Time and Technology: The Ancient Mediterranean at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney

This chapter introduces readers to the artefacts from Mediterranean antiquity and items related to the reception of these ancient cultures in later periods at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. With a look at the museum’s history and the origins of some of the ancient collection, it considers the role these types of objects can have in an institution which originated as a nineteenth-century museum of technology. By exploring examples of the particularities of collecting, cataloguing, and displaying such objects in the context of a technological museum, it is argued here, in this particular context, that ancient Mediterranean collections have occupied a complicated role as objects that can disrupt the linearity of temporal boundaries that form the standards in current and past museum practice.