Lindow Manchester

“Crumpled, folded, left lying for the peat
Flesh becomes water, became earth
Became stone in time.
No hope of that now, leather man, stone
Interrupted,
Your journeys unexpected direction?
To offer us questions
It’s always questions, that’s what we have of you.
Maybe questions are what we need
No certainties, no mysteries finally revealed”

“It’s spring outside now,
The frogs have broken the hibernation dream
And fill the world with bubbling, copulating life
I would bring you flowers and new shoots,
Pussy willow and hope.
But they cannot, could not, touch you in you
Sealed crystal coffin, defying even handsome princes
So I bring you the dream of spring and the wind
that blows over the hills, with the rain and
the sudden sleet, And I offer you, spring mornings
and the air full of promise, stones warming
slowly under a glowing sun.
I feed you dreams and a blanket of memories,
A thicket of hope to shelter you from the
Endless staring eyes in that cold, climate controlled
Bubble
We will hold a space for you in the dancing circles,
A place at the table, a welcome in the Feast for the Dead

With love, Gordon the Toad”

As part of the work on evaluating the Lindow Man exhibition I rang Carole Knight, Project Administration Assistant at the Manchester Museum, to ask how many people visited. 133,413 people came to see Lindow Man.

I spent this morning looking at the evaluation of the Comments Cards in the Lindow Man exhibition for October to December 2008 and there, as an example of a reflective comment from a visitor is this poem:-

It started out as a lovely day,

Birds were flittering amongst the hay,

For someone’s satisfaction I was slain,

My life was lost, they didn’t gain.

Distorted and squashed I’m here in the west,

It doesn’t stop the crowds,

I’m not at my best,

Cruel in life,

Crueller in death.

Washed down stream,

Flowing with river,

Caught in the floods,

Settled in moss,

Aged and weathered,

Man of the hills,

Mountains Loss,

The destruction of Cairns and Mounds

A couple of days after our Lindow Man exhibition closed I had a meeting with Cat Lumb, Lead Educator Humanities (Secondary and Post-16) to talk about how we could continue to offer an education session based around the Lindow Man courtroom scenario without being able to use Lindow Man himself.

We spent an hour looking around the Mediterranean Gallery and the new Manchester Gallery and  identified a number of objects that she could use with students to talk about what Lindow Man means. We spoke about different value systems and binary opposites between Northern (European)  and Southern (Mediterranean), cold and heat, beer and wine, barley and grape, ‘barbarous’ and civilised, native British (Brigantian?) and foreign (Romanised), literate and illiterate and so on.

Which of these sets of opposites  is better is a value judgement of course but native people don’t have a choice. They could either go along with the occupation or if they resisted they were defeated militarily in swift order. If the Roman administration is stamping out human sacrifice, then perhaps one of the (extreme) ways for native people to create or maintain a sense of identity is to sacrifice someone – like suicide bombers in Iraq. 

The reconstructed head of Worsley Man on display in the Manchester Museum offers a way in to this debate and the original head is of early 2nd century AD date too. Other things that help the contrast between native and Roman include a Roman amphora in the Mediterrenean Gallery and the altar set up by Aelius Victor to the Mother Goddesses here in Manchester and now on display in the Manchester gallery. 

We looked at some coins in the Money Gallery and compared native British gold coins with the Roman currency systems and discussed the different significance of money in different cultures. The perfect illustration of this was Chinese hell money displayed in the same gallery that is intended for use in the hereafter. It makes no sense in a monetary economy like ours but in the realm of magic and the afterlife it has considerable meaning.

Perhaps the Romans experienced a similar sense of bafflement faced with native British ways of doing things and vice versa.

Lindow Man exhibition closed today but remember that the Lindow Moss photographic exhibition continues until July.

It’s a great pleasure to know that the Lindow Man exhibition is still generating lots of interest. This morning I had an enquiry from a student about how the exhibits were selected and whether the people who helped us with the exhibition were consulted. How we selected the exhibits was dictated by our approach to the exhibition which emerged from the public consultation we did in February 2007.

In our public consultation meeting in February 2007 we were asked to two things: to tell the story or stories of Lindow Man from different perspectives and to treat his body with sensitivity. We decided to tell Lindow man’s story or stories from a number of different points of view, namely, those of: a forensic scientist, the man who found the body, a landscape archaeologist, a member of the Lindow community, a pagan, a museum curator and someone from the British Museum. We recognize that there are other perspectives of course but seven was an optimum number and the perspectives chosen seemed to give us the greatest breadth.

