Collection as (Re)assemblage: refreshing museum archaeology

ABSTRACT

A number of recent publications, including a recent special issue of World Archaeology, have engaged with museum collections as assemblages that can be studied productively. This paper attempts to refigure ‘collection’ and ‘assemblage’ as action nouns, in order to explore the role these processes can have in generating understandings of the past, especially within museum settings. While nineteenth-century projects involving collecting and assemblage contributed fundamental disciplinary frameworks to archaeology, museums have increasingly been regarded as institutions exclusively focused on the archival storage of excavated material, and the display of archaeological knowledge generated through fieldwork. This paper makes the case that a creative and reflective reengagement with collection, as a process of assemblage and reassemblage, including in forms made possible by electronic media, has the potential to refresh museum archaeology for the twenty-first century, realigning it with other archaeological practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Collection
• collecting
• assemblage
• reassemblage
• museum
• comparison

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge a number of productive and stimulating conversations with Dan Hicks and Rodney Harrison over several years, out of which some of the thoughts in this paper arise. I would also like to thank Nicholas Thomas and other staff at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for providing a workplace where it feels possible to attempt to bridge theory and practice. I am extremely grateful to CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) at the University of Cambridge for providing me with an Early Career Fellowship, in which this paper was developed, and the University of Cape Town for hosting me during my DST-NRF Early Career Fellowship, during which it was completed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Fowler (2013) for a consideration of assemblage in relation to the work of archaeological synthesis, and more recently in relation to typology (Fowler 2017).

2. A recent special issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal has explored Archaeology and Assemblage more widely (see Hamilakis and Jones [2017]), but its engagement with museums has largely been with the work of artists rather than museum archaeologists.

3. This book also includes one of the first straightforwardly archaeological uses of the term ‘assemblage’, although Lubbock did not define it (Joyce and Pollard 2010, 295). For a more complex rendering of this history, see Rowley-Conwy (2007).

4. Lubbock became Pitt Rivers’ son-in-law in 1884.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Wingfield

Chris Wingfield is Senior Curator of World Archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He previously worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery as a researcher and curator. He is particularly interested in museums and collections, and his PhD research involved reassembling the collection of the museum of the London Missionary Society.