Introduction: The 1936 Exhibition in the Sir Arthur Evans Archive

This online publication aims to reconstruct one room of the 1936 exhibition ‘British Archaeological Discoveries in Greece and Crete 1886 to 1936’, held at the Royal Academy, Burlington House in London. Although the exhibition as a whole was organised by the British School at Athens (BSA), the Minoan Room was organised under the supervision of Sir Arthur Evans. Because of Evans’s connections with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the contents of the Minoan Room, both display materials and the vast majority of objects on display, are now part of the Ashmolean’s collection. The display materials of the other three rooms instead became part of the BSA Archive, as discussed in the first essay, which covers the Exhibition as a whole. The second essay examines in greater detail the process of reconstructing the Minoan Room archivally. The third essay reconstructs the Minoan Room digitally, using the printed catalogue and the few surviving photographs of the Exhibition as a basis. Finally, the text of a lecture given by Sir Arthur Evans as part of the Exhibition programme helps to contextualise the thinking behind the Minoan Room. The catalogue provides a list of objects and display material in the Exhibition, where it is possible to reconstruct this, according to their order in the printed catalogue. The catalogue also provides references to Evans’s publications in order to place these objects in the intellectual context of the time, as well as links to the Ashmolean’s Collections Online website. This publication is intended as a complement to the individual records of exhibition labels, drawings and objects on Collections Online.

When Sir Arthur Evans died in 1941, under the terms of his will his ‘archaeological papers’ were transferred to the Ashmolean Museum. This bequest became the Sir Arthur Evans Archive, which has long been known as the primary archaeological archive for the excavation of Knossos on Crete. Evans began excavating the site in 1900, while Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and had largely uncovered the Bronze Age building known as the ‘Palace of Minos’ by 1903. His work continued on and off at Knossos until 1931, including large campaigns of reconstructions. As a result, his papers include the original excavation notebooks, plans and sections, photographs and glass negatives produced by Evans and his team. Since 2024, some of this material has been available on the Ashmolean Collection Online website, alongside a draft finding aid. This is the result of a cataloguing, and more recently, digitisation, project undertaken by numerous individuals.

Unfortunately the Sir Arthur Evans Archive was not catalogued when it arrived at the Ashmolean in 1941 and so its original ordering is largely unknown. Even where the ordering is known (for instance, the box files containing numbered photographic prints, or folders labelled by Evans), this has sometimes not been respected because the Archive has been re-organised over the course of several decades into its current arrangement. Photographs have been stuck into albums, original drawings have been removed from folders and grouped together. As a result the Archive is now largely grouped by object type (e.g. notebooks, photographs, unpublished notes, fresco drawings and so on). Although this makes practical sense as a way to organise the Archive, it moves away from Evans’s groupings of material by subject (e.g. ‘Nilotic Influences’, or ‘Minoan Wall Painting’). It is not clear that all material was ever organised systematically but regrettably it is now impossible to reconstruct the original order, as would be desirable from an archival perspective.

One of the reasons that the Archive has been reorganised in this way is that it has been turned into an archaeological resource for understanding the site of Knossos. The importance of the original notebooks and photographs became clear in the high-profile debate between Leonard Palmer and Sir John Boardman in the 1960s about the date of the Linear B tablets preserved by the final destruction of Knossos and, by implication, the accuracy of Evans’s records.¹ Both used the Archive to support their point of view. More recently the focus of digitisation has been on what can be regarded as the primary archaeological records of Knossos. Although Evans did publish his results in detailed annual reports and then synthesised them in the Palace of Minos (published between 1921 and 1936), many aspects of the site remain essentially unpublished.

Both because of the scholarly focus on the site of Knossos, and because of the reorganisation of the Archive, some of its other contents have been comparatively neglected. Much of the Archive in fact relates to the publication process for the Palace of Minos: many photographs and original drawings are labelled with annotations for the printer. Thousands of page proofs, some also annotated, survive, and even the original printing plates. This is not surprising because as Evans turned to the work of publication, he returned to the archaeological records in order to reuse them as illustrations for his work. If the Archive is regarded as a metaphorical archaeological site, the publication material is stratified above the original records, and some of these original records are redeposited in these later levels.

