About

The Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830, today cares for a collection of two million items, designated as pre-eminent for their national and international importance. Alongside the maps, photographs, books and archival documents that have previously been subject to considerable research, is a grouping of 957 objects labelled as ‘artefacts’, that have yet to receive substantial critical attention. This project seeks to provide the first systematic account of the Royal Geographical Society’s artefact collection, mapping its history, provenance, documentation, uses and display, from the 19th century to the present day.

The RGS artefact collection groups together a remarkable range of objects, pertaining to expeditions, individual explorers, and objects created by Indigenous communities that were gifted, exchanged or taken during the course of expeditions. It comprises both relics – surviving traces – of earlier missions, and commonplace objects that may be seen as achieving the status of relic through their close association with well-known figures in 18th and 19th century geographical exploration. Through their exhibition in this context, a simple cooking apparatus, a whistle, headgear, and a camel saddle are transformed from the everyday into the remarkable. By contrast, Indigenous objects bear little trace of their former makers and owners and catalogue records tend to be sparse on their ‘biography’.

In order to understand the role of the artefact collection within the wider history of the Society, this project will include the first in-depth study of the Royal Geographical Society’s museum which occupied the main hall of its premises, Lowther Lodge, from 1913 into the 1960s, but whose history has yet to be written. Abandoned as a relic of the imperial age, this project will place it within the wider context and practice of (so-called) ethnographic museums in the twentieth century.