 Wrth gwrs, rydym arludeig, felwch, cynhyrch, Zeheunets, Julie ennill wediим yn brofiadio ti'n meddwl iawn, a channau'r cyfle cyfan dda i'r Excheitiidd yn y byddwyr o'u gynghwysig ynghylch mewn digwydd yn cael y ffordd yr Excheitiidd. Mae gael amlygaed wedi yr Uned, ac yma y Gymdeithasiat Bwrs Ddolig i'r Rhywun Llywodraeth, ac yma yw'r materio lefyd o'r llwyst i'r cy lleon i'r bod pwylo'r cyflwyng. gydym i'n gweld, ni'nwat nhw. Wel, mae'n ôl i'r tynau argynnu a mynd i'r casgliadau yn gweithio rydych chi'n iaith wedi'u dibuno i fynd i gael rydych chi eich cyfnod accusei fawr ar gyfer y proses. Ac nhw'n sgwrsio'r cyfeirio ymlaen nifer yma?, yr ysgol wedi'u cyfrifol yn ein bod yn y lle yn gwneud stil yn y syniadau yn y gymorth a'u cyfarwysau i gyd yn ei gydden ni'n yw dwi'n creu chi'n dweudydd ac chi'n dweud Dyma'r hyn yn ei ddechrau'n cyhoedd. Mae'n gweithio i fynd i'r ddweudau. Felly, rydw i'r gwahanol, ydych chi'n symud o'r cyffredin, ac yma'r cyffredin perthynau gyda'i gyngorol, Yn Ymddangos Ymddangos Ymddangos Ymddangos Ymddangos Ymddangos Ymddangos Ymddangos Ymddangos Ebyd, hefyd yn ei ddweud o'i ddiadwyd yma i'r cyffredin, a Julia will wrap it all up at the end. I suppose the big question though is why? Why a Celts exhibition? Well it's because Celts is a word that sits in our lips and in our brains but is rarely examined in enough detail. It's a word that sits in the popular imagination. And yet many of the views of the wider public and indeed of some scholars are still based on maps like this. The idea of a single Celtic culture, a people, a group of migrants who wander across Europe bringing Celtic culture and civilization. The asterix view of prehistory if you like. And the work of the last generation of archaeologists has been kicking around and undermining this view and yet it still sits in the popular consciousness. And indeed I was disappointed to see a recent academic tome published this year still talks about the Celts coming to Britain in the Iron Age. The world is more complicated than that. And many fellows will be well aware of the debate starting in the mid-1990s questioning the concept of Celts, questioning what we mean by Celts, questioning the understanding, the background, the evidence for it. This has been a hot, contentious topic. It is by no means settled yet. But what we can be fairly confident with is there is no single people or culture or group called Celts. And there has been a division in this debate between the Celtomaniacs and the Celtoskeptics rather on cruelly caricature by Patrick Sims Williams perhaps showing that the evidence does not sustain a single view, a single idea of Celts. And this is the kind of material we thought should be presented to the public. This has been sitting in the scholarly literature rather than with the wider public. These things ought to be conveyed beyond the groves of academia. But why the problem? Well, this gives us one of the sources of evidence. One of the points that the Celtoskeptics would point out is that our early sources referring to Celts, the Greek and Roman writers, start from the Mediterranean and look out, whereas what we think of as Celtic today, the modern Celtic nations, are in other bits of Europe. Is this just an accident of survival? Is there evidence lacking? Is this just where things happen to have been preserved? Or is there a problem here? Archeologists would argue there is a problem, or many of them would, for there are differences across Iron Age Europe which make it hard to argue for a single culture and a single group. Take houses, for example. In Britain in the Iron Age, essentially everybody lives in a roundhouse. On the continent, nobody lives in a roundhouse. Rectangles are the things to live in. But this is not some early argument for Brexit, if you like, that Britain is doing things differently. For you can find a kaleidoscope of difference all across Iron Age Europe, a mosaic of different societies, from things as simple as pottery, things as deep as their beliefs in the dead. There clearly is no single culture lying through Iron Age Europe. But the danger is we leave it at that. Now we take this story apart and don't reassemble it. And this doesn't explain some of the things that do show links on the European scale. Objects, objects and decoration, things we call Celtic art. We take as an example here decorated sword scabbards of the 3rd century BC with, at the top of them, these devices, these heraldic animals, the symbol of a warrior in the 3rd century from Spain to the Thames to the Great Hungarian Plain, showing you are buying into some kind of wider international fashion or ideology of warfare. So art links groups that are otherwise divided and so too does language. The ancestors of the languages that we call Celtic today were widespread in the Iron Age and perhaps earlier. This is Patrick Sims Williams' data drawing on particularly classical accounts showing the distribution of these things. It's clearly a Western and Central European phenomenon. But the trick is to avoid any single simplistic essentialist interpretation. For language or art alone are not enough to make somebody a particular culture a particular people. I drive a Volkswagen but I am not German. I speak English but I am not English. These we can be far too simplistic in the way these sources of evidence are used. This is where a lot of the problem comes from. Different scholars working in different traditions use different categories of evidence but speak about the same thing. So ancient historians use their sources to speak about Celts, the Greek and the Roman historians were looking at their neighbours. They are not an unbiased source. This is propaganda, not documentary. But they give clues, they give clues in place names and personal names to language. And these language clues then get extended beyond the ancient sources and they overlap partly but not totally. And there are people using things we call Celtic art. Not one style but several. Not all the people talked about in the classical sources are using Celtic art. Not everyone using Celtic art is speaking a Celtic language. You begin to see the problem. And to further complicate matters these darned archaeologists come along and get things muddy and dig holes and call some things Celtic and destroy other things. The easy answer, the simple solution is to draw a big circle around the whole lot and call it all Celtic. And for too long that is what people did. But Celtic and Celtic are too small a word to take in the history of Europe over two and a half thousand years. We need to tell more complicated stories. And this is what we tried to do in the exhibition. Tried to do in the exhibition. I