Dr Jody Joy
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Hide and Seek? Looking for Children in the Past

Children rarely appear in the stories museums tell about past societies. Beyond special exhibits or museums of childhood, the average display contains few if any references to children. Why is this? How can we identify artefacts relating to children in existing collections and interpret them in a way that is engaging to the public? What might the benefits be of displaying the past in museums from a child’s perspective? These are some of the questions we thought about when creating a temporary exhibition Hide and Seek: Looking for Children in the Past, held at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge in 2016.

In this presentation, I will try to show how by asking different questions, and using some imagination, in the creation of this exhibition we have started to move away from exhibiting the ancient world exclusively through adult eyes. Through visitor evaluation, we were also able to demonstrate how children and childhood, because everyone has experienced it, is a subject which is uniquely able to engage museum audiences and encourage learning between generations, hopefully inspiring other museums to create similar exhibitions.

Location

University of Bradford