Keeping Stories Alive: Reflections from a Pitt Rivers Museum Intern

The behind the scenes of a museum are something you don’t see all too often, unless you’re watching Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller running around with a flashlight. Although the objective is to display things as clearly as possible for all to see, and the Pitt Rivers does show off a dizzying number of objects, one feels there is a lot going on beyond the glass cases in the galleries. Having the opportunity to spend two weeks as part of the collections team was a great chance to peek behind the curtain, and more curtains than I first imagined were pulled aside for me. Besides working with the collections team, I was given introductions to the conservation side of the museum, the photography stores, the Balfour Library, spent a day with the textiles team, helped with visitor VR and object handling sessions, and took a trip to the offsite storage bizarrely held in an old RAF base.

My main task as the intern, however, was to catalogue numerous clay pipes, as the museum was preparing for a visit from the Society for Clay Pipe Research. The first step in this process was pulling out the pipes, which are held safely under lock and key in stiff, wooden, Victorian drawers. This marked the start of my behind-the-scenes journey, seeing what lies underneath the cases and isn’t on display. On Mondays, the museum opens later to the public, and with no visitors around I was hoping for a Night at the Museum-esque scene, with drawers opening to reveal a lively entourage of objects coming to life. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, but what was revealed was certainly very interesting. 

 

Pipes are one of those objects that tread the line between form and function. Opening the drawer, one got the sense that these were objects of great aesthetic merit, but also ones that had been used; they played a role in people’s lives. We opened two drawers that morning, one of European pipes and one of Oceanic pipes. The first thing that struck me was the difference in form. The European pipes, for the most part, resembled what I imagine Sherlock Holmes to smoke from, whereas the Oceanic pipes were long tubes of bamboo, intricately carved or pyro-engraved. The second thing that struck me was that these pipes were so full of character, yet were lying still in an unassuming drawer. 

 

That feeling of quiet melancholy wasn’t because I’m a great admirer of pipes, but because I began to understand quite what my task was. Boxed in by 19th-century carpentry are 19th-century objects that tell 19th-century stories of 19th-century people. Keeping them in that drawer locks them in that period, both physically and symbolically. The relationship between Britain and Europe, and Britain and Oceania, is very different now to what it was then. The context in which I am taking these pipes from New Guinea out of the drawer is very different to the context of those who originally put them there, and I suddenly became very aware of that. That realisation stayed with me as I carried out the task of cataloguing the pipes, a process that brought me into even closer contact with their material and cultural history.

(1) 1933.40.3 - Incised Bamboo Tobacco Pipe (Papua New Guinea)

(1) 1979.21.107 - Bamboo Tobacco Pipe (Papua New Guinea, Wola)

 

(2) 1950.5.20B - Bamboo Tube (Papua New Guinea Highlands, Bena Area)

(2) 1950.5.22B - Bamboo tube (Papua New Guinea Highlands, Bena Area) 

Cataloguing the pipes involved updating their records on the museum’s database by photographing, transcribing labels, measuring, and writing descriptions. It was during this process that I began to discover more about how the pipes were actually used, and an article by A. C. Haddon published by the Royal Society on Smoking and Tobacco Pipes in New Guinea proved particularly helpful. It explained that the characteristic Papuan pipe (1) is made from bamboo, with one end closed and the other open or pierced. A hole, known as the dorsal hole, is bored into the side, where a bowl or leaf screw filled with tobacco is inserted. The tobacco is then lit, and the smoker draws the smoke through the pipe by suction. All the pipes had very similar construction in order for these steps to be met. Interestingly, some pipes lacked this dorsal hole (2) suggesting they were not smoked from directly but used to transport and store smoke instead. In working through them, I felt slowly transported to the time when these pipes were used, beginning to understand something of their original contexts.

