11 Museum Surprises: Rediscovered Treasures, from a Celtic Brooch to an Early Hitchcock Film
These newly identified objects were mislabeled, misplaced, or simply mysterious.
A museum is like a theater for art and artifacts. In the front of the house, the pieces of the collection play their various roles for an attentive audience gathered in a hushed space.
But behind the scenes, the support staff works in controlled chaos, scrambling to put on the show. Inevitably, in the midst of the drama, curators lose track of things for a while—sometimes a very long while.
Take the case of a mysterious lump of organic material that the British Museum acquired in 1891, along with other objects from a Viking grave in Norway:
The lump, perhaps the remains of a wooden box, sat in storage until recently, when a glint of something shiny caught a curator's eye.
An x-ray scan
