 Rwy'n rhoi cychwyn, wrth gwrs, ond rwy'n credu bod oedd ein gweithio'r syniadau o'r rhai ddaf yn ymwyaf o'r ffordd o'r argeddodd cymorth Cymru, oedd o'r rhai ddaf yn ddweud ymwneud sy'n teimlo i'r oedd yn sgwrdd gennychol a'r aethau o'r anoddau ar hyn o'r cyfan. Rwy'n rhaid i'n bobl o'r anodd a'r anodd cymwyno. Rydyn ni'n bod i arwag yn rhai dwyf yn sgwrdd o'r anodd ar gyfer ysgrifennu. I looked at over 900 acts of communication, but I only looked at nine British and six continental European museums, so it's a very, very small sample. I also had to say that the research was concluded in 2016, so it's already now out of date. I know that some of the displays I looked at have been changed and changing since I looked at them. So, with that in mind, what then do we mean by narrative? I looked at narrative theorists and what people said about narrative in the field of narrative theory. Here is one of the key people, Senior Chapman, who defined narrative and set the framework for later narrative theorists in literature theory. Narrative is concerned about people within particular settings doing things and being affected by things that happen within that setting too. Within the Mesolistic, a classic narrative of that kind would be a family coming back and it's seasonal round and finding its coastal settlement has been flooded by the rising sea levels which are drowning down the land. All the elements of narrative are there in that image, but why is narrative effective? Why do people like narratives? Well, here is Ben and Robin of X 2012, who looked at the rhetorical aspects of narrative and they say there are three particular aspects which are important to help people understand and get involved in narratives. There is the emetic, how realistic is the story world that is being created? The synthetic, that is the aesthetics of the telling of the story, how attractive is it? The ematic aspect of the rhetoric of narrative, does the story have resonance for the visitor? Does it mean something to them in their own personal lives? An illustration like this, for example, would speak to visitors, it's about this if you like the Mesolithic kitchen, how you prepare your food, everyone prepares food, everyone likes food, I'm famous for my stuff, I love food, so everyone can relate to this. That's part of what makes narrative important. For the purposes of this talk, I'm simply going to focus on two particular things. I'm going to focus on how characters are depicted in the museums that I looked at and I'm going to look at how a mimetic story world is or is not created in those museum displays. Let's look at character. In some cases it's very easy to depict character. In the case of Cedric Orge Museum, which is based around the find of the young Cederman adult male burial, you have actual human remains and a human at the site, you can base a story around. On the other hand, at the Heinecock Museum in Newcastle, you have a character introduced as they are in parts of their displays as an etch in the dog and glass with a text which is her speaking directly to the visitor. If you go to the Museum of East Riding Archaeology in Hull, you have the introduction of the classic mannequin figure, in this case a woman gathering in the forest as art of displays, talked about in the third person. You're also introducing that element of a person within the display. Slightly less easy, but allows you more creativity in some ways. This is the Yorkshire Museum in York, it's part of the Starcard Mesolithic displays. You have a series of panels dispersed in the exhibition with cartoon-like characters and aspects of Mesolithic day life going on. You have drawn characters within the displays linking artefacts to how the artefacts might have been used. You also have a little cartoon produced for younger visitors with a particular character and this character's journey through a particular day in Mesolithic. So you have multiple representations of characters and individuals within that display. At Amesbury Local History Centre, which is where the lick of the archaeological site from Mesolithic is being presented, very, very close to Stonehenge, they have taken the name Amesbury and produced the character Amy as this young girl who appears in the displays at different points in history and pre-history. Amy's story in Mesolithic is now rated in the third person. Amy did this, Amy's parents did this, etc. So they have a named person that people can relate to as part of their understanding of the displays. Now, on the continent, of course, there are also burials at the National Museum in Curranhawn in Copenhagen. You have a presentation of actual Mesolithic human remains, but also at Bedbeg Cwmwna, north of Copenhagen, where you have four particular Mesolithic individuals in turn, including this one, which is a famous one from Bedbeg, of a young woman by age roughly 18 or 19 on the scale of the Netherlands, with a young newborn baby dying in childbirth, both of them laid out on a swan's wing underneath her. It's a very, very evocative, very emotive sort of set of physical remains and introduces a character there that is a real wow sort of factor for the visitors of the audience, and very apathetic, really touches that emotional core, but not many museums are able to do that. They are lucky in having this kind of fun that they can do this, it's on. Elsewhere on the continent, human characters are sort of eluded too, in really quite some interesting ways on the edges that it were. At the Ytogstadg Husebian, in Ytog in Sweden, this is a knapher's stone, as excavated, flint around it with spaces where the feet of the knapher would have been and the knapher sitting on the stone, just having left would have gone away for his or her lunch, something like that. So the character isn't there, but it is there in their absence, which is a very nice way of replacing the character. There are aspects of the natural world and the interaction between humans and animals, in this case hunting, and we see from the side of the case the arrows flying in from off camera. The suggestion of people there actually doing the hunting, but you're not seeing people, so again, they're eluding too. Years ago, I should also say that there is a slightly more direct representation of people. The cases are laid out in a sort of with a surround that goes around, coloured like sand, and in the sand you just make out how human footprints are walking through them