If you were a diehard atheist — Richard Dawkins, say — would you become Archbishop of Canterbury? Presumably only to demolish the church from within. I imagine similar thoughts must have flitted through the mind of the Belgian archaeologist Laura van Broekhoven when she became director of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
Top of her list of present research interests, you see, are “repatriation and redress”. In other words, she campaigns for museums to return artefacts dubiously acquired during colonial times to their countries of origin.
So when she took over the Pitt Rivers she must have felt as if all her Christmases had come at once — for if any institution has scope for decolonisation it’s this mad gothic vault of a museum.
