Collection: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Collection-level records:

• Collection history (Museum website)

  The Museum was founded in the 1880s, when the global empires of European nations were expanding rapidly, there was growing debate around humanity’s history and cultural diversity, and increasing interest in material culture, technology and the arts of peoples worldwide. Some scholars in Britain and elsewhere theorised ‘social evolution’ and promoted racist categories. Others believed that museums could promote understanding of the cultures and achievements of people worldwide.

  Origins

  Like many museums, MAA grew out of a local scientific society. The Cambridge Antiquarian Society had assembled archaeology collections from 1839 on, and lobbied the University to establish a museum. Their efforts were supported Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon. A former student of Trinity College, he was Governor of Fiji in the 1870s. He had been encouraged to collect artefacts by a young Anglo-Austrian scientific traveller, Baron Anatole von Hügel. Donations from Gordon, the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and material from Alfred Maudslay, a pioneer of central American archaeology, constituted the Museum’s first collections.

  Von Hügel was appointed Curator, and was ambitious in fundraising for the purpose-built building, which was opened in 1913, and in expanding the collections. The 1898 Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait, led by Alfred Haddon, was the most important of early field research projects, and brought thousands of carefully-documented artefacts, photographs, sound recordings and drawings by Indigenous people. Trinity College placed exceptionally significant archaeological and anthropological collections ‘on deposit’ in the Museum (meaning that the College retained ownership of the objects). These included 102 artefacts from the first voyage of Captain James Cook, the earliest world cultures collection to be made in the field and systematically documented, and Roman inscribed stones, mostly from northern Britain, which were collected by the Stuart antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton.

  The twentieth century

  Through the twentieth century, Cambridge archaeologists, anthropologists and other researchers brought collections made in the field back to the Museum. They included leading scholars in their disciplines, such as Dorothy Garrod, Gregory Bateson, Kathleen Kenyon, Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody and Marilyn Strathern. From the 1990s on, MAA became recognised increasingly for a commitment to collaboration with local and Indigenous communities, regularly hosting researchers, students, curators and artists from the Pacific, Africa, the Americas and Asia. The Museum has sustained close engagement with archaeological research locally; a major redevelopment over 2010-12 created a Cambridge gallery on the Museum’s ground floor and a public entrance from Downing Street.

  Source: Museum website

  Date: 2022

  Licence: CC BY-NC

• Collection overview (Collection development policy)

  The Museum’s collections consist of archaeological and anthropological material from all parts of the world and from all periods of human history. The material in the Museum is organised into a number of key areas:

  Archaeology

  The Museum holds archaeological finds from every part of the inhabited world. They range from some of the very oldest – early hominid tools discovered by Louis Leakey in Olduvai Gorge – to modern Australian spear points knapped from glass. The collections include finds from major excavations crucial to the development of archaeology, such as those conducted by Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho in the Jordan valley, one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the world, and material from Star Carr in Yorkshire, excavated by Grahame Clark over 194951. MAA holds one of the finest pre-Columbian collections in Britain, including remarkably preserved early textiles; important prehistoric Arctic materials; wide ranging collections relating to early research in southern Africa and Egypt; collections from Bronze Age Hungary; and – of special interest to local communities – the region’s most comprehensive collection of artefacts from Cambridgeshire and surrounds, spanning all phases of occupation from the Palaeolithic to the Post Medieval periods. This collection continues to expand, primarily through the acquisition of objects via the Treasure Act (1996).

  Anthropology

  MAA cares for artefacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas, as well as material related to British and European folklore. Among the Museum’s best known collections are those deriving from the voyages of Captain Cook to the Pacific in the 1770s. The Museum’s founding curator, Anatole von Hügel spent several years in Fiji and assembled the single most important collection of nineteenth-century Fijian material outside Fiji itself, and went on to be highly energetic, soliciting collections and donations from fieldworkers and travellers in many parts of the world. Major field collections include those made by Alfred Haddon during the 1898 Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait, by Northcote W. Thomas from Nigeria and Sierra Leone, by Charles Hose from Sarawak, by Gregory Bateson from the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea, and by Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf in Nagaland.

  Photography

  MAA holds over 220,000 individual photographic objects, one of the largest and most significant collections of anthropological and archaeological collections of photographs in Britain. MAA has always held a collection of photographs, many related to artefacts in the collection, viewing them as important sources of information, but has only recently taken steps to regard them as a core collection. Our earliest photographs were taken in 1860 by Louis Allen Goss, a school inspector working in Rangoon, Burma. The collection includes material from the late 19th and early 20th century – when there were significant developments in the way photography was used – as well as recent works by contemporary anthropologists and artists. Many photographs are on regular display; the reserve collection can be seen by appointment.

  Modern and Contemporary Art

  Since the 1990s MAA has acquired works of modern and contemporary art, especially works that are relate to our historic collections, or that are otherwise relevant to the Museum. Since a surprising number of the historic objects that we hold were in fact distinctive, innovative creations, the much-debated distinctions between ‘traditional craft’, ‘material culture’, and ‘art’ have become less useful or meaningful. With the support of the Art Fund, among other bodies, the Museum is building a wide-ranging collection of sculpture, prints, paintings and digital and installation works that foreground indigenous perspectives from various parts of the world and include works by British and other artists that respond to both anthropological and archaeological collections, and to western traditions of collecting and museum-making.

  In addition to the long-term accessioned collections described above, the Museum maintains a number of other collections. Acquisition and disposal of material in relation to these collections is not necessarily managed according to procedures set out in relation to the core collections.

  Archival Material

  MAA’s accumulated archives are a rich resource that relates to the Museum’s collections, as well as to the history of the Museum itself and its role in the development of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Among the archives are excavation notebooks and site plans from sites such as Jericho and Pat Carter’s excavations in Lesotho, the Fijian journals of Baron Anatole von Hügel, and the correspondence of museum staff and collectors.

  Library

  MAA maintains a small reference collection of books related to our collections. This largely comprises publications such as exhibition catalogues sent to the Museum when items from the collection are published in them. The Museum also works closely with the Haddon library, the neighbouring library of the Departments of Archaeology and Social Anthropology.

  Handling Collections

  MAA maintains a separate handling collection, which is used by education groups at the Museum and elsewhere, and provides loan boxes for use by schools and education groups.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2022

  Licence: CC BY-NC