January 6, 2020 –  We all used to visit museum shows about antiquity to feast our eyes on gorgeous objects and imagine the cultural wealth of, say, ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome. These days, curators are increasingly changing and deepening the experience. Their institutional ethos has evolved to include hitherto overlooked layers of narrative around the artifacts—how they were excavated; how they were recorded and preserved; the assumptions made about them by archaeologists, right or wrong, at the time and why. There’s a new emphasis, also, on the life of locals who crafted the objects centuries ago or helped with the digs. We get to share the realities of historically distant others more fully, rather than gaze passively on the loot they produced or uncovered. We understand better how our thinking differs from that of the past, and how we, too, might have thought back then…