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Philip Spiess
Art:
This is getting interesting. The whole question of grouping objects is a complex one -- and one that one needs to be cautious about in museum work. Early archaeologists in particular (such as Schliemann at Troy or Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos) were eager to group objects they found according to the preconceived notions they had of the sites they were investigating. One hundred fifty or even one hundred years later, more recent scholarship and re-investigation of the sites often suggest that things were (or could have been) entirely "grouped" differently. As museum professionals, we always spouted (and often adhered to) the concept of placing the object "in its context" -- but who decided what context or which context often determined how the object in question was interpreted to the public -- a remnant of Greek sculpture, for example, could be interpreted one way in an art museum (as an "artwork") and another way in a history museum (as a "signifier" of a period in an historical culture, such as ancient Greece, or as a token of an archaeological find). A longtime director of the Corpus Christi Museum in Texas, Albert Heine, often gave his well-known speech on "Founding a Museum Based on a Nail," in which he would interpret a whole world of history, art, technology, science, and economics based, in turn, on the different contexts into which he could place the nail.
Now, although I am no "underground" archaeologist (though I was the founding president of the Washington, D. C., chapter of the national Society for Industrial Archeology, a largely "above-ground" archeological group), I have been associated with enough "real" archaeologists to know their professional methods. When excavating an archaeological "dig" underground, they plot "distances" in three dimensions by establishing a horizontal grid of smallish squares on the surface, which they then extend downward through the soil in pre-determined measured levels. It is of prime importance to them to note the "grouping" of objects within the squares, to determine the relevance of relationships between and among the objects ("artifacts") found. Likewise, in most cases, each level further down in an archaeological dig is assumed to be a previous ("earlier") level of cultural activity, and thus the objects found there are likely to be dated to an earlier time, unless other evidences indicate otherwise. (Heinrich Schliemann is supposed to have "discovered" -- or uncovered -- no less than seven layers of previous Troys.) Needless to say, all of this rarely accounts for movements within the earth, including significant upheavals. [I used to think that a useful exercise for training beginning archaeologists would be to have them sift through a cat's toilet box, eventually emptying it, but I never put the experiment into execution.]
And this is in some ways no different from the ways in which archivists operate. Much of the time, when professional archivists are given or locate a significant cache of important papers, documents, stacks of bills, laundry lists, loose letters, interspersed journals, schedules of meetings, etc. -- i.e., totally unorganized, filed, or categorized documents -- they carefully move them in situ to where they will inventory them, leaving them in the stacked order in which they found them, because the "unorganized" order is a natural order of the way in which the papers' owner left them, and so there is often a connection among the papers located together. Only after looking through those connections, and ascertaining them if possible, do archivists organize those documents by subject, date, or persons, or whatever system of organization they may be using.
Now, as to forgeries, that is a whole different subject! (I'll try to be brief here.) Forgeries of objects have existed since time immemorial, largely based on the presumed possible economic worth of said forgery. (The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a teaching museum of the decorative arts, purposely set up an exhibited collection of established forgeries in the 1850s, so that students could study them -- it's still there and is still used for those purposes.) Of course, nowadays we have many scientific ways of testing objects thought to be forgeries, rather than just by sight -- but see some of the articles on the (New York) Metropolitan Museum of Art's famous "Etruscan Horse" sculpture -- after almost seventy years they're still debating: Is it or isn't it a forgery, or at least not what it seems? My own actual "real life" example was simply proved: I had catalogued (first) the complete dental collections (going back to the 1830s) of what afterwards became the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, and then catalogued (second) the complete dental collections of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. (Cataloging museum objects is a complex process which I won't go into here, but computerization has eased much of the task.) There was a reason I was contracted to catalog both collections: the Baltimore museum's objects had been loaned for thirty years to the exhibits at the Smithsonian, and there was a serious dispute over whether all of Baltimore's objects had been returned by the Smithsonian. All of the personnel involved in the initial loan agreement had died; I was hired to sort it out -- which objects belonged to which museum (all that I know about dentistry itself -- except that it hurts -- could fill a tooth). The particular objects in contention were, historically, the earliest in the collection, and therefore (presumably) the most valuable: they were two or three dental instruments of the 15th century, rare in any collection; Baltimore claimed them as theirs; the Smithsonian said they were theirs. I studied them by sight at length for two or three days (see my several posts above about "Look and look again!" at the objects) -- they appeared way too new to me, but even antique objects can be "gussied up" to look fairly new. Then it finally hit me: the screws in the objects were an anachronism -- such screws did not exist in the 15th century! These screws were too perfect; 15th-century screws were exceedingly clumsy and coarse by comparison. So where did these instruments come from? I had an inkling of a clue: Baltimore (which at the time of its loan had no museum -- all its objects were in storage, hence its loan to the Smithsonian) had loaned its objects when the Smithsonian first set up its Dental Exhibit in the Old U. S. National Museum (now the Arts & Industries Building) before it was moved to the new (1964) National Museum of American History's "Hall of Medicine." There had been an exhibits laboratory at the Smithsonian which produced replicas of objects which the Smithsonian needed to tell its historical story, but which it did not have in its collections. Unfortunately, I found that the records of this lab no longer existed -- but the evidence was pretty clear to me: these replicas (not forgeries, per se) had been manufactured by the Smithsonian to fill out its interpretive story.
As to differentiating human beings into distinctive or various classes, I am opposed to that: despite the 39 "Ethnic Heads" that are sculpted on the outside of the original Library of Congress building (now called the Jefferson Building), chosen by the chief of the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology (Otis Tufton Mason) in the late 1880s (and very interesting they are, too), I learned in my doctoral work on evolution, studying under one of the editors of the Darwin papers (located at Cambridge University), that the idea of "Human Race" does not exist in real science, but is merely a cultural construct -- and one that has not served humanity well.
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