By Bernie Bell

Before fans of the very groovy 70’s Western Swing band – Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks get too excited – this is an evening with a different Dan Hicks!

Professor Dan Hicks is curator of the world-renowned Pitt Rivers Museum and Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University Of Oxford, and he will be presenting a talk to members of the Stromness Museum collections development department on December the 15th – which will be on-line and therefore accessible to all!

While Covid still makes its presence felt in our community many talks and events are taking place on-line, and the ‘plus’ side of this is that folk can participate from all over the world.  This is particularly appropriate for this talk as the theme is concerned with objects and artefacts which, over the centuries have been taken from their place of origin.  Some were traded fairly, some traded unfairly, and some – simply stolen – taken without leave to take, sometimes by force, and never returned.

Some of these stolen objects were of monetary value, some – even worse – were of spiritual ‘value’ to the people they were taken from.

Taking a nation’s wealth is one thing, taking its soul is another.

In recent years an awareness of the wrongs done to colonized and conquered nations has arisen – among other wrongs, those relating to their appropriated objects of ‘value’.

Reparation and restoration has been made in some cases.  The Benin Bronzes  https://www.artnews.com/feature/benin-bronzes-explained-repatriation-british-museum-humboldt-forum-1234588588/ are in process of being returned – which is A GOOD THING!

Our own Stromness Museum….

….has objects from around the world, and the collections development team is currently researching the provenance and interpretation of the central and western African material in the ethnographic collections, and, in association with the UHI Archaeology Institute, are pleased to host Professor Hicks’ talk. 

For more information about the talk and how to participate…..

I’ll take this opportunity to mention that the Stromness Museum is not publicly funded, so if folk would like to donate to the Museum, or buy from the shop for Christmas – that would be A GOOD THING too!