Roles and Challenges of the Museums in South America: A Bird’s Eye View

Pozzi-Escot D.; Saladino A. · The Oxford Handbook of South American Archaeology (2026)

Resumen

This chapter examines descriptions of the British Museum in travel narratives and diaries by American travelers to show how it informed broader conversations about the development of American museums. Visiting during the mid-nineteenth century, American tourists encountered a museum that was attempting to organize its collections and define its purpose as a public museum, and their descriptions highlight the anxieties raised by this process. Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented the museum’s vast quantities of objects, linking a fruitless search for meaningful artifacts to questions of genealogy. Other American travelers more explicitly considered the role of visitors in interpreting collections. The artist Orra White Hitchcock reflected on the place of women in the museum’s galleries, while the Black abolitionist William Wells Brown celebrated the opportunity to continue his education and to participate in critical discussions of the museum. © Oxford University Press 2026.