Lindow Manchester

Cat (Lead Educator, Secondary Humanities) came to see me with some of the responses to the Lindow Man teaching session that I mentioned in a recent blog. Abraham Moss High School came to the Museum last week and their students really enjoyed “the Verdict”, the courtroom scenario in which groups of  kids had to argue a particular interpretation of what happened to Lindow Man. These are some of their responses: -

“It was gripping and exciting”

“I didn’t realise it would be this challenging”

“I didn’t realise all of the facts and opinions”

“I didn’t realise I was gonna become a lawyer”

“I hope that we get to do something like this again”

“By the end I was feeling very proud and felt I had accomplished something”

“At the beginning I didn’t know a thing about Lindow Man and didn’t expect this to be so interesting. By the end I didn’t know that time went so fast and I was fully involved”

“I ended up knowing a lot about him”

“I hope I can do it again”

 Teacher’s comment: – “I was amazed to see the level of concentration  & that it was sustained. FAB, thorough, well thought-out & disciplined”

This is really encouraging because the kids seem to have got the point of the exhibition:- to question  and debate the assumptions we make about his body by looking at Lindow Man from different perspectives, using different interpretations of what happened to him. They clearly enjoyed the adversarial setting of a courtroom to debate the different theories. The ritual sacrifice argument won the day but other groups did well too. It’s enshrined within the National Curriculum that students should question and debate the nature of the evidence and not be spoon-fed. “The Verdict” seems to have succeeded on both counts.

A fortnight on and the comments are still coming in. Some say we have covered the various themes in a simplistic way but one of the Museum’s target audiences is families with young children so we wanted to make the text and ideas accessible. If people want to delve into things in more detail, however,  there is more information in supporting files and transcripts of the interviews and in the associated programme of events and activities and the education programme.

I believe there is some interesting material in the exhibition. Melanie Giles raises the possibility that the story of Excalibur from Arthurian legend may have originated in discoveries of ancient artefacts in watery places. Things like swords were not understood as material evidence of people who’d lived centuries before, but weapons from a different world entirely, the world of the spirits. It made them magical. J.D.Hill talks about the significance of water birds on the Wandsworth shield and the St Albans knife. Lakes, pools, rivers and springs were interfaces with a different world and the creatures that live in that environment were sacred and magical by association, hence their appearance on high status votive metalwork. The relatively modest bird figurines we found in our own collection may be further evidence of these prehistoric beliefs.  New approaches like this give the objects new significance. 

Susan’s photograph of the Lindow School choir and her repatriation t-shirt document Lindow Man’s social impact, a subject interesting in its own right.  When J.D. showed me his wonderful “Excalibur” letter opener in his office at the British Museum I immediately asked if he’d consider lending it to the exhibition because it encapsulates so many of these stories: offerings of  metalwork in watery contexts, prehistoric ritual and belief and how those beliefs may have survived in myth and legend.

Myths and legend influenced one of the thinkers whose work I read in researching the exhibition: Rene Girard. Girard’s theory of  scapegoating may offer yet another avenue of research on Lindow Man and other discoveries at Lindow Moss. It may even help to make sense of the Alderley Edge wizard but that’s a story for another day.

Going into work on Monday morning was like coming downstairs to open your presents on Christmas morning when you are a child. The sense of anticipation, the excitement, the not knowing what to expect. Karen on reception told me how it had gone over the weekend: about 750 people per day and an amazing £1500 spent in the shop each day, which is great news.

After all the excitement of last week it is a relief to be able to sit down in my office without the phone ringing or having to deal with emails that need an urgent response. A number of people call into the office. One of them is Cat (Lead Educator, Secondary Humanities) who’s brought the Lindow Man debate “the Verdict” box in to show me. Cat has taken the Lindow Man evidence and turned it into a brilliant educational activity. This is part of the Manchester Museum’s learning programme designed to enable schoolchildren and students to get more out of the Lindow Man exhibition.

