1

Q
What Is a Collection?
What Is a Museum?

DR. JOHNSON’S EVOLVING DEFINITION

I n 1755, Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), the irascible lexicographer and

author of one of the most influential dictionaries of the English lan-
guage, defined museum as a “repository of learned curiosities” (quoted in
Murray 1904:36). I like this definition because the phrase learned curiosities
reflects the interactions between objects and people that produce knowl-
edge in museums.
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Based on how museums are represented in popular culture, most

people still think of museums primarily as venues in which objects are
exhibited. This is misleading, as most museums exhibit only a small per-
centage of the objects in their collections (Heritage Preservation 2005). In
practice, museums value objects for many more reasons than just for their
exhibitionary qualities. The most significant feature of a museum is its
collection of objects, many or most of which are never put on public view.
What distinguishes museums from similar institutions is how museums
use and interpret objects in all ways, not just for display.
The original use of the word museum (derived from the Greek
mouseion) was to describe a temple of the muses, particularly the primar-
ily philosophical institution (or place of contemplation and teaching)
that existed in the third century BCE in ancient Alexandria (discussed in
chapter 3). However, collections have a much longer history than do
museums, beginning long before the Alexandrian Temple of the Muses
was founded. Archaeological evidence shows that our hominid ances-
tors began collecting shortly after they became bipedal, which means

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 2 Chapter 1

that collecting is a deeply ingrained human trait related to the way hu-
mans use objects to navigate their way through the world. The acquisi-
tion and use of objects is so fundamental to human beings that it has
been suggested that the “origins of the twin concepts of preservation
and interpretation, which form the basis of the museum, lie in the hu-
man propensity to inquire and acquire” (Lewis 1985:481). Although
humans are not the only animals that pick up and use objects, we are the
only animals that make true collections (see box 1.1).
When the word museum entered the English language in the early 1600s,
it was variously spelled musaeum (the Latin spelling), muséum, or museum.
In 1730, some fifteen years prior to Johnson’s definition, the Dictionarium
Britannicum; Or a More Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary
defined a museum as a “Study or Library; also a College or publick Place
for the resort of learned Men” (Bailey 1730:n.p.). Thus, during the 1700s,
there were two separate definitions of the word museum: one emphasizing
the physical structure housing the collection, the other emphasizing the
collection housed in the physical structure—but both centered around the
idea of the association of objects and learning.
Curiously, the word museum did not appear in the 1841 edition of
Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language, despite
the fact that there had been museums in North America since 1773. In
the revised edition published in 1856, museum was defined as a “col-
lection of natural, scientific, or literary curiosities, or of works of art”
(Buchanan 1901:42), emphasizing the collection but not the physical
structure it was housed in.
The Universal Dictionary of the English Language by Robert Hunter and
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Charles Morris, published in 1897, defined museum as a “room or building

used as a repository for works of art or science; a collection or repository
of natural, scientific, or literary curiosities; a collection of objects illustrat-
ing the arts, sciences, manufactures, or natural history of the world, or
some particular part” (Hunter and Morris 1897:3229), which more com-
pletely integrated the concepts of the physical space occupied by the col-
lections and the collections themselves. This basic definition was tweaked
over the next few decades in dictionaries published in both England and
the United States. By 1913, the Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of
the English Language defined museum as a “building devoted to the col-
lecting and preserving of works of nature, art, and antiquity, or to the
exhibition of rare and instructive articles in the arts, science, or literature;
also, the collection itself, as of interesting specimens in natural history,
mineralogy, painting, and sculpture” (Funk 1913:1634).
There were other conceptions of what museums were and were not. In
1890, the German art historian and philosopher Julius Langbehn (1851–
1907) wrote that a museum was a place “Where every separate object kills

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 What Is a Collection? What Is a Museum? 3