(3) 1961.8.1 - Porcelain Stafford Ware whimsy pipe (England, Devon)

(4) 1895.43.3 - Modified European pipe (Papua New Guinea)

(4) 1895.43.4 - Modified European pipe (Papua New Guinea)

 

Shifting from the Oceanic collection to the European pipes brought a different set of materials and stories into view. The European pipes differed greatly in form not only from the Oceanic pipes but also from one another. Many looked as you would expect, but some were very unique in their construction. The best example was a twisty porcelain pipe (3) from Devon, as vibrant in colour as it was confusing in form. There were also several pipes of European origin that had made their way to Oceania and been repaired or modified by the people of New Guinea. These pipes (4) occupy a fascinating hybridity. They clearly show that the objects lying in the 19th-century drawers were never truly stationary. Not only were they items of use, but each had travelled great distances and passed through many hands. Although the pipes’ journeys ended in Oxford and they now sit still in the drawer, their stories are constantly in motion. These stories reveal the layered relationships objects have had with collectors across nations, and with modern viewers across time. We owe it to these objects to keep their stories alive by sharing and experiencing them.

 

This awareness of objects as vessels of living history stayed with me when, in the textile store, I was allowed to look through a drawer containing various items from Pakistan. As I went through these objects, which reminded me greatly of my grandparent’s wardrobe, I felt the most at home in the museum’s vast collections. The stories of those objects were ones I had been told by generations of my family and lived through myself. Those objects felt alive because the life they lived was my own. Opening the drawer is a great first step, putting the objects out for people to see is the next one, and telling their story is what comes after.

 

(5) 'Wandering in Other Worlds: Evenki Cosmology and Shamanic Traditions' display and Evenki co-curator Galina Veretnova.

(6) Visitors viewing immersive Evenki Cosmologies VR films. 

The importance of storytelling became even clearer through the object handling and VR sessions I helped with. These sessions were run to complement the display on the Evenki people (5) from Northern and Central Asia who are a diverse cultural group. Seeing their objects is one thing; watching their lives unfold in VR is another. The VR films (6) were shot in their homeland of Evenkia, and Anya Gleizier, the artist who helped create the display, worked with elders and children to record their stories as accurately as possible. What is easy to forget when looking at 19th-century cabinets, often with labels written in 19th-century language, is that while the objects are frozen in time, the people they came from often are not. The Evenki people may have told their story, but it is still being written. They are still living in Russia, Mongolia, and China. Their objects are brought to life in our minds with a story, and it is important to remember this is not a story from the past but a reality being lived now. Although the 19th-century Evenki drum is kept in a 19th-century cabinet in a 19th-century museum, its beat reverberates through time, and I believe we should never let it die. We can keep the Evenki drum, the bamboo pipes from New Guinea, the porcelain pipe from Devon, and everything else alive if we look past the 19th-century cloak they are all shrouded in.

 

During my two weeks, I didn’t get my Night at the Museum moment. I have no stories of objects suddenly moving on their own, or displays coming to life after hours, to report. What I did realise is that maybe I had been looking at it the wrong way. Rather than waiting for the objects to come to life, I understood that they are already alive, and it’s up to us to ensure they stay that way.

By Subhan Aslam

BA History and English student

University of Oxford

Further reading:

Haddon, A. C. (1946). Smoking and Tobacco Pipes in New Guinea. Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 232(586), 1–278. http://www.jstor.org/stable/92349

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Further examples of pipes in the Pitt Rivers collection:

 (1) Examples include: 1933.40.3, 1950.5.19B, 1979.21.107

 (2) Examples include: 1950.5.20B, 1950.5.22B, 1938.36.571

 (4) Examples include: 1895.43.3 and 1895.43.4

The Keam Sherds in the Museum

Figure 1:Four pottery sherds 1922.35.118 – 1922.35.121 (front)

To many museum visitors and researchers alike, ancient pottery sherds may not inspire any meaningful insight into contemporary Indigenous culture and communities. Historically, these sorts of archaeological specimens have been considered ‘common objects’ and are abundant in institutional collections across the globe. However, researching closely with this set of pottery sherds reveals a concealed cosmology of thought and identity from the desert region of the American Southwest. 

A set of four pottery sherds, described in the museum database simply as ‘4 sherds, possibly Mesa Verde grey ware of the Four Corners region’, Arizona, Southwestern USA. Whilst their age and broad location indicates they are fragments of clay pottery made by the ancestral Puebloans (AD 100 – 1600), their status as objects of cultural importance and institutional interest far exceeds their material property. The intention of this blog post is to consider the Keam sherds in the wider context of their biographical history, their diverse and often divisive affordances both within the museum and outside of it, and the potential for decolonial thinking in partnership with them. 

