This chapter reviews the more standardised cave burial practices which appear to have developed after around 3300 BC. All the burials from Middle Neolithic caves where a rite can be reconstructed were successive inhumations. At this date, there is also a trend towards burial further into the cave system. This may point to the development of a burial rite which was specifically tied to the use of caves. By the Late Neolithic, there were very low numbers of cave burials but there seems to have been a similar concern with placing burials deep in the cave systems. In both these periods, the intermediary period seems to have become something which involved the agency of caves and dead bodies but not of living people. In the Beaker period, there are also low numbers of burials but there seems to be both more input from living people and more similarity to other kinds of Beaker burial site.

The museum is an inventive, globally and locallytranslated form, no longer anchored to its modernorigins in Europe. Contemporary curatorial work, inthese excessive times of decolonisation andglobalisation, by engaging with discrepanttemporalities – not resisting, or homogenising,their inescapable friction – has the potential toopen up common-sense, ‘given’ histories. It does sounder serious constraints – a push and pull ofmaterial forces and ideological legacies it cannotevade. This chapter explores the ‘times’ of thecurator, in terms of both these times we live in, inwhich curatorial theory and practice seem to beever-present, and a sense of the curator’s task asenmeshed in multiple, overlapping, sometimesconflicting times. It is concerned primarily withthe later, the discrepant temporalities, or perhapsthat should be ‘histories’, or even ‘futures’, thatare integral to the task of the curator today. Incontrast to the history of museum curating,curatorial work in recent years has been transformedby the re-emergence of indigenous cultures in formersettler colonies which suggest the decentring of theWest. Drawing on research in the USA, Canada and thePacific Islands, and analysing several diverse casestudies and examples, the chapter explores examplesof ‘indigenous curating’, that is to say, workingwith things and relations in transforming times. Indoing so, it contributes to a world-wide debate,which this book is part of, about museums and thefuture of curatorship.

This chapter explores the conceptual planning,organisation and reception of the exhibition FromSamoa with Love? Samoan Travellers in Germany,1895–1911 at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich,2014. It does so by taking into considerationcompeting obligations among the Samoan descendantsand community, the responses of mainstream museumvisitors in Munich with no prior knowledge of fa’aSamoa (the Samoan way) and the expectations of theBavarian government, who strictly controlled costsbut wanted large audiences. Museums are not as freeto create, or as powerful, as is often assumed byoutsiders and critics. Being the curator responsiblefor this exhibition meant juggling positions,demands and interests in a setting affected bySamoan perspectives and claims, German audiences’pre-knowledge and viewing habits, structuralconstraints imposed by the Bavarian museumadministration system, and even the Foreign Officeand diplomatic agendas. For the curator, trying tomeet these contradictory demands and reconcilingthem with her own academic and ethical ideas ofcuratorship indeed meant walking a fine line.

Curation is increasingly recognised as a profession ofhigh standing which requires extensive highereducation. However, the proliferation of communityengagement since the 1980s has placed new pressuresand expectations on curators, thus complicatingtheir role. This is particularly evident in the caseof ethnographic curators working with indigenouscommunities. This chapter explores these issues byconsidering the ways in which working with BlackfootFirst Nations communities have affected the role andwork of curators at three key museums, two in Canadaand one in the UK. Historically museums, and defacto their curators, were often seen as an enemy bymany Indigenous communities as they appeared as aphysical manifestation of colonialism. Thehistorical practice of collecting sacred culturalmaterial, and even the bones and bodies ofIndigenous people, have made museums synonymous withsites of death, both physical and cultural. Yet,nowadays they also present an exceptional resourceand opportunity to revive and reinvigorateprecolonial cultural knowledge and practice throughtheir collections. Consequently, curators often findthemselves in the dubious position of being bothpotential foe and ally. This is complicated furtherwhen curators work cross-culturally and try toembrace both Indigenous and Western ways of working,as this chapter explores. It has been argued thatcurators have moved from the position of ‘expert’ tothat of ‘facilitator’ but this oversimplifies thecomplexities of voice, accountability and power inthe representation of culture. There is a need for amore nuanced understandings of the pressures thatcommunity engagement places on the role ofcuratorship, especially in this current time ofincreasing expectations on engagement and decreasingresources to support museological work.

If you are standing on the shores of the Ottawa Riverlooking at the Canadian Museum of History, thenational library and archives and other nationalrepositories of Aboriginal heritage, you might welldespair at the comprehensive losses of curatorialexpertise, programmes of research and will to workcollaboratively with Aboriginal people which befellthese institutions under the government of PrimeMinister Stephen Harper. Looking harder, however,neither the shifting political ideologies nor theera of financial constraint that began with theglobal financial crisis of 2008 seems to have thrownprocesses of decolonisation and pluralistrepresentation that began to take root in Canadaduring the 1990s into reverse. Two exhibitionprojects that unfolded during that same periodprovide evidence that the changes in historicalconsciousness of settler–Indigenous relationshipsand the acceptance of cultural pluralism haveprovided a counterweight to the intentions of aright-wing government to restore old historicalnarratives. This chapter discusses them as evidenceof this deep and, seemingly, irreversible shift inCanadian public’s expectations of museumrepresentation. The first involved plans for the newexhibition of Canadian history being developed forthe 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation in2017, specifically a fishing boat named the NishgaGirl which was presented by a West-Coast FirstNation to mark the successful resolution of its landclaim. The second is the Sakahàn exhibition ofglobal indigenous art shown in 2013 at the NationalGallery of Canada and which marked a notabledeparture from its past scope. While utopia has byno means been achieved, neither, surprisingly, wasdystopia realised during the years of conservativereaction.

