North Gallery
Shipwreck Galleries
Ground Floor, Cliff Street
The North Gallery, is used for temporary and travelling exhibitions.
The Xantho exhibition, will centre on the engine and the wreck. In 1980 Keith Muckelroy, a leading maritime archaeologist, stated that work on early steamships and the like, while interesting and sometimes 'furnishing useful displays for museums,' was 'not archaeology'. He argued in 1978 that
'As an academic discipline, archaeology interprets the past on the basis of surviving objects; it becomes redundant at that point in the past after which surviving records, descriptions, plans and drawings of contemporary objects can tell us more about the culture of the time than we can learn from digging up a few relics.'
The Xantho project has proved this to now be an outmoded position and it has shown that much can be learnt about people from an examination of iron and steamship wrecks.