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 […]
Post card from Lyon: Behind the scenes of a museum loan
Last week, I told you how two of our artefacts, a gandao and a gundurik from Kalash, made the journey to Musée des Confluences in Lyon. Today, I thought I would give you a bit of a ‘behind the scenes’ view of what such a […]
Two seasoned travellers: From Afghanistan to Denmark to France
Most of our artefacts spend their days in the cold and the dark. They might be nestled in acid free tissue paper in a cardboard box, or they might lie on a compact shelf whiling the years away. A few lucky artefacts may see the […]
The adventures of Jørgen Bitsch – and a spiky ‘teat halter’
What is this? Some strange torture device? A really edgy necklace? Sometimes objects do not tell their story outright (at least not to those, who do not already have specialised knowledge). When I was combing through our database, looking for an interesting subject for today’s […]
The price of a normal life: Rubber dinghy
“The boat we sailed in was smaller than this”, she says. I am standing in the new special exhibition ‘After the Escape – Syrian lives on Samsø’ about an hour before it is to open, and I am talking to an 8 year-old girl. We […]
Cheeky monkey: Coconut figure from Namibia
The curious little coconut monkey figure is a part of collection that Mogens Stryhn just handed over to Moesgaard Museum a few weeks ago. As such, it has entered the museum database as EA 909-127. The entire collection consists of 269 artefacts that Stryhn has […]
Bringing Syria to Denmark: Brass tea pot
Mohammed has always been a strong man. A caring father and a hard worker, who loves to cook for his family. When Syria descended into war, he and his family decided that it was not safe to remain any longer. Mohammed went ahead and journeyed […]
The long journey of a pair of Syrian sunglasses
Sometimes, the most mundane artefacts hide within them the most poignant stories. What would you, for example, consider to be the value of these sunglasses? They are not some fancy brand, nor have they belonged to someone famous. Indeed, one side bar has broken off […]
Is there a genie in the lamp?
The Newars is one of the more than 130 ethnic groups in the republic of Nepal. In fact, they are considered to be the indigenous population of the Kathmandu Valley. For a number of reasons, the Newari community has attracted attention since the first Westerners […]
