Jersey's New Museum
Ann Hills evaluates the recently-opened island museum.
The new Jersey Museum, which officially opened on March 19th 1992, is a 3.8 million pound development funded mainly by the States of Jersey. Its origins go back to modest beginnings in 1836.
The new displays put on show for the first time the earliest recorded human activity in Europe. In a two-storey reconstruction based on a site at La Cotte de St Brelade, prehistoric figures from 250,000 years ago are seen climbing down a cliff face, over which they had hunted mammoths and woolly rhinoceros to their death – a scenario based on excavations, and with the original bones lying as they were found. Alongside the reconstruction is a case containing more finds – a fragment of a child's skull and thirteen teeth from a Neanderthal man or woman who died over 50,000 years ago. Next to this tableau is another, with an archaeologist explaining the finds to a child.
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