A Space Reimagined: The Dismantling of the Cyprus Gallery at the Harvard Semitic Museum

This short three-minute video from the Harvard Semitic Museum, published on the channel of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East in July 2017, documents the dismantling and reimagining of the museum's Cyprus gallery.

Following an opening ninety seconds without spoken commentary, an unnamed member of the project team speaks from 1:32 about the history of the display and the museum's holdings. The speaker explains that the Cyprus gallery had been installed in 1984 and had remained unchanged until the year before the video was released. Over those four decades, the museum's collections had changed dramatically.

When the team began working on the project to reimagine the space, one of its first steps was to go through all of the objects held in storage. In doing so, the staff found many boxes of artefacts that had been excavated at various sites across Cyprus by Harvard University expeditions dating back to the late 19th century.