‘Serious, Important, Overcrowded’: The Replicas in the Minoan Room at the 1936 Burlington House Exhibition

In 1936, 36 years after Sir Arthur Evans first broke soil at the site of Knossos, a retrospective exhibition dedicated to 50 years of British archaeological work in Greece was staged in the Royal Academy at Burlington House in London. Evans displayed his work on the Minoans in a dedicated room, in what would be one of his final major museum exhibitions. This article examines Evans’ heavy use of replicas in his Minoan Room. Ninety years on, replicas are a renewed focus of scholarly interest; this article takes advantage of this interest to investigate how Evans used the replicas to help present his ideas as they appeared in the Palace of Minos , the final volume of which appeared the year before the 1936 exhibition.