REGISTERS OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL HERITAGE IN MUSEUMS FOLLOWING THE INTRODUCTION OF THE ACT ON MUSEUMS IN 1996

• Authors: Jaskanis, Agnieszka

Abstracts

EN

The Act on Museums of 1996 regulated peculiar challenges faced by museums. At the same time it separated museum preservation of archaeological heritage from the system of the preservation of monuments. From that moment onwards those museums whose collections were movable archaeological heritage were obliged in their museum procedures to comply with the regulations of two acts: the afore-mentioned Act on Museum and the Act on the Protection and Guardianship of Historical Monuments of 2003, together with its implementing regulations. The ordinance of the Minister of Culture and Art on the standard for registering heritage items in museums introduced quite a revolutionary change in the registering of archaeological heritage in those institutions as for object inventorying. The registering was to be from then on applied only to single tangible heritage items, and not to archaeological sites together with all the collections like in previous years. The change implied quite a lot of organizational repercussions, including difficulties in defining the collection’s countability and its financial worth, or the unequivocal item’s identification. The challenges caused are, among others, problems with the decisions how to qualify different historic groups of scientific sources to be entered into museum documents. This is connected with the necessity to differentiate and define what archaeological mass finds versus museum objects are in museum registers. New principles of museum object identification were introduced, and their implementation in the documentation practice forced significant changes in the attitude to the traditionally perceived methodology of creating information on archaeological monuments. Furthermore, the value assessment of archaeological monuments is questionable. It is the lack of standards for assessing the value of this group of monuments that is related to this issue.

Keywords

EN

specificity of archaeology; legal amendments; register standard; museum objects; mass finds; value of archaeological monuments

• Publisher: Krajowy Ośrodek Badań i Dokumentacji Zabytków
• Journal: Muzealnictwo
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 60
• Pages: 246-255

Dates

published

2019-09-18

Contributors

author

Jaskanis, Agnieszka

Identifiers

DOI

10.5604/01.3001.0013.4671