between the cases. In the Schlossbottorf, in Schleswig, in Schleswig-Holstein, we had, within the display cases of lots of flint, and I am an ex-flint expert, so I do really, really, really enjoy flint and I apologise about it, just one of those things. You find droids of hands and arms performing tasks. You don't see the people that go with these hands and arms, so again, this is a suggestion of an individual and a character off camera, which I think is a very neat way of doing it. One of these sites I went to, which is near Leiden in the Netherlands, Archeon, is not a traditional museum, it's an open air living history site where they've recreated sites which have been excavated from around the Netherlands, all based on our cultural evidence, and where they have people in role, dressed according to the period with whom the visitors can interact. And a lot of these people are themselves archaeologists who work on a lot of these periods of these sites. And so you get a real person pretending to be a Mesodithic person with whom people can interact. I was quite blown away by the whole Archeon experience I have to admit. Now one of the things that was interesting that came out of my research was, and you will not be surprised by this, and many of you will already know this, the disparity between the depiction of men and women in our images of the past in particular of the Mesodithic. But of all the characters depicted that you can actually see in the museum's stays I looked at, were actually doing pretty well. In the British museums, the nine British museums I looked at, there were 29 actual individual characters you could identify, 15 of men, 14 women. On the consulates there were 28 characters in its entire part, 14 men, 14 women. And that actually is to the credit of the museums, they are well ahead of the game. In comparison with pictorial illustrations of the period I looked at, where some 90% of the illustrations have men in them, but only 60% of the illustrations have women in them. I also looked at, for example, at fiction, novels and short stories. And if you look at all the identifiable characters in novels and short stories, 64% are male and only 36% are female. So museums are actually ahead of the game of this, they've been good on them for that. Now when it comes to looking at the mimetic story world, how good were the museums that actually portrayed the sites of the environment in which Mesodithic people lived? This is actually quite hard in many ways. The star room of Tundam Museum, the finds are displayed against a backdrop, it's very, very hard to see and take a photograph of. A pictorial illustration of the site of star colour, the settlement by the lake. So the finds are set against the background of the environment. At the Yorkshire Museum, the whole wall behind the cases is painted as they fix them with a message inside about it. And within the Yorkshire Museum, coming out from wall wall, is an actual tent from inside which are the sounds of someone knackered from toys. So again, that's a nice piece of some mimesis coming in. That's last got off, where we have some dioramas, full-scale big dioramas that we didn't display. And here we have an Edinburgh settlement beach with a canoe drawer on the beach and the depiction of the surrounding environment. Ash Yotoborg, I've already mentioned the sound with the human footsteps within which the display cases are set. My personal favourite, a bed-bed crumbina, you walk into the museum and you walk through a document from season to season. And the seasons are indicated by the colour within the displays and the activities going on and the activities at the right time of year with the environments represented, with activities represented, reproductions you can touch that you're out in the open and with the settlement at the end by the beach set out in the opening in the open, without the glass partition, as though the people had just thought of a nest. And one of my personal favourites in the more science part of the displays, this column of plastic full of the equivalent of mesolithic midwaste, shells, leather, et cetera, et cetera, with a stopper which you pull off and you smell. And you can smell the mesolithic midwit. And the reaction when I was there, I was there, when a school party was going round, the reaction of the school children was absolutely wonderful. He said, oh, guys, stinks, you know. Whatever the Danish column does, guys, stinks. So a really fine effort at Mimesis there at Bedbeg. At Closalund, I went to the Pseftystedd Hopsgol in Closalund, where the museum is actually set within Birchwood and it's by a lake and it's portraying finds from a mesolithic site in Birchwood and by a lake. So the actual site itself of the museum is part of that mimetic experience of the story world, which is an approach which they're very lucky, not many museums could do that. Chedda Gorge and the outside of the museum have an activity space which makes them try to recreate areas of, in this case, lake panionithic, but also mesolithic, little environmental scapes where they do activities with schools and children. And then at Archeon, the ultimate in Mimesis, you walk through Birchwoodland from the entrance and you come out into the Mesolithic site. Based on an explanation that they're good men in Friesland, with a lake, with canoes, which they let the children just leak in and have a lot to make. Yes! I asked them, what do you do if anyone would fall in? I said, oh, well, it's not happened, but if they do, we just walk in and pull them out. You can go into their houses, there's more than one house we've constructed. They hold events where they're microfire, they'll have special activities where they prepare food, etc. And you do really walk back into Mesolithic times. Now, what do I derive from all of this? Well, I think, this is a debate from this part where you go to the end that you see. I think you need to be evocative, evoke a sense of place. I think you need to make sure that place is lived in by real people and that therefore, once you do that, we can start to tell the stories of these people, the events of their life leaves, and then how these periods change over time through the eyes of the people living in them. So to me, it's about people and the settings which help to make the museums really effective in telling that Mesolithic story. For me, that debate was mind-blowingly good at doing that. Thank you very much.