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Showerthought: museums keep calling them "ritual objects" and I finally asked why
I was at the Field Museum in Chicago two weeks ago and stood in front of a display case with about 40 small carved stones labeled "ritual use, purpose unknown." A volunteer docent nearby laughed when I asked what ritual and admitted the label basically means the archaeologists could not figure out what the thing did. She said it gets slapped on everything from bone tubes to clay balls, and half the time it turns out to be a game piece or a weight for a fishing net. I get that we cannot know everything, but "ritual" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for stuff that honestly looks like somebody's junk drawer from 3,000 years ago. How many "ritual" labels do you think would disappear if museums just wrote "no idea, your guess is as good as ours"?
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morgan31625d ago
Worked in collections at a small museum for years, and yeah, "ritual" is basically museum-speak for "we have no clue." The real kicker is that the label sticks because it SOUNDS better to donors and boards than admitting the truth. I once watched a curator relabel a whole shelf of mystery objects from "unknown" to "possible ritual use" right before a fundraising tour. The honest writeup you're talking about would gut half the placards in any ancient history wing. What drives me nuts is that "game piece" and "net weight" get tested all the time and usually WIN, but nobody wants to reprint the signs. My guess is you'd lose 60 to 70 percent of those labels overnight if museums just wrote "no idea" instead.
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