A while ago, I stumbled upon something pretty awesome in our database. Something that says a lot about working at Moesgaard, ‘back in the days’. If you are a regular reader of this blog (or take a quick glance over the previous posts), you’ll see an array of pretty sober looking photographs, each artefact placed neatly against a neutral background, a little bar showing the registration number of the artefact in question.

But then feast your eyes on the pictures above! Here you have a collection of artefacts, collected in Cuba in 2003, bravely modelled by Lars, then curator of the Ethnographic Collections. And they are only the beginning; in a glorious string of photographs, Lars poses wearing an array of shiny polyester outfits, hats (God only knows where he got the wig from!), and seemingly also different personalities.

You have the dame with an attitude and a duckface (way before that was a ting) in the yellow dress and the demure lady in the blue dress

The virginal, yet boldly challenging girl in the check patterned dress, the coolly smoking broad in what looks like a pope’s mitre.

And then there are the two gentlemen: the sleepy king in red and his aggressive looking friend.

The outfits were all used in Cuban rituals, dedicated to different Gods. It makes me so happy to know that we still have such quirky secrets hidden in our database! And though we might not dress up in our artefacts any more (and smoking laws have changed pretty drastically since these pictures were taken!), these photographs are staying put in the database as long as possible.

Because they’re awesome.

//Sophie Seebach