3,257
edits
Changes
→Birth of Modern Museums
By the 18th century, scientific progress and ever increasing knowledge about the world increased interest in creating large public galleries. Furthermore, similar to the interests of the Babylonian Empire, the new empires of the world, in particular Britain and later France in the late 18th century, began to see the collection of artifacts and objects as a way to display power and dominance in the globe. The British Museum was opened based on the principal it would be accessible to the public, although mostly it was the privy of the middle and upper classes, and it began to display the wonders of Britian's every increasing dominance and thus by extension reflect British superiority to the world.<ref>For more on how large national museums played a role in colonialism, see: Aronsson, Peter, and Gabriella Elgenius, eds. 2014. National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe, 1750-2010: Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
</ref> This continued into the 19th century, where the Louvre and British Museum began a type of competition to collect the best objects from natural and ancient history to show their respective state's prowess on the world stage. Soon, with the increasing collections, museums began to be divided into different types of museums, such as natural history and archaeology. However, it was only by the late 19th century were museums beginning to become more scientific in developing disciplines in studying ancient objects. With the advances made by Charles Darwin on the Theory of Evolution and archaeology becoming a more modern discipline led by Augustus Pitt-Rivers and Flinders Petrie do we see museums now retrieving objects with more care. The collections also now became more studied for greater insight into knowledge about the deep past, including the natural and human-made world.<ref> For more on the history of archaeology and how the Theory of Evolution and excavators such as Pitt-Rivers made it a well developed discipline, see: Renfrew, Colin, and Paul G. Bahn. 2008. Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. 5th ed. London: Thames & Hudson.<ref>
==Summary==
