This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(April 2018) |
Location | Cambridge |
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Coordinates | 52°12′09.63″N0°07′15.05″E / 52.2026750°N 0.1208472°E |
Type | University Museum |
Collections | local antiquities, together with archaeological and ethnographic artefacts from around the world |
Visitors | 76,669 (2019) [1] |
Director | Professor Nicholas Thomas |
Owner | University of Cambridge |
University of Cambridge Museums | |
Part of a series on the |
Anthropology of art, media, music, dance and film |
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Social and cultural anthropology |
The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, also known as MAA, at the University of Cambridge houses the university's collections of local antiquities, together with archaeological and ethnographic artefacts from around the world. The museum is located on the university's Downing Site, on the corner of Downing Street and Tennis Court Road. In 2013 it reopened following a major refurbishment of the exhibition galleries, with a new public entrance directly on to Downing Street. [2]
The museum is part of the University of Cambridge Museums consortium. [3]
Founded in 1884 as the university's Museum of General and Local Archaeology, the museum's initial collections included local antiquities collected by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and artefacts from Polynesia donated by Alfred Maudslay and Sir Arthur Gordon. Anatole von Hügel, the museum's first curator donated his own collection of artefacts from the South Pacific. [4] More material was collected by the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait under Alfred Haddon and W. H. R. Rivers. [5] Haddon and Rivers would encourage their Cambridge students — including Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, John Layard and Gregory Bateson — to continue to collect for the museum in their ethnographic fieldwork.
Von Hügel set in motion a move to larger, specially built, premises: in 1913 the museum moved to its present location in Downing Street, although the new galleries were not fully installed until after World War I. Various depositions and donations of eighteenth-century collections — including material collected on James Cook's three expeditions — were made to the museum in the 1910s and 1920s.
The MAA reopened after a lengthy refurbishment in 2013, with a completely redeveloped ground floor, new temporary exhibition space and new archaeology galleries. [6]
Von Hügel's successors as curator have been Louis Colville Gray Clarke (from 1922 to 1937), Thomas Paterson (from 1937 to 1948), Geoffrey Bushnell (from 1948 to 1970), Peter Gathercole (from 1970 to 1981), Prof. David Phillipson (1981 to 2006), and the 2006-present director, Prof. Nicholas Thomas.
Currently, the Museum is part of a joint research project with the British Museum, looking at the use of audio recordings within anthropology and mapping connections between related collections of objects, photographs, and field notes, under the supervision of professors Vicky Barnecutt and Don Niles. [7]
The museum's current displays are arranged on three floors:
The museum building, which is Grade II listed, incorporates the central section of Inigo Jones's choir screen from Winchester Cathedral. [8]
A display on the Anglo-Saxon Trumpington bed burial is on the ground floor.
In 1770, after returning to England from their voyage in the South Pacific Ocean, Captain James Cook and botanist Joseph Banks brought with them, along with a large collection of flora and fauna, many cultural artefacts. These included a collection of roughly fifty Australian Aboriginal spears that belonged to the Gweagal people. The spears were given to Cook's patron John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who then gave them to his alma mater Trinity College, and four are still in existence. The spears are among the few remaining artefacts that can be traced back to Cook's first voyage. Although the Gweagal Spears remain in the ownership of Trinity College, they are on display at the museum. [9] [10] [11]
The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada displays world arts and cultures, in particular works by First Nations of the Pacific Northwest. As well as being a major tourist destination, MOA is a research and teaching museum, where UBC courses in art, anthropology, archaeology, conservation, and museum studies are given. MOA houses close to 50,000 ethnographic objects, as well as 535,000 archaeological objects in its building alone.
Penn Museum, formerly known as The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is an archaeology and anthropology museum at the University of Pennsylvania. It is located on Penn's campus in the University City neighborhood of Philadelphia, at the intersection of 33rd and South Streets. Housing over 1.3 million artifacts, the museum features one of the most comprehensive collections of middle and near-eastern art in the world.
Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum displaying the archaeological and anthropological collections of the University of Oxford in England. The museum is located to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and can only be accessed through that building.
