Museums at home: access to digital archaeology during the COVID-19 crisis

In the last six months, 90% of museums around the world have been temporarily closed (UNESCO 2020), abruptly changing the ways that researchers, students and the public may interact with museum collections, archaeological sites and artifacts. A ‘digital stampede’ (Rees Leahy 2020) to produce online content has been a visible feature of lockdown life, enabling new means of access to institutions and collections in the form of exhibition tours, blogs, workshops, and webinars. Likewise, universities have shifted to fully online teaching, with staff scrambling to deliver engaging content in an online environment. While larger museums with established digital outreach programs could more easily pivot towards and diversify within this all-digital environment, this has been more difficult for smaller, regional, or university museums. Current circumstances constrain opportunities for engagement with artifacts across the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector, but those circumstances also provide a moment to experiment. We examine this moment through the lens of object-based teaching and learning in archaeology and ancient history. Using the Monash University Museum of Mediterranean Antiquities, we highlight the use of digital replicas to inform and engage students in an entirely online environment. We demonstrate that digitization is a scalable process just as applicable to university collections and smaller museums as it is to large, well-resourced collections at international flagship museums. As we contemplate the enduring impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, interactions with digitised archaeological collections will undoubtedly shape expectations around access to collections and teaching in archaeology for museums and universities alike.