A thing of beauty?

Are bones beautiful? I suppose that depends what the term ‘beautiful’ means to you, and it may seem to be misapplied to bits of dead biological tissue. People can be beautiful, as can fine art and scenery, but lumps of bone? My reason for raising this question is having spent a sunny Saturday pottering about a sculpture park, trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to develop the refined aesthetic sensitivity required in order to find beauty in some irregular blocks of stone or large blobs of bronze. Somewhere about the tenth Miró sculpture, as I was losing the will to live, it struck me that there is more aesthetic pleasure to be had in browsing through a skeleton reference collection than in most art galleries. The shapes of bones are curiously pleasing, and a drawerful of specimens of the same element of the skeleton is a fascinating series of variations on the same form, subtly differing from one iteration to the next. Underlying that variation is the complex story of form and function, moderated by the family relationships between species. Bird bones, in particular, have this appeal, their slender delicacy appealing in much the way that intricate glass sculptures or fine porcelain attract the eye. Perhaps if the eye of the beholder is not in too much of a hurry, then bones can be beautiful.

Context matters, of course. A few bleached bird bones washed up on the tide, recalled in tranquility as Wordsworth recommended, may linger in the memory because they recall a particular place and time. Reference collections generally lack those personal associations, but present bones in all their diversity in large quantities. We hold these collections because they are useful: they enable us to confirm the identification of ancient bone specimens by comparison with bones known to have originally grown in a gannet, a cat or a halibut. Without those collections, our identifications could not be validated, and much of what we try to do in zooarchaeology would become approximate and unreliable. So our collections of skeletons are clearly useful.

William Morris, he of the oppressive wallpaper designs and clunky furniture, reckoned that you should have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. We know reference collections to be useful, so that alone should justify cluttering up our labs with skeletons on shelves, in drawers, and hung on the walls. But do all of those specimens have to be useful?  Can we justify giving space to specimens that are probably of little practical utility? I am unlikely ever to work on material from the Antarctic, but if someone offered me a penguin skeleton, would I find room for it? Yes, of course I would, and I bet that many of my zooarchaeological colleagues have specimens in their reference collections that are of doubtful usefulness, but that are aesthetically attractive, or intriguing, or simply amusing. And why not? Perhaps we can admit to ourselves and to each other that we have nothing in our reference collections that we do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, and find a niche for William Morris in the unlikely surroundings of our labs. But please, not the wallpaper.

Part of the York bird skeleton reference collection