Monday 9 July 2012

BSA students and the Fitzwilliam Museum

My study of donations to the Fitzwilliam Museum by students of the BSA is now available online.

Gill, D. W. J. 2012. "From the Cam to the Cephissus: the Fitzwilliam Museum and students of the British School at Athens." Journal of the History of Collections: 1-10.

Abstract
The Fitzwilliam Museum holds material brought back to England by some of the early nineteenth-century travellers to Greece, including Edward Daniel Clarke and William Martin Leake. However, it was not until the later nineteenth century, with the founding of such organizations as the British School at Athens and the Cyprus Exploration Fund, that the Museum's collections started to be enriched through material excavated or otherwise acquired in Greece by archaeologists and other students. This article maps the impact of the emerging discipline of archaeology on the Fitzwilliam's collections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also demonstrates how the Museum profited from the close connections between students, archaeologists and museum officers of the period.

[Abstract]