must use the past sense now, it's a bit of a shock. We tried to look at one particular category of material decorative metalwork and other decorative material and see what that could tell us about the history of Europe. We were not the first. People have been putting on displays of stuff called Celtic art for years and I have taken just the major exhibitions in my own career so far to all of which we have lent material from Venice to Tokyo to Bern to Stuttgart. People have used this stuff we call Celtic art on big blockbuster exhibitions. And then all of these British material was represented and all of these British material was marginal. The main story lay elsewhere. And you get the sense particularly in recent exhibitions continental colleagues are thinking well if those folk on the islands don't want to be Celtic then they're not Celtic. We'll push them in a small anti-chamber. We want to make our material more important than that. We think that British material needs to be seen in a European context. In fact we will go further. It cannot be understood except in a European context. It is a long time since anyone tried to do this in Britain. 1970 was the last international scale exhibition of Celtic art. Again shared between Edinburgh and London. So one can argue it is long overdue to have this kind of exhibition. This is an exhibition that neither of us could have done on our own. The BM and the National Museum are the two great collections in Britain of Celtic art. But neither on their own is as strong as the two put together. The synergy has been really important. That and the little black books that we could put together to go and see colleagues across Europe to call on other material. And it's not just the collections with the people. In Edinburgh I would single out my co-curator Martin Goldberg. In London we would point to our former colleagues to the joy Indian lines and also to Rosie Weech who was project curator. We've also drawn on colleagues from elsewhere particularly for the medieval and post-medieval material Heather Pulliam and Francis Fowle from the University of Edinburgh. Their help has been invaluable in the exhibitions and also in the book which I'm sure many of you have purchased already. It's much more than just a catalogue. What we're trying to do with this show was develop a core which we then approached from different directions. Two exhibitions and one book all taking a slightly different slant on the idea of Celts. So what were we trying to do? We were trying to challenge the kind of misconceptions that I've outlined already. The idea, for example, that there is a single Celtic people or culture. We were trying to explore the development of the modern idea of Celts and where that comes from, why we talk about Celtic nations and Celtic identities today. Critical for us was to set Britain into its European context to make us less of an island nation. But also critical was the idea that there was no single Celtic art. It should be plural. There are multiple different versions of things we call Celtic art. Several Celtic arts. And we look at the Iron Age, we look at the Roman period, the early medieval, the Celtic revival. Each of those are reinvention, are anesongs, are revival in itself, drawing on older traditions at times of contact and change. And this will become a key part of the story as Julia will touch on later. We also want to make the point this is much more than just art. These are and were powerful objects. These were the actors and the agents in European prehistory, not just the props. They did things. They told stories. They impressed and empowered people. But to convince our visitor of that, we need to recalibrate the way they think and the way they see. Because we are used to seeing things looking realistic. We are steeped in the dye of classicism. So we are used, for example, to see things with faces that look like faces. Based on the Greek tradition here, the stator of Philip II of Macedon with the head of Apollo looking like a human and a chariot in horses looking realistic. This is not how the world needs to be seen. And the Iron Age versions of the same thing dissolve the head into curls and coils and spirals. And the horse acquires a human head. It is not because they couldn't draw. It is because they saw the world in different ways. And trying to convince visitors that this is a way that you need to see and think to understand this was one of our great challenges. Take an example. One of the treasures of the British Museum, the shield boss from the Thames at Wandsworth, on first sight looks like scrolling vegetation. And then the eye runs along the leaf and catches another eye and a beak and a wing and it morphs into a bird. Chasing a second bird round about the shield boss. And inside the wing of the first bird is engraved another bird. Or are they just shapes and shadows? And this is the point about this material. It's deliberately complicated. The more you look, the more you see but you have to know what you're looking for. This was not an art of the everyday. So trying to convince people there are new ways, different ways to look at this material influenced in particular by working the anthropology of art was one of our key tasks in the course of this. How, though, did we do it? Julia, she'll tell us. Thank you everyone very much for the invitation to your speech here today. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how we actually put together the narrative of the exhibition. And this was very much a joint process as Fraser has talked about particularly in the early stages as we were coming up with a shared framework that we would then approach slightly differently in our two institutions and that was really centred at the beginning around the book itself as well as obviously one of the first parts of the project to come to fruition. So I'm going to be telling the story largely from the perspective of the museum but some of these are parts that we did together. Of course as Fraser has outlined an enormous amount of ink has been spilled in this discussion of the Celts and who the Celts are and it was our job as museum curators to find a way to approach that story that allowed us to use our objects and our collections to tell the story and also to engage the wider public and to present it in a way that would be intelligible to them and approachable to them in their visit. And so this refers to the British Museum exhibition but to a certain extent these were sort of shared constraints and when we began putting the exhibition together at the British Museum and I should emphasise that colleagues before me were involved in this long before I came to