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Ancient objects with modern meanings: museums, volunteers, and the Anglo-Saxon ‘Staffordshire Hoard’ as a marker of 21st-century regional identity
journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-20, 13:41 authored by Marc Scully, Morn D.T. CapperThe Staffordshire Hoard is the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever found. On
display from soon after its discovery in 2009 during fundraising to secure it for the region,
the Hoard has become a source of local pride in Staffordshire, receiving over a million
visitors. This article explores the Hoard as a marker of identity, both in the past and in the
present and evaluates how the ‘treasure process’, museums and museum volunteers are
shaping public identification with the Anglo-Saxon past of the Mercian kingdom. Drawing on
focus group data, we argue that aspects of the naming and display of the Hoard have
encouraged its inclusion in existing narratives of belonging and ‘authenticity’ in
Staffordshire. Such archaeological discoveries have the potential to provide points of continuity between the post-industrial present and the distant past, and stimulate a
reconsideration of the present status of the region in contemporary cultural and political
discourse.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Ethnic and Racial StudiesVolume
39Issue
2Citation
SCULLY, M.D. and CAPPER, M.D.T., 2016. Ancient objects with modern meanings: museums, volunteers, and the Anglo-Saxon ‘Staffordshire Hoard’ as a marker of 21st-century regional identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 (2), pp.181-203.Publisher
© Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2016Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Ethnic and Racial Studies on 14 Dec 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1105996.ISSN
1466-4356Publisher version
Language
- en