material Culture 283“Great Chain of Being.” The astonishing rediscovery and excavation of Roman
Pompeii and Herculaneum served to place the classical world of the Mediterranean at
the pinnacle of human cultural achievement. In spite of the parallel preoccupation
with the Mediterranean of Egyptologists, classical objects were valued above all else in
the collection hierarchy. Sir John Soane’s self-curated house-museum in London is a
taxonomic spectacle ranking objects in a vertical plane according to their perceived
place in the evolution of societies, with the sarcophagus of Pharoah Seti I at the bot-
tom forming the basis for the arrangement of his classical artifacts higher up. Even in
1880, the Peabody Museum was desperate to acquire classical antiquities from the
Old World before they ran out, “to increase the standard of our civilisation and cul-
ture” (Hinsley, 1985: 55).Reading objects
Observation, more than re-creation, experimentation or cognition through touch,
still pervades the study of material culture today. A linked metaphor is that of reading
objects in order to give a voice to things that are otherwise mute. Philip Grierson
famously said: “It has been said that the spade cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part
to the fact that it cannot speak” (1959: 129). The implication is that a text is naturally
vocal and therefore naturally informative, but an object is remote and gains its voice
through the historian or archaeologist. John Moreland has argued that the opposition
between text and object is a consequence of a modern conflation of the written word
with common sense, and by extension, fact (2001: 33–34). The knowledge value of
collections is also increased by their publication in catalogues, another phenomenon
which began to flourish from the mid-eighteenth century. However, it would be
wrong to suggest that there is a natural opposition between text and object in the
study of material culture. Inventories, travelogues, correspondence and business
archives contain a large proportion of our evidence base describing the nature of
things, manufacture, supply chains, consumption and people’s social and cultural
responses.
The student of material culture today continues to hone their talent through visual
scrutiny, looking for and recording signs of wear, identifying palimpsests of use,
exposing tell-tale signs of origin(s), and embracing documentary sources to investi-
gate context and comparison. A growing interest amongst Mediterranean scholars is
to compare readings of historical objects to explore the nature of cross-cultural rela-
tionships. A composite casket in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum
comprising a stylistically early thirteenth-century Siculo–Arabic ivory body and an
incrusted wooden base dating to early twelfth-century Egypt has been convincingly
shown to be a result of mid-nineteenth century restoration/refurbishment by the
Castellani family of “archaeological jewellers” (Rosser-Owen, 2011). But the real
interest in this object was found by treating its base as an object in its own right, to
compare it for the first time with a group of similarly incrusted objects, and so provid-
ing tangible evidence of the close artistic connections between Egypt and Sicily in the
Fatimid and Norman periods.
Many of the paradigms inherent in the modern study of material culture originated
in or have used Mediterranean examples. But what does study of the Mediterranean
bring to material culture? The Mediterranean offers the historian and curator of0002063960.INDD 283 2/17/2014 11:38:26 AM