the museum at all most particularly Fraser has mentioned already in Ian Lines who began the curation process at the BM before moving on to other roles but it was always known that it was going to be an exhibition which would take place in the new exhibition gallery recently, open or fairly recently in the BM which is an enormous cavernous space which has both pros and cons to it as we'll see a little bit when we talk about the design it was always designs and envisions as something that would be large enough to hold this Viking long boat which appeared in the first show in that space, the Vikings exhibition and that obviously is people dealing with slightly smaller objects for most of what we were doing with our show that has both good things and bad things about working in a space of that scale and through long expertise in doing this people other than myself at the BM have come up with frameworks for an exhibition and so we were told, outlined to us that we should try and tell our story in about five sections and that we could have in that space probably around about 300 objects depending on what you count as an object we either had fewer than that or astronomically more than that if you count the whole of the objects from the snetish and hordes for example which is probably best not to do probably around about 20 lenders cost around 175 what we call stops which sounds like quite a lot but is less than you think when you come to writing the exhibition and this is anything, not an object but any piece of text any interaction with the visitor such as a piece of audio visual a video or sound something people can pick up and listen to because what we're aiming for in the British Museum and Fraser will talk a little bit about how this is similar or different in the National Museum of Scotland but we're aiming for what is rather upsettingly called a dwell time of around about 90 minutes in a major exhibition like this the British Museum likes for to have lots of visitors to its exhibitions and for that reason we sometimes at busy times have a lot of people trying to come through the space and so that means that we want people to come in very much enjoy the exhibition but not perhaps stay for too long so we aim for this and we ended up with an 83 minute dwell time for counts which I'm told is very good but what this means is because as well we know that a lot of our visitors like to come in and read all of the text that we can only have about 15,000 words again it sounds like a lot but it isn't when you come and try and sort of summarise all of this work that's gone before you to tell a story that spans over 2,500 years from around 500 BC to the present day some of the things are very kind of functional so the tone and the house style of labels we work with interpretation officers and I'll talk to you about that in a bit more detail in a minute and of course things that you don't think about until you come to do it like the numbers and types of display cases which are fixed so I think some people are under the impression that a big institution sort of goes out and buys special bespoke cases for all of its exhibitions and of course we can't possibly do that unfortunately so some things like that you have to work what you've got and some of the creative ways to make things work for those objects and for the story that you're trying to tell so within this we were trying to tell the story of the Celts and this begins with selecting objects and for these this was very much a joint process with Scotland as well we worked on what we call pin-up boards perhaps more or less exciting than it sounds depending on what you're expecting so here what we try to do is take an image of all of the objects that we wanted to include and use this section by section to start mapping out how we might group those objects even starting to think maybe about how we might group those objects in terms of labels if you've got 300 objects but only 175 stops some of which are panels and other things every object cannot have its own label you have to think about ways of grouping objects and this for us I think was a really instrumental part of trying to actually bring the exhibition to life a little bit in our minds thinking as well about pacing things like relative sizes of objects you don't want to have all of your small objects together in one case or in one section you need to pace the visuals of this as well because unlike reading a book it really is a truly immersive experience going into an exhibition like this and you need something that's going to engage your visitor and draw them in but also draw them forward through the show so you can see here some of the suggested objects we have for the section that's one of the first sections of the show and some of our later medieval material as well and in a bit I'll talk you through those sections of the show and how we planned it out you can see here at the bottom so this is obviously an artist's impression a cut-through of the BM and for anyone not familiar with it this down here is the space cavernous aircraft hangar-like space where the exhibition was it's designed to be a very flexible space but it's also very square and very industrial and very grey so when we were working with our designers this was something we really wanted to draw out and talk to them about and so I sent them lots of images like this which could be terrifying but actually they were very very responsive and worked for this very well they were real studios 3D design they've done a lot of work previously with museums and have done other shows at the BM as well including Shara Bass and Afghanistan if you saw any of those so they drew on these inspirations and they came up with a way to incorporate those swirling shapes and more organic forms into this very industrial space and I think they did a great job of softening the space slightly you can see here in this plan these curving walls here and they came up with a way to hang what they called an architectural voile from the ceiling and so what that effectively means really is that we have this is obviously their model that they showed us early on in the design process but as people come into the exhibition and wind their way through chronologically and then back this way then they will actually in this section I'll show you some pictures in a bit have something that sort of brings the ceiling down a little bit because again this is a six meter tall space designed for seeing and appreciating enormous sculptures or a Viking longboat and we wanted people to be actually really up close and personal with these objects as Fraser has shown you some of these are very small and this is I think