Hanna At Herstmonceux

After Ely, I headed to Cambridge for a few days (and no, I'm not applying to grad school here!). I stayed at the YHA, which was an easy walk into the city centre. I spent most of my time in Cambridge visiting museums: four that I had been really excited to see, and two that I just stumbled upon along the way.

First up was the Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute (Kelsey, I wish you had been there!)

Scott's goggles

A short walk across the river was the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University's Faculty of Classics building.

This museum is a "cast gallery", meaning that it's a collection of plaster casts of sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome. It has 450 casts and no originals (the originals are mostly in museums in Athens and Rome, and a few are at the British Museum). I stayed for an hour and I was alone the whole time, except for a couple of staff members- I guess it's not really a traditional type of tourist attraction.... Anyways, I had a great time. So many sculptures that I've studied in numerous Classical Studies courses over the last four years had casts here; it was so fun to walk around and watch things snap into familiarity. I recognized many of them, and even though they're not "real" they're exact life-size replicas, which was still so much better than just seeing pictures in textbooks.

Delphi charioteer

The Artemisium God (still under scholarly debate about whether it's
Poseidon or Zeus; the original sculpture is a rare example of a surviving
Greek bronze sculpture, since it was found off Cape Artemisium in
a shipwreck).

This is a Roman copy of a Greek statue called Diskobolus.
The Romans copied it wrong, though; the original had
his head turned to face the discus he's about to throw.

The Chatsworth Head. The original is in the British
Museum, so this was a rare one that I've actually
seen the original of.

Temple of Zeus at Olympia pediment. This temple has cropped up in so
many different classes I've taken!

Foreground: caryatid from the Erechtheum (original is
also in the British Museum). A caryatid is a female
figure that functions as a supporting column in a building.

I didn't recognize this one. I'm not sure who it is (Athena?)
but it was certainly impressive.

Diana of Versailles. I'm convinced that another copy of
this sculpture is in a museum garden in Geneva.... see below!

Outside the Musee d'histoire des sciences in Geneva

Cambridge Museums coordinated summer activity

Victory of Samothrace

Roman emperors!

The Primaporta Augustus

Small display of pottery from Pompeii to tie in with the British Museum's
blockbuster Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibit currently on

The tetrarchs

Afterwards, I walked back into the city centre to visit the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The ground floor exhibit was obviously the newest, and I thought it was fantastic in terms of how it presented information:

Explaining archaeological principles: how artefacts' relationships
to each other are so important for our understanding. The different
levels are labeled "Objects found together", "Objects brought together",
and "Objects that changed when brought together".

This was impossible to get a good picture of, but read the text panel
captured in the photo below to see why I liked it so much.

I come across a lot of Greek and Roman exhibits in museums and by now I usually expect to have some previous knowledge/context of whatever they're talking about (or at least I should, or I haven't been paying enough attention in classes!). But I'm often way out of my depth when learning about any other culture or time period in a museum. So, I think my favourite museum moment on this trip was walking into an exhibit on Art and Power in Fiji and realizing I recognized the people, places, and concepts being covered, since I had studied it in history class! In my Colonialism and Material Culture history seminar this winter, we read Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific.

Government House and the diplomats and visitors who lived there was covered extensively in the book and the exhibit- I instantly recognized this recreation of the weapons wall display from Government House (above).

Before this winter I had never realized how much could be said about giving
gifts of whale teeth :)

Tabua

There was also a temporary exhibit called "My Hair: Black Hair Culture, Style & Politics". It tied in with a bigger exhibit at the Fitzwilliam Museum (I'll get to that later).

Their archaeology floor of exhibits is being redone (and they're asking for feedback and ideas, which I thought was great):

Looking down into the anthropology floor of exhibits

Just down the street was the Sedgewick Natural History Museum:

The cases and displays seem to be quite old, and it was
really interesting to spot the newer additions to the exhibits,
like the red date sign on the right.

You can tell by the design and layout that this is a more
recent display!

EOSC online Rocks and Gems class coming back to me...

It turned out that there was another small museum nearby, called The Whipple Museum of the History of Science. On the way there I saw this plaque, marking the building where the electron was discovered:

See the problems with these protractors?! ;)

The Museum of Zoology was also nearby, but once I got there I found it's closed for extensive renovations until 2016.

I saved the Fitzwilliam Museum for last because it's the only one that I had been to before:

I was really excited to find these: objects from the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia.
This year I wrote a paper on a specific cult ritual at this site and mentioned some of
the objects, so I was thrilled to get to see them in person.