Pursuits and Joys

Transactions of La Société Guernesiaise, 2022

Summary of the year's activities by Guernsey Museum archaeologists and volunteers.

In G. B. Edwards’ novel of 20th Century Guernsey life, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (1981), Ebenezer becomes the unlikely custodian of an ‘ancient monument’ discovered on his land. The incident is treated, in the main, as a topic for comedy—a part of the novel’s satire of the many pretences and frauds of modern Guernsey—but the underlying issues should not be lightly put aside. ‘Les Fouaillages’, a megalithic site discovered in 1978, the year after Edwards’s death, on L’Ancresse Common, a short walk from the place where the fictional Ebenezer spent his whole life, is thought to be 6000 years old, and has a claim to be amongst the oldest built sites on the planet. There are many other ancient sites and monuments on this small island, as there are on the neighbouring Channel Island of Jersey. This article looks at the interconnected yet contrasting ways in which this extraordinary legacy on Guernsey has been revealed and described: the scholarly discourse of archaeology, the myth and legend of the popular imagination, and the literature of Guernsey’s poets and novelists.

Transactions of La Société Guernesiaise, 2020

Summary of the year's activities by Guernsey Museum archaeologists and volunteers.

Transactions of La Société Guernesiaise, 2021

Summary of the year's activities by Guernsey Museum archaeologists and volunteers.

Transactions of La Société Guernesiaise, 2018

Summary of the year's activities by Guernsey Museum archaeologists and volunteers.

Transactions of La Societe Guernesiaise, 2014

Collecting in the South Sea: the Voyage of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux 1791-1794, ed. Bronwen Douglas, Fanny Wonu Veys and Billie Lythberg (Leiden: Sidestone Press), 299–334, 2018

An illustrated catalogue of all artefacts now associated with the 1791-1794 voyage of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux. This book is a study of ‘collecting’ undertaken by Joseph Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux and his shipmates in Tasmania, the western Pacific Islands, and Indonesia. In 1791–1794 Bruni d’Entrecasteaux led a French naval expedition in search of the lost vessels of La Pérouse which had last been seen by Europeans at Botany Bay in March 1788. After Bruni d’Entrecasteaux died near the end of the voyage and the expedition collapsed in political disarray in Java, its collections and records were subsequently scattered or lost. The book’s core is a richly illustrated examination, analysis, and catalogue of a large array of ethnographic objects collected during the voyage, later dispersed, and recently identified in museums in France, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. The focus on artefacts is informed by a broad conception of collecting as grounded in encounters or exchanges with Indigenous protagonists and also as materialized in other genres—written accounts, vocabularies, and visual representations (drawings, engravings, and maps). Historically, the book outlines the antecedents, occurrences, and aftermath of the voyage, including its location within the classic era of European scientific voyaging (1766–1840) and within contemporary colonial networks. Particular chapters trace the ambiguous histories of the extant collections. Ethnographically, contributors are alert to local settings, relationships, practices, and values; to Indigenous uses and significance of objects; to the reciprocal, dialogic nature of collecting; to local agency or innovation in exchanges; and to present implications of objects and their histories, especially for modern scholars and artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

Archaeologists, attracted by beautiful things and by real knowledge, are transforming the remains into elements of historical significance tracing the nature of man. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the movement of protohistoric Maori neck and ear green ornaments. Hei-tiki is said to represent the human fetus.

2022

Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, 2010

We have become accustomed to assessing both the PAS and Treasure Act in terms of important finds preserved in national collections and the numbers of recorded pieces of information about objects found by members of the public. This however conflates the results of two different processes, the first is accidental finds made by members of the public going about their everyday lives, while the second source of these objects is from the deliberate exploitation of the archaeological record as a source of collectables for entertainment and profit. While the first is wholly uncontroversial, the latter involves a complex of issues connected with the way the archaeological record is treated and managed. David Gill however questions the degree to which a reporting system like TA/ PAS prevents damage to the archaeological record from the activities of artefact hunters and collectors. His text is an important contribution to the ongoing wider discussion of these complex and difficult issues.