What's the Point? Documenting and recontextualising Pacific arrows

What's the Point? Documenting and recontextualising Pacific arrows is a project to advance understanding of over 2,000 Pacific arrows through new research and scientific analysis, creating resources to guide the wider sector. The project, supported by Art Fund’s Reimagine programme, will highlight the significance of these arrows to communities and individuals, share their stories and increase access.

From the Caribbean to Cambridge: Reimagining Pre-Columbian Archaeology Collections Together

From the Caribbean to Cambridge: Reimagining Pre-Columbian Archaeology Collections Together is a research project which will bring together Caribbean diaspora communities in the East of England to collaboratively reinterpret, co-curate, and create the first permanent Caribbean cases at MAA. The project, supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, will involve community-led workshops, co-curation of displays, and the development of interactive interpretive materials, including 3D scanning and digital storytelling, ensuring that Caribbean voices are at the forefront of how these collections are presented.

Whispers of Caribbean Isles: Inclusive Narratives for pre-Columbian Archaeology Collections

‘Whispers of Caribbean Isles: Inclusive Narratives for pre-Columbian Archaeology Collections' is a research project which aims to trial new ways of connecting existing collections at University Museums with stakeholder communities locally and abroad. The project, which is funded by the Collections-Connections-Communities Strategic Research Initiative, began in November 2023.

MAA Digital Lab

In recent years MAA has committed to improving digital accessibility to collections from Asia and across the world. The focus of the new Digital Laboratory will be to try new ways of working with, showing and talking about the collections: to do things that cannot be done within the Museum.

The project will officially begin in September 2022, with our first online outputs launched in November 2022. 

Museum Affordances

What do museums afford? What repertoires of action do they make possible? MAA was the lead partner in a 3-year AHRC-funded project being led by Paul Basu, Professor of Anthropology at SOAS University of London, who worked with Nicholas Thomas and Chris Wingfield.

Explore the [Re:] Entanglements exhibition >>

Taking Care

The project TAKING CARE - Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care started on October 1, 2019 and places ethnographic and world cultures museums at the centre of the search for possible strategies to address these issues.

Digital Museum of Global Chinese Kun Opera

The Digital Museum of Global Chinese Kun Opera project is hosted by Cambridge Rivers Project (CRP) at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology (MAA), University of Cambridge. The project started in October 2016 and will collect, document, research, and exhibit...

Digital Museum of Global Buddhist Cultural Heritage

The Digital Museum of Global Buddhist Cultural Heritage project is hosted by Cambridge Rivers Project (CRP) at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology (MAA), University of Cambridge. It started in January 2017 and will collect, document, research, and exhibit Asian...

Heritage Matters: Culture and Development in the Pacific

This Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded pilot project analysed the current and possible future contribution of Pacific Island museums to sustainable development goals. It was a collaboration between the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA)...

Cambridge Rivers Project

The Cambridge Rivers Project (CRP) was launched in 1983 and is named after one of the founders of modern fieldwork anthropology, W.H.R. Rivers. It is dedicated to innovation and communication in anthropology. In particular it is concerned with collecting and...

Pacific Presences

Oceanic art and European museums European Research Council 2013-2018 This project will explore major ethnographic collections that entered European museums during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and have remained largely unstudied since. Focussing on materials from the Pacific that...

Multiple Modernisms: Twentieth-Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective

Multiple Modernisms: Twentieth-Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective Leverhulme Trust 2013-2016 This ambitious project explores what might be called the ‘other histories’ of modernism in art, focusing particularly on indigenous modernisms from Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The participants, a...

Collaborative Work with Torres Strait Islanders

MAA has a long history of working in collaboration with Torres Strait Islanders. One of the Museum’s most important collections – the objects, photographs, drawings and notes assembled by Alfred Haddon and the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres...

Fijian Art Research and Websites

This three-year project, running from May 2011 to April 2014, was a collaboration between the Sainsbury Research Unit for...