A brief history of the North American ethnographic collections in six Scottish museums

Abstract

Starting in the late 18th century, when Captain Cook's crews numbered many Scots among them, and throughout the 19th century, when trade and exploration between the "Old" and" New" World particularly flourished, strong ties between Scotland and North America were formed. Scholars, explorers, fur-traders, surveyors and map-makers, artists, missionaries, adventurers and "tourists" were keen, when they returned home, to share the fascinating items and "artificial curiosities" which they had discovered amongst the Native American peoples. Most of the North American and Inuit objects collected, therefore, and which have been subsequently donated to museums, were acquired in a casual and unplanned way with a few notable exceptions. Most of this material derives from the whaling and fur trading activities in the 19th century and early 20th century. Now, over a hundred years later, a variety of interest, use, emphasis, and type of display, was discovered in the museums visited which seemed to reflect trends in historical and anthropological views and those of current "museology". This ranges from the "Cabinets of Curiosities", through Pitt Rivers typology to the modern thematic approach. The concerns of this dissertation are to investigate the collections of North American Ethnographic Material in Six Scottish Museums in the following categories: one national museum, one city corporation, two university museums, and two district councils and briefly to describe their history.