Unpacking the Collection

Museums are a place to view art and artifacts and explain their archaeological and historical significance. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, museums also provide a way to advance social theory. When a museum attendee looks at artifacts made by another culture especially from an Indigenous culture there is usually not much emphasis on how the objects were obtained, which was often as a result of war or colonization. Additionally, knowing where an object is from can affect how the viewer reacts to the object, and the person who made it. This particular two-tiered level of identity and agency (of the maker and the viewer) is unique to museums.In this innovative volume, the Editors take the opportunity of this cross-cultural interaction as a theoretical framework to examine materiality, agency, and identity. Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies. This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management.