Lindow Manchester

Preparations for the opening of the Lindow Man exhibition, which opens to the general public on 19th April are, as you might expect,  in full swing. Over the last few weeks, working with my colleagues here at the Museum, I have been drafting text and selecting photographs for the exhibition guide, confirming objects and writing the exhibition labels. Training of our Visitor Services Assistants has begun but I still need to select the objects that are going to be used by volunteers in handling during the exhibition. Our dedicated team of volunteers will use the objects associated with this exhibition to work with the public, as they already do in the Museum as a whole.

You might assume that the exhibits consist of Iron Age or Roman objects but because of the way we have approached the exhibition, they could be as recent as a 1980s boy’s Hotspur annual or a CD of music by the Smiths! The reason for including very recent material like this is that the people we  interviewed about Lindow Man have responded in different ways.

Some people feel quite nostalgic about that time in their lives. We are actually exhibiting a child’s toy, a Care Bear, in the exhibition because it was given to one of our inteviewees about the time Lindow Man was discovered. For that particular interviewee it is intimately linked with Lindow Man. It is also a way into the exhibition and what it is about for families with young children. 

Before this exhibition I never would have guessed we might end up displaying a 2000 year old bog body with a 20th century child’s toy. We have put the Care Bear on one of our posters advertising the exhibition too, which has raised a few eyebrows. All will become clear at the exhibition opening I keep telling people. 

The Lindow Man report back to the consultation group that took place a few weeks ago (16th February 2008) went well. It is fair to say it generated a great deal of interest. Our Curator of Temporary Exhibitions, Stephen Booth,  showed a model of the exhibition and a mock up of one of the  display units, complete with audio facility; our Curator of Pulbic Programmes, Anna Bunney spoke about the programme of events and activities to accompany the exhibition and I explained the process we had been through and how we got to where we are now.

We had some comments from the audience. One of them was about the exhibition coming across as an art gallery type of exhibition. That categorization of exhibition is not something we would accept, or, if we do, we would actually seek to subvert it! So we didn’t see that as a major problem. We can be a University Museum but still do something others might label as “art gallery” and we wouldn’t accept that only art galleries can do “art gallery” style exhibitions and museums “museum style” exhibitions.

We have also had emails from members of Honouring the Ancient Dead  who attended the report back thanking us for taking their comments at the initial consultation seriously. They feel the spirit of the discussion we had back in February 2007 is coming through in the Lindow Man exhibition, so that’s very encouraging, not that we are privileging any one point of view.

It is humbling to me as a Curator to think that people can be so grateful for listening to them and their concerns. That has to bode well for the future in building sustainable relationships with the contributors and other intersted parties. That democratisation of the exhibition process, which involves consultation and engagement of different audiences  is increasingly important part of the work we do here at the Manchester Museum. 

Another reason why human remains may be seen as more sensitive now than they were years ago is because of repatriation. We tend to think of things like the Elgin Marbles when we talk about repatriation but the Manchester  Museum has repatriated  human remains to indigenous Australian communities because it recognised their claim on the remains of their ancestors. Generally speaking, the material was often collected without permission or without the native people’s informed consent. It may not have been looked at or used in research by the museum since its acquisition over a hundred years ago.  

Developments like this are changing the way we treat human remains in museums. Not everyone would agree of course. Museums curate material for exhibition, education and research purposes, now and for posterity. If we dispose of material now, will we limit future research? However, many museums contain human remains which have limited research potential because they have little associated information about the locality or the context of the finds. They may never have been looked at since they came to the museum 50 or 100 or more years ago. In these circumstances isn’t it right to consider disposal?

Of course this works in all sorts of ways and British groups like Honouring the Ancient Dead have campaigned for a more respectful approach in the treatment of native British human remains and the reburial of material that does not have research interest.