Catalan archaeological museography from the 18th century to the present day

Catalan archaeological museography from the 18th century to the present

Period of execution

2023-2025

Research team

Dr. Josep Manuel Rueda i Torres (ICRPC)

Project description. Mission and basic objectives

The public institution par excellence for transmitting knowledge to citizens in a visual and tangible way, since the end of the 18th century, has been the museum. This need for connection with citizens, to convey the knowledge it accumulates through objects, has been its raison d'être, especially since the Second World War, with the generalization of liberal democracies. This raison d'être has meant that the museum has evolved a lot in terms of the language, or what is the same in the presentations, used to transmit its mission and mandate. The museum has become another mass media, an essential communication tool in heritage facilities.

This research project aims to analyze and establish what has been the evolution and the steps to achieve the objective of making knowledge of archaeological heritage accessible to society, especially in Catalonia.

It also aims to analyze why society and academia have chosen this tool to carry out this task. What drives public and private institutions and citizen organizations to opt for the museum as a presentation tool? For this reason, it will be important to analyze and reflect synthetically on the origin of the museum, from the Hellenistic Museion to the museum without walls or borders of the 21st century.

Photo: Espai Cabrera of the Ethnological Museum of Montseny d'Arbúcies. Josep Manuel Rueda

In the 18th century, from the impact of the Enlightenment and with a strong public and educational vocation, the first museums, as such, were born. These had a special impact on archaeology from the creation of the Capitoline Museums of the Vatican and the Portici Museum in Naples, which collected objects from the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Specifically in our country, at the end of the 18th century, the importance of the first facility caught the attention of the Royal Catalan Academy of Letters. At the end of the 18th century, this already collected some museographic proposals. However, it was not until almost the first half of the 19th century that the work to create a museum of archaeology and antiquities began and was completed, convinced that it was the first of its kind in Spain.

This initiative, like that of the Tarraconense Archaeological Society, joined forces with the museums of the monument commissions promoted by the Spanish state. These museums, together with some others of archaeological origin also born in the 19th century in small towns in Catalonia, under the impetus of literati and under the auspices of cultural associations (excursionisme had a relevant weight) and very especially of the bishoprics, will form the matrix of the current Catalan archaeological museography. This stage will constitute the first phase, which we can define as the gathering or formation phase of the current public archaeological collections. The role of the Archaeological Societies in these beginnings and even in the last years of the 20th century must also be taken into account, as well as the influence of excursionism.

From the beginning of the 20th century and under the entrepreneurial impetus of the Barcelona Museums Board. The first rigorous museum formulations will begin to become a reality: Museum of Decorative Art and Archaeology, Museum of Art and Archaeology and in the 30s the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia.

From the 1940s, with the fascist dictatorship of Franco, the movement was appeased, dormant, but it survived and resisted. The most dynamic agents were the regional and local study centers, the local cultural associations (archaeological societies) and the Barcelona Archaeological Museum. This resistance of archaeological museology would enable the great impetus coinciding with the arrival of democracy in the last quarter of the 20th century. It would be the emergence and modernization of archaeological museography and the impetus for in situ museography, archaeological parks, recreations in the same sites or simply the signaling of these and generalizing the universal accessibility of a part of the sites. A phenomenon to be taken into account. Archaeology also approaches social museology (derived from the New Museology), insofar as most archaeological museums deal with everyday life and life in ancient societies, not only the production of the ruling oligarchies. And obviously a very important part of archaeological museology, is born in redós and is developed closely linked to local and regional Catalan territorial museology, which is the most genuine contribution of Catalonia to the world.

The evolution of museographies will be analyzed from cumulative presentations, to the first attempts at taxonomic presentations, based on a chronological and typological basis of the objects found, based, in the case of prehistory, on the division of the 3 ages (stone, bronze and iron). Going through descriptive museographies, through contextual ones, reaching the current immersive representations of past societies, based on scientific advances.

Photo: Interpretation Center of the Font de la Canya in Avinyonet del Penedés. Josep Manuel Rueda