Manchester Histories Festival
Attended the Manchester Histories Festival on Saturday, where the Manchester Museum, the Youth Board and the Young Archaeologists Club had a stall. Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, suggested we move into the Banqueting Hall where there was more space. We set out the handling objects for Lindow Man and for several hours I chatted with visitors about the material, which dated from about the time of the late Iron Age and early Roman periods. We had a Samian bowl, some hairpins, a beautiful little safety pin type brooch, some melon beads and a replica of one of the Malpas gold armillae. Whilst the latter dates from later Bronze Age it made an impressive handling piece to support the Museum’s intepretation panel about treasures in the collection.
A good half of the people who came to our stall had already been to see the Lindow Man exhibition and others said they would definitely come and see him before the exhibition closes. As the new “Our City” gallery opens on 4th April and features the recently discovered Roman altar found in Manchester and the redisplayed skeleton of the Indian elephant, Maharaja, that makes two good reasons to visit the Manchester Museum over Easter.
In the afternoon I spoke to a group of students from the University of Cardiff who were staying in Manchester over the weekend. We looked at the exhbition and then had a chat in the Museum’s Kanaris theatre. Some of them liked what we’d done, others would have preferred it to have covered more of Lindow Man’s life and times.
