MUSEUM OF CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The Museum of Classical Archaeology (MOCA) is home to over one of the three major surviving collections of plaster casts in the UK. MOCA’s light and airy Cast Gallery houses over 450 casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, with more in reserve – plus c.600 original artefacts, 10,000 pottery sherds and 3,000 squeezes of ancient inscriptions.

As a roll-call of some of the most famous statues from the ancient past – where else could you see the Farnese Hercules alongside the Augustus Primaporta, or the pedimental sculptures from Olympia, the Parthenon and the temple of Artemis at Corcyra in the same space? – the collection is a mainstay of teaching in the Faculty of Classics. But as a collection made up primarily of historical replicas, it also offers a glimpse into the reception of classical sculpture and Victorian ‘ways of seeing’ the ancient world.

MUSEUM OF CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The Museum of Classical Archaeology is home to plaster casts of some of the most famous sculptures from the ancient world, as well as a few surprises (painted sculptures, anyone?).

VOLUNTEERING AT THE MUSEUM OF CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

One of the advantages of studying at Cambridge is the resources available to support your studies, including nine University Museums and Collections – but the museums don’t just provide rich and varied objects to learn from. You can also volunteer and gain skills which will stand you in good stead when your studies are over.

The Museum of Classical Archaeology (MOCA) offers a range of opportunities for students to engage with the museum, its audiences and its collection. How does helping us with events sound? Or getting hands on with our collection of c.10,000+ sherds? Or even teaching Latin?

Every year, we train a group of volunteers to teach Latin in afterschool clubs in local state schools. Since 2013, the Museum has been running the Minimus Primary Latin Project. The aim of the project is to introduce pupils to Latin and the Romans and provide them with a fun and rewarding activity. We send undergraduate and graduate students from the Faculty of Classics to teach Latin as an after-school club in state maintained primary schools. In the 2019/2020 academic year, 15 classics students taught 60 pupils across 6 state schools in Cambridge.

Classics students also have the opportunity to get involved in collections care and cataloguing of over 5000 squeezes of ancient inscriptions and over 10,000 pottery sherds which the museum holds. Previously, our student volunteers helped us to inventory our entire sherd collection – it took three years, as they painstakingly recorded the location of every single sherd. Now, our Sherd Cataloguing volunteers photograph, measure, and triage the sherd collection. Through this project, they learn vital skills for the museum sector, and are supporting us as we redevelop our catalogue and improve the information we hold on our objects. Similarly, our Squeeze Re-boxing and Cataloguing volunteers learn to photograph, measure and house objects to the highest museum sector standard. Both roles are an opportunity for students to experience day-to-day running behind the scenes of a university museum.

MOCA also offers opportunities specifically catered to the faculty’s graduate students. The Grads Curate project is a unique opportunity for our PhD students to create a small temporary display in the Museum, which relates to the student’s research and MOCA’s collections. The graduate students work closely with the curator to create a cohesive exhibition that uses the collections of the museum to disseminate their research and ideas. This project allows students to gain curatorial experience on a small scale: selecting appropriate objects, writing labels, creating engaging displays and mounting their display. It is an important part of the Museum’s programming each year.

And it’s not just MOCA you can volunteer with – our sister collections also all run wide and varied volunteering projects, most of which are advertised through the?University of Cambridge Museums’ Volunteer Makers platform.

THE COLLECTION

The Museum of Classical Archaeology (MOCA) is the crowning jewel of the Faculty of Classics. Some of the most famous sculptures from the ancient world are accessible in the Cast Gallery, just above the Library: the Farnese Hercules and the Laocoon, the sculptures from the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Doryphoros and the Aphrodite of Knidos and the Primaporta Augustus… The original ancient sculptures may be far away in Italy, Greece or even across the pond in America, but the Cast Gallery is full of historical plaster casts. Most are Victorian in date and are historical objects in their own right. The collection is one of three major surviving collections of plaster casts in the UK.