BOX 1.1.
Collecting Animals
Humans are not the only animals that pick up and save objects. Among the
best-known nonhuman collectors are wood rats, magpies, and bowerbirds.
Wood rats (popularly called pack rats) are any of nineteen species of
the rodent genus Neotoma that range from Mexico into the United States
(MacDonald 2006). Wood rats build complex nest structures in cracks, crevic-
es, caves, and trees using plant materials and other debris. Wood rats actively
collect nesting materials and build onto their nests throughout their lives. As
they scamper about looking for stuff to add to their nests, wood rats often
appear to be attracted to specific objects, particularly shiny ones—sometimes
they will drop the object they are carrying if they come across a new object
that catches their attention along the way.
A wood rat nest is referred to as a midden (a term also used in archaeology
to refer to a refuse heap). Wood rat middens are used by multiple genera-
tions—some nests have been used continuously for 50,000 years or longer. For
this reason, wood rat nests are valued by researchers as records of vegetative
and climate change. Wood rat middens are held together in part by the rat’s
urine, which crystallizes into a substance called amberat that helps protect the
materials from deterioration.
The Eurasian or common magpie (Pica pica) is a corvid (a relative of crows
and jays). Magpies have an undeserved reputation for being particularly
attracted to shiny objects when, in fact, they do not just pick up things that
sparkle but most anything that catches their attention. In some folk traditions,
magpies are considered to be thieves, as in the 1817 opera by Gioachino
Rossini (1792–1868) named La Gazza Ladra, or The Thieving Magpie. The
folk belief probably comes from the fact that people tend to notice magpies
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when they pick up shiny objects but not when they pick up other objects or
food items.
The twenty species of bowerbirds (family Ptilonorhynchidae) are found in
the forests of the Austro-Papuan region. Most male bowerbirds pick up brightly
colored objects and arrange them on their display grounds (called bowers) as
part of an elaborate ritual to attract mates (Welty 1979).
All of these are examples of organisms selecting, picking up, using, and stor-
ing objects, which tells us that the use of objects is deeply embedded in the
DNA of many animals, so it should not be a surprise that we find the collect-
ing of objects to be practiced by other hominids as well as our own species.
Many different kinds of animals use objects—what makes humans different
is that we craft the objects for our purposes before they are needed and then
keep the objects to use again and again (MacGregor 2011).

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 4 Chapter 1

every other and all of them together the visitor” (Langbehn 1890:17). The
Italian poet and futurist Filippo Tommasco Marinetti (1876–1944) wrote:

Museums, cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so

many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where
one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs
of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-
blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls! That one should
make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’
Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath
the Gioconda, I grant you that. . . . But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our frag-
ile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour
through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot? (Marinetti 1909:1)

What could be characterized as cynical definitions were issued by

both museum supporters and detractors. In 1889, George Brown Goode
(1851–1896), the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, fa-
mously quipped, “An efficient educational museum may be described
as a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected
specimen” (Goode 1889:262). In 1916, at the eleventh annual meeting of
the American Association of Museums, Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852–
1933), then a member of the organization’s board, jokingly characterized
a museum as a “place where things out of date were gathered in order
to become more so” (Gilman 1916:53). In the 1970s, Joseph Mordaunt
Crook (b. 1937) wrote, “The modern museum is a product of Renais-
sance humanism, eighteenth-century enlightenment and nineteenth-
century democracy” (Crook 1972:32).
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One thing noticeably missing from all of these definitions of museum is

any characterization of the visitors or in fact any purpose for the collec-
tion beyond study. The concept of museums as institutions open to the
general public is fairly new. In 1946, the definition of museum adopted by
the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in its constitution stated,
“The word ‘museums’ includes all collections open to the public, of ar-
tistic, technical, scientific, historical or archaeological material, including
zoos and botanical gardens, but excluding libraries, except in so far as
they maintain permanent exhibition rooms” (ICOM 2016:n.p.). By 1951,
ICOM had modified the definition to include purpose:

The word museum here denotes any permanent establishment, adminis-

tered in the general interest, for the purpose of preserving, studying, and
enhancing by various means and, in particular, of exhibiting to the public
for its delectation and instruction groups of objects and specimens of cultural
value: artistic, historical, scientific and technological collections, botanical
and zoological gardens and aquariums. Public libraries and public archival

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 What Is a Collection? What Is a Museum? 5

institutions maintaining permanent exhibition rooms shall be considered

museums (ICOM 2016:n.p.).

