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Fully illustrated colour guide to permanent collections of Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology.

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Chiefs & Governors: Art and Power in Fiji is the first major exhibition dedicated to Fijian art in the UK. Inspired by MAA's outstanding Fijian collections, it explores the early colonial history of Fiji, the foundation of the Museum, and the dynamism and creativity of Fijian art and culture. Co-authored by Curators Anita Herle and Lucy Carreau, it includes specialist contributions by Fergus Clunie, Jocelyne Dudding, Steven Hooper, Katrina Igglesden, Karen Jacobs, Stéphanie Leclerc-Caffarel, Andy Mills and Barbara Wills. 136 pages with 189 illustrations.

Chiefs & Governors is one of the outcomes of the Fijian Art Research Project (2001 -2014) generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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Catalogue accompanying major exhibition at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (March 2009 - November 2010) by Anita Herle, Mark Elliott and Rebecca Empson.

ISBN No. 978-0-947595-18-0

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Publication following major exhibition in the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (May 2006 - February 2008) edited by Rosanna Raymond and Amiria Salmond.

ISBN No. 978-1-877372-60-5 (Otago University Press)
ISBN No. 978-0-947595-17-3 (CUMAA)

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"Buddha's Word: The Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond" is Cambridge's first museum exhibition of tibetan art and artefacts, showcasing unique items from the collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Cambridge University Library. This catalogue to accompany the exhibition is the most complete publication to date of MAA's Tibetan and Buddhist collections, including artefacts and research published for the first time.

Specialist articles by leading international researchers draw on cutting edge research to explore the complex materialities and social efficacy of sacred books - as supports for Buddha's words and relics with their own potency and agency, and as travelling texts that have undergone and enacted dramatic transformations in their journeys across Asia: from manuscript to printing and from palm leaves to digital dharma.

"Buddha's Word" is co-authored by curators Hildegard Diemberger, Mark Elliott and Michela clemente, with contributions by Alessandro Boesi, James Canary, Daniele Cuneo, Camillo Formigatti, Imre Galambos, Agniezska Helman-Wasny, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Craig Jamieson, Peter Kornicki, Filippo Lunardo, Sukit Sivasundaram, Anuradha Pallipurath, Karma Phuntsho, Paola Ricciardi, Alex Ruiz-Falques and Tomasz Wasny.

156 Pages with 181 illustrations.

Buddha's Word, a collaboration between the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology and the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit of the University of Cambridge, is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the frederick Williamson Memorial Fund, with support from University of Cambridge Museums and Arts Council England.

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The artworks of black and indigenous peoples - a missing chapter in the history of modern art - are brought into sharp focus in The Power of Paper, an exhibition focusing on artworks made in Australia, Canada and South Africa during an epoch of decolonisation.

It exhibits for the first time in the UK some of the earliest prints made by local and native artists onwards, as the end of empire informed works reflecting attachments to land an belief, as well as the struggles with violence, dislocation and contemporary city life.

Exhibition catalogue: 40pp, 34 full-colour images

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Find glimpses of children lives in East Anglia and across England from 1 million years ago to the 20th century. Children outnumbered adults for most of human history, yet they rarely appear in the stories that museums tell. This exhibition, the first on the topic, aims to redress the balance.

Some objects on display will be familiar: a doll, a sledge, a baby’s feeding bottle. Other artefacts won’t look like children’s objects: pots with small fingerprints, a tiny handaxe made 400 000 years ago, goldwork as fine as a human hair. By looking carefully at all of this evidence, we will discover children’s lives and the part they played in society. Written by Jody Joy, Imogen Gunn, Sarah-Jane Harknett & Eleanor Wilkinson.

Exhibition catalogue: 62 pp

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Over one hundred artefacts, paintings and photographs from the collections of MAA, many of which have never been exhibited before, will be complemented by artworks by contemporary artists from the communities represented, commissioned with support from the Art Fund.
Focusing on communities known variously as Indigenous, ‘Tribal’ or Adivasi (literally ‘original inhabitants), the exhibition will showcase extraordinary and fascinating objects, many of which tell equally intriguing stories. From the Nagas and other peoples in the hills of Northeast India to the Gonds, Todas and Chenchus of the South and the Santhals and Bhils in the East and West of the country, the displays will present strikingly diverse stories of India, collecting, colonialism and British involvement in the subcontinent. Written by Mark Elliott; Foreward by Nicholas Thomas; Afterward by Ruby Hembrom

Exhibition Catalogue: 136pp; Full Colour; ISBN 978-0-947595-24-1

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The Pacific artefacts and works of art collected during the three voyages of Captain James Cook are of foundational importance for the study of art and culture in Oceania. These collections are representative not only of technologies or belief systems but of indigenous cultures at the formative stages of their modern histories, and exemplify Islanders' institutions, cosmologies and social relationships.