a very intimate art that calls you to come a little bit closer and have a really close up interaction with these objects and we wanted people to feel encouraged to do that, not feel put off by this very large and cavernous space so I just thought you might be interested to see some of the kind of things we did with the designers talking about how we wanted to present objects these were some different ideas about how to present boards and so you can see they're working even from quite an early stage on the idea of kind of laying out particular cases they were trying to sort of bring those curbs in and we also did work with them so if you saw the exhibition you will maybe remember one of the cases as part of the section boards that had all of these hundreds of pieces of talks laid out looking a little bit as if they had just been strewn they were not strewn they were carefully planned in to the millimeter by our designers who took a day to go through all of this material with us and talk about what we wanted to kind of bring to the fore and how we wanted to lay it out so it was a very very painstaking process at many different scales going through the design and some of this will have been similar in Edinburgh and some different I'm sure I'll be talking to you about that we did work to try as well and lift the colour of the space a little bit it's very very grey this is Alastair our designer laughing because I've told him to put more colours in because all of the colours he is testing are grey but we did this work actually bringing objects out of the galleries laying them out looking to see which kind of colours worked with which kinds of objects the designers came up with a colour palette which was initially predominantly grey as you will see and actually one of the great things that Neil McGregor did for the exhibition I think was to talk to the designers about bringing a little bit more colour and a little bit more life into it so what initially was quite small areas of colour became much wider and richer as you may remember and as I will show you in a bit if not we're also working on our sort of marketing identity and everything at this time we knew that we wanted the two shows to have either the same name or very complementary names and of course the same name had to go on the book and to give you an idea of how this kind of process works time wise we had finished writing all of the book, editing the book and we had written the introduction and the conclusion before we knew what the title was going to be so we were quite lucky in many ways that it ended up being something that fitted I think very well both with the show and with the book and this is the marketing from the BM side and you'll see that we wanted very much to bring out in our marketing materials the partnership aspect of the show so we have here the Battersea Shield one of the objects from the British Museum collections and also the lovely Stone Slab from Monifith so emphasising that partnership with NMS by including one of their Stone Slabs as well and of course the chronological range of the show so this is something we were drawing at the same time as doing our 3D design we're also looking at 2D design probably easier to see these as I talk through the show a little bit but trying to sort of differentiate between sort of the different scales and the hierarchies of the text so on this side here you can see one of our main introductory panels and within that sort of sub-sections as well as we sort of break the show and the story down within that we had of course as well labels and we included for the first time for the BM alongside the main labels for objects family labels with the delightful Blewog the Boar was there to encourage children to engage with the objects with exciting questions so these were developed by our family team with input from the curators as well and we had a lot of great feedback that families actually found those very helpful for engaging their children with the exhibition so hopefully it's something we might look to do going forwards in future exhibitions too as part of all this we were working on our text of things sort of happening at the same time as the loans are being agreed and everything and I wanted to draw out a few things for you to talk a little bit about the interpretation process and so we wrote a first draft of the text on the sort of curatorial side and I have created here for you a wordle I'm obviously not going to go through lots of text but the size of a word here shows how many times we used it in our text now you can see that from our perspective this was very much a show about Celtic art and we sent these labels off to be addressed and discussed and what came back was a lot of feedback saying that actually as a show that the British Museum was telling we were trying to focus too much on art and so something that we really wanted to do with our show was to try and make it a little bit more about the people make it a little bit more about the history and the stories and so this is what our word cloud looks like of the final panel text for the exhibition and so you will see Celtic art for example have got much smaller and Celts comparatively has got a little bit bigger because we are trying to talk a little bit more about people and comparatively as well words that we had been using a lot objects styles decorated we have been putting a lot of emphasis on the visual characteristics of the objects themselves and you can see that we have used those words a lot less because we are having to talk more about people I think it is not coincidental that words like may, possibly, perhaps are a lot bigger in the second word cloud because by the nature of this we are being asked to speculate a little bit more and interestingly people actually get smaller and that is because one of the things we are really encouraged to do by our interpretation team was to try and find a great variety of words so although we are talking more about people we are trying to find other ways of talking about them metal worker or communities anything that we can say that is a little bit more specific about who we are talking about they are obviously in prehistory that is very difficult so on the one thing I will say we were also told you will see iron age which wordle has helped to split out and we were told we couldn't use this because it was too much of a specialist piece of terminology so I find it it was considered much better when we sent the text back but I think it is not coincidental that ancient has become much larger because of course we are trying to find ways to phrase things that will be intelligible to general public but also helpful for their understanding and that is one of the challenges of trying to do this in a museum context so I am going to very quickly just talk through the sections of the exhibition and this is our introductory section and I think what you will see when Fraser comes up again to talk a little bit more about the Edinburgh show the introduction and the conclusion are perhaps the most different so this is how we addressed it in London when people first walked in we were aware from focus groups and things that we had done but most people were coming in with the idea that Celts and Celtic referred to the modern languages history and traditions of the modern Celtic nations so we opened with these three objects and on the wall in large words beside them this explaining that the word Celts and Celtic has not always been used to talk about these regions to talk about these kind of objects and looking at how we were going to unpick that thread if you like and as people moved round into the second part of our introduction they were greeted with the statue from Hullsgalingen going back to the earlier start of our story and a very different map showing areas that the ancient authors had actually referred to the Celts as living and of course as Fraser has already sped because apart from Britain there is no overlap in these at all one of the big decisions we obviously had to make about the exhibition as a whole was when we were going to start chronologically and because it's a show entitled Celts and because we were trying to talk about people it seemed to make most sense for us to talk about the time when this word is first being used has first been recorded around about 500 BC there would be lots of other ways of doing this we could have looked specifically at the first beginnings of Celtic art which ties in with this but not precisely looked at languages for example but because we were telling a story through objects and because we were talking about Celts and all the different ways that word has been used this seemed like a sensible place to begin so our first main section, the main body of the show after the introduction after this we went through chronologically we'd kind of drawn out the two extremes there both the sort of modern use of the word and the ancient peoples first referred to as that name and what we wanted to explore in this first major chronological section which we called the first Celts was that Iron Age period if I may be permitted here to use that term but looking at what is happening in Britain but also across Europe at the time when this word is first being bandied around we would first have the word Celts Celtoi recorded and the kinds of objects that people are using and making and the ways in which these people are connected and what we chose to look at here was the art and the decorated objects as Fraser talked about showing those pan-European connections we also tried to look a bit at things that were different and to emphasise the fact that if you look at objects like for example talks and the big metal neck rings that people are wearing there is shared idea but huge variety and so that perhaps we need to challenge the idea that we can consider these as single people this is what that section looked like as you were walking through it that you'd be very lucky if you came in absolutely nobody in there and you can see here the designers put over the top and again hopefully maybe get a sense of how we are pacing the objects in terms of scale and size as well second major chronological section was the impact of Rome what happens as the Roman world is expanding into many of these areas and here we were focusing narrowing down our focus more to be about Britain and Ireland and we looked both at what was happening within the Roman province of Britannia with objects like the Staffordshire Moorlands pan which are showing that although there is this idea particularly amongst the general public that Celtic art is something which persists in the fringes outside of the Roman world and survives in spite of the Romans actually in many ways this is an art that is being changed perpetuated through contact with Rome and it exists perhaps in its later forms which we will see in a moment because of that Roman influence rather than in spite of it and we are also looking at developments that are happening outside of the boundaries of the province so for example the tradition of massive metal work up in Scotland the way that even outside of the Roman empire people's lives and the objects they are making are still changing and transforming the next chronological section looked at what is happening after the fall of the western Roman empire and particularly again in Britain the development of both the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Celtic speaking areas bringing in that idea of language particularly in western and northern Britain and in Ireland and the idea of the importance of the coming of Christianity because we were telling a story that is as well about decoration and the objects these people are using to unpick some of the ideas that people have about what Celtic art is and one of those is this idea about looking at these manuscripts and things like interlace and thinking about that as being pure and simple Celtic art and the development of particularly Scotland, Wales and Ireland and we showed these alongside Roman objects as well as local objects to explore the ways that many of these designs come out of a Roman world that draws on a very, very wide variety of influences not least Germanic ones so for example we displayed one of the lovely Anglo-Saxon buckles from the Favishon cemetery down in Kent alongside not this particular broach but other pieces of jewellery from the Celtic speaking world to show that although people tend to think about interlace as Celtic actually it's much more complex than that and this is a sort of fusion art style that is coming about in another time of contact another time of great social change and our next chronological section was about the Celtic revival and this is where we started to come back to say that all of those things that we have been looking at since the kind of Roman period hadn't actually been called Celtic at the time the people who made them and the people who spoke languages that today we call Celtic didn't have that name Celts associated with them until the earliest the 1500s and that really it was in the 1700s that in particular the languages are first given that name so we're looking at the academic history of the reinvention of the word Celts and how that gets applied to something that it hadn't previously been used to describe we marked the