Pembroke People: Collections, Curating, and Community with Ben Paites

Ben Paites (2009) studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Pembroke. He’s now the Collections and Learning Curator at Colchester Museums, a role which combines traditional curatorial duties with a focus on accessibility, education, and community engagement.

What is your specialism within Archaeology?

I specialise in Roman archaeology and in particular provincial archaeology. So not Roman archaeology in Rome, but in Britain, France, or Germany - the fringes of the Empire.

What drew you to that?

I love looking at how different cultures blend together, looking at it from a material cultures perspective. It wasn’t the case that Roman culture came along and everything became Roman. Local cultures pick and choose what to adopt, whether it’s artistic styles, or technologies. I enjoy looking at what gets chosen and what doesn’t, and how two cultures can live together in one place. The architecture and the buildings, how those two cultures blend.

Photo copyright Colchester + Ipswich Museums

Why museums?

I’m one of those rare people who knew what I wanted to do from a very young age. I always wanted to work in museums and I particularly wanted to be a curator, although I didn’t really know what it meant. I had in my head this idea of what is was but having finally got the job it’s very different to what I expected!

I did a lot of volunteering when I was younger and then I did an MA in Artefact studies at UCL. I then did a placement at the Museum of London working for the portable antiquities scheme. This is a national body based at the British Museum. Each country has a Finds Liaison Officer, an archaeologist who works with members of the public who have found artefacts. They have a database of over a million finds now, and have been running for about twenty years. It acts as a resource for researchers to look at the archaeology of different areas. They’re also encouraging people, metal detectorists especially, to do responsible detecting and to share what they find with other people so the public can benefit. I was a Finds Liaison Officer for Essex and that got me to Colchester. After a year or so one of the Curators left and so I applied for the job and have been doing it ever since.

What does a Collections and Learning Curator do?

They’re very different to most curators, who will predominantly be very research-focused, looking into the collections they have, generating content for exhibitions and so on. And I do that. But I also develop and run the activities programme for the school holidays, help develop the schools programme for school visits, and develop and run activities for adults. Essentially the entire activities programme is jointly run by the Collections and Learning team and the Visitor Services team. We also facilitate research visits. We have thousands of objects in the collection and it’s designated as internationally significant because of the Roman collection, Colchester having been the capital of Roman Britain at the start. There’s a whole wealth of finds we have here.

Why combine Learning and Curator roles?

On a national scale we’ve always been a small museum service. We’ve got three curators working across the three museums. Before I started there was a natural history curator, social history curator, an archaeology curator, a learning team, a community engagement officer, and an events officer. And now there are three people doing all those jobs. It’s partly funding related but the main reason behind it is that for many years there’s been disagreement in best practice between museum curatorial and learning teams. They have different approaches and priorities. Having individuals who are responsible for both the collections and the learning hopefully means you get a more coherent voice in exhibitions and events, and make them more accessible. It is a challenge but it’s starting to work, and other museums have begun to adopt it as well.

What does the community engagement aspect involve?

My role changed slightly in the last year because the museum service became a National Portfolio Organisation for the Arts Council. These are organisations around the country identified as showing best practice, that should be looked at as examples of running a museum service, an art gallery, a theatre, or so on. As part of that my role began to include community engagement as a focus. I’m the community engagement lead in the service at the moment, and I facilitate and ensure that we have a community element to everything we do. Part of that is going out to groups and speaking to them, particularly organisations that work with community groups, and asking how the museum service can support the work they do. Last year for example our big focus was on developing a programme around better access for people with autism. We have relaxed openings once a month and that will continue running forever, hopefully!

The idea is that we want to ensure no one feels they can’t come into our museums. There are financial, physical, and perceived barriers to museums and we want to work on improving those things. Sometimes people don’t realise they can go into museums for reasons other than just to look at the art or objects.

What is the value of museums to communities?

One strand is education. It’s not just history. In Colchester we have Colchester Castle which is archaeology, Holytrees Museum which is social and working history, and the natural history museum which is about science and the natural world. It has elements about sustainability and climate change. Although school curriculums are often very good on these topics, it’s a more interactive and fun way of learning.

What I always say is that museums aren’t necessarily places of learning, but a place to inspire learning. I’d much rather kids come to us and go away not necessarily remembering all the facts within the museum, but having said , ‘I really enjoyed that virtual reality chariot, I’m going to go and read about Roman chariots’ for example.  That’s my idea. And we’re working with communities, asking what they would like to see from us.  We can say, we’ll give you this, but that might not be what the community needs.

There is almost always something for everyone. Everyone has an interest and we hope you’d find something within the museum that will resonate with you on some level.  But at the same time we’re very aware that this isn’t always the case. So one of the big things we’re looking at this year is how representative our permanent displays are of the community in Colchester. So in Holytrees we have a lot of white, straight men in our displays, and the women are usually in the kitchens or the children gallery. I’m hoping to get different community groups in to have a look at our collections, and create a resource that looks at perspectives from the community and helps our permanent displays become more reflective of that community.