ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests how an alternative, more holistic approach to people and their relationships with each other and their things, and to how people lived their daily lives, can be employed as the theoretical basis to improve prehistoric archaeological displays in museum contexts, thus revealing the multiple social identities of historical persons. The principal suggestion is to work across disciplines and for archaeologists and museologists to join forces by employing the concepts of the chaîne opératoire and cross-craft interaction, which are of great potential and use to both museum studies and other humanities disciplines. Changing approaches to museum displays of prehistoric collections may subsequently attract interest from contemporary and future visitors who may be able to connect personally to some past human activities and identities (see Swain 2007: 195). Feeley-Harnik (cited in Butler 2006: 471) states that: ‘we have no knowledge of past people except through present people; we have no way of knowing others except through ourselves’ (see also Barker 2010: 296). Visitors may, as a result of a different museum experience, become interested in actively taking part in producing meaning in relation to what they observe, absorb and associate with.