To continue the stratigraphic analogy, the material from the 1936 Exhibition is in the latest stratum of the Archive. As Renée Trepagnier show in her essay on the Minoan Room, many of the exhibition labels reuse either page proofs or original drawings in Evans’s possession. And yet because of the focus on the excavation records, and also because of the lack of an original catalogue, this material has never been properly studied. Only through close comparison of the framed material with the few surviving photographs from the 1936 Exhibition has it been possible to confirm that this material, or at least some of it, was indeed included in the Minoan Room. Some of it is clearly recognisable because the labels are still framed between glass and card with distinctive black-taped borders. Some of the larger drawings also still have black frames with the original plate glass intact. As a result of this project, the 1936 stratum of the Archive has ben more fully recognised. In some cases it has been possible to rediscover items which were subsequently unframed and then grouped with related items, such as drawings or page proofs, in other parts of the Archive.

This renewed focus on the 1936 Exhibition is the result of a number of factors. One is a growing interest in the history of archaeology as a discipline, with the importance of archaeological exhibitions in this history being increasingly recognised.² By examining early archaeological exhibitions, scholars have shown how the discipline gained public recognition. Another related factor is work on the British School at Athens Archive undertaken recently by the Archivist, Amalia Kakissis and the Archive Intern, Charlotte Townsend, to reconstruct the other rooms of the 1936 Exhibition from surviving material in the BSA Archive.³ This resulted in a series of blog posts which helped to contextualise the Ashmolean’s material. More broadly this focus on previously neglected material can be seen as the result of digitisation projects which aim to make such bodies of unpublished archival material available online.

This particular project addressed this growing interest in disciplinary history with a workshop in May 2025 to contextualise the 1936 Exhibition alongside other exhibitions before the Second World War and the contemporary reception of the Minoans. The workshop and the research for this publication was funded by TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) with a grant for ‘Reconstructing the 1936 BSA Exhibition using the Ashmolean’s Sir Arthur Evans Archive’. This workshop resulted in a number of insights into the 1936 Exhibition and we are grateful to the participants. The papers were recorded and are available on the BSA website. There are also plans for a parallel publication on the BSA website, presenting the material from the Exhibition in the BSA Archive.

This project also wrestles with the difficulties of making over 200 exhibition labels and a similar number of Ashmolean objects comprehensible. Each label was digitised at item level on the Ashmolean’s collection database and is available (as are the objects) on the Ashmolean’s Collections Online website. Although the labels are grouped in a hierarchy (File AJE/6/2/1/1: Exhibition Labels from the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1936, within Sub-Fonds AJE/6: Exhibition Materials of Sir Arthur Evans) they are essentially unordered on the website because no original numbering survives. Users can follow the archive hierarchy or find them through search terms but it is difficult to understand their context in the 1936 Exhibition in this format. Most of the archaeological objects displayed in the Minoan Room were borrowed from the Ashmolean collection and have a distinct accession number which relates to the date they entered the collection. What this online publication aims to do is order the labels and objects according to their position in the Minoan Room, a temporary order which lasted for a few weeks in the autumn of 1936. Each object/item in the catalogue links through to Collections Online but the catalogue and essays help contextualise them according to their 1936 ordering.

This online publication also draws on the printed 1936 Exhibition Catalogue and integrates it with these newly digitised archival items for the first time. It also reconstructs at least a partial object list of objects loaned from the Ashmolean collection; no complete list of loans has yet been found in the archives. As a result it reproduces much of Evans’s original text, including some descriptions and terminology which would be regarded as racist or sexist today.

One of the results of this project is to show how an online publication of this kind can not only contextualise archival items (and archaeological objects), but also re-order them according to a temporary event. This is important because it reflects the contingency of ordering the Sir Arthur Evans Archive itself. Evans himself reused pieces of paper according to various different needs, and only the process of archiving this material has resulted in them being given a fixed identity and unique number. By understanding this temporary context it becomes possible to contextualise certain parts of the Sir Arthur Evans Archive in a different way. Not only is the Archive an important archaeological resource but it is also a valuable source of disciplinary and exhibition history.

1. Palmer and Boardman 1963. ↩︎

2. e.g. Thornton 2015, Baker 2020 ↩︎

3. Townsend 2023. ↩︎