perception; and in place of only caring for beautiful and striking objects there has arisen some interest in whatever can throw light on the past civilisations. But unhappily the ideas of conservation have not kept pace with the work of discovery. The present system of museums is the most serious bar to the progress of archaeology. The building, which is the mere modern shell, of no interest, and often of no beauty, is the master of the collection, which is restrained and crippled by such conditions that its use is impaired and its growth is stopped. The past is vanishing before our modern changes yearly and daily. There is ever less and less to preserve. And everything possible must be garnered before it has entirely vanished. The present has its most serious duty to history in saving the past for the benefit of the future.

Buildings.

In a museum the collection is the essential; the building is the mere accident of the surroundings of the collection, and it should completely conform to all the requirements. Yet can it be believed that, even in the last year or two, enormous national museums—as at Cairo and Brussels—have been built without the smallest regard to the collection, or the opinions of the curators? The result at Cairo is the most deplorable sacrifice of the art and history of a great country to the follies and childish vanity of an incompetent and unsympathetic architect. We will not stay to detail the entire unsuitability of that building in style, form, size, and lighting; the constructive questions of what is needed for a proper museum are our subject.

Lighting.

After the common purpose of all buildings—security from man and nature—the first requirements in a museum are lighting and grouping. Whatever interferes with these is a detriment which should be avoided or removed. Lighting must be (1) direct, not from reflection by walls; (2) full, but not dazzling; (3) in exactly the right direction. Of all the precious statues of antiquity there is not one that has had a tenth of its value spent on the best lighting possible. Most are in hopelessly bad positions, as the Aphrodite of Melos in a weak, diffused, sidelight; and none have the simplest blinds to change the direction of the light, so as to study the surface in varying lighting. To know what a figure requires, only take a fine statuette in the hand, and try what can be made of it by the variation of direction, obliquity, and amount of lighting. Then see how hopeless it is to know a statue in one fixed lighting, even if that be suitable. The only person competent to arrange the lighting of objects, and especially statuary, is a successful photographer who has well practised the lighting of portable figures. An almost vertical light is essential for all human figures in the round or flat; but it needs most delicate adjustment to bring out the more important modelling, and many different directions of light to shew all that there is in the work. What is true of statuary is true in a lesser degree of every other object. No other qualities can possibly atone for defects of lighting in a museum. No building with a bad light can be called properly a museum; it may be an architect’s triumph, a civic ornament, a costly patchwork, a marvel of folly, but a museum it is not, if it is unfit for the first requirements of a collection.

Grouping.

The second great requirement, that of grouping, includes the intelligent display of objects so as to shew their relation to each other in development, their connection as found together, the preservation of the whole of the material that should be preserved, and its comparison by means of casts.

The relation of objects in development requires free space in a museum, and the absence of any pinching consideration of how to utilise every square foot. Their connection as found together in tombs and groups also requires free space, more than is yet to be had in any English museum. The preservation of the whole of the needful material is still more utterly beyond the limits of any of the present museums. Every year a great deal of entirely irreplaceable material is thrown away, or neglected on the spot, because there is no hope whatever of preserving it. In the British Museum space costs several pounds a square foot, and only objects of great value can be reasonably preserved there. We are driven, then, to the conclusion that the progress of archaeology and the preservation of the past, as it comes into our hands year by year, is essentially a question of free space. And that is practically entirely a question of cheap space. To refuse to preserve anything that is not worth some pounds per square foot, is the death of archaeology; and yet such are the necessary conditions in our present museums, however much we may expand them in their costly conditions. If we once think of what the condition of affairs will be fifty years hence, when many periods and places will be exhausted, and yet nothing but showy objects are preserved, we see that the future knowledge of archaeology is helplessly bound up in the question of our immediate expansion of conservation.