Re-connecting with Taonga: Māori in the Museum
The 250th anniversary year of explorer James Cook’s arrival in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand has offered opportunities for the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (MAA) to reflect on the ways we work with Cook voyage collections. The common perception of Cook as a heroic discover of new lands ignores the long histories of Oceanic voyaging, settlement and trade. Skilled…
Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ Tours – where are we now?
The University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) have been running volunteer-led LGBTQ+ tours, Bridging Binaries, since December 2018. The tours are delivered by a team of brilliant volunteers and explore the spectrum of identities that exist across time, place and culture in our collections. In late 2019, after great audience responses to the pilot tours at the Museum of Classical Archaeology,…
Solving a Chilly Mystery
Conservators are often privy to some of the most exciting discoveries on individual objects within museum collections, since we work so intimately with them. It isn’t every day that you discover a veritable Russian Doll of objects thought to be lost to history, however! The project began fairly straightforward, with a set of leggings and mittens from the Oroqen people…
