Unboxing the Dead
by Adam Horovitz
Man as jigsaw
kept in cardboard box
each bone in plastic bags
scapula almost connected
to humerus, mandible, fibula.
A glossary scattered in storage.
Dirt and dig-dust
housed in separate boxes
await technologie’s advances.
All will be useful one day
to claim the truths of bone
from myth or expectation.
Let this man remain uncoloured
by the sympathy of naming.
Leave that for children
who wrap all they encounter
in flesh or clothes,
wind everything into a story.
For now, we must learn
what we can in the hard light
of this climate controlled room.
Contain the bone-dance. Mute
the thrill of trying too hard
to imagine lives unlike our own.
A Soundscape in Storage
by Chris Cundy
It’s said you can’t eavesdrop on history; you have to just be there. Well I’m at Corinium Museum’s storerooms in Northleach to eavesdrop on a guided tour and to follow a small group of visitors for a behind the scenes view of the Museum’s expansive collection. This is where you’ll find everything that’s not currently on display to the public. I’m also hoping to locate a few more of the finds from Hazleton North, the neolithic long barrow excavated just a few miles away from here on Barrow Ground field during the 1980’s.
The store rooms reveal a labyrinth of brightly lit corridors and shelving units stacked to the ceiling with cardboard boxes, all labelled and carefully numbered. It’s a library of objects drawn from the landscape, a taxonomy of place names and dates from Victorian country houses to motorway construction sites and second world war airfields.
I follow a group of visitors through rooms filled with silent threshing machines and industrial sawmills, fragments of industry and village life. We see parts of a Roman mosaic, cornice stones belonging to long forgotten buildings, all curiously compiled and kept under the immaculate light of the storeroom. Upstairs in a corner is an unassuming set of shelving units where the neolithic things are kept.
After our tour party has departed we stay behind to meet up with collections assistant Caroline Morris and Museum director Katharine Walker. We’re here to see the bones of a whole community of people who lived nearly six thousand years ago. Forty or so individuals were excavated at the site of Hazleton North long barrow and their remains are kept in cellophane bags inside cardboard boxes, along with their animals, their tools and even the plant life, the grains and seeds they were cultivating for food. Fragments of the tomb itself can be found here too.
Caroline carefully removes the lid of a box marked ‘Individual A’. There’s a man’s body inside, his whole life and a world I can hardly imagine.
The music I have created for this repeats a slow refrain, everything comes and goes in waves. I’ve combined the lowest tones using a large ceramic vessel, the air of a clay flute mouthpiece, and the oscillation of two electronic transistors. The music is about the gesture of breathing, the expression of the body, and the slow melody that follows.
© 2022 Adam Horovitz & Chris Cundy
Archaeology of the Ear; a series of poems and soundscapes exploring historic places and Corinium Museum artefacts that have sonorous and musical stories to tell
supported by Help Musicians & Arts Council England
