Typological displays compared with other forms
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Extract from King's 'Franks and Ethnography' in Caygill and Cherry 1997
[pp146 - 148]
So far as arrangement was concerned there were, during the early nineteenth century, three co-existent models or paradigms of display. The first was that of the gentlemanly cabinet of highly mixed materials of eclectic intent, as espoused by Hans Sloane and still existing in the first rooms in Montagu House in the early nineteenth century. Secondly, from the 1780s onwards there was sufficient ethnographic material, particularly from Cook's voyages, for contextualised shows of materials from certain geographically defined areas to be exhibited in, for instance 'The South Seas Room', an appellation which included Pacific America. It was this paradigm which saw greatest expansion in the nineteenth century: as collections came into the Museum the material was crammed into cases to show Canadian Inuit or Ghanian Asante material culture, with brief published guides. The third paradigm was the pseudo-medieval, armorial display, as invoked by Samuel Rush Meyrick, Sir Walter Scott, the Royal United Services Institution Museum, General Pitt-Rivers [sic], and in the 1860s William Blackmore in Salisbury. The importance of the pseudo-medieval display mode is that it came incidentally to fit into the Pre-Darwinian evolutionary schemes that were moving to the fore in the explanations of human history. Just as the Three Age System (Stone, Bronze and Iron) was employed to elucidate European pre-history, so technological evolution might continue to be presented implicitly through exhibitions about the medieval period. This was achieved by the comparison of African, Asian and Pacific arms and armour with those of the European medieval world.
The British Museum did not adopt the pseudo-medieval display methodology, and indeed retained much of the geographical arrangement of the world in ethnographic displays. Ideas of evolution came to the Museum quite slowly. Initially, what Christy and the Christy collection achieved was the juxtaposition of the Old World palaeolithic with ethnographic materials in cased displays. Steinhauer's 1862 catalogue expresses this intent in a very elliptical manner:
This Catalogue of Weapons, Tools and Utensils made and used by Aborigines is arranged especially to show the relations and differences between the Stone Implements used in different ages and in different countries; and also to illustrate, in some degree, the conditions of civilization under which the Stone Implements of prehistoric times have probably been used.
In 1868 Franks published the second guide to the Christy Collection. In the preamble he briefly explains his current understanding of Christy's intentions:
Mr Christy had devoted what leisure he could command to inquiries concerning the history of human civilization, and especially those earlier stages of it commonly termed the Stone period. In illustration of these studies he collected the stone weapons and implements of the Prehistoric races of Europe, and any objects of a more recent date, or belonging to still existing races, that illustrated such remains.
Just after this Franks began to prepare a third, more substantial, account of the Christy Collection of prehistory and ethnography. This reflects a greater interest in the sequence of human development. In the 1870 introduction of this unpublished work Franks more firmly joined together ideas about prehistory with those of the Three Age System. Franks explained the scope of the work:
By the term 'Prehistoric Antiquities' we understand the remains of human races that have either themselves passed away without any full account of them having appeared in history, or though still existing, were at the period to which the objects belong in a state of civilization and culture different to that in which they are found in historic times ... The periods into which prehistoric antiquities have been divided are characterised in some measure, by the material of the weapons and implements then in use: stone, bronze and iron.
While Franks continued to collect and catalogue ethnography, and was still to produce the 1880s ethnographic galleries, he no longer seems to have explained his intentions even in this manner. In a sense, after the tumultuous period of the 1860s and the substantial development of social evolutionary theory, particularly by Hubert Spencer (1820 - 1903) during the 1870s, the significance of ethnographic collecting for the development of archaeology receded. By the 1890s, the decade of Franks's retirement, ethnography was simply and clearly defined. It had lost all connotations of race and physical anthropology and was founded on the concept of social evolution. A British Museum guide put it succinctly: 'Ethnography is the name given to the scientific study of the manners and customs of particular peoples and of their development from savagery towards civilization, and it more especially concerns itself with those races which have no written records' (A Guide to the Exhibition Galleries of the British Museum [Bloomsbury] London 1899, pp 551 - 552)...
In [Franks's] scheme of the world everything was conceived of in material terms through the morphology of artefacts. The methodological aim was quite simple: he sought to create series of different specimens, just as an ornithologist might collect variations in the subspecies of terns or pigeons. To this end he used the natural historian's concept of 'type specimen', and with great boldness consigned 'duplicate' material to an outer darkness where it could be exchanged or disposed of. The aim of museums, and of ethnographic collecting, was the construction of ideal series of objects. This included both the past, which was reconstructed through the Danish model with the Three Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron, and the present - the world outside Europe - which was conceived of as reflecting the survival of societies and technologies analogous to those of ancient Europe.