Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition
The addition of the pictures of the ‘viewpointers’ would be good repeated in the alcoves where the sound systems are – people are drawn towards a friendly face.
Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition
I recently got back off annual leave to find that one of my collegues, Jeff Horsley, Head of Exhibitions and Presentation, had kindly left a copy of the catalogue to the Bocksten Man exhibition in Gotenberg on my chair. Bocksten Man is a Swedish bog body dating from the Middle Ages. Originally discovered in Bocksten Bog in Halland in 1936 by 11 year old Thure Johansson, the body was taken to the Regional Museum in Varberg, where the remains, including a complete set of Medieval clothes, were studied, consolidated and put on display. On the basis of the style of the clothes Bocksten Man was dated to 1340-1370; radio carbon dating out him between 1290 and 1410; dating a wooden stake and clothing enabled the date to be refined to 1340-1370. Bocksten Man was 30-35 years old when he died and suffered from DISH, a disease associated with too rich a diet. Although he was relatively well-off, his clothing showed he wasn’t from the upper classes. He appears not to have had a manual job. Recent forensic study suggests that he died from three blows to his head (though not all agree with that interpretation) and he had been impaled in the bog: two birch stakes had been driven right through the body, but this may not have happened whilst he was alive. One of them came from a roof from a peasant farm building. Bocksten Man’s identity may never be known but he may have been a bailiff who was murdered by peasants and his body hidden in the bog. Bocksten Man’s head was also reconstructed, complete with shaggy mane of hair. It is amazingly life-like. ‘Who do you think he looks like?’, the Catalogue asks. I think he’s the splitting image of Christopher Walken, the famous American actor who starred in The Deer Hunter! Dating aside, the similarities with Lindow Man are interesting: the refinement of dating made possible by new technology and analytical techniques; the debate about precisely how he died; the veritable detective story to reconstruct the circumstances of death; and the acknowledgment that the curators do not have all the answers – you may have your own theories – the riddle is not yet solved. The new exhibition opened in 2006. For more information see Christina Andersson-Wiking & Pablo Wiking-Faria The Bocksten Man Exhibition Catalogue, Harland Regional Museum in Varberg, 2008, ISBN 91-89570-10-3 or look-up the website www.lansmuseet.varberg.se
Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition
The Lindow Man exhibition continues to draw comments in large numbers. Cat Lumb, Lead Educator (Secondary Humanities), at the Manchester Musuem told me that for this quarter comment cards in LM were approximate to the number of cards collected from the rest of the museum! To put this in perspective, the total number of cards collected from the museum (Egypt, Archaeology and Myths about Race) from Apr-Jun was 1959, and the total from Lindow Man for the same period (bearing in mind LM didn’t open until mid-April) was 1886. In April there were a total of 653 cards collected, in May (so far, although not all have been in-putted yet) 377, and in June the figure rose to 856. So, it’s safe to say that visitors are commenting a lot on the exhibition – more so than in any other part of the museum. This represents a large body of data which Cat and colleagues will be going through to tease out visitors’ responses to the Lindow Man exhibition. Post graduate students have also requested access to the information and are supplementing it with their own visitor survey .
