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no, and why is this in the Museum tag?
Do you guys ever think of how being in your 20's feels like you only have 5-7 years left in which you have to achieve as much as you can, like it's a deadline to your success and if you don't make it in this time your life is and will be a failure?
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well that's even more reason to take the time you need to rest!
After two days of being home sick, I tried to go in today, had a little cry, and was gently (yet firmly) told to go home
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oh this was a fun watch.
A very brief run-down of how I got into the sector.
undergrad in history and classical civilizations [no latin or greek language]
in the second semester of my second last year get the chance to sit down and talk to a curator as I had told my prof who knew her I was thinking about museums instead of a PhD in history. She tells me about my eventual Masters program.
In my final year get the opportunity to skip writing a thesis and intern for 8 months instead in a museum. Actually get 2 four month internships in two different departments in two different museums.
plan a pedal bike trip around the Australian coast and apply to 3 masters programs assuming I won't get in.
Get in?!
Do that, have another 2 month internship in yet another institution in a different department again.
get back home and apply for jobs. Realize that 10 months isn't enough experience and head to my local art gallery to volunteer. Go from January until July volunteering and working a few hours in the museum shop - lucky to live at home with my parents so I can afford this.
Get a 4 month internship in BC. move out here. get offered a 12 month contract at the end of the internship - with a few months tacked on to bring me from Sept to Dec.
COVID. Burn out. massive depression. Autism diagnosis. No musuem work for over a year.
Get hired just before I hit homelessness to manage at Camel town.
End up as ED for a GVA museum make more money than I ever have in the world. 50 per cent of it still goes to housing.
It is a lot of work, and I nearly left the sector a few times - did leave it in 2021, still might go back to academia in the future. but... I love this work.
youtube
New video premiering here in 10 minutes!
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take care of yourself.
I haven't talked about it much but I have been sick for 90 per cent of 2024 - spent 14 days in bed with a 3 day migraine in the middle of my two 7 day stretches.
You [and I] are worth taking a break and making sure you're well. You deserve a break when you need one. You have worked so hard to get to where you are and going to work sick is a quick way to get burnt out.
After two days of being home sick, I tried to go in today, had a little cry, and was gently (yet firmly) told to go home
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Very good point.
As far as I am aware there isn't a specific term in English but we tend to use the phrase 'permanent loan' to describe that phenomenon.
I remember a few years ago - I think pre-2017 but I might be wrong - there was discussion about the French sending the Benin Bronzes back on 'permanent loan' because it was believed that this was a way to 'sneak' them back home without upsetting the stakeholders of the French museums in question.
In which case, the bronzes would still have 'technically' belonged to the French collections meaning they'd be on the hook for paying insurance and all conservation expenses, but there was no intention to return the loaned bronzes back to France.
A museum I used to work at in Canada had a similar set up with a NEIGBOURING museum because when some local items were discovered on an archaeological dig, the communities in the town wanted to keep them but didn't have a museum yet. So the neigbouring institution took the objects into their collection and as soon as my town set up their little museum, loaned them permanently back to us. The goal when I was there [the museum was only 3 or 5 years old at that point] was to get those loaned objects repatriated officially, but even if that never happens, they are never leaving the town again.
There has been a recent surge in repatriation/give everything back posts in Museum Tumblr so I thought I would share a story I found out about recently.
Background; I did some volunteer work for the Canadian Museum Association that included looking pretty in depth at a few exhibitions from 2023. One of them really caught my eye because it goes into an aspect of Originating Cultural Relationships that I don't see reflected in the public sector a lot even though its not that uncommon among my coworkers.
So back in the 1860s the Prince of Wales was gifted a series of baskets from the Michi Saagiig [Mississauga] women. These were a gift and have remained in the Royal Collection Trust ever since.
It is agreed upon by all parties that the Royal Collection is doing a good job caring for the baskets. However, the baskets still represent the women, the ancestors, who made them. They are family. And the living Michi Saagiig missed their grandmothers and aunts.
So the Peterborough Museum and Archives [Peterborough Canada, not the one in the UK] worked out a temporary loan from the Royal Trust Collection to bring the ancestors back 'for a visit' to their ancestral lands of Nogojwanong-Peterborough.