The kids will be given a box containing three sets of legal briefs and supporting evidence. They will be divided into three teams and have to show that Lindow Man was murdered, sacrificed or drowned. Each of the three teams have to present a case using the evidence and a panel of judges makes a decision – the verdict.

It’s amazing how impressive a simple thing like a piece of plastic mistletoe intended for the Christmas party market looks when put in a plastic jar and boxed as evidence. As Paul Newman isn’t appearing in this version of “the verdict” I guess there’ll be no puckering up! Even the dossiers have been tied with a purple ribbon for that authentic legal flavour.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this works with the kids. With such imaginative  activities in the learning programme hopefully there’ll be no shortage of schools wanting to be involved.  I should say more about this in another Blog.

Lindow Man A Bog Body Mystery opened on Friday night, with over 500 people attending the special opening by Julian Richards. Julian fronts the Meet the Ancestors TV programme in which archaeologists and forensic scientists create a picture of someone who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. I’ve never known so many people attend an opening event, which must be an indication of Lindow Man’s iconic status here in the North West.

I went in with the first visitors and it was fascinating to see their response to the exhibition. I’m not sure they knew what to make of it. Our comments board captured a selection of their views. Some people said it was “different”; some people liked the respectful approach; some hated the lighting; some liked the freedom of not seeing Lindow Man’s body if they didn’t want to; and one person didn’t understand why the Beano was one of the books available for visitors to browse. One visitor questioned why we’d included an interview with a Pagan (the “hippy Druid stuff”as it was referred to).

We’ll analyse all this feedback statistically throughout the year that Lindow Man is here but there’s already quite a body of information to look at. And Lindow Man himself? I’ve seen him at the British Museum and I have to say I find he has a far more powerful presence here, no doubt because we have a lot more space in which to create a context for him, where many more of his stories can be told. Standing next to his case on Friday afternoon being interviewed by BBC North West it felt quite eery. He seems to be more recognisable as a 3D human body in our case.

Only one day to go before the special preview before our formal opening and it’s all go. I spent most of the morning in the Media Support Unit getting some images from Christine Pemberton and Matthew Hyde’s Lindow and the Bog Warriors printed off. The museum volunteers are going to work with an  album containing these photographs. Last week we did some training with the volunteers and they were asking loads of interested but difficult to answer questions. I did the life and times of Lindow Man and early this week we looked at the objects they are going to present to  the public.

This afternoon I helped Pete fill the “Find out More” files  with Lindow Man related articles and newspaper cuttings. We are putting very short labels in the exhibition itself but more detailed information will be available for those who want it in the files. Nobody wants to see a “book on the wall” but with only 25-30 words per lable how can we convey the complexity, the nuances of what is known about Lindow Man? Well we put it in the ring binders and there’s a large print version for visually impaired visitors.

Tomorrow one of the last jobs will be to print off our extended labels. In some ways this has been the most interesting part of the exhibition. Free of the restrictions of word totals I can give free rein to whimsy, happily including information about mirrors such as the fine example from Aston, Herts., kindly lent to us by the British Museum, and a quote from Cold Mountain. In this novel set in the American Civil War, Nicole Kidman’s character, Ada Monroe, leans over a well and looks at the surface of the water reflected in her  mirror in the hope of seeing the future. Though she doesn’t understand it at the time she sees her lover walking towards her in the snow fatally wounded. What’s that to do with Lindow Man and the Iron Age? The decoration on Iron Age mirrors, such as  the example from Aston, evokes the visual confusion  felt by Ada trying to make sense of her vision in the well.

People in the Iron Age had a special reverence for water, often making votive deposits of metalwork or other objects or people to the deities of the place. Areas of open water such as would have existed at Lindow Moss would have reflected light like a mirror and represented a means of communication with another world if not the afterlife, in the same way Ada’s mirror offers glimpses of the future.  Must do this as a talk in our public events programme.