Recently, scholars from the Pacific and further afield, working with Pacific artefacts at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at University of Cambridge, set out to challenge and rethink some longstanding assumptions on their significance. The Cook voyage collection at the MAA is among the four or five most important in the world, containing over 200 of the 2,000-odd objects with Cook voyage provenance that are dispersed throughout the world. The collection includes some 100 artefacts dating from Cook's first voyage. This stunning book catalogues this collection, and its cutting-edge scholarship sheds new light on the significance of many artefacts of encounter.
348 pages; Full Colour; ISBN 978-0824859350
Editor: Thomas, Nicholas; Adams, Julie; Lythberg, Billie; Nuku, Maia; Salmond, Amiria

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA)

Cost: £40 per person including materials and refreshments
Date: Saturday, 8 November 2025
Time: 10.00-12:30pm
Venue: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3DZ

Name of leader: Sarah-Cate Blake, https://www.sarah-cate-blake.com/about

Contact:
E-mail: admin@maa.cam.ac.uk
Tel no. 01223 764956

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This book is a study of ‘collecting’ undertaken by Joseph Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux and his shipmates in Tasmania, the western Pacific Islands, and Indonesia. In 1791–1794 Bruni d’Entrecasteaux led a French naval expedition in search of the lost vessels of La Pérouse which had last been seen by Europeans at Botany Bay in March 1788. After Bruni d’Entrecasteaux died near the end of the voyage and the expedition collapsed in political disarray in Java, its collections and records were subsequently scattered or lost.

The book’s core is a richly illustrated examination, analysis, and catalogue of a large array of ethnographic objects collected during the voyage, later dispersed, and recently identified in museums in France, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. The focus on artefacts is informed by a broad conception of collecting as grounded in encounters or exchanges with Indigenous protagonists and also as materialized in other genres—written accounts, vocabularies, and visual representations (drawings, engravings, and maps).

Historically, the book outlines the antecedents, occurrences, and aftermath of the voyage, including its location within the classic era of European scientific voyaging (1766–1840) and within contemporary colonial networks. Particular chapters trace the ambiguous histories of the extant collections. Ethnographically, contributors are alert to local settings, relationships, practices, and values; to Indigenous uses and significance of objects; to the reciprocal, dialogic nature of collecting; to local agency or innovation in exchanges; and to present implications of objects and their histories, especially for modern scholars and artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

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This book brings together artists, curators, researchers and conservators to consider the significance of coconut fibre armour from the islands of Kiribati. Taking as its focus the armour found in museum collections, it investigates the historical context that led to these unique artefacts leaving the Pacific and entering the orbit of British collectors and institutions, as well the legacies of those practices in the present.

As well as exploring the historical milieux surrounding its collection, the book includes essays from expert conservators that discuss the challenges of caring for coconut fibre armour. Other contributions include case studies focusing on the construction and variety of the armour and helmets, and the findings of a comprehensive survey which has tracked down and documented every piece of Kiribati armour held in UK museum collections. Finally, the book considers the significance of coconut fibre armour in the present, with particular reference to the work of a group of I-Kiribati artists whose creativity and innovative research has led to the production of a contemporary suit of armour inspired by the armour of the past.

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Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices.

This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders’ perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively.

Volume I focuses on the historical formation of ethnographic museums within Europe, the making of those institutions’ Pacific collections, and the activation and re-activation of those collections, over time and in the present.

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Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices.

This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders’ perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively.

