Wilson College Antiquities Collection

Wilson College maintains a collection of some 500 antiquities, dating from the third millennium BCE to the Byzantine period. The collection includes items from a range of locations around the Mediterranean basin, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, Italy, Greece, Palestine, and Syria, although most are of Greek and Roman origin. The collection also spans a wide range of media, including ceramics, glassware, coins, metal objects of various types, terracotta figurines, and sculpture.The first objects were added to the collection in 1921, a century ago. Antiquities have been acquired through purchases by the College and by gifts from students, institutions, and interested donors.

A rotating selection of the collection is on display in the Barron Blewett Hunnicutt Gallery, located in the Hankey Center. The gallery, named in memory of Lecturer in Art History Barron Blewett Hunnicutt, was made possible by a gift from her husband, Captain William Hunnicutt. The Hunnicutt Gallery and the Antiquities Collection serve as a unique resource for classes in ancient world studies at the college. Classes in ancient world studies frequently work on projects related to the collection, including pop-up museum exhibitions for Student Research Day and curation of a display case located on the main floor of the John Stewart Memorial Library. Students have completed projects on Roman glass, Egyptian textiles, Greek vases, Greek and Roman coinage, and ancient houses. Objects from the collection provide students a concrete and tactile way to interact with the ancient world, bringing it alive for them. Students also work directly with the collection as interns, and have assisted in the development of the current exhibition, digitization of the collection records, maintenance of collection storage, organization, and photography.

The current exhibition, Voices of the Wine Dark Sea, transforms the gallery into the Mediterranean Sea, offering visitors the ability to travel around the Mediterranean basin listening to the voices of marginalized peoples from the ancient world, represented by the juxtaposition of objects from the collection with primary source texts.

The Wilson College Antiquities Collection: The Next Hundred Years

As we reflect on the hundredth anniversary of the collection at Wilson College, much has changed in the world since the first objects were acquired by the college. The current project, Building Equity: Making the Barron C. Blewett Hunnicutt Gallery Accessible to All, aims to position the collection as a regional resource for local k-12 teachers and neighboring colleges. We invite you to check out the classroom resources and lesson plans on our website and to consider either visiting us or inviting our faculty into your classroom or school. For college students (undergraduate or graduate), there is the possibility to work directly with the collection on a variety of projects or for personal study.

Support for this project comes from a Society for Classical Studies Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities  grant and a Classical Association of the Atlantic States Leadership Initiative Grant.

As we look forward, anticipating a bright future for Wilson College and the Antiquities Collection, we have also taken a look back, evaluating where we have come from and where we have been. As educators with the goal of decolonizing the ancient world studies curriculum, decentering whiteness from our view of the ancient world, and illuminating marginalized voices, we have had to grapple with our complicity, through ownership in the collection, in a marketplace that is rooted in colonialist and imperialist practices, and is used to fund terrorist groups and other extremists.  Only by acknowledging our role in this tangled web can we move forward to a decolonized future for the collection.

Read our statement of ethics here.

Contact Us

For information about the Wilson College Antiquities Collection and the Hunnicutt Gallery, please contact Bonnie Rock-McCutcheon, Instructor of Ancient World Studies.

Bonnie Rock-McCutcheon, PhD
Assistant Professor
717-264-6227
bonnie.rock@wilson.edu