The University is home to the highest concentration of internationally important collections outside London, which span the full spectrum of natural and cultural diversity over time and across the world.
This includes paintings by Titian, Monet and Picasso; early hominid tools discovered in East Africa by Louis Leakey; international archaeological and natural history collections; as well as books, maps and manuscripts spanning over 4,000 years of human history and in more than 2,000 languages.
A consortium of five institutions - the Fitzwilliam Museum, Hamilton Kerr Institute, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Cambridge University Library - will benefit from this investment. This cross-departmental collaboration was developed within the context of the Cambridge Heritage Science Hub (CHERISH) initiative, recently launched within the Materiality Research Growth Network of the University’s Research and Collections Programme.
The project will be led by Dr Paola Ricciardi, Senior Research Scientist at the Fitzwilliam Museum, with Professor Marcos Martinón-Torres, Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at the Department of Archaeology.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge