 I'm the Becky Scott one and I work in the Department of Britain Europe and Prehistory. This is my colleague Sally Fretcher who works in the Near East Department. So I'm really pleased that Clis showed the walkthrough of the permanent galleries from the music because I'm actually going to talk about something very different because we as the people who work on earliest prehistory really have no place in the shop front at the moment. I'm a Paleolithic specialist and Sally works on late Neolithic pottery. It's a hard sound, really hard sound. Is it this one? It's really, really hard to get the stories that we're writing through our research for which there seems to be through online engagement, through mainstream media engagement. A really big appetite for, if the cats don't have no brand then Paleo certainly does and the Ice Age certainly does. People think they know what these things are. But when your museum is full of all the shinies then you're never going to get your flint or your pottery out to tell the stories you're working on. Why am I dodging the P word? So I've chosen to describe a museum chooses to describe what we do not as prehistory but as deep history. That's because within what's supposed to act as a global museum of all of human history, splitting prehistory off as something other, something different, privileges periods within which you have the written words and puts us in a slightly darker place. And also we found, and especially if you work on the Paleolithic, prehistory in the Paleolithic past has connotations to people of naturalness and simplicity. And actually this works through into this imagined hunter-gatherer past being used in a lot of ways to sort of read by current social structures. Lazy journalists will say then do this when you do that because of our hunter-gatherer past without actually coming to any of us to think through and talk about what that thing together with past actually is. Another reason for using deep history rather than prehistory is although you do have prehistory displays which reference earliest prehistory right at the beginning, first people, in fact actually telling the stories of how we became human doesn't normally happen in an archaeological context. Usually it happens in museums of natural history, museums of human evolution and interestingly in the UK at show caves. So these are Victorian caves where you go to Marble at Salactites, oh by the way, there's also ancient people. However, despite this lack of a place in the window, paleolithic research at the end is really, really vibrant. So from at least 2003 there's been a big series of research projects coming through, attracted a lot of funding through a whole series of projects which is a lot of publications. We have a big team of people working on these stories spanning two million years of many, many different human species and an incredible amount of artifacts. You never see them. Since 2005 however, the paleolithic has started to creep out of the closet and into the main using, mainly through this space. So this is room three, which you will find on the right-hand side as you come in through main entrance to the British Museum. And it's a small temporary exhibition space, probably about a third again, the length of this room, about a similar width. And it's a changing space used just for short periods, so four to eight week exhibitions to really showcase individual objects or small groups of objects and focus in detail on bones. So in 2005 the very first of these exhibitions curated by Bill Cook was the exhibition Made in Africa, which concentrated just on three paleolithic hand-axes from multiplying hord to the two million years old. Actually, if you're interstellar, they're fairly unremarkable, but they were lit as art historical objects. They were made to look very beautiful, and it was the fact of their oldness and using the grammar of art historical display to make them attractive and beautiful. This was followed in 2010 by another exhibition within the same space which focussed on this object, a single object, a swimming reindeer, which is a battle for motorstrucks, so that's about 13,500 years old. And it really went through all the information that could be taken from this object, which is beautiful and intricately carved and presented it as a masterpiece of the art. So then again you have this appeal to these art historical sense and way of setting things up. Culminating in 2013 with this fantastic exhibition, a larger exhibition in the exhibition space upstairs that we're using, isage art, a rival of modern minds, which brought together many of these masterpieces from across Europe, and again presented them very much as art to be enjoyed for art's sake, and played them against modern works by Picasso and by Henry Moore that were inspired by these. However, what we mostly deal with is this sort of stuff, so it's bones, it's tools, it's mud. This is the site of Hadesborough in North Norfolk, which at least 850,000 years ago is evidence of the earliest people to ever get into northern Europe. There's a lot to tell us about survivorship, evolution, journeys up into Europe, and it's exceptional evidence, but really, really unexceptional finds that you don't love print. Even more exceptionally, but even more insubstantial for these ones on the site. These are the Hadesborough footprints. Back in 2013, we were doing some survey work there. We happened to have a geoarchaeologist with us who works in Orff, where there are mesolithic footprints. As this was peeled off by the sea, he said, I think we've got a footprint surface. Within a couple of days we had Sarah Duffy from York coming and recorded using photogrammetry within two weeks it had gone. Working from Sarah's model, you can pick out at least 49 individuals who are fairly short, slightly taller than me, but also children. You capture this moment almost a million years ago where you have a little group of people moving through this estuary. They don't go in a straight line because I don't know about you and who has children here, but you cannot go in a straight line when you try to check with your children through. Anyway, these objects are difficult to present. They're not an object. If anything, they're a trace fossil. They're the absence of an object. What actually happened was this was presented in a very different way within the same space, but brought in and played with in a way which addressed modern concerns about migration and leaving one's country becoming an exile, but also time depth to these processes. So the exhibition was pulled together between three main stops as a guide that was a video installation which was excerpts from this film in which Edward Pisson reflected on the process of migration. This very, very moving artwork by the Iraqi art himself, or actually in which he reflects on his own experience and the process of being an exile. And then the foot things themselves, which are presented in two ways that sort of play with their liminality and how insubstantial they are. So at one point we 3D printed out a section of the surface so you can touch that, put your hand into it and actually feel toe spaces. But the other part which centered the exhibition was this sort of section of shipping container into which you could move and then be cued into the landscape by birdsong, by water lapping and watch on the floor beneath you. The sea come in, cover the footprints up and then everway just leaving these, these prints exposed. And what was really interesting was seeing how people responded to this. So just going and standing there and watching people, you'd either had older adults who were scared to go in it because it was something to be watched and to be sort of consumed versus if you ever had children in there, they just ran straight in and were trying to put their feet in the footprint. So it was really interesting to see the differences in how people responded to that. And I'll move on to Sally. She just did that thing which went, oh my goodness, you're here. It's not working. I am going to go. Shall I be your glamorous assistant? That might need to be. It really isn't. There you go. The down areas are all the points that way. Move on. So, same space, still in room for the museum. And this is a show about Jericho's Girl, which is, again, a fascinating object. People get very excited about Jericho's Girl. It's part of a group of seven that was found at the site of Jericho in 1953 by the Canadian Kenyans. And it is a human cranium which has a casted face added to autumn on it here. And it has inserted beautiful shell eyes. And it's super old, not as old as the stuff that Becky's been talking about, but still in the dim mists of time. It's about one and a half thousand years old. And with this show, we wanted to look at ways that we could get people to engage with an object that is quite so old. To some people, quite repelling. People don't like the idea that we see some facts. A dead person that you are literally staring in the face. And we wanted to try and engage visitors with some of those big stories that are out there, particularly associated with this period of archaeology in the Middle East, though the first cities are beginning to just have their very, very, very earliest origins. We have huge questions about revering the dead. There's lots of terms that are bandied around, around ancestor cults and what's going on. We wanted to see if we could tell some of those big stories in this exhibition. So I'm going to take you through it in a series of steps. Step one, thank you Becky. Step one was being to try and get people to really, really engage with the plastic skull itself. And that was partly by throwing away entirely any idea of timelines. So when Melissa was saying people really want timelines, I was thinking oh no, I've got rid of the timeline. But I've got rid of the timeline because of those queries around. We don't really know. If you read the original reports from Jericho, they used this newfangled science known as radiocarbon dating, and they came up with the date for the objects from this period around 5,000, sit 5,000 BC. We now know that's way, way wrong. Way too young, these things are much, much older. There's lots of fantastic research being done around the origins of plant domestication and animal domestication and the dates are swinging backwards and forwards and the public just doesn't care. They just don't care. They don't want to know about my internal angst about the dating of the premotory near the peak period. They do not care. And when I said this to our interpretation officer, I said they don't care. She looked at me with this deep horrified sort of how could I not care that the public don't care. But I kind of felt I needed to go with that. So I'm just stuck to... Jericho's girl is about 9,500 years old and left it there to give people a sense that it's really, really old and then just leaves out where it fathods with things. The really important thing we put on the very first panel in the exhibition is we would