By examining these objects, and describing the different meanings they can have when considered in different lights, we’ve shown the different sides of the stories that every object has to share. We’ve also highlighted the ambiguity of interpretation; who’s to say what is right in a given context?
Focusing on objects whose pasts have been blurred with modern interpretations and reuses, from 19th century seal stones to re-painted frescos, we’ve also emphasized that many of these questions have no clear answer because, to put it in somewhat casual terms, nothing comes out of the ground clean.
But what this means, beyond a bit of dust, it that everything is attached to the context of its history that stretches back into a time incomprehensible to the human mind. To a certain extent we cannot imagine the past, the world of Knossos any more than we can imagine the daily life at Vindolanda or the sight of Cleopatra’s barge sailing down the Nile. By virtue of where, when, and by whom they were excavated the objects from Knossos are linked not only with Bronze Age Mediterranean society but 20th century British Archeologists, the mythological past of Greece, and the views of modern tourists who come, clutching cameras, to see evidence of a lost civilization.