One of the other priorities with the Lindow Man exhibition is the recording of what are known as Collective Conversations. These filmed conversations about things in the Manchester Museum collection allow members of the public to engage with objects and to express their opinions about them. We decided recently that rather than re-interview our Lindow Man contributors we would film conversations on a subject-by-subject basis.

With Lindow Man there is no shortage of potential conversations. At the recent report back as part of our consultation process someone suggested a Collective Conversation involving archaeologists talking about the impact Lindow Man made on the appreciation of forensic sampling in the North West. Another topic of personal interest is to gather together some of the people – then children but now grown up with children of their own no doubt – who sang the Lindow Man we want you back again song during the 1980s (think Grandad we love you and you get the idea) to see what they remember of their day in the recording studio. There’s a wonderful photo of the choir. We are still trying to put names to the faces.

And then there’s the Conversation we recorded recently with Neville Jones, retired Chief Inspector from the Cheshire Constabulary, and Mr Robert Connolly of the Department of Human Anatomy at the University of Liverpool. The two interviewees last saw each other on site over 20 years ago whilst investigating Lindow Man’s discovery!

At first the Lindow Man’s remains were thought to have been those of a woman who disappeared some years before. A head turned up on a conveyor belt at Lindow Moss in 1983. The Police investigated and the woman’s husband was convicted of her murder. But when the head was radio-carbon dated it was found to be Roman! The sensational circumstances of Lindow Man’s discovery are discussed in detail by our two interviewees and some remarkably candid statements made about the forensic evidence. I won’t spoil the surprise – best to watch the interview on You Tube when its uploaded in the not too distant future.

One week to go and the pace is becoming frenetic. No sooner had Pete, the Interpretation officer, and I finished off the text and labels but it was on to the virtual exhibition, which the public can access via the Museum website. We are using the Museum’s documentation system, KeEmu, to do this. So I spent all of Wednesday bringing the records of the objects up to date and adding photographs to something called the “Multimedia Module”.

I had to keep stopping to take photographs of some of the more popular exhibits, which is how I came to find myself outside the Conservation Lab, where the objects are being assessed in advance of the exhibition opening. “I’ve come to photograph the Bros poster” I said. Roy, the Senior Conservator, gave the resigned sigh of someone who has long since ceased to be surprised by anything that happens in the Museum and let me in.  Bros were all the rage during the late 1980s and early 1990s when Lindow Man was exhibited at the Manchester Museum, so we appealed for any related memorabilia and someone kindly kind lent us their prized poster. The nostalgia aspect of the exhibition is very important to us and music has that special quality of taking us back to earlier times in our lives.

Hopefully many more people will be able to engage with the exhibition  because of the different approaches we have taken.

Thursday 3rd April

Bumped into Jane one of the design team working on the Lindow Man exhibition during my lunch break on Oxford Road and she said only half jokingly “Get back in your office and do your work!” It’s been that way over the last fortnight. Everyday brings a new deadline or a request for clarification, images or text.

Pete, the Interpretation Officer, and I have worked our way through the labels and other text and we are just about there with our stuff. One last minute addition is a label for a massive “hay knife” purchased for us by one of our peat digger interviewees. When I write “hay knife” if sounds like a bread knife or a machete. In fact it’s more like a plough or the sort of tool used by Japanese fisherman for stripping blubber from whales! The Lindow peat diggers used it for stripping frozen peat from the cuttings to get at the softer stuff underneath. Those guys must have had muscles like Popeye! Anyway we considered using it in object handling but had nightmares about people dropping it on their toes or falling over and disembowelling themselves with it. Thankfully Steve, another colleague on the design team, came through on Friday and said it will go in the display case with some peat digging tools we are borrowing from Lancashire Museums. That’s great news.  

Meanwhile the exhibition construction continues. It certainly breaks up the space in the Temporary Exhibition Gallery or TEG (see photo).