The ethical treatment of human remains after excavation is a core debate in archaeology. This project explores the treatment of human remains in some European museums with an aim to support open discussion of complex ethical issues among research and heritage professionals involved in the care of human remains.

Religious practice in the Roman world involved diverse rituals and knowledge. Scholarly studies of ancient religion increasingly emphasise the experiential aspects of these practices, highlighting multisensory and embodied approaches to material culture and the dynamic construction of religious experiences and identities. In contrast, museum displays typically frame religious material culture around its iconographic or epigraphic significance. The author analyses 23 UK museum displays to assess how religion in Roman Britain is presented and discusses how museums might use research on ‘lived ancient religion’ to offer more varied and engaging narratives of religious practices that challenge visitors’ perceptions of the period.

Calls for the restitution and repatriation of cultural objects continue to escalate. High-profile cases such as the Parthenon Frieze and the Benin Bronzes dominate international news cycles and provoke fierce debate; however, less attention has been paid to items that are quietly returned and to the potential positive outcomes for the institutions on both sides. This article discusses three Southeast Asian case studies to address this lacuna and urges institutions to become more proactive in their engagement with restitution and repatriation claims.

Between the 1960s and early-1980s the museum sector in the United Kingdom (UK) was rapidly professionalised and systematised. A crucial moment in this transition was the creation in 1967 of the Information Retrieval Group of the Museums Association (IRGMA), and the subsequent launch of its system for the machine encoding and communication of museum catalogue records. The rise of IRGMA marked an inflection point in museological practice and the normalisation of computerised work within the UK museum profession, a moment when the desire for a ‘layman's guide to the scheme’ began to give way to new professional personas and forms of documentary labour. This article asks how cultures of museology and professional labour shifted in response to IRGMA. It argues that between the late 1960s and mid-1980s both the implementation of and the debate around computerised cataloguing disrupted the function of UK museums and how museum professionals imagined their labour. And by tracing the emergence of these cultures and their intersections with professional identity and labour practices, this article seeks to tease out the ways museum history can resonate with wider narratives of labour, expertise and technological innovation in contemporary British history.

Current debates surrounding decolonisation and the democratisation of display are a critical issue for prehistoric collections as well as more recent material. The objects most likely to symbolise prehistory in museum displays, and thus in the popular imagination—those made of precious, skilfully worked materials—are a restricted group of iconic things, often interpreted as reflective of social status rather than anything more personal or spiritual. To contextualise this debate, the authors outline public reaction to the display of alternative objects with more representative messages within The World of Stonehenge exhibition, which was held at the British Museum in 2022.

The purpose of this study was to explore how science and environmentally related museums in Alberta, Canada are digitally engaging with climate change and energy education. This inquiry utilised qualitative discourse analysis to examine the discourses, dynamics and tensions present in digital museum contexts related to climate and energy education in Alberta. Drawing on Eisner’s three curricula — the explicit, implicit and null — the study focused on museums’ websites and social media activity. The museums studied share common foci on science, environment, or energy but range in size and location. As a long-standing energy-based economy, Alberta provides an interesting, and often contested, setting to observe climate and energy education in practice at museums, many of which exist in communities and within governance and stakeholder networks which are connected to the energy industry. Discourse-connected findings, discussion and implications are presented in relation to museums’ institutional mandates, curricular initiatives, pedagogical practices, special events and infrastructure initiatives.

This article examines how artists, activism, and works of art may contribute to a more textured understanding of debt in contemporary society and culture. The diversity of aesthetic practices and range of strategic interventions in which artists are organizers and activists are manifest in the Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), advocacy initiatives by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), and alternative, trans-local projects such as the Arts Collaboratory. These activist interventions provide the context for an examination of how artists have seized upon discourses related to debt and finance to produce works that offer a critical reappraisal of the global economy. Artists’ projects by Martha Rosler, Cassie Thornton, Zachary Formwalt, and Michael Najjar challenge audiences to rethink the invisible networks of debt and exchange by creating new visual vocabularies for ‘seeing’ debt. The emergence of activist groups, such as Liberate Tate, has also signaled renewed interest in the ethics of corporate sponsorships, museums, and environmental issues. A heightened awareness of the ethical dimensions of debt and global support for activist movements may contribute to new notions of citizenship and performative democracy that can incite individual and collective renegotiations of how we might critically rethink debt.

Bamako, March 1991. 100,000 protesters took to the street challenging Mali's military regime. Both men and women participated in six months of protests, their actions shaped by class, gender, and generation. The press, in its reporting, produced a specific, gendered, image of protest, involving young men protesters and their exceptional mères indociles (rebellious mothers) motivated to protest by the risk of bodily harm to their children.1

Prehistory comprises millions of years and encompasses a diverse range of social, cultural, economic and technological practices. Despite its widespread public popularity, understanding of the chronology and developments of this vast expanse of human history is frequently anachronistic. Here, the author uses the results of museum visitor questionnaires and tracking surveys to assess public preconceptions of prehistory and engagements with museum displays. In addition, the article documents and explores 173 prehistory displays in museums in England, identifying trends in representation. The results point to some significant representational disparities affecting the display of prehistory and highlights some opportunities for reimagining museum prehistory displays.

This paper examines the Pahlavi Dynasty Museum, which was inaugurated in 1976 during the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pahlavi rule. Built inside the Marble Palace, the shah's former residence in the center of Tehran, the museum was intended to memorialize the achievements of the Pahlavis, presenting the official Pahlavi version of Iran's modern history. The museum was unique in many respects, not least because it was the only former Pahlavi palace that had been converted into a museum to honor the Pahlavis, but it shared the objectives of other museums constructed during this period. During the late Pahlavi era, a major aspect of the state's cultural policy was to sponsor initiatives that strengthened the official state narrative, which argued that the Pahlavis were the legitimate heirs of a 2500-year-old monarchical tradition. The article explores how the state attempted to express these narratives through the museum's design and exhibits.

As European nations address their legacy of colonialism, many museums in France, Germany, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Western Europe are examining the provenance of objects in their collections that were removed during periods of colonial occupation and, in some cases, have developed plans for their restitution. As of 2022, few museums in the United States have announced similar objectives. This article offers specific suggestions for American art museums to proceed proactively and transparently with colonial-era provenance research projects. I propose that museums identify objects in their collections that were displaced in one of two ways: either looted during a post-Napoleonic military conflict or stolen or traded by force under a period of colonial occupation. These works of art should be prioritized for provenance research and listed or otherwise made discoverable online. By listing these objects on their websites, museums will acknowledge the contentious histories of works of art in their collections and signal an openness to engaging with source communities, whether about the return of an object, loans, storage, display, educational initiatives, or other matters of care.

This article foregrounds the postcolonial museum as a new source, and site, from which to write South Asian histories of partition and its aftermath. It focuses on collecting practices in India within East Punjab, following the partition of the British-era Punjab province in 1947 between India and Pakistan. Tapping hitherto-unused archival sources, it reveals the considerable financial investment and drive to collect at this time, belying the idea of museums being ‘dead’ colonial assets, and demonstrates their centrality to how citizenship and belonging were articulated (or withheld) in independent India. Some discoveries have far-reaching implications for both historians and museum professionals. The article also shines a light upon a new range of actors—both named and nameless, professional and citizen—who have been marginal to historical enquiry thus far. Moving beyond the familiar colonial templates within which museums in the region have until now been studied, it asks critical questions of the postcolonial museum in South Asia by interrogating the relationship between collections, and the Indian nation-state and its subsidiaries.