A case study in collaboration: displaying Greece and Rome at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK

Using object biographies to understand the curation crisis: lessons learned from the museum life of an archaeological collection

“…Buchanan's ethnography of archaeological curation in five different contexts (two excavations, a museum, a conservation laboratory, and an archaeological repository) provides one of the few comprehensive inquiries into the continuum (or, according to Buchanan, the discontinuum) of curatorial practices of archaeological collections (Buchanan 2016b). Moreover, in the recent literature, there are some examples of empirical studies of participatory collection management and exhibition design that also make some observations of the related curation processes (e.g., Nash, Colwell-Chanthaphonh, and Holen 2011;Cooper 2013;Longair 2015;Buchanan 2016a). Outside of archaeology, comparable ethnographic research (e.g., Trace 2006;Gracy 2004) and case studies of collection management (e.g., Jefferson and Vince-Dewerse 2008) have been conducted also in the context of archives and manuscript collections.…”