beginning of this section with the inclusion of Choracticus well in the care of the collections of the Guildhall but actually normally housed at Mansion House home of the Lord Mayor of London he had to be winched out in the small hours of the morning when an entire road could be closed they had to take down I think three chandeliers in order to be able to get to him so we were very very lucky to have him able to come and join us and we looked at the way that this sort of revival of the idea of the Celts the idea of a Celtic heritage being applied to those regions newly of Scotland Ireland Wales and of course Cornwall Brittany and the Isle of Man as well was really picked up and really developed as those regions were really emphasising their own local identities and histories and traditions that were very different to England and the English we finished and again this is one of the differences between the exhibitions with a section on the present bringing the exhibition up to the modern day some of this was based around objects some of this was based around a piece of audio visual which you may or may not have seen in the exhibition looking at modern day Celtic festivals but trying to pick up a little bit on the politics and identity of Celtic identities in the modern world and the fact that something which was a local identity with the Celtic diaspora has actually become very much a global story and so that was the story in London and with that I will hand back over to Fraser who is going to tell you a little bit about Edinburgh Thanks Julia we were very keen that we were more than just London light that in doing the exhibition in Edinburgh it was our version of this material not just the same thing in part that was for practical reasons we have a smaller space our space is 650 square metres and it's 1100 it's also not as high rather than the towering 6 metres we have a mere 4 metres so we can't fit longships into our gallery but we're also very aware we were putting this exhibition on in Edinburgh and not in London we're putting it on in a city where many people will either think of themselves as Celtic so we'll have a view of Celtic which is different from what is the case in London we were also aware that there are a lot of things like to get their money's worth 90 minutes is barely the beginning of it we have discovered I am not pandering to any stereotypes about Scots here if people pay for an exhibition they are darn well going to read every single word that they expect audio visuals they expect lights dancing all kinds of things so in general with our exhibitions we put in a lot more audio visual content and this for us was really good because we could have some big screen presentations to tell more of the context and background that the objects can't carry but always of themselves but also in depth touch screens where people could explore the decoration explore the background look at some of the archaeological evidence behind this material the excavations for example this gives you an idea of the context and two of our themes which were colour coded differently you'll see the height is rather different but we tried hard to make sure that we're recognisable links between the exhibitions so Real Studios who have done the London design did their initial scheme design the overall design for Edinburgh and we then worked with an Edinburgh based design company Real Studios and our own teams to apply this and morph this into what we could fit into our space so sharing the concept sharing the core and some of the design language but it was redesigned, redesplied and rewritten for our show but we tried to keep the core of it similar so we have the three core blocks the Iron Age, the Roman Daerle Medieval are the same although not always with the same titles the first Celts has become a connected Europe for example it's the beginning and the end where we see the big differences and those I'll dwell in a minute you will see of course we also kept the cute mascot we couldn't be sure that was there, he was the star of the show well this is our introduction and it's worth perhaps taking you through the text you walk in and you face the whole scirling and statue and on the panel on the left was the following text who were the Celts Celts is a word with many meanings constantly changing through time however there has never been a single Celtic people or nation two and a half thousand years ago Greek writers spoke of barbarians called Celts who lived north of the Mediterranean world today we speak of Celtic identities and Celtic languages in places such as Scotland Ireland, Wales and Brittany between these very different times and places lies a complex history which we can begin to unravel through powerful objects decorated with what we call Celtic art so we tried to place we tried to give a sense of time and place and some of the questions we were trying to answer and within this introduction we posed a juxtaposition and a sequence the juxtaposition was what we termed myths and realities here is the myth, the 19th century vision of Celts the druids bringing in the mistletoe by Hornell and Henry and here an ancient reality the whole scirling and statue an audiovisual just off screen to the left here took people through the time and space and related it to the iconic objects the cross slab from in virgauri for the early medieval period the Staffordshire Moorland's pan for Romans and mesic terrets for the Iron Age and in each case the label was trying to pose questions created or crushed by Rome for example Celtic continuity a romantic imagination for example to get people thinking about what was to follow and we deliberately reflected back on some of these questions at the end for our structure is a loop so you come in at one door you loop your way around and you're coming out 180 degrees round a 360 degrees round from where you went in we changed the number of things but because the space the space may have been much smaller but we also have a smaller visitor pressure as Julia said the visitor numbers in the BM are very high we don't get that pressure and as a result we don't need to leave as much breathing space so we didn't cut half the objects and although we cut things we also added things I don't want to take you through them on a blow by blow basis but the result was we ended up I think with more lenders rather than less 27 different lenders from 12 different countries for the Edinburgh show but I'd like to show you why we changed things the kind of things that we modified so in London this beast here the head of a carnix an Iron Age warhorn from Deskford in Banshire and from Murray was in display along with the reconstruction