like you to meet this person because all the way through we wanted to remind people that this is not some alien being. This is not some sort of hairy thing living in a cave. It's none of those preconceptions you might have about period from people from this time period. This is a modern human living actually a very modern life and it will come to another way that we'll try to bring that out in a second. The other thing I really wanted people to do was look very closely right the way around the object so a lot of the labels encouraged people to engage and re-engage. It was really gratifying watching people interact in the exhibition because they looked at the object, they read the label and then that magical thing that all curators want to see, they looked back up and that was great. For example here the label talks about fake finger marks still visible in the mud that was inserted into the back of the skull to hold the whole thing together. You can still see those finger marks from nine and a half thousand years ago. Let's have the next slide, fantastic. So on to some of those big stories, those big questions, those early big supplements we wanted to bring that through. We brought that through by talking about the site. We went with this image, big image on the wall to try and get across that idea that Jericho is the oldest city in the world known and we continue as an occupation right the way through from about nine and a half thousand years ago, even slightly earlier than that, right the way through to the present day. We could have written a huge, great big log piece of text all about that detailing all the different time periods that this is screened through. I think the end we just went with photograph which does what it says on the tin. This is a sign to the site. We went with that and tried to keep it really clean and simple. We wanted to engage families so we brought in the character of Kathleen Kenyon. We did a graphic based on this picture of her and we had her talking on these extra banners that were through the exhibition with really, really condensed texts. The idea being that if you walk in with your family and you have your picked moment, the parents don't need to translate. They can just go straight to the orange banners. He's had a mixed reception. Some people said, why is there a nurse taking his hand next week? We didn't get it entirely right. Some people went, that's rubbish. Why would it just not be the full label? Which you know, with that, again, a curator's dream, someone that wants to read the full label. But generally there was quite a lot of positive responses and we found that a lot of adults read this text first and that they have a child with them in a pot and then maybe engage more deeply with them or detail texts above. Interesting little point. Kathleen Kenyon was the daughter of one of the directors of the British Museum. So we made the point in a weird kind of way she was sort of coming home. So we also wanted to bring in the fact that I've been working on for quite some time. There was about eight years of research left in this and we did some CT studies work with the skull to get past the laser cluster, which means you can't see what's going on with me, look at the cram of underneath, have it 3D printed, we put the 3D prints into the gallery so people can see, didn't know you were right, go on, put the 3D prints into the gallery so people can see what we were basing our research on, they could actually see the skull underneath and then moving on, we had a facial reconstruction of an old school style like the original, the original, which need to be deeply spread from the start and last slide had people engage with the person themselves. I was thrilled when we got this picture because our point was, this man could walk down any street in London and he would not be surprised at his appearance. Here he is! Looking at himself. And we really wanted to make that point because one of the things that we brought out was that this person had undergone cram and medical modification and they'd had their skull shape artificially altered in infancy, but it actually had very little effect on how they really looked in daily life and the point was that their special burial, this plaster face that was put upon them was based on life experiences that his community knew that he would have been through. So we're bringing in lots of huge themes and questions right away through the exhibition in the simplest way you could possibly think of. But looking to the future, we decided, I think from both of our shows, we sat there and went, what have we learnt? And we learnt that we can move on from treating queer-historic objects as art. We've done that quite a few times now. We found that people respond positively to it. It's time to move on. So we can move on from those aesthetic qualities. And we need to talk about how essential interdisciplinary research is to understanding deep history. So my work and Becky's work hold in an awful lot of team projects. I think I listed the number of people that was involved in getting the show together at the where lines. I talked to staff in the museum, they were amazed at how many people have been involved. And we think that some of the details that give you those connections between modern audiences and past peoples are really key to engaging visitors. So it's the fact that the children are walking along the foreshore. The fact that you can look somebody in the face is what really gets people excited and involved. Thank you.