We interviewed all seven people and asked them to contribute material that would illustrate their connection with Lindow Man and say something about their own background and lives. In some cases the interviewees struggled to suggest material either because they genuinely couldn’t think of anything or because it simply hadn’t survived. All the peat working tools used at Lindow Moss appear to have been lost for instance so we borrowed some from Lancashire Museums Service to support Bruce and Andy Mould’s section. In those cases where the interviewee was at a loss to suggest something we proposed an object and asked the person concerned if he or she was happy with it. Don Brothwell was happy for us to show a range of lab equipment, for example, because all those used in the BM forensic study of Lindow Man had been lost or disposed of over the years.

In the case of Susan Chadwick, Susan had already made it known to us that she had material relevant to the repatriation campaign to bring Lindow Man back to the North West, including a t-shirt and a photograph of the Lindow School choir. This was one of the reasons we invited Susan to take part. When it came to suggesting something from Susan’s childhood that she had had at the time of Lindow Man only the Care Bear survived, and we decided to display it because it showed that Susan, though now a mature woman, had been a child when Lindow Man was discovered. Susan’s comments about seeing Lindow Man’s body on display at the Manchester Museum in 1987 have to be read in that light. We broadly agreed the exhibits that were more representative of the 1980s with Susan but sourced them according to what was available or what was offered to us. I think the boy band poster came from a friend of one of the ladies in the office, and the Grolsch shoes were mocked up based on what Susan told us she could remember about fashion in the play ground.

So all the objects were either selected by or agreed with the interviewees. In fact I can think of one example where Emma Restall Orr, our pagan contributor, said she didn’t like our suggestion that we display a copy of “Asterix the Golden Sickle” and we took it off our potential exhibits list. So the objects were selected in a collaborative and inclusive way that took account of the interviewees’ own suggestions. When we proposed something we obtained that person’s agreement.

The New Year has brought with it more comments cards left by visitors over the holiday period. This is one of the longer contributions kindly copied for me by Cat Lumb (Lead Educator, Secondary Humanities):-

“I have no problem whatsoever here, I think he is very respectfully displayed & considering the apparent violent death Lindow Man suffered, we may well ask if there is any point to instigating ideas of ‘peace’ or ‘rest’ when they have not (arguably) been robbed from him in the first place…

P.S. I imagine there are people (like me) who would not object to their exhibition in 2000 years’ time. To a man with no knowledge of ‘museums’ (as we know them), perhaps there is justification in displaying him – the education of others-besides it’s the closest thing to living on after death, really. (Smiley face).”

The question I am struggling with is whether the manner in which people died in the past makes a difference as to whether they are displayed or not. If Lindow Man was put to death as a scapegoat, as I think it is possible to argue, does that mean we should be less willing  to display him? The educational case is a strong one but what of Mary Bateman, the so-called “Yorkshire witch” who was tried for murder and hung in 1809. Her skeleton, or what’s left of it, is on display in the Thackray Museum in Leeds. You could argue that she’s paid her debt to society couldn’t you?

Carolanne telling a story at the Manyacs Xmas party

The Manchester Museum Young Archaeologists Club (the Manyacs for short) had their Xmas party on Saturday. Clare, Carolanne, Andy and the other helpers put on a feast of the kind Lindow Man might have enjoyed. I brought some home made spelt bread cakes along. Clare made various kinds of pancake and bread using oats, barley and wheat. Although we couldn’t serve meat for health and safety reasons. we put out cheese, onions, apples, honey and nuts too. 

Clare heated up some stones to show how people in prehistory cooked stew in a cauldron without having to set it above a fire. Although it wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped, the children were surprised by how much the larger stones kept their heat. The water did get water but not warm enough to boil the eggs Clare brought along.

Carolanne told stories about the great deeds of the legendary Irish hero, Cu Culain, and how he got his name. Inspired by tales of the hero’s facial distortions in the grip of his battle rage, the kids made some truly terrifing masks. Lest anyone’s seasonal appetite be left unsatisfied we also offered chocolates and crisps at the end of the session.

Some replica stone heads originally made for the 1987 or 1991 Lindow  Man exhibition came in handy as table dressings and they helped illustrate the story about Cu Culain that Carolanne told the children.

