Week 1

Part of the assessment for the museums and archaeology course is to work in a group and create our own artifact catalogue of objects from the Manchester Museum. On Friday 5th February we meet with Bryan Sitch, Curator of Archaeology at the Manchester who showed us a number of objects, mainly pottery that were part of a collections of objects that all had accession numbers but very little else written or known about them. We were charged with the task of picking a number of items and researching and presenting them in an interesting way to a particular audience of our choosing. There were a number of objects that particularly caught our attention, generally the ones that were interestingly decorated objects. We went away from the meeting with Bryan with a couple of ideas about decoration but a final decision had not been made.

We met again on Tuesday before our lecture and discussed an idea which had cropped up on Friday, that of gods and goddesses from Greece. Hannah Manson had researched the national curriculum and discovered that as part of the key stage two children had to learn about key figures from the ancient world. Hannah Lawson then pointed out that at the school she works at the children know all the current celebrities so we thought we could do a catalogue that talked about ‘Celebrities of the Ancient Past’ discussing why they are famous and the way thier fame is portrayed on the objects we have chosen,using people from the Roman, Greek and possibly Egyptian periods. We will start with the pottery we were shown by Bryan and then use the Manchester Museum catalogue to find other objects which suit the criteria.

We also thought that because the catalogue is for children it could contain a number of activities which will help the children to engage with the material and information they can learn from the material. We were shown an artifact catalogue for an academic and I think it looked pretty boring so to get the children to be interested in what the catalogue is telling them it needs to be really fun as well as educational. Easier said than done I think!
Objects we have chosen so far

(Written By Beth Thomas)