Exhibition Design

You will construct plans for an exhibit at the John Brown House that is rooted in our archaeological excavations. The materials for this exhibition must include direct data from our artifacts and excavations, as well as information from paperwork, photos, historical documents, and other readings. You will need to consult the artifacts from our excavations, previous excavations (see Evie), our paperwork, excavation photos, classmates’ field blogs, and historical documents (perhaps from the midterm projects) for this project.

Your task is to visit with Dan Santos at the John Brown House and view the area in the “Sally” exhibit room and particular area or case that could potentially house a small exhibit for the Archaeology of College Hill finds. In constructing plans for this exhibit, consider carefully the audience, the surrounding exhibitions, and the space for presentation. You will need to create a theme for the exhibit, and strike a careful balance between text, images, and materials. Be careful not to ‘fit’ the excavated materials into the surrounding exhibits. Instead, think about the interpretive possibilities that our data presents, and build from these.

You may include larger objects from the John Brown House collections – but these must be limited (1-3) and must be integrated into the archaeological presentation.

Your final product will be a scale mock-up of the exhibit and written proposal for a future exhibit. The proposal will be presented to the RIHS for consideration for a future exhibit. This should be thorough – including exact materials, their placement within the case, labels, text for panels, information about size of panels and text on them, images and other media to be used – and their size., and any historical documents or interpretive stories for the presentation. Of course, a title and structured theme is also required.

Syllabus / 2008 Class Members and Field Blogs / Readings / Critical Responses / 2008 Excavation & Unit Summaries / Sample Field Forms / 2008 Images / References & Resources / 2008 Midterm Projects / 2008 Final Projects