This was facilitated by the Museum, but the partnership was multi way, between Hiawaitha First Nation, Mississauga Nation, Museum, and the Trust.
This exhibition ran from April to November last year and was ALWAYS meant to be a 'visit' - that language is deliberate. The baskets came home for a visit before returning to their new home in the UK.
here's an article about it
Now, from a layman's perspective this might seem like a small victory - the baskets, the makakoons, didn't even stay in Hiawatha which is the modern location of the village they were made in. And it was only a few months, but still cool. Still pretty neat.
But from my perspective this is MASSIVE. This means that the ROYAL FAMILY has agreed to send things home - at least on the short term. This will bring about change in British collection law. It won't be quick. But we will see more and more British institutions sending things on visits. And eventually we will see repatriation. It is going to take a very long time, and this is by no means the first rung on the ladder. But
THE MAKAKOONS CAME HOME FOR A VISIT
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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
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There has been a recent surge in repatriation/give everything back posts in Museum Tumblr so I thought I would share a story I found out about recently.
Background; I did some volunteer work for the Canadian Museum Association that included looking pretty in depth at a few exhibitions from 2023. One of them really caught my eye because it goes into an aspect of Originating Cultural Relationships that I don't see reflected in the public sector a lot even though its not that uncommon among my coworkers.
So back in the 1860s the Prince of Wales was gifted a series of baskets from the Michi Saagiig [Mississauga] women. These were a gift and have remained in the Royal Collection Trust ever since.
It is agreed upon by all parties that the Royal Collection is doing a good job caring for the baskets. However, the baskets still represent the women, the ancestors, who made them. They are family. And the living Michi Saagiig missed their grandmothers and aunts.
So the Peterborough Museum and Archives [Peterborough Canada, not the one in the UK] worked out a temporary loan from the Royal Trust Collection to bring the ancestors back 'for a visit' to their ancestral lands of Nogojwanong-Peterborough.
This was facilitated by the Museum, but the partnership was multi way, between Hiawaitha First Nation, Mississauga Nation, Museum, and the Trust.
This exhibition ran from April to November last year and was ALWAYS meant to be a 'visit' - that language is deliberate. The baskets came home for a visit before returning to their new home in the UK.
here's an article about it
Now, from a layman's perspective this might seem like a small victory - the baskets, the makakoons, didn't even stay in Hiawatha which is the modern location of the village they were made in. And it was only a few months, but still cool. Still pretty neat.
But from my perspective this is MASSIVE. This means that the ROYAL FAMILY has agreed to send things home - at least on the short term. This will bring about change in British collection law. It won't be quick. But we will see more and more British institutions sending things on visits. And eventually we will see repatriation. It is going to take a very long time, and this is by no means the first rung on the ladder. But
THE MAKAKOONS CAME HOME FOR A VISIT
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I would love those links if you have the time.
Out of curiousity, do you think most national museums are participating in the same kind of thing that the British Museum is, i.e. holding onto items that they stole in conquest / archaeological items that other nations are requesting back?
I always wonder if we should be looking at the bigger picture rather than just this one spotlighted issue (not that the spotlight isn't important in raising the issue originally).
oh goodie we're digging up stuff I wrote from 2 years ago...yay
Okay, for starters, let's look at how you've phrased your question. Currently, the heavy implication is that this is all the BM is (i.e. it only holds colonial loot and contested items), which is false. Yes, it does hold colonial loot from the British Empire. No one is disputing that. It also holds contested items such as the Parthenon Marbles and the Rosetta Stone. What it also holds are many items taken from digs where the country in question permitted them taking them, and then also gifts and other such non colonial requisitions.
Mostly, I need to stress, because as someone who's adjacent to museums this drives me insane: Framing all museum collections as Bad and only containing Bad Items from Bad Deeds doesn't give you the full picture and if you don't have the full picture you can't really address the issue of repatriation properly. It's the classic 'All or Nothing' mentality and I'm begging people to seek nuance on complex topics such as this. Also governments suck and so hearing repeated 'well museums suck because XYZ' means they're more than happy to simply defund them, which they already are doing and that's not helping stuff like repatriation either.
