Chronology or Context: Temporality and Artificiality of Museum Collections

Abstract

Although museum collections represent a temporary assemblage of “affiliated objects”, aimed at facilitating the responsible curation of the museum funds, in practice they are treated as an obligatory unit, without which the museum object itself does not exist, and they are imminently permanent. The origins, as well as the consequences of their formation may differ.

The text examines several issues concerning the artificiality and temporality of collections: what are the values we observe when museum collections are formed, are these values transparent and permanent? Which attributes are con- sidered as crucial bythe curators in the classification of archaeological material and are these classifications consistent?

Does chronology/periodization prevail in practice and how are the boundaries between the periods established? Is context preserved or, more precisely, is an object attributed along with the other artefacts from the same unit, which was carefully separated during excavation? What or whoinfluences the processes of formation of museum collections?

The analysis is conducted on the case of the National Museum of Serbia, the oldest and the main museum institution, primarily because the archaeological objects form its basic fund ever since its establishment in 1844. Today, there are several hundred-thousand objects, organized into 16 basic collections and study material. Along with the obligatory authenticity, dating is most frequently the basic principle on which classifications are based, concerning period, origin, or typological systematization. Chronology – period/sequence – is also the main criterion of the permanent museum exhibitions, and necessary to custodians inmediating the disciplinary knowledge.

Custodians “re-arrange” the past, starting from a museum object and collection, creating specific units of museum(archaeological) time – time capsules, frozen reconstructions, new realities. The museum may thus be understood as a contextdetermined by multi-temporality, or the co-existence of different times.

Furthermore, working from the idea of Bennet (2009) that the museum may be identified as “the field”, it can also be interpreted as a “multi-layered site”. Various actors – object, collection, custodian, public – contribute to the accumulated character of the record. The “museum layering” is determined by the diversity of the criteria of acquisition, various attributes of classification, the artificiality of collections, transitionary value of objects, as well as personally and socially determined interpretations.