By 1970, the word museum was being widely applied, sometimes to

institutions that did not have collections (contrary to most of the historic
definitions cited here). The Accreditation Committee of the American
Association of Museums (AAM, now American Alliance of Museums)
stated that a museum is an “organized and permanent non-profit institu-
tion, essentially educational or aesthetic in purpose, with professional
staff, which owns and utilizes tangible objects, cares for them and exhibits
them to the public on some regular schedule” (Alexander and Alexander
2008:2). Curiously enough, the AAM itself has no official definition of mu-
seum (only its Accreditation Committee does), but the organization does
consider zoological parks, botanical gardens, aquariums, planetariums,
and nonprofit galleries that exhibit but do not own objects to be museums.
In the United States, the legal definition of museum was provided in
the founding legislation for the Institute of Museum Services (now the
Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS) in 1996: “A public
or private nonprofit agency or institution organized on a permanent
basis for essentially educational or aesthetic purposes, which, utilizing
a professional staff, owns or utilizes tangible objects, cares for them, and
exhibits them to the public on a regular basis” (Malaro and DeAngelis
2012:3). The problem with this definition is that it restricts the use of
museum to those organizations that exhibit objects (even if the organiza-
tion doesn’t own the objects it displays), while excluding institutions that
own, use, and care for collections but do not exhibit them to the public.
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In her 1970 history of museums, pioneer museologist Alma S. Wittlin

(1899–1990) wrote that the “International Council of Museums (ICOM)
succinctly defined a museum as an establishment in which objects are
the main means of communication. If we agree with this definition, an
establishment in which objects are not used at all or are not used as main
carriers of messages are not museums, whatever their qualities may be
otherwise” (Wittlin 1970:203).
As the history of collections and museums is traced, we eventually ar-
rive at institutions that reflect the most widely accepted contemporary
definition of museum, adopted by ICOM at its twenty-first general confer-
ence in Vienna, Austria, in 2007, which first stresses nonprofit status, then
permanence, followed by public service, and only then mentions collec-
tions: “A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service
of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, con-
serves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible
heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education,
study and enjoyment” (ICOM 2016:n.p.).

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 6 Chapter 1

COLLECTIONS AND THE MUSEALIZATION OF OBJECTS

Pinpointing the origin of collections is problematic, but recognizing

what distinguishes a collection from an accumulation of objects is much
easier—collections are made on purpose, while accumulations just hap-
pen (Simmons 2015; Simmons and Muñoz-Saba 2003). To make a col-
lection, someone must select the objects for a reason, which means that
some sort of relationship between the objects—some sort of order—must
be recognized. As Susan Pearce points out, the order may not make sense
to anyone other than the collector, but all collections have order (Pearce
1994). Historically, establishing and maintaining order in the collection
(in storage, on exhibition, and in the catalog) has been a fundamental
aspect of museums.
Systems of order have changed greatly over the centuries both as reflec-
tions of our understanding of the objects and as the result of the continual
musealization of objects. For example, most natural history collections
are organized according to internationally accepted hierarchical systems
(e.g., class, order, family, genus, species); a history collection might be
organized by the kind or function of the object or the date of its creation;
and an art collection might be organized by type of media, artist’s name,
or accession number—but all have order (Latham and Simmons 2014).
Because the story of collecting begins in prehistory with the associa-
tion of objects and the remains of hominids, a distinction must be made
between an object that is used once and discarded and an object that is
collected. From a theoretical point of view, what distinguishes a collected
object from other objects is that a collected object is musealized when it is
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removed from its original context to become part of a collection—in other

words, when the object is physically and conceptually removed from its
original natural or cultural environment and becomes part of a collec-
tion, it transcends functional reality to serve as a document in a different
context (Desvallées and Mairesse 2010; Maranda 2009; Maroević 1998).
Objects can be musealized without becoming part of a museum collection.
Not only is musealization a change in the status of the object, muse-
alized objects also continue to acquire new meanings and contexts
throughout their lives as musealia (collection objects). Maroević has de-
fined musealia as “real and potential museum objects, that is, objects with
the traits of museality” (Maroević 1998:134). Museality is defined as the
“characteristic feature of an object to become a document of reality by
being relocated from its authentic environment into a museum reality”
(Maroević 1998:134).
Musealization imbues objects with special and distinctive meanings (a
sword that was used as a weapon becomes musealized when it is inten-
tionally buried in a tomb rather than being passed on to another sword

