ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Materialising Deep Time: Ceramics, Glass, and Plural Scientific Worlds at the Museum of Practical Geology

• In Event: Stratigraphy, Deep Time, and the Making of Geological Knowledge 3

English Abstract

This paper examines how the Museum of Practical Geology (London, 1851-1901) mobilised ceramic and glass objects to make the newly emerging concept of geological deep time materially comprehensible to Victorian publics. Rather than treating deep time as an abstract scientific idea, the museum presented fired clay and silica as mediums through which Earth history could be apprehended, handled, and visualised. Drawing on the early geological reflections of the museum’s founding director, Henry De la Beche (1796-1855), on the ‘youth’ and ‘revolutions’ of the Earth (1818), the paper traces how museum curators used ceramics to collapse distinctions between human craft and geological process.

Included in the museum’s ceramics catalogue, a diagram by the antiquary William Chaffers (1811-1892), depicted geological strata populated with potsherds rather than fossils, casting ceramic fragments as temporal markers embedded within the Earth’s layered ground. In the museum’s ceramic and glass department, the ceramicist George Maw (1832-1912) arranged British clays in geological sequence, from post-Tertiary deposits through Jurassic and Triassic strata to the Silurian, further framing ceramic materials as products of deep geological ages. Through these practices, the museum positioned clay as both an industrial resource and an archive of the planet’s antiquity, rendering the Earth’s deep past newly legible through manufactured objects.

By analysing catalogues, correspondence, display lists, and surviving objects now in the V&A, the paper argues that ceramics acted as alternative ‘fossils,’ enabling visitors to encounter deep time not only through scientific authority but through the tangible affordances of everyday material culture. This case shows how the museum brought geological science, archaeological excavation, industrial craft knowledge, and religious chronologies into contact, creating plural temporal worlds and exposing overlapping and contested narratives of Earth’s past.

Author

• James Leo Kiernan, University of Edinburgh