Andy with replica Iron Age stone head at the Manyacs Xmas party

Joyce Tyldesley, one of the Museums and Academic Joint Appointments or MAJAs, here at the Manchester Museum, popped into the office on Wednesday to say that she’d heard a BBC Radio 4 programme – Thinking Aloud with Laurie Taylor – that quoted part of our report on the public consultation in advance of the Lindow Man exhibition. The programme was a short discussion about how museum attitudes to human remains have changed. Tiffany Jenkins at the University of Kent and Adam Cooper at  Brunel University took part. In brief Taylor asked the question whether the approach to human remains shown by the Lindow Man project is indeed sensitive treatment of a difficult subject or just plain daft. Jenkins sketched the history of collecting human remains from the acquisition of curiosities in the 18th century to the rational scientific collecting of the 19th century. Taylor talked about these human remains as objective material evidence, not having any residual meaning for people at the time.  In Lindow Man a Bog Body Mystery we try to show that human remains do have a range of very different meanings for some people. As a university museum we naturally want to provide opportunities to both students and the general public to explore the world from very different perspectives. The Lindow Man exhibition allows people to do precisely that without us saying that any one point of view is right.

We place great importance on public consultation in the Manchester Museum and the Lindow Man exhibition, to a degree, reflects the wishes and requests of the very wide group of people we consulted with in February 2007.  Many of the consultees agreed that Lindow Man should be treated with sensitivity and respect and that different sides of his story  or stories should be told. The Lindow Man a Bog Body Mystery  exhibition is the working through of those wishes, albeit tempered by our own museum experience, bearing in mind what was practicable within our limited budget and design considerations.

In Thinking Aloud our efforts to make the exhibition process more inclusive, more representative and dare I say it, democratic, was passed off as a retreat from traditional curatorial authority in the face of sustained critiscism of the museum’s role.  What we seem to have here is a profound misunderstanding of what is or what should be the role of curators and museums in modern times. There has been a shift in the way museums work partly in response to new thinking about claims to be authoritative and partly in reponse to national developments.    Government policy and government funding requires us to work with different communities and to bring in communities and voices previously excluded from the work of the Museum. Lindow Man A Bog Body Mystery reflects these policies but it would appear that the Radio 4 presenters were advocating a retreat to an old-fashioned and elitist role for museums.

I think the programme would have been more balanced if someone from the museum had been invited to take part.

I might also add that this is the first time that a report that I have written has ever been quoted on Radio 4!

Collective Conversation about the Lindow Man exhibitions

It’s amazing to think that is already over 20 years since Lindow Man first came to the Manchester Museum on loan from the British Museum. The temporary exhibitions of 1987 and 1991 were very popular and influenced a generation of Museum visitors in Manchester and the North West. Yesterday I took part in a Collective Conversation comparing the current Lindow Man exhibition with earlier exhibitions. Helen Rees Leahy, Director of the Centre of Museology at the University of Manchester, kindly took part and commented on changes in curatorial practice; and Manchester Museum colleagues Sue Bulleid and Tom Goss contributed their memories of the earlier exhibitions. I brought along some black and white photographs as prompts. Tom and Sue talked about their impressions of the  earlier Lindow Man exhibitions: the darkness, the use of palisades and other props to give a sense of an Iron Age setting and the emotional impact of seeing Lindow Man’s body. We talked about the differences between the approaches taken to interpretation, from giving a sense of Lindow Man’s life and times in the 1980s and 1990s, to the current exhibition, looking at the body from different perspectives. Commenting on the exhibition, particularly the way in which the Museum had stood back from its traditional authoritative role as sole interpreter of the exhibits, Helen Leahy welcomed the inclusion of different voices and the innovative design but wondered whether this created a mismatch between what was offered and visitor expectations. By setting aside a single authoritative narrative voice, the exhibition had become a  disorienting experience for visitors. The difficulty with  debating responses to the exhibition is knowing precisely whose comments and criticism are  paramount. So far we have little formal data  from the Museum’s core audience of families and children. Observations over the summer suggest they have enjoyed the numerous different ways  of engaging with the subject and younger people may be more attuned to a cultural environment in which plurality, relativity and poly-vocality are taken for granted. Older visitors may miss the re-assurance of definitive, confident interpretation. The Collective Conversation will be edited shortly and hopefuly it won’t be too long before it is posted on U-tube or made accessible via the Manchester Museum website.