Museum Wednesday: None, Exactly

First off, no real Museum Wednesday post. I was going to do Imperial War today, but it was raining really hard and I didn't feel like taking the tube, so I picked a couple that were closer. I did the National Portrait Gallery and part of the British Museum- specifically, the special gallery housing an exhibit on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Neither place allowed photography, and for good reasons the both of them. I took a few pictures of the British Museum proper, but I suspect I"ll be sharing those with you when I do a full post on the British Museum.

I plan on actually doing several posts about that. I have some... issues with the place. It's very White Man's Burden- even their newer stuff. For example, the only (non-Egyptian) African gallery is in the basement. They also have several artifacts that are really contentious. I'm not even talking the Benin plaques or the Elgin marbles- for instance, in their Grand Court, they have this stone lion. It's a lovely lion, even if the poor boy is missing his lower jaw, but the way they got him is just wrong. He was on top of a tomb excavated in the late 1800s. Neither the tomb or the lion were in danger of being damaged, but they just chiseled him off the top of the tomb with no regard to what he meant. You can tell by looking at the base of the lion that they weren't careful in regards to the top of the tomb itself, so long as they got the whole lion. The took nothing else from this tomb- just the statue to bring home to England because England has a lion fetish.

That sounds like looting to me. Not archaeology. Though I suppose that by saying that, I start a terribly slippery slope. How much of anything is too much to take? Does it matter if you're excavating remnants of a culture with no real descendants? Is visibility more important than an artifact's national integrity? What if a culture gives permission?

These are things to think about! Archaeology is a difficult ethical field sometimes, when you think about it. Actually, the next thing I'm posting deals a lot with archaeological ethics. Sorry if you find that dull, but as I said, this really isn't a travel blog. I promise the post after next won't talk about archaeological ethics at all. Instead, it'll be about enchanted spaces and my love for the derelict. Then the one after that is about remembering the forgotten dead. Sounds like a Rob Zombie memoir or something, doesn't it?