Into the Amazon

About the Exhibition

Into the Amazon: materials and manufacture in the Amazon Basin, highlights this museum's important Amazonian ethnographic collections, both old and new. The exhibition looks at raw materials and the way things are made. It examines the use of traditional and new methods and materials, and the changing nature of production for both domestic and tourist purposes.

This exhibition came about as a result of the internship at this museum of conservator Monica Lima Carvalho from the University Museum of Anthropology in Goias in Gioânia, Brazil. In 2000, Monica worked with our conservation department for 6 months. This year a second intern from Brazil, Lucia Bastos, assisted in the conservation of objects exhibited here.

Monica has worked with members of the Kuikúru people from Xingu National Park, documenting their harvesting and use of buriti palm leaf. In 2000, Monica collected examples of primary materials such as cotton and palm fibre, seeds and dried fruits. She donated these samples to Exeter Museum, as well as objects made by the Txicoa, Kalapalo and Karajá people from the Xingu National Park region and Tocantins. Monica also added to our knowledge of the museum’s historical collections from the Amazon Basin.

During the summer of 2003, Monica worked with the Karajá people in Xingu. This gave her the opportunity to collect additional material and record the artists/makers on video. You can see this audio-visual material and related collections in this exhibition.

In October 2002 Morwena Stephens, an Exeter Museum conservator visited museums in Rio de Janeiro, Belém and Goias. She took with her a CD ROM of ethnographic object images from the museum's collections. Ethnographers, museologists and conservators at the Brazilian museums were able to add new layers of knowledge and information to that held in the museum.

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