The cast collection began in the Fitzwilliam Museum, where casts were donated from private collections in its first years of opening. The first director of the Fitzwilliam, Sir Sidney Colvin, was appointed in 1874 and he began to build the collection of plaster casts, most notably to include fresh new discoveries from contemporary excavations at Olympia. MOCA was founded in 1884, to provide a home for the casts outside the increasingly crowded antiquities galleries of the Fitzwilliam.

Today, the casts are displayed in a purpose-built gallery which is light, bright and airy. One of MOCA’s most famous casts in the painted Peplos Kore, which challenges the idea that classical sculpture was purely white: with colours which are often garish to the modern eye, the Peplos Kore was always intended to be a provocation to make us think about what we take for granted about the past.

The collection continues to grow, although more slowly than in the nineteenth century. Recent additions have included a cast of the Terme Boxer, which was professionally coloured to replicate the original’s complex polychromy, and a digitally rendered replica of the Ruthwell Cross.

The Museum is also home to a collection of 10,000+ sherds (small pieces of broken pottery and other materials), around 600 more complete original artefacts, some of which are on display in a teaching room, and 3,000 squeezes (paper imprints of inscriptions). Students are encouraged to make use of and engage with the collection: both the casts and the reserve collection are used in faculty teaching, and the Cast Gallery provides a space for both undergraduate teaching and independent study. The cast and sherd collection is available online through the research catalogue, and a more comprehensive catalogue is currently in development. Students who wish to consult objects which are not on display can arrange to do so with the Curator.

The Gallery is open Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm and 10am-1pm on Saturdays during University term-time.

THINGS TO DO: EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS

The Museum of Classical Archaeology plays host to a whole range of different events and exhibitions throughout the year. Our events are free and aim to get people exploring the collection in new and diverse ways, all while having plenty of fun.

We love that our casts can inspire creativity and welcome anybody to bring pencil and paper, pull up a chair and get sketching whenever we are open. One of our most popular events, Drink & Draw provides another chance to get arty in the summer months. Visitors are welcomed into the Cast Gallery afterhours with a glass of wine (or cordial!) and everything they need to get started, with local artists on hand to help. Drink & Draw is an event for everyone, seasoned sketchers and novices alike.

There are regular Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ tours at the Museum, which challenge binary approaches to gender and sexual identity through our objects. From goddesses and ancient myths to powerful emperors, our volunteers guide visitors to see the spectrum of identities that exist across time, place and culture in amongst the statues and sculptures. And our volunteers are very much in control of the stories they tell: they each have their perspective and experience, which gives them a unique style of storytelling. Visitors who can’t attend a tour needn’t miss out: they can pick up a Queer Antiquities trail in the Museum and go on their own LGTBQ+ journey around the Cast Gallery instead.

The Museum also takes part in some of the biggest events in the University’s calendar: we host more traditional lectures, tours and activities in the Cast Gallery, putting on show the breadth of research happening in the Classics Faculty and taking part in University-wide research festivals. In the past, we have hosted lectures on race in the ancient world, ancient writing systems, Roman daily life and hands on workshops. Special one-off events offer a new way to enjoy the collection, such as Greek Love, a valentine’s collaboration exploring ancient sexuality with MuseumBums for LGBTQ+ month.

MOCA also hosts up to four exhibitions of contemporary art each year, which help to bring our Cast Gallery to life. These are not all curated in-house; instead, we welcome exhibition proposals from artists and others, both local and international, who interpret our space and collection in creative ways. In recent years, we’ve hosted Marian Maguire’s Goddesses, which cast the Greek goddesses through a feminist lens in a series of colourful lithographs: would they keep their traditional roles, if they could see us now and they had the choice? In Silence of Time, local artist Loukas Morley, whose work is created sustainably from salvaged materials, transformed the Gallery, with installations, mirrors and his own plaster casts. And Layers of Landscape was a research exhibition of archival photographs, exploring the changing face of the Milesian peninsula over time and presented in both Turkish and English. The result is a wide range of unique exhibitions, from contemporary art and photography to archaeology, taking full advantage of the skill sets and specialisms of our collaborators, and sometimes supported with themed events.