The Graeme Clarke Hands-on Teaching Collection

Emeritus Professor Graeme Clarke has generously donated over 450 fragments and objects as a new hands-on teaching collection to enhance the educational outreach activities of the ANU Classics Museum. The items stem from excavations conducted by Professor Clarke at Jebel Khalid in Syria, a Hellenistic site on the banks of the Euphrates River, undertaken from 1986 - 2010. The objects that make up the teaching collection are those that were approved for removal to Australia by a panel of experts in Syria who examined each item. This process has ensured no items of significance or value left the country.

The items donated by Professor Clarke include ceramics (small vessels, amphora handles, fragments and sherds), metals (weapon heads, small domestic objects, and fragments), stone and plaster (sculptural fragments in marble, tesserae from mosaics), and glass (fragments and small vessels). While the individual items are of little financial value or consequence, their educational value is incalculable. In addition to these items, Prof. Clarke has donated site maps from the excavations, which will allow students to learn how to identify the original context of an object in the site. The site drawings are by the late architect Dr Barry Rowney, father-in-law to new Classics Museum Curator Dr Georgia Pike-Rowney.

Highlights of the hands-on collection include; a Parian marble toe (a fragment of a larger than life-size sculpture); a fragment of a ceramic child’s toy horse; a bronze lamp lid in the shape of a crocus; and fragments of fine Nabatean pottery.

The hands-on collection has been named in Professor Clarke’s honour, and will be housed in a bespoke object based learning room adjacent to the Classics Museum.

This room will undergo renovations early in 2023 in order to appropriately house the collection, as well as provide infrastructure and materials for hands-on learning activities, and a collection of reference texts. The Major Reports of the excavations at Jebel Khalid have been published in 8 volumes (6 are complete with two volumes forthcoming). These volumes will be generously purchased for the object-based learning room by the Friends of the Classics Museum. The renovations will also include an updated set of museum cases devoted specifically to the display of student curatorial projects, creative responses, and temporary exhibits. The renovations of the room and the adjacent museum cases is generously funded by the Classics Endowment.

Georgia will now be making use of this generous donation to develop hands-on educational programs. School students will be invited to visit the museum and undertake hands-on workshops in the new object-based learning room, and she will also take items out to schools. Thanks to Professor Clarke, many new generations will be engaged in the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds.

Dr. Georgia Pike-Rowne

School of Literature, 
Languages and Linguistics, 
ANU College of Arts and 
Social Sciences.