 Yn 2014 ac 2017, rydyn ni wedi'i gweld y projech yn ymddiadau ar ysgolwyddiadau, sydd wedi'u gwneud y cyfnodau a'r legosi yng Nghymru yn ymgyrch, ac mae'r ffyniau yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Yn ymgyrch ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, mae'r ffordd yma o'r model ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Nid ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch dan 19 yr ymgyrch yn ymwyf yng nghymru, ac mae'n gwneud ar gyfer yr ymgyrch yn ymgyrch gan ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, mae felly mae o'r fewau i'ch vinell. A ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ein bethau, ynglyn â gydych chi'n amli gwych hefyd, ac allan yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ei ffyniadau. Byddwch yn y cyfnod y gweithio y ffordd ar y cyfnod, byddwn ni'n meddwl ydy'r 350 ymgyrch yn 27 ymgyrch yn 5 ymgyrch yn ymgyrch ar Ymgyrch Egynfod Argyllidol. I should emphasise that such a widespread distribution of archaeological finds does not reflect an inherent interest in the ancient Egyptian past. Bear in mind that much of this material being sent out is pottery, pottery fragments, bronze fragments, small amulets. Instead, it reflects far more recent geographies of cultural authority, power and knowledge. So, in trying to look at the history of these collections, and I'm particularly interested in finding out why would Japanese universities want Egyptian objects? Why would they end up in Ghana? Why would they end up in Canada? I've tried to establish a far greater sensitivity to the historical conditions that shape and enable these interests. So central to my argument is something that we've termed the object habit. This is basically a shorthand for referencing society at large's interest in things, its attitude to material culture, affecting what got collected, when and why. So in other words, it's not just about museums and their ideological practice or their agents, and it's not just the intellectual thrust of archaeology as a discipline establishing object value. Both of those exist not on a vacuum but in society, and how does society, what does it make of things? And so in order to kind of try and demonstrate this point in the short time I've got here, I want to compare and contrast two periods in Britain's collecting. On the one hand, an almost insatiable desire to acquire Egyptian archaeological finds between 1880 and about 1925-1930. And then contrast that with an increasing disinterest and indifference towards antiquities after the Second World War. It's a really profound change coming with modernism and futurism. And at this time we see collections being disbanded and dispersed and I want to try and explain why. So starting in 1882, this is the founding of the Egypt Exploration Fund and this is the newspaper headline announcing the founding of the organisation. And you can see the title there, Egyptian Antiquities. That's the draw, that's the interest. The rhetoric within the column is appealing to biblical and classical narratives. It's within wider trends, imperial and colonial rhetoric around preservation. And you can also see in their names like H.R. Lainard who of course was famed in the 1850s for his work at Nineveh and which provided the British Museum with a wealth of monuments. And clearly that headline is hoping to reflect that ecology of images in the Victorian public's mind. But the very last line of that column says it must be distinctly understood that by the law of Egypt no antiquities can be removed from the country. So how come all of this material ends up leaving Egypt? Now this is quite a complex story, I'll just give you a very brief overview. Partly you could say from an intellectual point of view it's Flinders Petrie. That archaeologist that we line eyes for promoting the value of the small and the everyday signs. And that his interest is in contrast to those Egyptian antiquities laws which more readily recognise the colossal, the monumental and the unique as subjects for state control. But it's not just the essential qualities of things here. This is opportunistic. And Petrie has to negotiate value of these objects with Gaston Maspero, the French head of antiquities in Egypt. And this is a letter from 1883 where they negotiate partage whereby Egypt can retain first choice of objects and the foreign excavator can then remove objects from the country. And Petrie essentially argues that these trinkets, trifles and ornaments, they're of no interest to Egypt but they will be of value to collections in England. So we've got mechanisms for moving objects out of Egypt and we've got an indication here of the context in which they are then absorbed which is the rise and development of museums across Britain. The Egypt exploration fund was founded at a time of peak growth of regional museums so beyond the British Museum there's now a whole host of other institutions more than willing to have less than monumental pieces of Egyptian culture and that's largely because of industrialisation. So there's a broader society context we have to understand. And so several industrial town museums were putting on displays of modern equipment, modern technologies of production and the ancient finds that Petrie is bringing out resonates with that. So somewhere like Sheffield which is an iron producing town is absolutely thrilled by the offering of four iron knives, a nail and an iron hook. Thrilling. So you've got mechanisms for objects coming out of Egypt. You've got new context for their absorption. But why would the Victorian public care? Why would you even want to see these small and incidental finds? Well for that we have to look far more broadly at the Victorian attitudes to things and those attitudes had also been shaped by industrialisation especially from the 1880s onwards as tastes were nurtured by developments in advertising and department stores. And so within Victorian affluent Victorian homes we've got domestic spaces becoming more museum-like. Their parlours and their halls are full of clutters of exotic things. But the key thing is that