this is normally in our collections our visitors can see this for free every day of the week we additionally borrowed the head of a carnix from Mander and fragments of a tube and ear from Abenteuer to show that the carnix was a European wide idea but interpreted differently in different ways local versions of an international theme and that for both of us I think was one of the key ways of understanding Celtic art, not the same but related some of our editions were designed to expand the scope sometimes geographically we wanted more from central and eastern Europe so we borrowed the terrets from Mesec one of our star pieces we borrowed material from Bern including the wonderful bear statue of Dea Arteo an absolute stand out piece of the society's own collections the Cutterdale sword and scabbard which we were delighted to get from our show although if it was being pedantic I would point out the photograph the society had provided has got the handle the wrong way around but this expansion in certain areas allowed us to modify and tweak our story in parts and to take particularly the Iron Age story for the East to take also the Roman page story on to the content for parallels as well to actually display material also poses problems the Gundistrup Cauldran for both exhibitions was an absolute master piece and an absolute nightmare we were delighted to get it the first time this had come to Britain and so central to the story something everybody sees in books and videos and films of Celtic art and yet it isn't Celtic but displaying it is really challenging because it's decorated on the inside and on the outside and in the base and it has lots of funny angles and it's silver which shines in funny ways for us it was really the turning point of the exhibition the point where we shifted story from the Iron Age into the Roman and we put it if you like within its own cauldron with a curtain printed with some of the images on the interior allowing us to separate it off take the interpretation out onto the walls here and leave people to walk around the cauldron but judging the height to put the cauldron at was possibly the most difficult thing in the exhibition and even though we think it worked we still had more complaints about this than anything else even though most people could clearly see it quite well but we also tried to set it into a broader context you can't understand Gundistrup on its own it is a really complicated object so we borrowed these pieces of Thracian Silver from the Museum in Vienna because they provide the only parallels for the exact decoration on Gundistrup and one of the key pieces of evidence as to why we think it's made in the south-east of Europe rather than anywhere else this silver smithing technology the first time these have ever been displayed together because this for both of the exhibitions was a key part of the story the Gundistrup takes us far beyond a Celtic world it's made in the south-east of Europe drawing on western influences such as the Carnix drawing on eastern influences such as ideas of the ritual bullfight rather stylised elephants yoga poses and ends its life far to the north of anything called Celtic in Jutland taking us far beyond the Celtic world and showing us again how one single world can't capture the complexity of what's happening at this period there's other places where we shifted emphasis a little bit although we're telling a similar story the beginning of our, if you like, medieval story started in the middle of the Roman period because we wanted to emphasise the point of how current scholarship is showing the roots of this material as Julius said why not in some magical survival beyond the edge of the Roman Empire but are drawn from the Roman provinces and in the spirals and the decoration and also some of the technologies and the materials the fingerprints of Rome are all over this early medieval material it couldn't have come into existence without the Roman provinces we put a little more interpretation into the language issue particularly with an audio visual with some Celtic language experts speaking about this material because in a Scottish context that Gaelic will be dealt with more extensively and although that's quite difficult to do with artefacts we felt we can do it much more coherently in an AAV and this seemed to go down quite well we also emphasised gaps in the story rather more so our early medieval story we finished it around 1000 AD because the swirling, curdling forms of art we've been tracing for more than a thousand years fall from use around this time and we emphasised the gap between this and the Celtic revival it's not that Gaelic traditions are not surviving but we saw the art styles as changing at this moment and wanted to emphasise that rather more and in the final section it very visibly reflected back to the beginning some of the questions we'd posed to start with deliberate sightlines through from these crazy druids to these crazy druids for example and looking at the ways in which the druids were a very important way in which the Celtic revival understood what they thought was Celtic we didn't look at the most modern reflections of Celts today if you like because we feel this is a separate exhibition particularly for a Scottish audience it needs more treatment in depth the idea of modern Scotland the idea of 19th century Scotland is not something we can squeeze into a few cases at the end and it's also not something we felt as archaeologists we particularly wanted to do we'd rather stick to stuff we're good at and this is material where both London and Edinburgh have a long pedigree and in both exhibitions we emphasised how it was some of the founding figures of our museums who played such a pivotal role in identifying Celtic art in the first place Daniel Wilson in Edinburgh Augustus Franks in London were two of the key figures in recognising the styles which we now call Celtic art very diverse styles in a way they're part of the problem as well as the solution but nonetheless critical in showing how these museum collections are a key part of the story and we finished our exhibition in two ways we finished it with an AV with a video where the various people who'd contributed to the exhibition spoke about what Celtic meant to them and we edited it to create a diversity of views to show how there is a single vision but we also finished with this image you see on the left here a wonderful piece of revival art by the dindie artist John Duncan and I'm a Celtic, a Celtic soul where the muse dreams of a Celtic past and a Celtic future with figures from Gallic myths around about her and objects strewn or decorating her we know where the