Figure 2: Four pottery sherds 1922.35.118 – 1922.35.121 (back)

The sherds arrived in the Pitt Rivers in 1922, sent by Walter Hough, the head curator of the Smithsonian Museum, to the Pitt Rivers’ first curator, Henry Balfour. Six other objects acquired in this same donation are currently on display in the Pottery – North America case (c.153.A) on the ground floor of the Pitt Rivers Museum. This includes an ‘ancient’ pottery ladle from Keams Canyon (1922.35.1), three small ‘ancient’ pottery bowls from an unspecified area of Arizona (1922.35.2), (1922.35.4), (1922.35.8). An ‘ancient’ ceramic jug from a similarly unspecified area of Arizona (1922.35.6), and a ‘modern’ pottery jar from either the Walpi or Owachomo Pueblo Village (1922.35.3). 

Inscribed prominently onto the sherds are the words ‘Keams Canyon’, giving some insight into their location of origin. Somewhat misleadingly, Keams Canyon refers not to a canyon itself, but an area of land settled and homesteaded by the Keam family on the modern-day Hopi Nation, in the North-East of Arizona. An array of notable archaeologists and ethnologists collected at Keams Canyon, including Cosmos and Victor Mindeleff in 1882 on behalf of the Bureau of Ethnology, as well as James and Matilda Coxe Stevenson who worked in the area beginning 1879. Thomas Keam himself also sold objects to the Smithsonian , the Peabody Museum, and many other museums within America.   

Figure 3: Smithsonian Accession records containing mention of ‘fragments of pottery (mixed)’ obtained from ’12 miles north of Keams Canyon’ by James Steveson in 1885. 

Whilst thousands of sherds are recorded as being collected by different archaeologists and ethnologists in the area, it is impossible to discern who is indeed responsible for the collection of the Keam sherds. There is also the possibility that the Keam sherds were not collected by Keam or any of the collectors visiting the site, but by the mostly unnamed Indigenous people who guided and aided ethnologists and archaeologists in the Americas. This history is complicated and tied to a frenzy of ethnographic collecting which occurred throughout the 17th and 18th Century, through which many objects found themselves in the Pitt Rivers Museum. 

Figure 4: Local Navajo men assisting Walter Hough’s team of archaeologists in an excavation at the Jettyo Valley.  

Source: Hough, W. (1903) Archaeological field work in northeastern Arizona. The Museum-Gates Expedition of 1901: Govt. print. off. p.252 

Whilst these collaborations in collecting may appear positive, it is important to remember that the unequal power relations which occur under colonialism require this history to be viewed critically. In a report on the 1901 Museum-Gates Expedition in the region of Keams Canyon, Walter Hough writes: 

‘Lack of water, however, has not prevented the Navaho tearing the Jettyto ruins to pieces in search of pottery for the trader [Thomas Keam]’. 

This image of the looting of an ancestral landscape by Indigenous people is difficult, but such histories are part of the very fabric of ethnographic collecting and its deep ties to colonial regimes. To this day, Indigenous people continue to have little control over how their material culture is displayed and talked about in museums. Beyond the many possibilities behind the collection of the Keam sherds, it is important to remember that the contemporary Indigenous people of the region may challenge the legitimacy of all collecting done under the unequal power relations of colonialism. 

Figure 5. A photograph of the inside of the Trading Post at Keams Canyon, taken late 19th Century and recovered from a box of mixed prints in the British Museum archive.  

Photograph provided by The Trustees of the British Museum, available at: https: ://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/EA_Am-B34-15 © The Trustees of the British Museum.  

The influence of archaeology on anthropological thinking is highly visible within the Pitt Rivers Museum, an overlap of a historical field often described as ‘ethnoarchaeology’. The collection of Hough’s pottery which is displayed in the North America Pottery case is a product of much of this so called ethnoarchaeological thinking which combined anthropological ideas about societies with archaeological ideas about the deep past. When the potsherds are described in terms of ‘specimen’, these ideas are imposed onto them, and they come to represent ethnoarchaeological ideas about American antiquity and historic academic beliefs about the so-called ‘development’ of Native American society. 