On the basis of our experience as editors of a debateon ethnographic museums in a German journal, weanalyse the conditions and limits of the currentdebate on the ‘decolonisation’ of ethnographicmuseums in the German-speaking context. Strictlyspeaking, the German debate lags behind a bit inrelation to the Anglophone debate, but in the faceof the reorganisation of the Berlin ethnographicmuseum as the ‘Humboldt Forum’ it provides crucialinsights into the epistemology of unfoldingpostcolonial debates. We diagnose certain pitfallsof this discussion, e.g. a tendency towardsantagonisms and dichotomisation, an overemphasis onthe topic of representation and on deconstructionistapproaches, an underestimation of anthropology’scritical and self-reflexive potential and too narrowa focus on ethnographic collections. From our pointof view, decolonisation must be a joint effort ofall kinds of museum types – ethnographic museums,art museums and (natural) history museums as well ascity museums, a museum genre being discussed withincreased intensity these days. As a consequence, wesuggest a more thorough reflection upon thepositionality of speakers, but also upon the format,genre and media that facilitate or impede mutualunderstanding. Secondly, a multidisciplinary effortto decolonise museum modes of collecting, ordering,interpreting and displaying is needed, i.e. aneffort which cross-cuts different museum types andgenres. Thirdly, curators working towards thisdirection will inevitably have to deal with theproblems of disciplinary boundary work and theunderlying institutional and cultural-politicallogics. They eventually will have to work incross-disciplinary and cross-institutional ways, inorder to reassemble disparate collections andcritically interrogate notions of ‘communities’ asentities with clear-cut boundaries. After all, in anenvironment of debate, an exhibition cannot anylonger be understood as a means of conveying andpopularising knowledge, but rather as a way ofmaking an argument in 3D.

This chapter begins by considering the history of the interpretation of multi-stage burial practices in the Neolithic. These interpretations have contrasted secondary burials involving exposure and bone circulation with successive inhumation of bodies in a single location. Chronologies and temporalities of different styles of burial rites are considered. Various ethnographic discussions of collective and multi-stage burials are also introduced, including the important interpretive concept of the intermediary period in funerary rites. The chapter then goes on to discuss evidence which needs to be understood in any archaeological discussion of the intermediary period. This includes the taphonomy of human decomposition; the differences between different burial environments; and cave processes and their possible effects on burials.

This chapter addresses the question of what the agency of non-animate objects might imply for the study. It begins by discussing early archaeological applications of the ideas of Giddens and Bourdieu. It then moves on to discuss anthropological ideas about the agency of non-humans, in particular Ingold’s dwelling perspective and the idea of the taskscape. It suggests that the agency of inanimate objects has been conceptualised in two different ways. Gell’s ‘secondary agency’ is compared with Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’. These approaches are situated more broadly within developing Post-humanist interpretations of object agency. Understandings of time and temporality are also discussed within the same framework. The chapter follows Gell in using the distinction between A and B-series time to construct an account of time experience based on the material world. B-series time is held to be a map of temporally ordered events. Material narratives of time and object biographies are shown to be central to this process; of particular importance is the way that changes to objects and places index the passage of time.

This volume argues that curatorship may be ‘recalled’and remade through collaborative relationships withcommunities leading to experiments in curatorialtheory and practice. What can museums of ethnographyin the Americas and Europe learn from the experienceof nations where distinctive forms of Indigenousmuseology are emerging and reshaping the conventionsof curatorial practice? In addressing this question,this chapter draws on research by the authors,including interviews with Māori curators, museumprofessionals, academics and community leadersthroughout Aotearoa New Zealand, exploringconnections with the wider Pacific and the world. Indoing so, it focuses on the ‘figure of thekaitiaki’, the Māori ‘guardian’, as a particularlocal development of the ‘figure of the curator’. Itconcludes that museums across the world can learnfrom Pacific experiments and become active agents inshaping cultural revival and future potentialitieson a global scale.

ćəsnaʔəm, the City before the City is aboundary-breaking exhibition that has successfullychallenged the museum world to revisit who is thecurator and who is the audience. This chapterprovides an Indigenous-framed insight into kinaccountability as (re)presented to the museum worldfrom the local tribal/aboriginal communityperspective of Musqueam. The exhibition wassimultaneously displayed in three venues of theVancouver city region, each providing multipleperspectives of the original inhabitants of avillage named c̓əsnaʔəm more than five thousandyears old. While the central city venue at theMuseum of Vancouver was high-tech and pitched to aninternational museum visitor, the Museum ofAnthropology exhibit was uniquely ephemeral,transient and aimed at shifting preconceivedperceptions of what it means to be a modernaboriginal raised in a city established on thousandsof years of unbroken occupation. The mostchallenging of the three exhibits was to be found inthe Musqueam village Culture Centre. In thisinstance the art and treasures were displayed in amanner that required elders to provideinterpretation and the audience is their own. Threeexhibits, three boundary-breaking contact zones, onepeople, Musqueam.