Inside the Museum

Welcome to the Museum, our student-led exploration of the role of specific objects and of material culture in the Anthropocene.

Here you will find our initial selection of objects contributed by previous students of the Human Geography in the Anthropocene third-year undergraduate course at the University of East Anglia, each with their own short essay. And we will soon be adding objects from the 2022 cohort. Please browse the collection and respond with your comments on any objects you find particularly interesting and share on social media.

There is a short introduction to the Museum of the Anthropocene where you can also leave comments on any aspect of the Museum project or the relevance of material culture to our understanding of the Anthropocene.

And if you’d like to explore examples of ClimateCultures members using different objects to investigate our relationships with the more-than-human world in this new, human-produced planetary age, do check out our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

Zapotec Poetry

Markus Martinez Burman presents Bishé, Zapotec poetry that's a legacy of a people and their pre-Columbian Mesoamerica empire. Colonized and subjugated, only touristic legacies of the Zapotec remain, the land exploited for neoliberal resource extraction: a forgotten land surrounded by Bishé, “a soul that is being taken by the devil.” ...
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The Christmas Tree

Jess Scragg explains how, originating in pagan religions and repurposed to celebrate Christianity, the Christmas tree has become a comforting image for many, becoming widespread with the Industrial Revolution and material accumulation. Mass production to fuel stimulated demand has led to 'commodity cities', which manufacture huge quantities of Christmas gifts ...
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Salviati Planisphere World Map, 1525

Joanna Wanat's contribution of the Salviati Planisphere shows how 15th and 16th-century Europeans' creation of world maps, with large empty spaces inviting exploration of the 'New World', marked one possible start of the Anthropocene epoch and helps us to reflect on the global consequences of the ‘explore and conquer’ mentality ...
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“Indian Squaw Pocahontas Costume Ladies Sexy Fancy Dress Sexy”

Contributing a Native American Pocahontas 'fancy dress' costume to the Museum, Ruby Rae explores how the Columbian Exchange led to near eradication of cultures and ideals, and objectifying these concepts as a costume only enforces the victory of the colonisers and exacerbates a negative, historically selective concept of the Anthropocene ...
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Fahrenheit 451

Khilna Shuklaa contributes Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's 1953 satirical novel on the relationship between humans and technology, published in the early days of an era that promotes consumers as patriotic citizens. Fahrenheit 451's spectacle of book burning reminds us how easily our knowledge and identities can be reshaped or destroyed ...
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Space Junk

Alise Miluna contributes Space Junk. With over a million derelict human-made objects left circling our planet from the early days of the Cold War and multiplying every year, near-Earth orbit is a museum of space exploration since the beginning of the Great Acceleration, a candidate start date for the Anthropocene ...
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Roundup – Glyphosate-based Herbicide

Jessica Parry offers Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide that reflects the intimate ways chemicals flow between ecologies and our bodies in the age of the Anthropocene and how the dominance of a small number of corporations on our global food supply promotes a standardised package of GM herbicide-resistant seeds, herbicides, and fertilisers ...
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The Mirror

Alex Stone offers the mirror, an object infused with meaning yet taken at face value. With modern narcissism a driving force of consumerism and the Anthropocene, where all we see in the mirror are the technofossils we wear as clothes or jewellery, the mirror is a tragedy of the commons ...
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