Art history meets archaeology: considering cultural context in American museums

Abstract

The recent heightened international sensitivity to cultural property issues has affected how antiquities are presented in museums in the United States, not just by diminishing the number of works in those museums’ collections as a result of restitutions and curtailed acquisitions but also by changing the nature of gallery installations and interpretations (wall texts, object labels and multimedia presentations). Many American museum displays offer a mélange of the art‐historical approach, which emphasizes the beauty of the object and the skill of its creator, and the archaeological approach, which emphasizes cultural and geographical context, presents clusters of companion objects from excavations and demonstrates losses to the record and to the objects themselves caused by the ravages of time and of looters. Surprisingly, the information provided on museum labels does not always match the information they actually possess regarding the objects. For a recent Athens panel on ‘Museums, Sites and Cultural Context’ I investigated the current state of the display of antiquities in American museums, which quite often do not know where, when or how their treasures were originally uncovered. Nevertheless, they have to devise ways to describe these ‘orphaned’ objects and present them intelligently to visitors. I examine here some specific examples of best and worst practices and end with examples of ‘separated objects’ that should be reunited to be seen as their creators intended them to be.