Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

I was a bit on the fence about visiting the museum at first – I feel like museums of anthropology in particular have a lot of caveats attached to their collections related to colonisation and theft. To be fair to the museum they are aware of this themselves with the below sign greeting visitors in the entrance and their website stating they were one of the first museums to return items to their country of origin in 1961. The latest items to be returned when I visited were some Aboriginal spears stolen by James Cook and his men from Australia in 1770.

The museum is two pronged, the history of humanity as depicted from items around the world (which did make me a little uncomfortable at times) and archaeological finds from the Cambridge area over the last 140 years. The Museum was founded in the 1880s formed around collections donated from a variety of sources including the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon, Governor of Fiji in the 1870s. The purpose built museum building was built in 1913.

One of my favourite pieces is actually outside in the grounds of the museum. It’s called Displaced Mihi and was made by a Maori sculptor Lyonel Grant especially for the museum. It was gifted in 2020 and is an adaptation of a traditional tekoteko figure which stood at the top of meeting houses to welcome visitors. Here it is acting as a guardian of the contents of the museum from many cultures and as a welcome to visitors which I think is a lovely idea.

I also found these Mayan sculptures interesting as they were among the first objects given to the museum. They are plaster casts (the best I can tell the originals are still in situ, although now quite badly eroded) and come from Quirigua in Guatemala. They were made by Lorenzo Giuntini, a member of the explorer Alfred Maudsley’s Central America expedition in 1884.

The building itself is quite beautiful which you can see at the back of the museum where there’s a green courtyard surrounded by other university buildings. Certainly a museum that makes you think if nothing else. Entry to the museum is free.