artist got them from lifted from the catalogue of our museum published three years previously and one of the exciting realisations in the research for the exhibition was picking up the catalogue and flicking through it and suddenly realising we could pinpoint the exact objects the exact images which were used for the drawings and this is really important because it shows us what Duncan was thinking of as Celtic this was his vision of Celtic material from the late Bronze Age to the 18th century and for us it was a perfect point to finish the exhibition on because we would argue you cannot bundle all these things together let them breathe and let them tell their own stories not one single Celtic story not one single Celtic art but multiple different arts but did it all work were we successful I shall leave Julia with the last word so the three outputs of our project as you see here the two exhibitions that we have talked to you about and also the book which we really hope stands alone and will continue to be useful after the exhibition as well I wanted to pull out some quotes and things I've picked lots of nice quotes we obviously as Fraser says did get some other feedback as well a lot of it in the way that you always do that sort of accessibility and access and font size access to particular objects in terms of the press I think we felt within the museums that we had generally very very positive press reviews the Guardian gave us five stars for the BM exhibition and declared it the number one art show of 2015 which was somewhat ironic given that in some ways I think for us as curators it was the most frustrating review because this was the review that picked up on the thing that Maury does most which is that if this is something we are trying to unpick this idea of the Celts as a single people this idea of all Celtic arts being something that you can smush together and it's all effectively the same by bringing all of this stuff into one room is it possible that we are going to end up reinforcing that rather than pulling it apart and we were aware from the beginning that that was a real risk and actually despite Jonathan Jones and the Guardian who obviously did love the show I think we actually feel that it was well received and that it was timely to do this and that most of our audience did get what we were trying to say the idea as Fraser has shown particularly there at the end that you can pull this stuff apart into a much longer timeline and that not all of the ways that this word Celtic is being used are the same and that there has to be room for a lot of different interpretations there and if you are going to use the word you need to be clear about what you mean and I think actually that is something that from our feedback it does seem that a lot of our visitors came away with and I think it was timely to do an exhibition about that because I think it is something that was starting to kind of reach the public consciousness a little bit and it was timely to tell that story in a different context as well we had very good visitor numbers between the two shows we had I think just shy of 240,000 visitors which was on track for our sort of goals so that was really really good for us and it means we were being able to tell that story to quite a few people and I think we had a good mix of good comments from everyone including visitors but also press reviews and into academic reviews as well we hope that the show will leave a little bit of a legacy it was bringing this sort of 1990s debate about what the Celts are to a museum audience really for the first time but there were also things that we feel it was doing that were new and which are still there in the books or I sound like I'm pushing the book but things like placing these objects really into their social context not just looking at them as art objects but thinking about them as powerful things that are used by people within their lives and to create and represent particular worlds we also were trying to place Britain very firmly in its wider European context we can't tell the story of these islands without looking at Europe and I think the same is true in reverse as well and also we were trying to make sure that we were really representing objects from this sort of really really great span of time really really great geographical spread in a way that hadn't been done before and so in that sense we did get a lot of good feedback that people were starting to sort of get this story but also hopefully there are things that we've been able to add to that and a really big one of those which comes out from that breadth of material and that geographical diversity as well is this idea that Fraser touched on in the beginning about different Celtic arts that the idea that that has to be a plural idea it can't be something that is singular because so much of this material is in fact very different and although all of these are powerful objects they're being used in very different contexts at very different times by very different people there are objects that we would have loved to include but couldn't that couldn't travel for whatever reason illustrated here just a selection of those that I know we would both have loved to have the incredible Ardarchalis from the National Museum of Ireland the Tintiniac Carnix that I'm sure as you can imagine Fraser in particular to put next to the brilliant Carnix from the Scottish collections would have been wonderful to have with its fabulous ear still in place but unfortunately it's too fragile to travel and likewise this incredible disc here from the Royce chariot burial in France which is actually quite a recent archaeological discovery within I think the last 10 years really showcasing just that incredible swirling designs and here if you look at the cursor you can see the little faces of horse-like creatures swirling around this sort of central ball but I think even though we weren't able to include all of the pieces we would have liked hopefully we had certainly enough breadth of objects in every sense to tell the stories that we wanted to tell and so I'm not going to talk you through the word clouds again but you can see here these are from the panels of the London show and the Scottish show and so I just wanted to finish by emphasising that the two exhibitions and the book is very much a sort of shared project but within which we were lucky enough to have enough wiggle room to tell different perspectives on that same story which suited our different audiences and I feel and I hope Fraser feels too that overall the project was really successful and hopefully we'll leave a little bit of a legacy behind as well so thank you very much