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Saturday 3rd May was Lindow Man Big Saturday, one of the days when we organize family friendly events and activities in the Museum. I worked on the object handling table. Visitors could see and hold a range of Iron Age and Roman artefacts including a horse bridle bit, a plough tip, Roman coins, hair pins, brooches, iron nails and a range of pottery. We also displayed the recently discovered altar , the first Roman inscription from Manchester in 150 years and, amazingly, still only the second example of an inscription naming an individual from the settlement.
Whilst doing my stint at the handling table I spoke to a gentleman who had come to review the Lindow Man exhibition for Antiquity. He was very interested in how we had gone about putting the exhibition together, the public consultation, and the multiple voices approach. Some visitors have come to the exhibition with a preconception of what the Lindow Man exhibition should be about, but given all the questions raised about the interpretation of Lindow Man it seemed to us to be honest to say there is much that we just don’t know. People coming to the museum in the expectation of finding a single story or interpretation are bound to be disappointed but that is what life is like. It’s messy and complicated. CSI on television may find the guilty party every episode. With Lindow Man it really is a question of different people interpreting the evidence in different ways.
Yesterday I gave a talk about using Rene Girard’s Mimetic or Sacrificial Theory to make sense of Lindow Man as part of the Museum’s Showcase seminar series. At the end a gentleman in the audience complimented us on the exhibition and asked a very interesting question about the implications of moving away from the “single authoritative voice” approach. Is it a ‘cop out’? Is it saying ‘anything goes’? I don’t believe so. There is obviously a lot of variety in the possible responses on a spectrum that runs from ’single authoritative voice’ to ‘anything goes’. The Museum as an organization has a lot of control over what appears in the exhibition but we decide in collaboration with contributors. That seems to be an adult and mature way forward.
