Knowing What Is Important: Rethinking collections with Maasai cultural leaders
In January 2020 a group of Maasai activists and cultural spiritual leaders from Kenya and Tanzania were hosted in Cambridge by the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) during a two-week visit to museums in Oxford and London. The encounter between Maasai men and women and their ancestral artefacts was emotional for visitors and museum staff alike, but from pain…
Uncovering LGBTQ+ history at the Sedgwick Museum
Being able to ‘look things up on the computer’ is something that all of us rather take for granted. Even in a Museum where the size and scope of the collections is such that full digitisation is a daunting task, it is still hard to think back to being entirely reliant on drawers of catalogue cards and hand-written indexes. As…
Lessons learnt: engaging with Māori taonga
The exhibition Tū te Whaihanga: A Recognition of Creative Genius opened at dawn on Monday 7th October 2019 at the Tairāwhiti Museum, Gisborne, Aotearoa New Zealand. It featured 37 taonga (Māori ancestral treasures) traded and gifted with James Cook and the crew of the Endeavour and the Tahitian priest-navigator Tupaia during encounters in the Tairāwhiti area in 1769. Over half of the taonga were from the Sandwich collection, on deposit at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, (MAA) from Trinity College, Cambridge. These included a rain cloak of flax, wood, bone and stone weapons, fishhooks and two…
