President’s Column
The Kent Archaeological Society is a charity, and therefore to fulfil its charitable status must deliver public benefit. Much of that revolves around education and informing. That is the principal function of our publications, the various digs, and activities we have supported over the decades, and the collections we have accrued.
An anomaly is that Kent does not have a designated museum for this county’s rich and complex history. Running museums, of course, is an expensive and time-consuming business. The traditional model of museums as places to look at often diverse, sometimes randomly accrued, artefacts has long been pushed aside. These days, we have much more sophisticated ideas about the narratives and frameworks within
The KAS has no lack of material that might be used in this way. A listing of our repositories in Maidstone Museum, with whom we have enjoyed a close association since the 1860s, comes to over 3700 items. These range from the Iron Age to the Romano-British era, through the 6th century into the early, middle, and late Medieval periods. It includes material found throughout Kent at excavations and investigations held over the last century and a half. Some of these, such as that at Lullingstone Roman villa, were not such of local but of national interest. Others exposed crucial added information about migration patterns, power changes, and the rise of the early Christian church after the Augustinian mission in the sixth century.
Looking through this list, however hard it is to take in all the richness of the information there, one thing is abundantly clear: this is a collection teeming with suggestive linkages, new possibilities for interpretation, and insights. It includes tools, weapons, implements like bowls and combs for domestic usage, items of clothing – and then gold torques from the bronze age, and burial urns and objects. Only a tiny amount of this material is currently displayed. Perhaps much of it might be best stored as reference materials.
But more of it might be more readily accessible and put into a fresh, and new interpretative framework is also striking and unmistakable.
Kerry Brown
The KAS has redefined its core mission to deliver more for public benefit through education and is keen to make our unique holdings more available to a wider public. One way of doing this is to collaborate more closely with our partners, of whom Maidstone Museum is key. Our discussions currently are to collaborate more in having a defined space in the museum as it looks at its development plans in the coming few years. We are also keen to improve digitalisation and digital access with a proper web redesign. Virtual archives now are the norm, not the exception. Our one exists but needs to be expanded, updated, and more reflective of our ambitions.
All of this will be time-consuming work. It will involve not just volunteers but paid staff. It will also include raising more funds to be able to create the space where the KAS can be more deeply involved in education, research and learning, but also where we can move towards achieving the core vision of having a place where people can go and see the story of Kent set out in a more countywide, comprehensive context. This is not to deny the importance of the county’s many excellent town, city, and region collections, which make a crucial contribution. But it is to recognise that a place that tells the county’s story would be something that enriches and enhances what others are doing at a more local level.
We hope that members will be engaged and excited by the possibilities offered by this plan. We hope to be in a position soon to provide more detail about an enhanced KAS exhibition. The imperative is to make this not just an aspiration but something real.
Best wishes,
Kerry Brown
President