Volume II illustrates the sheer variety of Pacific artefacts and histories in museums, and similarly the heterogeneity of the issues and opportunities that they raise. Over thirty essays explore materialities, collection histories, legacies of empire, and contemporary projects

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Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon's Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898
Edited by Anita Herle and Jude Philp

£35

Format: paperback
378 pages
ISBN: 9781743326480
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.30722/sup.9781743326480
Publication: 01 Dec 2020
Series: Indigenous Music of Australia
Publisher: Sydney University Press

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This book explores a complex relational assemblage, a collection of 1481 Pacific artefacts brought together by Captain Edward Henry Meggs Davis, during the three voyages of HMS Royalist between 1890-1893. The collection is indicative not just of a period of colonial collecting in the Pacific, but also the development of ethnographic collections in the UK and Europe. This period of history remains present in the social and cultural lives of many Pacific Islanders today.

Using the collections as a starting point the book is divided into two parts. The first provides the historical background to the three voyages of HMS Royalist, discussing each voyage, its aims and outcomes, and the role that Davis played within this. Davis’ motivations to collect and the various means of collecting that he employed are then explored within this historical context. Finally the first part considers what happened to the collection once it was sent from the Pacific to England, where and how it was sold, and how the collection was a part of and subject to the networks of museums, and private collectors in the UK and Europe during the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century. It offers a detailed view of the contents and development of the collection, and what the collection can tell us about British ethnographic collecting at the end of the nineteenth century.

The second part of the book explores the traces left by the ship amongst the Pacific Islands communities it visited. Focusing on three Pacific Islands- Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Kiribati- the chapters in this section interrogate the contemporary relevance of this period of colonial history for Islanders today, exploring current social, political and environmental issues

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Anthropology’s engagement with art has a complex and uneven history. While material culture, ‘decorative art’, and art styles were of major significance for founding figures such as Alfred Haddon and Franz Boas, art became marginal as the discipline turned towards social analysis in the 1920s. This book addresses a major moment of renewal in the anthropology of art in the 1960s and 1970s. British anthropologist Anthony Forge (1929-1991), trained in Cambridge, undertook fieldwork among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and 1960s, and wrote influentially, especially about issues of style and meaning in art. His powerful, question-raising arguments addressed basic issues, asking why so much art was produced in some regions, and why was it so socially important?

Fifty years later, art has renewed global significance, and anthropologists are again considering both its local expressions among Indigenous peoples and its new global circulation. In this context, Forge’s arguments have renewed relevance: they help scholars and students understand the genealogies of current debates, and remind us of fundamental questions that remain unanswered.

This volume brings together Forge’s most important writings on the anthropology of art, published over a thirty year period, together with six assessments of his legacy, including extended reappraisals of Sepik ethnography, by distinguished anthropologists from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

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Created across the six islands of a remote archipelago in eastern Polynesia, the art of the Marquesas is one of the world’s most distinctive and remarkable art traditions. Though exhibited in major museums around the world, Marquesan art is nevertheless poorly understood, and the formation of collections still largely unresearched.

This book documents and explores the most extensive early collection from the archipelago. In May, 1804, participants in the first Russian voyage round the world, usually known as the Krusenstern expedition after the principal commander, spent twelve days at the island of Nuku Hiva. Inspired by the science and collecting associated with the voyages of Captain James Cook, the mariners interacted with Islanders, and made extensive collections of artefacts. While the lives of the collectors and exchanges among scientists led to these artefacts being widely dispersed, the research reported here has identified some 200 objects collected during the voyage which are now in museums in Russia, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The outcome of years of work in museum stores and archives, Tiki reassembles a collection of exceptional importance. A set of essays contextualise these precisely-provenanced artefacts historically, and in the life and environment of the Marquesas Islands. For the first time, this heritage is made accessible to Islanders themselves, and to interested scholars and curators.

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From an award-winning scholar, the extraordinary sixty-thousand-year history of how the Pacific islands were settled.
Thousands of islands, inhabited by a multitude of different peoples, are scattered across the vastness of the Pacific. The first European explorers to visit Oceania, from the sixteenth century on, were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving so many miles from the nearest continents. Who were these people? Where did they come from? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such immense tracts of ocean?

In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas. From the third millennium BC, the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia were settled by Austronesian peoples of the western Pacific littoral. Later movements of Polynesian peoples took them even further afield, as far as Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and – eventually – New Zealand, up to AD 1250.

Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from linguistics, archaeology, and the re-enactment of voyages, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the sea-going technologies that enabled them, and the societies that they left in their wake.