King's Museum

King’s Museum lies at the heart of the University's Old Aberdeen campus. As well as being Scotland's newest museum, it may also be the oldest as its origins lie in a museum collection established in King's College in 1727.

King’s Museum has exhibitions changing every few months to display these collections, some involving students and academic staff collaborating with the museum to bring recent research to a wider audience. With a service for schools, evening lectures and other events, such as the annual ‘Night at the Museum’, the museum is a place where objects and ideas are explored in ways that would have been inconceivable to those who have collected and curated the collection over the past centuries.

We hope that the museum is a friendly place, where passers-by, students, staff and tourists can drop in for a break; a place of stimulation and reflection in the middle of the busy campus.

This is an exhibition in King's Museum of recent archaeological discoveries from western Alaska, excavated by a team from the University of Aberdeen in partnership with the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Quinhagak.

‘Nunalleq’, meaning ‘the old village’ in Yup’ik, is a winter village site dating from 1350-1650AD. The permafrost has preserved tens of thousands of rarely seen artefacts from wood and other organic materials, and the collections ranks as one the largest and best-preserved ever recovered from the north. The research is a race against time as rising sea levels and melting permafrost are eroding the site at a catastrophic rate.

The exhibition explores the relationship between Eskimo/Inuit peoples and the Arctic environment through the lens of material culture, with finds from the recent archaeological excavation displayed alongside objects from the University of Aberdeen Museums’ Arctic collections. The finds from Alaska appear with the permission of the owners, Qanirtuuq, Inc., of Quinhagak, Alaska.