Museum of Anthropology

Last Tuesday night, December 28th, we met up with Pam and Gregory again and drove to the Museum of Anthropology. This museum and research institution is part of the UBC campus in Vancouver. I had been wanting to go for a while as it's one of the top-rated local attractions on TripAdvisor... and since entry is half-price after 5pm on Tuesdays, it worked out perfectly!

We joined an hour-long guided tour, which made our visit a lot more interesting than it would have been if we had just been reading the signs.


The museum has a strong focus on the First Nations (i.e. aboriginal people) of BC. My favourite gallery was the high-ceilinged Great Hall, which contained totem poles, canoes, potlatch dishes, and other incredible woodwork. It was dark by the time we arrived at the museum, but the view of Point Grey from this gallery is apparently very beautiful; the architecture features a huge glass-covered wall in the hope of enabling visitors to appreciate how the totem poles would have looked in their original outdoor setting.




The huge dishes below were used to hold food during great feasts known as potlatches...


A rotunda dedicated to the artwork of the late Haida artist Bill Reid contained an enormous sculpture called The Raven and the First Men (first photo below). The sculpture was commissioned by the Koerners, a couple who were significant patrons of the museum, and it was based on the small wood carving in the third photo below. Note that the original sculpture is only a few centimetres tall, whereas the commissioned sculpture is a few metres tall! Prince Charles unveiled this sculpture at the museum in 1980.




There was also a large collection of artifacts from other native cultures around the world. We saw artwork, weaving, utensils, clothing, weapons and musical instruments from PNG, New Zealand, Indonesia, Micronesia, Japan, Africa, etc... but not a single thing from Australia!!



We also toured the Koerner Ceramics Gallery, which contains over 600 European ceramics dating from the late fifteenth to early nineteenth centuries. All of the pieces were donated to the museum in 1990 by the Koerners (the couple who commisioned the sculpture above)! The photos below show a large ceramic furnace and a complete 60-piece dinner set...



After spending three hours at the museum, we took Pam and Gregory to Tim Horton's for an essential Canadian experience!


Then we dropped them back at their hostel and headed home to pack for our 2-night trip to Vancouver Island the next day...