Archaeology and the Museum

Rosemary Joyce

Museums and archaeology seem to be a natural pairing to me. But then, they would; I have wanted to be an archaeologist since I was seven years old, and I spent a good part of my time weekends and summers involved in programs at the Buffalo Museum of Science before I went away to college. I did my first archaeological field work through a Museum of Science program, and spent months after our dig processing excavated materials. At the same time, however, most of what went on around the museum was not archaeological, or even anthropological; still, there was something fundamental that linked the two kinds of settings and activities for me.

One kind of link clearly lies in the relative muteness of objects in both settings. For me, archaeology is an intensively interpretive process; decisions to recognize some variation as indicative of past conditions are implicit parts of field practice, and decisions to examine museum objects from one perspective or another are made either consciously or unconsciously in all museum practice. The objects simply don't speak for themselves. Instead, both in field archaeology and in museum work in general, we are engaged in a wealth of strategies to create understandings of objects in their settings.

Museums provide a space in which the general public expects to find reliable information. A museum like the Hearst, set as it is within the University of California, has immense authority. Most discussions recognizing the existence of such authority conclude pessimistically that museums can only enforce a single point of view on a public seen as passive. Certainly, if we take our task to be providing simple objective statements of the real facts about other cultures and other times, museums are almost certainly doomed to foster passivity. But if we take as one of our tasks exposing the actual processes through which different interpretations are arrived at; if we take as one part of this task the challenge to acknowledge that multiple interpretations are possible; if we make the exploration of how we know as important as the exploration of what we know, museums can change the way people think about knowing cultures.

Here, I think, is the greatest opportunity in linking the museum and the archaeological community here at Berkeley. It is the undeniable physical existence of certain kinds of objects and settings made and used by people in the past that grounds archaeological interpretation. Museums are distinguished from other kinds of cultural institutions by holding and using physical collections. As an anthropology museum, the Hearst can create a distinctive identity by taking as a central concern the ways that human manipulations of material experience work. Anthropology museums have had an uneasy identity never quite certain whether they were second-rate art museums or historical societies of the distant past. The historical roots of anthropology museums in natural history, with the inherited storyline of evolutionary progress, has been uncomfortable. We are different from these other models, and have an extraordinary opportunity to redefine what a museum can be about.

By making the anthropology of specific aspects of everyday experience -cloth, food, and medicine- the focus of our traditional exhibitions, we will begin to address the central issues of how interpretations are grounded in material things. By moving into less traditional modes of dissemination made possible through technology, we can break down the barriers between research and exhibition, making multiple interpretations and the data they rest on available on CD ROMs with hypertext links. And I hope we will continue to do what museums have always done for archaeologists: provide them the opportunity to exercise their creativity by interrogating the wealth of previously excavated materials with new questions, using new techniques, framing new theoretical perspectives that gain much of their reality from the objects that anchor them.