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11 Re-examining the contribution of Dr Robert Toope to knowledge in later seventeenth-century Britain: was he more than just ‘Dr Took’? Jonathan R. Trigg Had made dead skulls for coin the chymist’s share, The female corpse the surgeos purchas’d ware…1 This chapter presents a reflection on, and assessment of, the life, career and work of the little-studied seventeenth-century physician and ‘Renaissance man’ Robert Toope. He is currently, perhaps, chiefly known for his correspondence on wide-ranging, eclectic, subjects with the likes of fellow antiquarian John
The book studies Neolithic burial in Britain by focussing primarily on evidence from caves. It interprets human remains from forty-eight Neolithic caves and compares them to what we know of Neolithic collective burial elsewhere in Britain and Europe. It provides a contextual archaeology of these cave burials, treating them as important evidence for the study of Neolithic mortuary practice generally. It begins with a thoroughly contextualized review of the evidence from the karst regions of Europe. It then goes on to provide an up-to-date and critical review of the archaeology of Neolithic funerary practice. This review uses the ethnographically documented concept of the ‘intermediary period’ in multi-stage burials to integrate archaeological evidence, cave sedimentology and taphonomy. Neolithic caves and environments and the dead bodies within them would also have been perceived as active subjects with similar kinds of agency to the living. The book demonstrates that cave burial was one of the earliest elements of the British Neolithic. It also shows that Early Neolithic cave burial practice was very varied, with many similarities to other Neolithic burial rites. However, by the Middle Neolithic, cave burial had changed and a funerary practice which was specific to caves had developed.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, museums in Europe and North America were at their largest and most powerful. New buildings were bigger; objects flooded into them, and more people visited them than ever before. The Manchester Museum is an ideal candidate for understanding cultures of display in twentieth-century Britain. It is a treasure trove of some four million priceless objects that are irreplaceable and unique. Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips. This book traces the fate of his cabinet from his death in 1814. The establishment of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) allowed naturalists to carve out a space in Manchester's cultural landscape. The Manchester Museum's development was profoundly affected by the history of the University in which it operated. In January 1868, the Natural History Society formally dissolved, and an interim commission took control of its collections; the Manchester Geological Society transferred its collections the following year. The new collection was to be purely scientific, comprising geology, zoology and botany, with no place for some of the more exotic specimens of the Society. The objects in the collection became part of Manchester's civic identity, bringing with them traces of science, empire and the exotic. Other museological changes were afoot in the 1990s. Natural history collections became key sites for public engagement with environmental issues and biodiversity and more recently as sites for exhibiting art.
Concilio Et Labore (By Wisdom and Work) Latin motto of the city of Manchester Like many British cities, and indeed urban centres around Europe and the United States, Manchester is home to a museum with a significant collection of Egyptian antiquities. The accumulation of such material in Manchester did not come about by chance but through a complex network of political circumstance, philanthropic patronage and personal taste. In order to evaluate the responses to the
example, Schulting and Richards 2002a, 1021). In this book, I will discuss the human remains from British Neolithic caves on their own terms. They were part of a wider European tradition of cave burial. They were also an important strand in the overall diversity of funerary practice in the British Neolithic. By understanding cave burial in the period, we get a much clearer understanding of attitudes to death in all contexts. One way of describing this book would be to say that it is an exploration of the archaeology and agency of natural places. However, it could also
4 Acquisition: collecting networks and the museum The Manchester Museum was based on the collections of the Manchester Natural History Society. Very soon after the transfer to Owens College, however, this founding collection made up only a fraction of the specimens housed within the Museum. Elsewhere, the Sloane collection at the British Museum and General Pitt Rivers’s material at the University of Oxford accounted for only a tiny proportion of the museums they seeded. This chapter explores how the rest of the collection came to be in the Manchester Museum
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
for other objects, but the present example is unusual in having been carved in a single piece, without a cavity. Its date and possible function will be considered below. It is a pleasure to dedicate this article to Rosalie David, whose pioneering multidisciplinary research has inspired a generation of younger scholars to apply innovative scientific methods to the study of mummies and grave goods to enhance our understanding of life and death in the ancient Nile valley. Acquisition The figurine entered the collections of the British Museum, London, in 1915, when it
5 Origins Introduction In this chapter, I want to consider the evidence for the origins of cave burial practice in Britain around the start of the Neolithic period. This is not to suggest that there were no intentional burials in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic in Britain. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, the data gathered by Chamberlain (1996, Figure 1) and updated by Schulting (2007, Figure 2) shows a significant increase in burial activity which broadly coincides with the beginning of the Neolithic in Britain. In the rest of this book, I will be
claimed to be ‘dealing with’ the problem. 12 Witness testimonies suggest that, in these cases, the certification of death and burial of bodies was not carried out swiftly, if indeed at all. Second, when burials of OT and SS labourers did take place, there was also considerable variation in terms of how bodies were interred, influenced by where and when individuals died, who they were, and internal and external pressures placed upon the German administration. St Anne’s cemetery When British