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The First Scientific Investigation of a Bog Body, 1781
Bogs are curious places. They spark memories of Irish childhood summers spent footing and saving turf amid swarms of midges. They inspire awe and alarm as nature’s own carbon-capture technology, but rapidly disappearing. For others, bogs are political landscapes that evoke anger, as age-old turbary rights appear threatened by the urgency of conservation. In the…
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Befriending Byron and Poaching Antiquities: John Lee in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1810–1815
Who spends five years travelling in the Mediterranean and Middle East, hangs out with Byron in Athens, and gets in trouble for poaching Greco-Roman antiquities? A Cambridge maths graduate called John Lee, that’s who. This post looks at some key moments in Lee’s five-year tour of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East in 1810–1815. He…
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John Ross’s Arctic Artefacts on Display in Oxford
The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, is home to thousands of treasures. Many of those treasures were taken from (or “gifted by”) indigenous peoples around the world for study or as status symbols in European museums, universities, and private homes. Among the artefacts on display in the Museum, is a collection of Inuit hunting and fishing tools.…
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Scandinavian Artefacts in John Lee’s Private Museum
John Lee’s private museum at Hartwell House was said to contain some 4,000 items. The main room’s sixteen large glass cases and several smaller cabinets formed a ‘miscellaneous collection of articles culled from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; as well as antiquarian relics, and works of industrial art.’ The museum had sections devoted to the arts…