Once when I was a teenager, I visited a natural history museum that had an articulated skeleton of a saber-tooth tiger on display. I recall looking at the Simlodon and realizing that there were several things wrong with the skeleton. At first I realized that what I was looking at was not the cat's actual skeleton, but rather a plaster casting of the original bones. I became aware that I was not looking at the remains a living creature at all, but rather an artificial representation of that creature removed from its original environment. The problem that I encountered with the saber-toothed tiger was that the article on display was removed from its role as a fearsome Neolithic predator. This phenomenon of context is not unique to the displays at natural history museums. Anthropological collections on display are frequently removed from the customs and ideas of the culture that produced the artifact. The average museum attendee might consider an idol made by a tribe in New Guinea to be exotic, and usually the people who have catalogued and described that object have no connection to the artifact's cultural origins. As a result some people who visit museums feel that the collections "seemed to lack contact with the human communities from which the material had come from, and real understanding remained elusive." (Pearce, 109)
What a fossilized skeleton on display does not answer is where and how then animal lived. A saber-toothed cat's skeleton provides scientist with a wealth of information about the animal, but when the skeleton is placed on display that information is lost because the skeleton is removed from the world in which the Simlodon lived. A display that also included a model of what a living saber-toothed tiger looked like in among a reconstructed Neolithic environment might place the skeleton back into the context of a living, breathing creature. The problem that museums face in the 21st century is keeping their collections relevant to the viewing public. In order to maintain relevance museums must endeavor to place their exhibits back into the context of their origins. Without context, a museum display is nothing more than a few curiosities in a glass boxes.
Works Cited
Pearce, SM. "Museums, Objects and Collections." Smithsonian. pp 89-117. 1992