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 What Is a Collection? What Is a Museum? 7

wielder). In a museum, the continuous process of the musealization of

objects often produces unexpected information due to the formation of
new connections and meanings associated with the objects, which is a
fundamental aspect of museology and museological theory. In Maroević’s
theoretical structure, applied and theoretical museology are united but
with four limitations based on musealization—those of (1) the museum
objects; (2) the functions of preservation and use of the objects; (3) the in-
stitutions in which the functions of preservation and use take place; and
(4) societal attitudes (Maroević 1998).

PASSIONATE COLLECTORS AND

THE POSSESSIONS OF THE DEAD

Most collectors are passionate about their collections. In 1661, as Cardi-

nal Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino (1602–1661) lay dying, he expressed his
regret at having to leave behind his collection of objects, even though
he believed he was bound for an eternity in heavenly paradise (Wittlin
1970). Mazzarino collected art and jewels and had a particular fond-
ness for diamonds—some of the diamonds from his collection were
ultimately given to Louis XIV and ended up in the Louvre. In Bruce
Chatwin’s short novel Utz, a Czechoslovakian collector of Meissen por-
celains (Kaspar Utz) is so closely connected to his objects that he cannot
leave them and refuses to defect to the West, even though he has op-
portunities to do so (Chatwin 1988). After Utz’s death, it is discovered
that his collection has mysteriously disappeared. The fictional Kaspar
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Utz is based on a real collector named Rudolph Just (1895–1972), whose

collection also disappeared after his death, only to reappear thirty years
later on auction at Sotheby’s (Riding 2001).
Many of the earliest known collections are grave goods, the objects bur-
ied with the dead that are physically or symbolically intended to be used
by the deceased in the afterlife or objects that are so deeply associated
with the dead that they have greater value in the tomb than they would
if left among the living. There are many motivations for placing objects
in graves—it is a custom as old as human burials. As is discussed in
chapter 2, Neanderthals buried objects with their dead, as have people of
almost every subsequent human culture. In some instances, the value of
the entombed objects encouraged grave robbing, a desecration that is the
exact opposite of what the burial intended. From the pharaohs of Egypt
to the Wari royalty in ancient Peru, many cultures have taken elaborate
steps to protect tombs from robbers, usually to little avail. All too often,
the value of the grave goods makes violations of cultural taboos and the
work of breaking into sealed tombs worth the risk and effort. Sometimes

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 8 Chapter 1

it is the cultural value rather than the monetary value of grave goods that
causes the objects to be retrieved from the grave. When Elizabeth Siddal
(1829–1862), the beautiful young wife of pre-Raphaelite poet and painter
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), died from an overdose of laudanum
in 1862, he placed in her coffin the only copy of a manuscript containing
most of his unpublished poems. However, in 1869, Rossetti changed his
mind and had the coffin exhumed and the manuscript retrieved so that
he could publish the poems (Simons 2008).
The ultimate expression of not wanting to leave objects behind can
be found in the number of museum founders who are buried in the
institutions they started, sometimes in the collections. These range from
the well-known to the obscure. A neo-Greek style mausoleum (built of
yellow brick) in the midst of the Dulwich Picture Gallery (figure 1.1)
in London contains the bodies of the museum’s first benefactors, the
collectors Noel Desenfans (1745–1807), his wife Margaret Morris (1731–
1813), and Sir Francis Bourgeois (1756–1811). The ashes of founders
Henry Clay Folger and Emily Jordan Folger rest in the Folger Library in
Washington, DC (Blom 2002). The mortal remains of Albert M. Brooking
(1880–1946), founder of the Hastings Museum (Hastings, Nebraska), are
buried in the basement of the museum he created. Once I was shown a
small urn containing ashes of the founder of a natural history collection,
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Figure 1.1. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

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 What Is a Collection? What Is a Museum? 9

housed in a drawer along with some of his favorite specimens. Thus not
just objects can be musealized—so can the collectors of the objects.

