MotM – Brighton – Honouring the Ancient Dead

Museum name: Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Location: Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton & Hove

Spotlight on: ‘Our Ancestors’, The Elaine Evans Archaeology Gallery

Archaeology at Brighton Museum @brightonmuseums has been transformed by cutting-edge science and ancient finds. This award-winning gallery provides an immersive environment to experience the past, focusing on seven people from the Ice Age to the Saxons. @AncientDead

Website:              brightonmuseums.org.uk
Twitter:                @brightonmuseums
Instagram:          @brighton_museums
Facebook:           RoyalPavilionandMuseums

The Story:

The ‘Our Ancestors’ gallery redefines the interpretation of archaeology in a museum space. If you visit, you will feel as if you are wandering through an ancient Sussex woodland full of shadows, filled with birdsong and the sounds of our industrious ancestors. Presence, wonder and magic leads to interpretation through experience. A gathering space for contemplation, stories and remembrance encircles a flickering campfire. Mindfulness can’t help but lead you to a deep connection with the past, sharing the space with ancestors both figuratively and literally. From surrounding glass cases, the faces of local long-vanished inhabitants peer at you with interest. They know why you are here and are content to share their time and space. They have stories to tell. It is a moving experience. Rarely does a museum gallery pervade the souls of everyone who enters.

The gallery layout nods to the floor design of a chambered tomb. Each ancestor is placed in a different chamber. Unknowingly but innately, you will play out the experience of visiting your ancestors just as other ancestors would have done 6,000 years ago. The gathering space and campfire encourage congregation in circles, a natural behaviour so common to human togetherness through space and time. Life, movement and sound abounds. Ambient film of forgotten crafts and digital artworks faithfully recreate ancient sights so that you share our ancestors’ landscape and home. Come lay your hands upon a local henge stone just as the gaunt-faced blue-eyed man next to you once did too. It’s his turn next. Beautiful and famous objects such as an ancient amber cup are juxtaposed with the everyday and domestic. The ’Our Ancestors’ gallery is all about the sacred and profane and joins scientific rigour and artistic interpretation seamlessly to create a very special experience. An experience which is humbling and all encompassing. Do come and pay your respects.