Week 9

This week I continued to enter books into the system. There are fewer and fewer books on the shelves as I continue working through entering them. I also had a reading in Museum Studies in Material Culture by Susan M. Pearce. I had to read chapter 9, entitled "Material Culture Research and the Curation Process." It was about two different exhibition styles, the aesthetic and reconstructive. The aesthetic pertain to art, or primitive art where the reconstructive is more informative and ethnographically meaningful. So, both contribute to the overall understanding of the material culture of the past but in different ways. One is the artistic materials left behind where the other is the preserved items that show a primitive culture. The chapter continues to discuss the need to document and preserve all of the artifacts so they can be understood, referenced, and provide further research in the future. The artifacts that are restored pose a problem. They are restored to their previous glory, but yet the art of restoration detracts from the authenticity since sometimes the artifact can actually be made better than it would have actually been in the past. This chapter covers multiple issues faced with the exhibition, restoration, preservation and documentation of artifacts.