Last week was half term for schools in Manchester and Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes at the Museum, arranged crafts and handling activities on the theme of Lindow Man. There were cut-out and colour in swords and shields, making miniature prehistoric axes, friendship bracelets and trying on replica Iron Age clothing.
Many of the curators were involved and I did a couple of sessions later on in the week.
I demonstrated the Iron Age clothes that were purchased thanks to the generosity of the Dorset Foundation and the Heritage Lottery Fund. They included tunics and trousers, dresses and cloaks in a range of garish patterns.They particularly appealed to children who enjoyed dressing up and looking at themselves in a mirror.
I explained how such clothing continued into the Roman period and that Lindow Man is likely to have worn similar clothes, although he seems to have gone into the bog naked. It was announced at this morning’s diary meeting that we had had about 4000 visitors per day last week. This is likely to have been in response to marketing and publicity by the Museum.
It may also reflect the fact that in this time of financial austerity families are not going abroad but are staying at home and choosing to visit free attractions like the Museum. A number of Manchester venues had high visitor figures last week.
Mr Will Charlton, a Trustee of the LSW Museum, visited the Lindow Man exhibition as part of a fact finding tour last December. He writes:
‘My next impression from a first reading of the text on some of the walls was that the information and conclusions of each of the 7 persons were presented as of equal value: a Druid’s on a par with the Professor who had been brought in to supervise the investigation, with those of the men who had found the body etc. And that the exhibition itself was, as I had inferred from the web-site, focused on Lindow Man: I found no reference to finds of other humans buried in peat/bogs. My confusion became anger: leaving aside subjectivity and knowledge and the off-handed presentation of Lindow Man himself, the exhibitors seemed unware of the possibility of degrees of detached knowledge (and therefore utility)….I left dis-satisfied, very dis-satisfied.’
This was not the end of the matter. Mr Charlton goes on: -
‘Something, perhaps successful visits to other exhibitions, encouraged a return. I am glad that I did: I was
prepared to investigate the copious information that was available. Processing, synthesizing that information
then and since has lead to my main conclusion: education is more than information, it is ideology, what each
of us believe and how that is transmitted, taught, disputed.
‘…closer, serendipitous, reading of the information on Lindow Man made clear it was different to that advertised: there has been change since the 2 previous ‘87 and ‘91 exhibitions, in archeological techniques and therefore what can be inferred but also to attitudes to such remains: ie the mystery has changed. Which, for myself, was and is more than enough justification for this further exhibition. Couldn’t, shouldn’t it have been advertised along those lines?’
We have noticed a number of people revisit the exhibition after being disappointed initially. They come to appreciate it as they get to know it better.
I don’t have a problem with setting up any of our speakers on the same level as one another. After all they all talking about the same person, Lindow Man, and their different perspectives are stimulating each in their own way. They are on an equal footing. I don’t think we can claim that some sort of hierarchy should be observed in the commentaries. That seems to be going back to an old way of doing things.
The exhibition’s starting point is that science hasn’t been able to tell us what we really want to know. The trimmed hairs of Lindow Man’s moustache are fascinating in their way but where does that get us? We still can only speculate on the motives for killing him.
Yesterday’s Strategic Team Awayday turned up an unexpected link with Lindow Man. We had all filled in a Myers Briggs questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences. We speculated on whether everyone in the world really did fit into one of the 16 categories. Wasn’t it like horoscopes, someone asked. Wasn’t it all a simplification, a lumping people together in boxes? Can the horoscope prediction of the day really apply to one twelfth of the population? One of the team replied quoting a line from the Frank Zappa song dancin fool “Love your nails… you must be a Libran…” It made me think of Lindow Man with his well-manicured fingernails. Does that mean Lindow Man was a Libran?
Filed under: Criticism, Lindow Man Exhibition | Tags: Lindow Man comment card
“This whole exhibition makes a mockery of itself. All emphasis has been put on the ethics of seeing a dead body despite the mummys upstairs. Why not allow patrons to choose for themselves whether to see it and produce a historical exhibition?”
S.C.
This comment was placed on our comments board by a visitor.
