Shedding Light on the Lux Project: Researching the Hetherington Collection

The Hetherington Collection contains lamps and other ceramics, as well as metal, and wood objects. At the moment Melissa and I are concentrating on the lamps, which are the inspiration for the Lux Project’s name. This is the first time looking into ancient lamps in any depth for both of us, and the process has actually been quite difficult.

To start, what we know about the collection itself thus far is that some of the objects were collected by Albert Edward Hetherington, an alumnus and faculty member of Wesley College (the precursor to U of W), in 1928, while others have been added to the collection over time. Hetherington travelled through Egypt and Syria, and we know he kept a journal, but we have yet to locate it. These artifacts were poorly documented, which makes the process of identifying their provenance particularly challenging. In the mid-1990s the collection was catalogued and assessed by Belle Meiklejohn at the University of Manitoba and more recently, members of the Chemistry department here at U of W have analyzed the ceramic items in the collection to determine where they may have originated based on the mineral composition of the clay used to make them. We decided to conduct our own appraisal and because we aimed to extract a different type of meaning than that of Meiklejohn, whose catalogue mainly attempts to record dates of the lamps. 

But there lies the question: What type of meaning can we extract from these lamps when they have no provenance?

I (Simone) started my research by looking at books in the library here at U of W. While neither of us has  yet come across a comprehensive guide to lamps from the ancient Mediterranean, I did find a decent catalogue of the ancient lamps in the Royal Ontario Museum’s collection (Hayes 1980). While this catalogue was extremely informative, it dated to 1980 and only had black and white photographs. In fact, most of the sources that I found dated to the 1980s and 90s and seemed to say the same thing: a comprehensive catalogue of lamps has yet to be produced. 

Simone hard at work identifying lamp typologies.

All of my sources delved into the complexities of lychnology and discerning lamp types. I only began to scratch the surface of the intricacies of lamp production and exportation. I found contrasting resources on how the size of lamps may or may not determine which were ‘original’ and which were ‘copies’ or made by branch workshops in various locations. The topic of ‘originals’ versus ‘copies’ in itself is another concept that requires much more clarification on my part. My immediate goal is to identify basic lamp typologies and to figure out how our lamps fit into that structure. For now, it seems that I have only begun to unravel the minutiae of ancient lamps.