282 tehmina goskarthose pioneered in ancient Mediterranean archaeology, principally during Flinders
Petrie’s excavations in Egypt and Palestine in the 1890s–1930s.
The second method of analysis emerged more recently, a constructive, rather than
purely narrative, technique called object biography or charting the life cycle of an
artifact to interrogate its multiple meanings through time. The idea of an anthropol-
ogy of things is encapsulated in The Social Life of Things (Appadurai, 1988) and
epitomized in Igor Kopytoff ’s seminal essay on cultural biography and processes of
commoditization. Kopytoff set in train several paradigms used in material culture
studies, principally that all objects, like people, are constructs of the society they
inhabit(ed). The object biographer explores notions of a subject’s ideal career, and
gauges society’s responses to events that are out of keeping with those expectations,
such as the rightful home for antiquities being in public museums (Kopytoff, 1988:
73). Mediterranean antiquities have experienced controversy in their life stories, prob-
ably more than any other category of historical object, from dubious or disputed
provenance to archaeological fraud—damaging social expectations of authority and
authenticity. In 2003, an expert forger used a late nineteenth-century sale catalogue
to fabricate the life story of a rare “lost” Egyptian alabaster statuette, the so-called
“Amarna Princess” originating in fourteenth-century bCe Egypt, and sold it to Bolton
Museum for nearly £440 000. The fake was exposed in 2006 as one of a series of
sophisticated counterfeits made in a domestic garage in northern England and now
tours museums as a witness to a salutary tale.Contexts
The assemblage of objects into public collections is probably the most powerful and
widespread act of decommoditization ongoing across the world. The museum’s role
is to safeguard and preserve objects in theoretical perpetuity for the educational ben-
efit and enjoyment of society. This sacralizing act removes objects from the normal
ravages of time. But this immortality comes at a cost as the dislocation of an object
from its original contexts is an anti-historical act, which can only be countered by a
process of recontextualization, for example, by classification, object biography and
comparison. Time and decay may be further forestalled by conservation and environ-
mental control to mitigate the degrading effects of fluctuations in humidity, tempera-
ture and light. This war against time is embodied in the museum showcase by
defending historical artifacts from their greatest threat: people. The glass display case
therefore occupies contested ground as both a portal and a barrier to the understand-
ing of objects in history. However, the privileging of the sense of sight over touch is
not just a consequence of the moral imperative to preserve antiquities and specimens.
By the mid-eighteenth century empirical observation and recording were considered
to be the foundation of all scientific knowledge. It became acceptable to distance
people from historical objects as all they needed to know could be learned through
seeing.
Empiricism had a great impact on early collectors who increasingly saw themselves
as antiquaries in pursuit of scientific evidence about the past rather than connoisseurs
fixated by aesthetics. In the same period, across the eighteenth century, travel in the
Mediterranean during the Grand Tour, to observe and collect fragments from the lost
civilizations of Greece and Rome, was reinforced by a fascination with the idea of the0002063960.INDD 282 2/17/2014 11:38:26 AM