Manchester Museum is a museum displaying works of archaeology, anthropology and natural history and is owned by the University of Manchester, in England. Sited on Oxford Road (A34) at the heart of the university's group of neo-Gothic buildings, it provides access to about 4.5 million items from every continent. It is the UK's largest university museum and serves both as a major visitor attraction and as a resource for academic research and teaching. It has around 430,000 visitors each year.
Alfred Percival Maudslay was a British colonial administrator and archaeologist. He pioneered the careful archaeological study of the Maya ruins and the results of his field work were presented in Biologia Centrali-Americana: Archaeology (1889–1902). The massive five volume set continues to serve as an important work of reference for the study of Maya culture. In 1908, he made a complete translation, with annotations, of Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia. His translation remains the standard English edition.
Malakula Island, also spelled Malekula, is the second-largest island in the nation of Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, in Melanesia, a region of the Pacific Ocean.
Alfred Cort Haddon, Sc.D., FRS, FRGS FRAI was an influential British anthropologist and ethnologist. Initially a biologist, who achieved his most notable fieldwork, with W.H.R. Rivers, C.G. Seligman and Sidney Ray on the Torres Strait Islands. He returned to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he had been an undergraduate, and effectively founded the School of Anthropology. Haddon was a major influence on the work of the American ethnologist Caroline Furness Jayne.
The William R. and Clarice V. Spurlock Museum, better known as the Spurlock Museum, is an ethnographic museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Spurlock Museum's permanent collection includes portions of collections from other museums and units on the Urbana-Champaign campus such as cultural artifacts from the Museum of Natural History and Department of Anthropology as well as historic clothing from the Bevier Collection of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. The museum also holds objects donated by other institutions and private individuals. With approximately 51,000 objects in its artifact collection, the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collects, preserves, documents, exhibits, and studies objects of cultural heritage. The museum's main galleries, highlighting the ancient Mediterranean, modern Africa, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas, celebrate the diversity of cultures through time and across the globe.
John Willoughby Layard was an English anthropologist and psychologist.
Anatole von Hügel was the second son of the Austrian nobleman.
The National Museum of Indonesia is an archeological, historical, ethnological, and geographical museum located in Jalan Medan Merdeka Barat, Central Jakarta, right on the west side of Merdeka Square. Popularly known as the Elephant Museum after the elephant statue in its forecourt, its broad collections cover all of Indonesia's territory and almost all of its history. The museum has endeavoured to preserve Indonesia's heritage for two centuries.
The Gweagal are a clan of the Dharawal people of Aboriginal Australians. Their descendants are traditional custodians of the southern areas of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Nicholas Jeremy Thomas is an Australian-born anthropologist, Professor of Historical Anthropology, and Director, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge since 2006, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2007.
The Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna is the largest anthropological museum in Austria, established in 1876. It is housed in a wing of the Hofburg Imperial Palace and holds a collection of more than 400,000 ethnographical and archaeological objects from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America.
The Powell-Cotton Museum is situated in Quex Park, Birchington, Kent and houses the diverse personal collections of hunter and explorer Percy Powell-Cotton. The museum also contains the collections of Powell-Cotton's two daughters, Antoinette and Diana Powell-Cotton, who shared their father's passion for collecting. The museum, which links to the ground floor of Quex House, now comprises nine galleries dedicated not only to the extensive collection of large mammals, but to many artefacts representing the cultures and traditions of the locations Powell-Cotton visited.
Maureen Robin Lander is a New Zealand weaver, multimedia installation artist and academic. Lander is a well-respected and significant Māori artist who since 1986 has exhibited, photographed, written and taught Māori art. She continues to produce and exhibit work as well as attend residencies and symposia both nationally and internationally.
Ken Thaiday, known as Ken Thaiday Snr, is an artist from Erub, one of the Torres Strait Islands. He is known for his headdresses (dhari), masks, shark totems and kinetic sculptures, which connect to his island traditions and culture.
The Gweagal shield is an Aboriginal Australian shield dropped by a Gweagal warrior opposing James Cook's landing party at Botany Bay on 29 April 1770. The shield was recovered by Joseph Banks and taken back to England, but it is unclear whether the shield still exists. An Aboriginal shield held by the British Museum, and once thought to be the Gweagal shield, is more likely to originate from an area further north. It is currently the subject of a campaign for its repatriation to Australia.