In short, if you're asking does any other museum have a law like BM63 (I wrote 68 in the post because...I'm bad at numbers)? Not as far as I'm aware, no. The BM is unique in that instance where the government literally created a law to prevent it from divesting of its collection.
Do other national museums hold colonial looted artefacts and contested items? Yes. Lots of them. All over the world.
Germany's Neues Museum holds the bust of Nefertiti, which is contested.
The Louvre in Paris has multiple Italian artworks that were stolen in the 1790s that Italy wants back.
The Horses of St Mark's (in Venice) were stolen from Greece by Constantine in the 1200s. (Not really all that contested but they were definitely stolen).
Yale University holds numerous items from Machu Picchu. The 1911 dig had permission from the Peruvian Government, but the items were supposed to be returned. I believe (don't quote me) that less than half were originally. They have subsequently been returned, but this is not an uncommon story.
There's a bunch of Nazi looted artworks that are in museums that need to be returned to their rightful owners.
The MET museum in the US and everything it got from Douglas Latchford (this is ongoing, with some repatriations having already happened)
The National Museum of Australia also got caught out by that guy.
To be fair, the MET Museum has a problem with looted artefacts in general from the 70s onwards as they tried to compete with the European collections and thus ended up gaining a lot of 'not properly provenanced artefacts'. There was a gold sarcophagus they returned only recently that was looted from Egypt post-2011.
The Bible Museum in the US has...stuff it shouldn't (there's a lot and I'm not listing it).
*voice dripping with derision* Whatever the Hobby Lobby is up to
I could go on!
Focusing solely on the BM is a result of a US-Centric mindset, and a pervasive anglophone bias in things people will read. (Or in other words: It's fun to shit on the Brits and most of you only read English anyway.)
This has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like the BM is only museum in the world doing this, and they're not. Not in the slightest. Many museums, national or not, will have colonial looted items if that country has, at any time in the past, waged expansionist wars against other nations, no matter how brief. If your local museum has artefacts from Not Your Country there's a good chance they were looted! Again, I stress that many many artefacts that left places like Egypt were part of agreements with the Egyptian government (called partition agreements) whereby the Egyptian government took first pick of artefacts from a dig and then the dig organisers could take the rest. This hasn't happened since UNESCO World Heritage Convention 1975, which prohibits new artefacts from leaving countries which is also why I will bonk on the head with a cardboard tube anyone who says Archaeologists/Museums are still stealing things.
So yeah, if you're looking at repatriation, you'll be much better looking at the bigger picture and understanding how all this came to be in the first place than you'll ever be making memes about the BM stealing things on the internet.
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This is my egyptologist friend Dr. Ken who I met at a dig in Egypt.
He is a respected field egyptologist and now runs a museum of egyptology.
Ken is neither young nor fit.
Can you be kinda chubby and be an archaeologist? I’m working on my health and fitness, but I’m still kinda chubby and not really cut out for field school yet. I read this article saying fat people can’t be archeologist and it kinda crushed my dreams. Because I know it will take a bit to get rid of the weight, but I feel so out of place after reading that..
Hi there, dirtling, this makes me so insanely angry. I am incandescent with rage. I would like to find the author of that article and rip them from limb to limb.
You can absolutely be fat and be an archaeologist.
I am so sorry that I have to be the one to tell you this. I am sorry that you have not received support from other members of my community. I am sorry that someone's ignorant fatphobia has crushed your dreams. Please let me try to convince you otherwise.
I have had the privilege to dig with dig with several fat people, and in each case they were an asset to our team. They were just as capable of excavating as those of us who were carrying less weight, and each of them brought special skill sets and unique capabilities to the table that we would have been worse off without had they not been working with us.
You do not have to lose weight before going on a field school. You know your body better than the writer of that article ever can. If you feel like you are capable of performing the manual labor required during an excavation, then I believe your self assessment. There is no maximum weight limit for participating in an archaeological dig.
Even if you don't feel like you're physically able to go on a dig, there are other archaeological opportunities for you! As someone with a disability who can't do a ton of manual labor, I do a lot of lab work because it allows me to be sitting down. There is so much more to archaeology than just digging stuff out of the ground, and there is absolutely room for you in this field of study.
