Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology opens its doors for Bank Holiday Gala Weekend

To celebrate this, and exactly 100 years at its Downing Street home, the Museum is holding:

Retail Retold: A retailers event on Friday 3 May, inviting local retailers and businesses to the museum to explore the links between their businesses and objects in the museum – some of which were unearthed during the Grand Arcade building works, just yards from the Museum.

A Gala Weekend over the first May Bank Holiday (4-6 May) for families and the wider community to come and explore the museum, and discover a range of unusual and intriguing activities.

Retail Retold

• Local tattooists will view the tattoo combs collected by Captain Cook, whose voyages first brought tattooing to Europe (see photo attached).
• Staff from local dry cleaners will see a Viking ironing board made of whale bone – to smooth their linens on.
• Staff from Bravissimo and Triumph will examine a particularly large-breasted wooden statue.
• Beauticians will be shown the remnants of rouge, still in a Roman make-up pot.

Gala weekend
Visitors will be able to:
• Have a go with a full-size medieval catapult
• See a deer butchered the prehistoric way
• Take their photo in the Edwardian photo booth – the era when the Museum opened on Downing Street a century ago
• Make bunting, enjoy face painting and other crafts
• Enter the Art Fund national photo competition to win an iPad

The museum has one million objects which document two million years of human history, of which under one per cent are on display. Many objects pivot around critical life events: birth, sex, feasting, beauty, ceremonies, illness and death. They tell heartfelt, harrowing and celebratory stories of the human journey through the ages.

By contrast, many objects are mundane: a Viking ironing board, a Roman make-up container (with remnants of rouge), medieval beer jugs, and an implement for Anglo Saxons to clean their ears. 

The museum’s new ground floor Cambridge gallery has been created to display the museum’s unparalleled collection of artefacts from East Anglia. The Museum has one of the most important collections of archaeology and anthropology in the UK. It holds material collected by Captain James Cook and the largest Fijian collection outside Fiji itself. Uniquely comprehensive are its collections from world prehistory, particularly from the Palaeolithic era (2,000,000 to 100,000 years ago).