By Andrew Klein

Dedication: To my wife — who sees the forest and the trees, who laughs at the powerful, and who never lets me forget that the best stories are the ones they tried to hide.

I. The Medici and the Ceramic Worker

In 2013, Renaissance scholar Catherine Fletcher made an observation that should have been obvious but somehow wasn’t: archaeology can be just as elitist as history.

Fletcher noted that some of the most prominent archaeological projects in Italy focused not on ordinary people, but on the Medici — the wealthy, the powerful, the celebrities of their day. The tombs of grand-dukes made headlines. The lives of ceramic workers remained invisible.

Why?

Because funding follows fame.

Institutions reward research on the spectacular. A golden mask is more likely to grace a journal cover than a broken pot. And a Medici tomb — with its lineage, its patronage, its connection to power — is simply easier to fund than a ceramics workshop whose workers left no names and no portraits.

But you cannot have kings without peasants. You cannot have cathedrals without stonemasons. And you cannot understand human history — real human history — by studying only the people who could afford to be remembered.

This is not malice. It is methodological inertia. And it is time to name it.

II. The Australian Parallel

The same bias shapes Australian archaeology and museology — but with an additional, uncomfortable dimension.

Australia has two histories: the 65,000+ year history of Indigenous occupation, and the ~250 year history of colonial settlement. In terms of actual physical space in museums, funding for research, and curatorial attention, the balance tilts overwhelmingly toward the colonial period.

Consider:

· The Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney has made genuine efforts to embed First Nations principles, including a ceremonial space for community healing,

plantings with Gadigal names, and exhibitions co-developed with Aboriginal art centres

. These are good steps. But they are also recent steps — and they were notable enough to generate headlines, which tells us how unusual they remain.

· The Potter Museum’s “65,000 Years” exhibition explicitly “asks us to rethink the roots of Australian art history and culture and recognise Indigenous artists as the first artists of Australia”. The very title is a provocation: 65,000 Years versus the colonial timeline. The fact that this framing is still described as “provocative” suggests how deeply the colonial default remains embedded.

· A $30 million NSF Centre for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science has been established, but the researchers themselves note that “the practice of archaeology with and for nonsettler communities remains underdeveloped with regard to institutional priorities and funding agency bureaucracies”. In plain English: the money still flows to old models.

III. Truth-Telling as Institutional Practice

Nathan “mudyi” Sentance, a Wiradjuri librarian and museum educator, has been working for over a decade on “supporting First Nations representation and truth-telling in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums”.

The fact that this work is still described — by Sentance himself — as requiring “small but complex steps” tells us how far we have to go. Truth-telling is not a checkbox. It is not a single exhibition or a single smoking ceremony. It is a structural reorientation — one that institutions resist because it requires them to cede control.

And control, as the Medici tombs remind us, is what elitism is for.

IV. The Funding Gap

The pattern is consistent across continents and centuries:

Aspect Indigenous / Ordinary People Elite / Colonial

Timeline of attention Recent, partial, underfunded Longstanding, institutionalized

Museum space Often relegated to “ethnographic” wings or afterthoughts Central galleries, grand entrances

Funding priority Reliant on grants, community partnerships, and philanthropic intervention Well-funded through established channels

Exhibition logic “Truth-telling” framed as a difficult innovation Default narrative, rarely questioned

Who controls the story Slowly shifting toward co-design Historically and institutionally controlled by settler / elite frameworks

The question is not whether things are improving. They are. The question is: why did it take so long? And why does the balance of physical space, funding, and curatorial attention still tilt so dramatically away from the majority of human experience?

V. The Unseen Forest

This is the same pattern we identified in rainforest archaeology — and in the history of disease research, and in the gene-centric blind spots of molecular biology.

Scientists and institutions look where the light is good.

They excavate where funding is available. They publish what journals will accept. They build careers on questions that have clear answers, methods that are well-established, and narratives that flatter the powerful.

The rainforest was unseen because no one looked. The ceramic worker was invisible because no one asked. The 65,000 years of Indigenous history were sidelined because the colonial story was easier — easier to fund, easier to exhibit, easier to teach.

But “easier” is not the same as “true.”

And the obligation of scholarship is not to the easy. It is to the real.

VI. A Call to Look Elsewhere

We cannot excavate every forgotten workshop. We cannot fund every understudied site. We cannot, overnight, reorient the institutional inertia that has shaped archaeology and museology for generations.

But we can stop pretending that absence is evidence.

We can fund research in neglected regions and on neglected topics. We can insist that museums measure their success not by the glitter of their golden masks, but by the depth of their truth-telling. We can ask better questions — and hold institutions accountable when they choose easier ones.

The Medici will always be studied. That is not the problem.

The problem is that the ceramic worker remains invisible — not because the evidence is lacking, but because the will is lacking.

And that is a choice.

It is time to make a different one.

VII. Conclusion

The hidden majority of human history — the peasants, the stonemasons, the ceramic workers, the First Nations peoples, the ordinary people who built the world while the powerful took credit — deserve more than a footnote.

They deserve to be seen.

Not because they are noble. Not because they are victims. Because they are real. Because their lives, their labour, their adaptability, and their survival made everything else possible.

And because a history that only remembers the powerful is not history at all.

It is propaganda.

Andrew Klein

References

1. Fletcher, C. (2013, December 2). Archaeology can be just as elitist as history. History Matters, University of Sheffield.

2. Chau Chak Wing Museum. (2020). Embedding First Nations Principles. University of Sydney.

3. Broad, T. (2025, May 19). The Potter Museum’s “65,000 Years” exhibition. Broadsheet.

4. NSF Centre for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. (2023). Funding announcement.

5. Sentance, N. (2022). Truth-telling in museums. Artlink, 42(1).

6. Silliman, S. W. (2023). Codesigned archaeology: A way forward. American Antiquity, 88(2), 1-9.