Here are some resources that I was able to find about obesity and archaeology.
The Fat Archaeologist
Who decided it was bad to be fat— Sapiens
The Archaeology of Obesity: Discourse Analysis and Implications for North American Obesity Research
I did actually try to find the article that you mentioned so that I could take apart its argument piece by piece, but I wasn't able to locate it easily. If someone could direct me to it, I would be more than happy to rip it to shreds because it is categorically false and actively harmful. In my personal opinion, that author can suck it. Sorry, not sorry. I'm mad.
-Reid
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Right, considering the current state of corporate politics on this site, and that it seems that only those affected seem to be actively speaking on the matter, it is up to I, the only fucking cishet on tumblr, to drag this out to a wider audience.
REBLOG IF YOUR ACCOUNT IS A TRANSFEM SAFE SPACE.
We need to show these higher ups how much we truly value them.
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there isn't a central Canadian job site for museums, but the Museum Associations all host job posting. So, CMA, BCMA, AMA, OMA, etc are all good places to check.
University of Leicester Museum Studies Jobs Desk used to be a pretty good one, the original host passed away a few years ago and I know someone else is keeping up with it, but I haven't used it so not sure how good it is any more.
Anyway. ULMS Jobs Desk is mostly UK, but also gets posts internationally too.
Do you or followers know of websites/organizations that post or gather archaeology/museum/heritage jobs around the world? I've tried doing some research but am unsure how to find I guess reliable and vetted sources, especially since I've never applied to jobs in other countries before (I'm Canadian if that makes any difference).
Hi there,
I'm mostly familiar with Shovel Bums, but that's pretty US centric. Like field schools, I get the sense that a lot of these jobs are also passed around by word of mouth, with people giving their recommendations and advice for who to steer clear of.
When you're searching, I would recommend looking for listings in a specific country rather than just searching for international jobs as a broad category. Also talk to the people who trained you to see if they have any contacts—whoever hires you will probably want to talk to them as references anyway.
While I haven't applied for any jobs like this, I would imagine there's also the added wrinkle of visas/language/travel that you may have to take on yourself. If you're going abroad, you'll have to compete with that country's native archaeologists, so be prepared for that.
I'll tag @archaeologistproblems as a Canadian professional who might have some advice? Anyone else is always welcome to chime in too.
-Reid
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update;
Hospital visit done, food et [forgot to eat lunch first was very hungry by the time they got to me]. was there for 3 hours, actually had 3 tests done. the tests took.... about 45 minutes? yeah... it was a longer one.
Very much over did things today, I have been home sick with a cold since Sunday. lol.
My IV port is still sore.
dont worry not dying.
as you may recal I had a hysto in 2022 (July I think) and then in August I got a concusion. Fun!
Well I had a 1 in 100 complicationgiving me a physical disability that I don't like talking about. If you know, you know. y'know?
Anyway. Settled into GVA, got Klaus, decided to get this thing sorted instead of just dealing with it.
Step 1 CT scan. Just waiting for my timeslot. Ianto's at home with Klaus as I have no one to hold him for me at the hospital. My IV port is freaking itchy!
Wish me luck.
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dont worry not dying.
as you may recal I had a hysto in 2022 (July I think) and then in August I got a concusion. Fun!
Well I had a 1 in 100 complicationgiving me a physical disability that I don't like talking about. If you know, you know. y'know?
Anyway. Settled into GVA, got Klaus, decided to get this thing sorted instead of just dealing with it.
Step 1 CT scan. Just waiting for my timeslot. Ianto's at home with Klaus as I have no one to hold him for me at the hospital. My IV port is freaking itchy!
Wish me luck.
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Congratulations Christeah. I am so glad to hear you are setting in to your new job.
When I finally settled in the GVA I started going exploring and it felt so good to do. I hope your video making goes smooth and quick today.
It's happened.
I returned to full time work about three months ago, so I've been getting up at the same time every day. It's my weekend. I was awake at 7 am (despite going to bed Late). I wanted to record a video today but I'm very sleepy so I will caffeine heavily to make up for it.
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