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@MuseumsUnlocked

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Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

Dec 9, 2022

@archaeologyuk

✨"Letter to a Young Archaeologist"✨
I was delighted to contribute a text to this lovely monthly @archaeologyuk series, beautifully curated during 2022 by @McfadyenLesley & @clairecorkill
you can read my letter, plus those of other contributors, here >>> archaeologyuk.org/resource/lette…

1/16
It’s a strange calling, to get your hands dirty with the detritus of the past, to crouch with a trowel in a muddy trench, to trace the delicate contours of earth works in rainy fields, to run soil through a sieve, to ink letters and numbers onto potsherds and ziplock bags,

2/ to perhaps put what some you found on display to the public and to deposit the vast majority of it in box after box in a museum store room, all in the name of excavating ghosts, waking the dead, reading a past that was not written down but just left behind.

Read 18 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

Mar 8, 2022

@smithsonian

THREAD - a quick commentary on what today's massive news of the @smithsonian committing to returning its entire Benin 1897 collection means

https://twitter.com/profdanhicks/status/1501198260068917255

1/14 this announcement by the Smithsonian is another sign that we are witnessing a fundamental global shift in the ethics of museum curation
in the past a self-selected handful of the richest and most powerful institutions has sought to control, dominate and close down the debate

2/ but since the 1990s restitution has become a mainstream part of professional practice in the very different historical circumstances of returning Nazi loot or ancestral human remains to Indigenous people around the world.

Read 16 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

Dec 8, 2021

@Pitt_Rivers

every now and then working at a museum like the @Pitt_Rivers means that you experience a moment of sheer terror and shock

I had one of those moments, a truly M.R. James winter night kind of moment of revelation, while working yesterday evening

(THREAD)

I was working through some historic photographs of museum curators to send to a colleague as part of a current artist collaboration

Most of the photographs were from the first decade of the 20th century, shared with a designer we're working with for details of dress

for example I sent her this photo taken “on the occasion of the first practical examination in anthropology in 1908″, showing Beatrice Blackwood, Sir Francis Knowles, 5th Baronet, James Harley, and their tutor the curator Henry Balfour

Read 14 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

Nov 17, 2021

My new interim report on what we currently know about the Benin collections of the University of Oxford has just been published online - read it here >> prm.ox.ac.uk/benin-bronzes

the 229-page report summarises
- 145 objects which provenance research suggests were looted in the Benin 1897 attack
- 15 further objects possibly from that attack
- more items taken in other expeditions in what's today Nigeria
- further Benin objects exported in the 20th century

@Pitt_Rivers

here are some of those @Pitt_Rivers objects in a thread

1/ Carved ivory tusk burnt in the fires during the desecration of Benin city

Read 60 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

Oct 28, 2021

it's been a very busy week for the return of looted objects from France to Bénin 🇧🇯 and from the UK to Benin City, Nigeria🇳🇬

here's a summary of what's been going on (THREAD) 👇

@quaibranly

1/ a "farewell exhibition" is being held at the @quaibranly
displaying the 26 items of the Trésor de Béhanzin, looted from the Abomey Palace in the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892—which will be returned to Cotonou next month
The exhibit is open till Sunday quaibranly.fr/fr/expositions…

@FelwineSarr

2/ a major conference was held to mark this landmark return, with speeches from many of the key players including Prof @FelwineSarr and Prof Bénédicte Savoy @KuK_TUBerlin — who compared this watershed moment to the fall of the Berlin Wall: "there was before, and there was after"

Read 10 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

Oct 26, 2021

the Trésor de Béhanzin—looted by General Alfred Dodds in November 1892 from the Palace of Abomey, and donated by him to the French state—is being returned from Paris to Bénin

here’s a shortlist thread of some of the 26 items involved:

1/ the Throne of King Ghézo

2/ The Throne of King Glèlè

3/ the doors of the Royal Palace of Abomey

Read 9 tweets

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