Field Notes - 7 February 2014 - Archaeological Context in Motion: Egyptian Field Sites and the World’s Museums, 1880-1930

Dr Alice Stevenson (UCL) Abstract The latter part of the Victorian era and early Edwardian period witnessed a change in the pace and nature of museum collecting of Egyptian culture. Crucially, this was the time when both archaeology as a discipline and museum curatorship as a profession became established, their relationship up until the 1920s being symbiotic. By examining case studies from a few of the hundreds of the world’s museums that received such material of the export and reception of assemblages from British excavations in Egypt this paper seeks to tease apart these relationships and explore how the idea of archaeological context was constructed in the intersections between fieldwork and museum practice.