Artefacts of Encounter: Cross-cultural exchange on early European voyages into Polynesia (1765-1840) and socio-cultural transformation

This three-year project uses artefacts as primary evidence of the nature of encounters between European explorers and Polynesian islanders on more than thirty Pacific voyages from 1765 to 1840, and the transformations - both immediate and long-term - that they engendered.
These artefacts include the objects they acquired, many of which survive in museums, as well as the intellectual and artistic traditions into which these important exchanges were immediately and subsequently incorporated.
Whereas research focused on artefacts is often said to treat cultures as museum exhibits, fixed in an eternal ethnographic present, this project turns such assumptions around by demonstrating that artefacts, of all forms of evidence, are key to understanding how socio-cultural change unfolds. It considers not only technological developments, and the expansion of people's knowledge of each other's worlds, but also the ways in which their most basic assumptions about existence were challenged - in some cases abandoned or transformed.
Marshalling a range of material connected to the voyages into relational databases, the research team will also collaborate with members of present-day Polynesian communities interested in museum collections to shed new light on cross-cultural dynamism in the context of European imperial expansion and its far-reaching effects.