The British Museum and British Antiquities

Extract

Professor Hawkes’s important article on ‘The British Museum and British Archaeology’ in the December number of ANTIQUITY is based on an intimate knowledge of the Museum and a sympathetic understanding of the disabilities which have beset it since the war. It may be that he is not fully aware of the changes in work and tempo that have markedly developed since he himself left the staff in 1946, but we know well that his article reflects a widespread impatience to see an end of the disabilities and the problems which have developed as the direct result of the war; and above all to see created in the National Museum an organization for dealing with British archaeology and antiquities which will be equal to the great advance of the subject that has taken place in this century, and with dramatic acceleration in the post-war years. No one is keener to see this development than the staff of the Department of British Antiquities who are entirely alive to what is required. We fully recognize, therefore, the importance of what Professor Hawkes has to say, but he does seem to be in some danger of falling into the mistake that many other less well-informed and less well-intentioned critics have made—of assuming that the honourable scars which still disfigure the British Museum and the overcrowding which was the inevitable concomitant of an informed and successful collecting policy in the Museum’s many departments, are being complacently lived with and that nothing has been done to bring about the speedy disappearance of these obstacles to our service.