5th July 2011, 12:36 PM
This is all well and good and obviously correct but how many museums were actually established with the aim of being repositories for archaeological information so that it might be made available to future researchers. Any? None? Surely most are the result of random Victorian (or earlier) collecting combined with local political ideology and are now basically galleries with stories. What might be more useful would be a series of perhaps regional stores (not places where stuff is put on display) of archaeological material acting as research centres. That way museums (as galleries with stories) could pick the best and probably shinyest items for display in order to get, er, bums through the door, while the rest of the crud is there for archaeologists and other obsessives to look at. This way it could be far more rationalised, museums could be dedicated to what I would say they do best, engaging with the public, and all the material from a particular region could be accessed in one place. At present if you wanted to compare, say, all the medieval pottery from a single region comprising perhaps 3 or 4 counties you might have to visit a dozen museums. The cynical might also say that kindly and noble archaeological contractors hanging onto archives because the museums are full might be convenient for a variety of reasons, not least controlling the data.