This is, before all else, a reflection on research I have been doing about a small artefact presently in the collections of the British Museum. The artefact is described as part of harpoon head carved of bone. The story goes that this was taken way back in 1819, when settlers raided a winter camp of the Beothuk on the shores of lake in the interior of the island of Newfoundland. It then passed through a few hands before coming to rest in the British Museum and, in coming to rest, became a “specimen” of Beothuk handiwork. As a specimen it is associated with a way of life that was destroyed by English and Irish settlers and is now considered lost, and only recovered through old stories and material traces. My research is a work of re-storying, or fabulation, at and beyond the margins of the imperial archive. By reflecting on work, I wish to think with the making and (un)making of this, and other such things which disclose and obscure histories of settler colonial violence, as “relics” – fragments of a whole life now lost, or maybe fragments of these very histories of loss. I also wish to consider the ambiguity of such relics and the limitations of fabulation, which gestures towards the presence of that which once was only to reveal that which is recoverable: an absent other which eludes the archive and our aspirations to fashion stories that are not ours to tell.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre.
Convened by Paul Basu and Elizabeth Hallam
