The Wiltshire Heritage Museum, formerly known as Devizes Museum, is a museum, archive and library and art gallery in Devizes, Wiltshire, England. During 2013, the Museum will be changing its name to the Wiltshire Museum. The museum was established and is still run by, the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (WANHS), a registered charity founded in 1853. After the purchase of an old grammar school the museum was opened in 1873. Subsequently it expanded into two Georgian houses on either side and still occupies this location today.
The museum maintains a collection covering the archaeology, art, history and natural history of Wiltshire. This collection covers periods of history from as far back as the Palaeolithic and also includes Neolithic, Bronze Age, Roman, Saxon, Mediaeval and more recent historical artefacts. Among the prehistoric collections are items from the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Several of the collections have been designated as being a significant part of England’s cultural heritage.
One of the most important collections at the museum is the finds from Bush Barrow, an early Bronze Age burial mound in Stonehenge World Heritage Site. The barrow was excavated by William Cunnington in 1808 and produced the richest and most important finds from a Bronze Age grave in the Stonehenge Landscape to date. The finds were acquired by the museum in 1883 and were displayed there until 1922 when they were indefinitely loaned to the British Museum. After a controversial restoration of the largest piece that may not reflect its original finish, the pieces were returned to Devizes in 1985. Replicas are on permanent display in the museum but the original artefacts themselves are kept in a bank vault due to their priceless nature. The original pieces were exhibited for a weekend in 2008 to celebrate the bicentenary of their discovery. The Museum is currently raising funds to be able to create new Neolithic and Bronze Age displays, that will include the Bronze Age gold. English Heritage have announced that they have developed the Stonehenge Museum Partnership with Wiltshire Heritage Museum and Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum to tell the Stonehenge story at the new Stonehenge Visitor Centre.
The natural history collection includes remains of a plesiosaur called Bathyspondylus found at Swindon in 1774. Bathyspondylus swindoniensis was first described in 1982 from the Museum's specimens.
The Museum has launched a community bus service, the Henge Hopper, linking Avebury with Amesbury and Stonehenge.
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Famous quotes containing the words heritage and/or museum:
“Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honoured as the jewellery of God only by them—when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.”
—Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)
“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)