If I say ’money’, I’ll wager that there is a pretty good chance that you’ll conjure up an image of coins and bank notes. But what exactly is money? What it basically boils down to, is some sort of artefact that we have all agreed […]
Anything can be made with imagination and enough raffia
All right, can we talk about how awesome this home-made laptop is?! Made from the raffia, and collected in Gabon in 1998, it is wonderfully wacky with all its knobs, buttons, and dials, and shows such a tremendous amount of imagination. We do not know […]
Love, cigarettes, and new beginnings: Happy New Year!
Ah, New Year’s Eve. A night of celebration with friends. Of looking back at the ups and downs of the past year, and with hope and good wishes for the year to come. It is also a night of good food, copious amounts of champagne, […]
Beware the angry elf!
Who says Christmas has to be this happy time, where everybody revels in candles, presents, and family comfort, and where you might meet a jolly Father Christmas accompanied by a helpful elf in every department store and kindergarten across the land. Looking at the little […]
The night is dark and full of terror: Santa Lucia special
This week, we are diverting from our usual format. Instead of looking at an artefact in our collections, we are looking at a creature, which has been roaming the corridors and exhibitions of Moesgaard these past three Saturdays. But beware, the night is dark and […]
Nicaragua, war, and pictures – what is Mogens trying to show us?
This last month, we have had the pleasure of having Maria Grilo intern at the Ethnographic Department at Moesgaard Museum. Maria is a Portuguese journalist, who came to Denmark to attain an MA in International and Global History at Aarhus University. During her internship, she […]
Come as you are – Mogens, the little girl, and the photo album
This last month, we have had the pleasure of having Maria Grilo intern at the Ethnographic Department at Moesgaard Museum. Maria is a Portuguese journalist, who came to Denmark to attain an MA in International and Global History at Aarhus University. During her internship, she […]
A timeless design: Qatari bracteate
Isn’t it wonderful, how some designs survive practically unchanged for thousands of years, across vast distances of time and space? I still remember the first time I saw the ‘Huldremose woman’, and Iron Age bog body, in the Danish National Museum. After approximately 2000 years […]
Lookin’ good: the New Guinean bone belt
Fashion is a varied and subjective thing. What looked good 30 years ago is not necessarily considered beautiful today (though often trends come back to haunt us – I am looking at you, 1990s…). But today I am not looking at the fashion trends of […]
’Artefact lottery’: Afghan woman’s hat
A while ago, on a particularly unimaginative Monday, I was trying to come up with an idea for a blog post, at I came up with the idea of the ‘artefact lottery’: closing my eyes, scrolling through the database, and clicking on something random. Back […]
La Catrina: From the Aztec underworld to the Day of the Dead
This weekend Moesgaard Museum celebrated the Day of the Dead, or Día de Muertos, in style. We had paper flowers, coloured paper hangings, lively skeletons greeting our guests, face painting, and an altar for the dead. And in our ethnographic exhibition, La Catrina and her […]
The four winds hat
Take a look at this colourful specimen of a hat. It’s quite something, isn’t it? It is tall, colourful, and quite unlike any other hat I have ever seen. It was collected in 1963 among the Sámi population of Kautokeino, Norway. The Sámi are an […]
