The Day 4 post continues!

Please prepare for some turbulence by putting your seatbelt on as I will be attempting to make this post with photos and text! Wonders of wonders, miracles of miracles. You’ve been warned.

After a nice time at the BM, Mother and I continued on our way to the Petrie Museum of Egyptology. Unless you are the ONE person who knows about this museum *cough* Brandon *cough* you will be interested to know that this museum resides at UCL (the school I will be going to!).  Mum and I completed two missions in this one trip- seeing a museum (objective no. 1) and scoping out UCL (objective no. 2)

 

 

The Museum itself is wonderful! We had a great time. It’s celebrating its centenary this year and the hard work is evident.  It’s also a teaching museum that’s pretty darn up to date.  The collection is mostly the archeological findings of William Flinders Petrie from Egypt and the Sudan.  The museum has on display about a tenth of their 80,000 piece collection at any one time. It’s very compact (mostly in two rooms and down an emergency exit hallway).

 

 

Flinders Petrie is a really important figure in archaeology for many things including bringing a more academic and systematic approach to digging.  One of his greatest works was classifying pottery into time periods by their shape, material, and decoration.  He found over 51 different classifications.  Basically, archeologists can determine the age of a site based on the pottery alone.  This is really helpful because a) duh and b) pottery sherds and shards are some of the most commonly found items in digs.  He also was pretty good (for the time) at including female students and using his local overseers as people with knowledge of the landscape and history.

 

 

There are tons of things to look at and discover, it’s really overwhelming.  The staff have chosen to highlight specific objects in each case that are worthy of note or relate to their current exhibition with red labels. It’s a clever way to make the experience manageable. The text panels are super and even cause us to question our own assumptions as viewers. Check out the last line on this one:

 

THE DRESS IN QUESTION:

GO FEMINISTS GO

Seeing stuff like that makes me really excited to work and learn with people who are this visibly progressive. 🙌

I was even asked to fill out a visitors survey (sidenote: HELL YES). Though I may have scared the poor volunteer with my enthusiasm.

ALSO:

How cool is this? The first known figural representation of weaving, ever IN THE WORLD

 

Overall it was really great though still needs more help, labels updated etc.

Rating: 4/5

Pros: AWESOME, super focused

Cons: Cramped and us shorties can’t see everything on the top shelves, for intense archaeologists