Sapiens

DECEMBER 4, 2024

In early 2024, Spain’s culture minister announced that the nation would overhaul its state museum collections, igniting a wave of anticipation—and controversy. As a multicultural Spaniard with extensive experience in the museum sector, I see the initiative as part of a long-overdue and much-needed reckoning with Spain’s colonial past.

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Museum Archaeology Artifacts Heritage 128

Sapiens

APRIL 2, 2025

A Tanzanian historian and poet conjures alternative engagements with Black African women who were marginalized by violent colonial histories and imprisoned in the archives. My Imagined Archive was where I could envision what conversations with those who do not appear in official records could sound like.

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Archiving Heritage Museum Anthropology 83

Anthropology News

JANUARY 16, 2025

The human urge to collect and preserve objects, what Jacques Derrida calls archive fever , takeson special significance when there is no body to bury, no grave to visit. The social life of these clothes had a shift, akin to the widely discussed binary shift from commodity to gift within anthropological discourse.

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Archiving Anthropology Museum History 122

Anthropology News

MARCH 27, 2025

Open-access sites like Annas Archive challenge these barriers, much like underground migration networks, offering access but risking legal suppression. Even open-knowledge projects like the Internet Archive s Wayback Machine face legal threats, echoing the way public records and historical narratives are censored.

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Archiving Artifacts Anthropology Museum 52

Sapiens

APRIL 3, 2024

In museum archives, researchers found photos of remains from Paleolithic children who had belonged to a group of early Homo sapiens in Eurasia. In a museum basement, we huddled over a black-and-white photograph showing pieces of a lower jawbone and its loose teeth. Not all fossil discoveries happen in the field.

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Archival Research Museum Archiving Artifacts 138

Anthropology for Beginners

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

The presentation of the findings of archaeology to the public cannot avoid difficult political issues, and the museum curator and the popularizer today have responsibilities which some can be seen to have failed. These include objects significant to the archaeology, architecture, science or technology of a specified culture.

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Archaeology Cultures Anthropology Heritage 130

Sapiens

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. I wondered if any people before me who utilized his remains for their research had ever pieced together his storyor even contemplated how he got to the Natural History Museum in London. No bullet holes.

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Museum Archiving Anthropology History 117