ORDO AB CHAO

Why do humans make collections? In the process of collecting, objects are

named, organized, and classified to make them useful for understanding
the seeming chaos of the world around them—ordo ab chao (order from
chaos). Classification has been defined as the “orderly arrangement of a
set of particulars that instantiate some intentionally defined, abstract,
generality—a universal, what some would call a natural kind” (Kluge
2005:8). Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) wrote, “Taxonomy, or the sci-
ence of classification, is the most underrated of all disciplines. Dismissed
by the uninformed as philately gussied up with jargon, classification is
truly the mirror of our thoughts, its changes through time the best guide
to the history of human perceptions” (Purcell and Gould 1986:14). There
is a curious parallel between the human need to organize and to classify
and creation myths—just as it is necessary to give objects names in order
to place them in a taxonomy, so in most cultural traditions the establish-
ment of a taxonomic system is a fundamental part of the creation myth, in
order to give names to things. For example, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
creation myth, the first task of the first human is giving names to all the
animals. How important this naming of things is in the human environ-
ment was aptly illustrated by Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) when
he imagined the founding of the town of Macondo in One Hundred Years
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of Solitude, writing, “The world was so recent that many things lacked
names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” (García
Márquez 1970:1).

OBJECTS, PRESERVATION, AND MUSEUMS

The concepts of collecting and preserving are closely related because, for
collections to be truly meaningful, they had to survive into the future. The
natural durability of some objects determined what has survived from the
earliest collections. The preservation of organic materials is particularly
difficult, which means that many objects made of leather, plant material,
bone, or wood have deteriorated, while objects made of stone or ceramic
have survived. Because of this differential preservation, what little knowl-
edge we have of early collections is skewed. For example, clay tablets are
more easily preserved than are papyrus scrolls, and papyrus scrolls are
longer lasting than are texts written on animal hides.

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 10 Chapter 1

The oldest method for the long-term preservation of organic materi-

als is dehydration, which is the basis for mummification. Human and
animal mummies were made on purpose at least 8,000 years ago in
Peru and Chile and at least 5,000 years ago in Egypt. Mummification
techniques have varied widely from place to place and over time, but in
essence, a mummy is made by removing much of the soft tissue (which
is prone to rapid deterioration), extracting the moisture from the re-
maining tissue (sometimes using dehydrating salts, sometimes allowing
environmental dehydration to take place), and then wrapping the body
in skins or textiles, often treated with oils and resins for protection from
pests (Andrews 1998; Arriaza 1995).
Even objects that are made of durable materials, such as stone or
gold, are subject to deterioration. In effect, the preservation of objects in
museum collections requires constant vigilance and care. For example,
although several catalogs of Renaissance collections have survived, very
few of the objects that were in those collections are still extant.

SUMMARY

For purposes of locating the beginnings of collections and museums,

Dr. Johnson’s definition of museum as a collection of learned curiosi-
ties will suffice, but as the evolution of these institutions is explored in
greater detail, the definition of museum also evolves as we work our way
forward to the modern museum. Museums did not suddenly appear as
institutions similar to those we know today—they developed slowly from
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private collections to public collections, from treasure troves to objects

preserved for the public good. The gradual transformation of collections
into museums did not always proceed in a linear fashion but varied from
place to place and time to time along many divergent paths, assisted by
a few conceptual fits and starts. There is no definable moment in history
when the museum appears, although we can identify the major trends
and foundational concepts among the prehistoric hoards, palace rarities,
church treasuries, and cabinets of curiosities that preceded the emergence
of the modern museum in the Age of Enlightenment.

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