Today, the Pitt Rivers acknowledges that the language of labels which appear in the collection may not appropriately or accurately reflect the knowledge that source communities themselves hold about these objects. Instead, what these labels often reflect is historic academic attitudes and academic ideas that harmfully, and occasionally intentionally, contradict with Indigenous understandings of self and history. 

The cultural significance of pottery within the landscape will be visible to anyone who has visited Tribal lands in the Southwest, where potsherds are intentionally and consciously left upon the ground; occasionally grouped together to be viewed, but firmly within the land. Indigenous voices in the American Southwest advocate strongly for the protection of this material, and the important role of ancestral material culture within the landscape. 

‘Those artifacts represent more than just remnants: so much labor mixed with the surroundings by the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants’ Kimball Bighorse (Navajo/Cayuga). 

For many Indigenous people living in the region, knowledge and memory of their ancestors is preserved within the landscape and the artefacts left there by their ancestors, who are known as Histat’sinom (people of long ago), in the Hopi language. 

 

‘Protection of the landscape allows us to share with the outside world that we are more than historical footnotes, to show that our connections to the ancestral land traverse distance and time’ Lyle Balenquah (Hopi). 

To Indigenous societies of the region, ancestral objects are valued for the connection they can provide to the ancestors, and the removal of these objects presents a serious violation of that relationship. The removal of the Keam sherds and the lack of information recorded about their biographic history is therefore frustrating in many ways. The Keam sherds are a small representation of many objects within the Pitt Rivers Museum which are characterized institutionally by an absence of records, and they remind us that colonial violence presents itself in different forms. Within the Pitt Rivers Museum, the reminders of colonial violence can be seen in blatant ways, such as the burn marks on the rear of an Ivory Tusk from the Kingdom of Benin, but they can also reveal themselves in these vast absences and silences. 

The task of giving voice to the Keam sherds is an almost paradoxical one of applying restitution to an object that has become ‘lost’ whilst we are able to hold it in our hands. The locality of these ancestral objects is deeply important to Indigenous people for whom they afford an irreplaceable connection to the ancestors. The violation of this relationship through collecting is therefore a harm caused by the collectors.  

Perhaps a hopeful outlook is to consider how the Keam sherds can continue to be teaching objects as they were in their homeland by inviting us to look differently at the space of the museum. The Keam sherds expose how violence against Indigenous people is not always obvious physical violence and can instead take the form of the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and the removal of sacred objects. It is this sort of violence that remains the most sustained within institutions like the Pitt Rivers, making the Keam sherds not just evidence of a violent history but witness to an ongoing one.  

The Keam sherds also remind us that some wounds cannot be fully healed, and decolonisation is not a process of total reversal. Perhaps it is better to suggest that the Keam sherds encourage us to sit with discomfort and to take seriously the harm done by museum institutions. Afterall, to acknowledge and to frustrate over these impossibilities is to share- in small part- in the Indigenous experience itself. With this acknowledged, there is optimism that the Keam sherds may now inform people about the many different ways of knowing and being experienced by people in the world. With the Keam Sherds this should perhaps best begin with how Indigenous people of the Southwest show reverence to ancestral objects: in the presence of great forces of ancestors is the invitation to sit quietly and to think. 

By Olly DeHerrera

Graduate of Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Further reading: 

 

Colwell, C. (John S. (2010) Living histories : Native American issues and Southwestern archaeology. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. 

 

Hicks, D. & Stevenson, Alice. (2013) World archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum : a characterization. Oxford: Archaeopress. 

Keeler, J. (ed.) (2017) Edge of morning : native voices speak for the Bears Ears. First Torrey House Press edition. Salt Lake City, Utah: Torrey House Press. 

 

Peers, L. & Brown, A. K. (2015) Visiting with the ancestors: Blackfoot shirts in museum spaces. Edmonton, Alberta: Athabasca University Press.