these collections in Victorian homes they're not just about showing off status. They are absolutely vital to understanding in the Victorian world. I just point you towards the literature of the period. Take Ryder Haggard for instance, famous Victorian author. His novel She has 12 pages devoted to describing single pottery shirt. Objects in these tales are fetishised as sources of power and meaning. Even a fragment or small relic offered a seductive possibility of an unmediated connection with the past. And this power of objects to tell and reveal things permeates all areas of life. Sunday schools are desperate to get small museums and collections because objects are stamped with divine approval and authority. Other schools are trying to create museums themselves if you're really rich like the private school of eating you can fund the Egypt exploration fund and get original objects. So we start to see that this period is more than just an epistemology of things. People like Chris Gosden have argued that knowing the world was mediated through objects but I would argue it's far deeper seated than that. There's a greater ontological value in things in this period than if we contrast it with what happens after the Second World War. Now the physical devastation by the Second World War across Europe was only one of the threats faced to collections. Far more insidious was a widespread society change in attitudes to things. And I'll just give an example. Flinders Petrie's wife in 1949 writes to dozens and dozens of UK museums offering material that before they had been keen to acquire and every single one declines. Curators replied that interest in archaeology is long dead. There's no public interest. But actually most telling is the fact that as Britain's empire fragments after the Second World War the ideology of expansion precedes regional institutions start to define themselves far more closely by their regional collections. They're not interested in exotic antiquities from elsewhere. Fortunately I suspect we're seeing similar trends today. But not only are museums not collecting this material anymore they're getting rid of it. They are thinning of their displays. They don't like this clutter anymore. Quick examples here are UNESCO putting out rhetoric museums association saying clear out the clutteration of your collections make your museums bright and cheerful. This new rhetoric is not just an initiative of the museum sector. It's far more broadly and I'll just mention two factors briefly. First, modernism. Now modernism had taken root on the European continent in the early 20th century things like Le Corbusier's machine for living in, shoes ornaments. We don't want fussy. We don't want clutter. And Britain lagged behind those developments until the Second World War when rationing and post-war austerity cemented a distaste for ostentatious display. And we get a wider embrace of continental trends. And this is a period of exuberant house building and modernist architects are not doing open plan areas gone are the parlers, gone are the halls, gone are the mantle pieces on which domestic display had occurred. After the bleakness of war this is a promise of a fresh aesthetic. Decluttering was as much a general shift in society as it was the result of the internal dynamics of museum practice or the disciplinary focus of archaeology which itself had stopped being as interested in objects as new field techniques were taking off. A second broad trend that undermines the status and antiquities in museums is the rise of the post-war future boom. Nuclear science, the Cold War Space Wave Wraith and other sorts of big science enterprises were catalyst to a widespread interest in the future on its visual high tech iconography. Now I should emphasise that this scientific mindset it's nothing new. The Victorians were very interested in the future but it was far more strongly grounded in the historical field. I'm thinking for example of pit rivers and sequences of objects from primitive to complex. So those sorts of cultural evolutionary ideas were based on incremental change and it could be mapped out using well-ordered museum collections. But the science boom of the 1950s that meant that instead of collection and enumeration its experiment and theory that are now considered fundamental to understanding. And so we've got a widening conceptual difference between the past and the future that renders the past totally foreign. So just to end with one final, more positive perhaps note these objects can be repurposed because we've got quite dismal picture here and many of the objects that were disposed of from museum collections in Britain ended up in decolonising nations like Ghana. On the eve of independence in 1957 the National Museum of Ghana opened using a vast array of objects collected including Egyptian objects particularly because they were seen to tap into narratives about a glorious pre-colonial Ghanaian past and that was seen to emanate from the civilisations of Egypt. And that was important also to the modern politics at the time where the leader Kwame Nukrumun's radical pan-Africanist politics were attempting to overcome tensions, national identities, royal authorities and other local issues. So for example we've already heard about the Aswan mission by UNESCO this is an example Ghana got involved and here's a series of stamps produced in 1963 juxtaposing Egyptian monuments with the Ghanaian flag in effect putting Egyptian royalty next to Ghanaian nationalism. Now I don't have time to unpick all the other nuances in these histories of collections so if you'll forgive me a horror of blatant plug for my forthcoming book Scattered Fines that should be out in January will be free to download. So just in closing I think it's suffice to say that when we're examining these histories of collections I think it's not just about trying to understand where objects come from to give us more insight into the ancient past. They are much more likely to provide us insight into more recent and contemporary worlds as they are for any ancient reality. Thank you very much.