Dear all,
I am having four boxes made to contain artefacts intended for feeling
"blind", one of the Wiltshire Archaeology Festival activities. I have a
great box design and good ideas about what sort of objects would be suitable
- but no objects (we've seen the boxes at the Natural History Museum in
Oxford and at Chichester Museum).
Whilst the Festival has access to various museum collections we haven't yet
located suitable objects which the curators are prepared to lend - I don't
blame them, they're happy for us to have all sorts of un-stratified bits and
pieces for our giant excavation sandpit but complete artefacts are another
matter. And the trouble with replica items is that they can be expensive,
so a reluctance surrounds these too.
Where might I find some suitable material?
I have had suggestions such as "buy a replica Roman oil-lamp, they're quite
cheap in museum shops", "use a gas-mask for your modern object, there's
thousands of them", and "be sure to have a fossil, very difficult to do any
damage to a solid ammonite!". At the moment our list is a pot, oil-lamp or
something similar; a fossil; a bone; something modern (maybe from the
railway industry?), but that's not a huge variety of textures - any
suggestions?
We do have some money to spend so we're not desperate for freebies.
Yours,
Katy Whitaker
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