Filed under: Lindow Man Exhibition, Visitor Figures | Tags: Lindow Man vistor survey
Attended yesterday’s data group meeting at which the results of lasts summer’s visitor survey by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre was presented. It showed that total visits to the Manchester Museum had increased by 23% compared to the same period (July to September) last year and that half of the 55,909 visitors came to see a specific exhibition, namely Lindow Man. However, a new system of counting visitors has been introduced so that might explain some of the increase. Three quarters of visitors saw the Lindow Man exhibition. There has been an increase in the numbers of older visitors and there was a significantly higher proportion of visitors coming from outside Manchester. Younger people and Manchester residents were proportionally less well-represented. This could indicate that older, more affluent people are taking the opportunity to come and see Lindow Man whilst he’s here but that local and younger people have perhaps already heard about him and seen him. Some of the increase in older visitors could be people who were themselves young in the 1980s bringing their grandchildren to see Lindow Man. The priority target groups (socio-economic groups C2s, Ds and Es, BME communities and disabled people) have increased by 2000 compared to 2007-8. Some of this increase could be explained by the fact that larger numbers of older people are coming to see Lindow Man and older people tend to have proportionally higher rates of disability and illness than younger people. Medwen at MHM is going to check this detail for us using a “cross-tabulation” so hopefully there’ll be some clarification. Whatever the case, Lindow Man’s continuing ability to attract visitors is confirmed. Many more of our visitors are also aware that Lindow Man is on loan to us from the British Museum (until 19th April 2009).
Student's drawing of Lindow Man's death (courtesy of Aoife)
Aoife kindly sent me some copies of some more reconstruction drawings of Lindow Man’s death from the work done by the students she consulted. She talked to the students about her project to create a sequential illustration visualising the death of Lindow Man in order to establish the level of graphic violence sutiable for a the proposed target audience of teenagers. Aoife was inspired by the graphic novel by Frank Millar ‘300′ which has recently been made into a feature film. Some of the students felt that Lindow Man’s death could be explained with the minimum of violence but it would tend to stick longer in the minds of students if the deaths of ritual sacrifices was shown to be extremely vivid and graphic. She also asked them whether sequential illustration was less likely to be taken seriously because of the medium. One student felt that was possible because people could argue that the violence was being blown out of proportion in order to shock but most teenagers would probably take it seriously.
Thanks again to Aoife and the students for sharing their work on the Lindow man Blog.
Aoife's bird's eye view of a native settlement
Just got out of a meeting with a student called Aoife, who is taking an MA in archaeological illustration at Swindon College. She is working on a cartoon strip sequence which will tell the story of how Lindow Man was killed. Today was a fact-finding trip to find out more about the circumstances of Lindow Man’s death. I showed her slides of dramatic reconstructions of Lindow Man’s death from the Manchester Museum’s 1987 or 1991 audio-visual presentation. It was very hard to answer some of her questions either because we don’t know or because the experts disagree. In that case how does she represent visually Lindow Man’s last hours? The work-in-progress drawings were fascinating and even without text it was very clear to me that this was about Lindow Man. Her depiction of Lindow Man’s death was, well, graphic and shocking: sprays of blood burst out after Lindow Man is hit on the head and the executioner is covered in the stuff.
Lindow Man hit on the head in Aoife's sketch
It reminded me of the killing of a live pig on Jamie Oliver’s programme about pork last week. Somehow it’s the mechanical and routine nature of what is done that is the most shocking. The same kind of rawness can be seen in Lone Hvass’s reconstruction of the death of Borremose III woman that appears in Mike Parker Pearson’s article ‘Lindow Man and the Danish connection’ in Anthropology Today (Feb.1986). The naked woman’s arms are held behind her back, whilst someone else is about to strike her with a thick branch. In the background the mob is baying for her blood and someone appears to be bending down, perhaps to pick up a stone. It is hard enough to read about scapegoating incidents without seeing the moments before death depicted so clearly. Perhaps like poetry, the artistic medium of drawing is the only way to get across what may have happened with the appropriate intensity of feeling. I’m really looing forward to seeing this in finished form. Thanks to Aoife for allowing the Museum to post examples of her work in progress on the Lindow Man blog for others to see.
