The MAA Digital Lab is a way of highlighting artefacts, histories and relationships from the collections at MAA, starting with a number of key research themes including tea, alcohol and Chinese art & culture.
Explore the most recent blog posts below or use the side bar to filter by date or category, or head over to the University of Cambridge Museums Collections in Action blog, for many more blogs from across both MAA and the wider UCM consortium.
A chance discovery of a chaotically arranged grave led to the most important Iron Age find in the Cambridge area for many years. Discover more about wine amphorae, grave goods, and what they can tell us about Iron Age Europe.
Have you ever tried Tibetan salty yak butter tea? If you visit a Tibetan household today, chances are the tea will be served in a 多穆壶 (duomuhu) like this. I explore the trajectory of the 多穆壶 (duomuhu) throughout history, and what it tells us about the politics of the Chinese empire.
昆曲 (Kunqu Opera) one of the oldest remaining forms of Chinese opera, was listed on the ‘Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity‘ by UNESCO in 2004. It has acted as a representative of traditional Chinese culture and national treasure, receiving attention both nationally in China and around the world. In general academic…
The term ‘Chinese New Year’ and ‘Lunar New Year’ are interrelated and often spark controversies. The festival itself is celebrated across east and southeast Asia. It is a shared intangible cultural heritage, often victim to claims of origin and authenticity. Can museums and the collections in their care provide a forum to negotiate these claims?
Michael Freeman, photographer and author of ‘Tea Horse Road: China’s Ancient Trade Road to Tibet’, explores the pressed tea bricks in MAA’s collections and the longest trade route in the ancient world.
By Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas and Mark Elliott. To mark the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year and the Year of the Water Rabbit, we did the obvious thing and looked for rabbits in the collections at MAA. But we didn’t find what we thought we would.
4 minute read By Mark Elliott There is music in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Well, there is and there isn’t. Museums have traditionally acquired, exhibited and interpreted artefacts: tangible things. Intangible aspects of human cultural life and wellbeing such as music don’t generally get collected except in their material manifestations as musical instruments.…
By James Lin Alcoholic beverages made from fermented rice and sorghum grains were considered ritually important in ancient China. This post explores alcohol and immortality in the Han Dynasty (206BCE – 220CE).
By Aayushi Gupta In my previous blog post on this object, I pursued one of the clues found on the label on its back. That label also gave us another clue – ‘Given to me by A.C. Haddon 29 Dec 1900’. Who was this tea brick given to? Why did Haddon give it to them?…
By Mark Elliott A bottle of European gin made its way from Germany to Nigeria, where it was collected by an English missionary. Discover it’s stories of trade in West Africa, currencies, colonial exploitation, Christianity, traditional African religious practices, sociality, alcohol consumption and prohibition.
By Mark Elliott We are excited to announce the launch of the MAA Digital Lab: an online platform through which we aim to increase and diversify digital engagement and access to the world cultures collections in the Museum.
By Shuzhen Kong Ever tried to guess the flavour of tea just from looking at the leaves or bricks, without brewing? Or even just from photographs of them? Take a look at one example from MAA’s collections with me, and see what we can discover.
By Ashleigh Griffin While recataloguing the Asian collections at MAA, I came across a number of historic inaccuracies as well as stories of warfare and plunder hinted at in the documentation around the objects. This is the tale of an artefact that brought both of these together, which highlights important issues facing collections of ethnography,…
By Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas When thinking of alcoholic beverages in the pre-Columbian world, chicha occupies a prominent place. For us, then, chicha provides an excuse to explore collections at MAA in search of maize-relate objects.
By Aayushi Gupta In the object collections at MAA I found nine tea bricks – six from China, two from Tibet, and one unknown source. Encountering Russian inscriptions, however, did not make sense; were tea bricks produced in Russia? Where did they travel, and how did they get there?
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The Museum’s catalogues include historic descriptions and representations that are factually inaccurate, racist and otherwise inappropriate. We are committed to the work of addressing hurtful legacies in the collections we care for. We ask for your help in identifying images or data that cause offence or harm, and we welcome your feedback or suggestions which can be sent to feedback@maa.cam.ac.uk
MAA Digital Laboratory 