A museum is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment".
The Bowers Museum, which aims to "Celebrate world cultures through their arts", houses artefacts from around the world. Their have extensive collections of Pre-Columbian art, Art of the Pacific, and African art, and also a children's museum called the Kidseum.
The museum also hosts some big touring exhibitions, such as Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor, Secret World of the Forbidden City, and Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt…Treasures from the British Museum, and runs events.
The Bowers Museum is in Santa Ana, Orange County, California.
The Denver Art Museum is located in the Civic Centre of Denver, Colorado. The Museum is well known for its large collection of American Indian art, which holds over 16,000 works representing over 100 tribes across North America. The Museum also holds a comprehensive world art collection, with a total of more than 68,000 art works from across the world. It has nine departments, consisting of architecture, design and graphics, Asian art, modern and contemporary, native arts, New World (pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial), painting and sculpture, photography, Western art; and textile art.
The Yorkshire Museum in York, England, was established in 1830, covering themes of archaeology, astronomy, biology and geology. It is also the home to the 1,000 year old Cawood sword, which is regarded as one of the finest Viking swords ever discovered. The Museum was founded by the Yorkshire Philosphical Society to accommodate their geological and archaeological collections.
The Yorkshire Museum re-opens on 1 August 2010 after a large refurbishment project which will extend the Museum to hold five new themed galleries displaying some of Britain's finest archaeological treasures, rare animals, birds and fossils.
The Ara Pacis Museum in Rome is a striking modern building designed by architect Richard Meier, which has been criticised for its lack of congruity with its historical surroundings.
It houses the Ara Pacis, or "Altar of Peace". The Ara Pacis is a stunning work of Roman art, which was discovered in the 1930s. It was commissioned in 13 BC to celebrate the return of Emperor Augustus from Gaul and Hispania.
Harborough Museum was opened in 1983 and is set in the historic market town of Market Harborough. The museum celebrates Market Harborough’s long history as a centre of trade and industry in the heart the Welland Valley at the crossroads between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.
Special features: the Hallaton Treasure, one of the most significant Iron Age finds in Britain, in their Treasure Gallery and the Vamping Horn. The Treasure was found near the village of Hallaton in south east Leicestershire in what was once an Iron Age shrine.
What was it like in early Anglo-Saxon times? At West Stow you can walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, explore their homes and see the evidence for yourself.
The site has been occupied by a succession of peoples since the end of the last ice age. The site was used by stone age hunter-gatherer groups six or seven thousand years ago. There are traces of Neolithic burial mounds, as well evidence of an Iron Age settlement which lasted to 60AD.
The reconstructed buildings have been produced through a technique called Experimental Archaeology, this is testing out different ideas about how things were done in that time, using the same tools and techniques availble to the Anglo-Saxon builders. Therefore every reconstruction is different as different techniques were tried out to find the most likely way the original buidings were constructed.
In the museum you will see fascinating displays of some of the objects found during the excavation of the village telling the fascinating story of this settlement and the people who lived here, plus see an exhibition of Replica Anglo-Saxon costume. Early Anglo-Saxon material from West Stow, Icklingham, Westgarth Gardens and Eriswell is displayed.
The Grant Museum of Zoology was founded in 1827 as a teaching collection and is now the only zoological university museum left in London. The museum contains over 62,000 specimens, covering the whole of the animal kingdom. Many of the speicies it holds are either endangered or extinct such as the Tasmanian Tiger, the Dodo and the Quagga. The museum displays animals in forms of skeletons, mounted animals and specimens preserved in fluid, it also contains many of the original collections of noted zoologists, Robert Grant and Thoman Henry Huxley.
At the Jewry Wall Museum one can discover the archaeology of the city's past, from the Prehistoric to the Medieval period. The museum contains one of Leicester's most famous landmarks known as the Jewry Wall. The Wall which once surrounded the Roman towns' public baths, is one of the tallest surviving pieces of Roman building left in the country surviving for nearly 2000 years. The museum holds Roman archaeology collections, and artefacts from other eras from groups which have settled in the Leicester area.
At the Potteries and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, you will find an amazing colleciton of Staffordshire ceramics, a sensory oases with plans and fungi to smell and touch and information panels that will lead you to explore the wildlife, landscape and geology of the Potteries. The gallery also holds a unique collectios of artworks, inclucing Picasso, Durer and Degas.
The Tutankhamun Exhibition is a small museum in the town of Dorchester in Dorset, England, dedicated to the famous Egyptian pharaoh King Tut. It's housed in an old converted Roman Catholic church, and features a single permanent exhibition comprising various replicas of items from the tomb of Tutankhamun, laid-out in a scale recreation of the tomb itself.
The brainchild of Dr Michael Ridley, the museum was founded in the wake of the massive success of the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum in London in 1972. It reveals the history of King Tut through the eyes of British Egyptologist Howard Carter, as he explored the tomb in 1922.
While none of the exhibits in the museum are originals, some original techniques and materials - even gold - have been employed in the creation of facsimilies of such famous objects as the Golden Death Mask, the Canopic Shrines and the Golden Throne. A life-sized replica of King Tut is also displayed. It's said to have taken two years to create, using X-rays of the real mummy, and to be the only anamatonically exact recreation of Tutankhamun anywhere in the world.
