Museums are usually in cities. So, where transport is poor and it’s expensive to travel, many people can’t visit them. We decided to experiment with a way of getting around the problem: we built a travelling museum.

I’m an archaeologist working in the Limpopo Valley, in the north of South Africa, studying hunter-gatherers and the rise of precolonial kingdoms. I am interested in how crafted goods and local wealth shaped social relations and became the pillars upon which state society was built.

Together with Justine van Heerden, I designed a mobile museum to share our research. It’s a sturdy, portable cabinet with drawers that each tell a chapter of regional history. There are five layers, with the bottom ones stretching back over 250,000 years, and the top only a few hundred years. Inside the drawers are objects from teaching collections or which have been handed to us over the years, like pieces of pottery or stone tools.

The mobile display cabinet. Justine van Heerden, Author provided (no reuse) We travel with our museum to the field, to conferences and to meetings with land-owners, and we have written a paper to share with our community what we’ve learnt about community engagement programmes, and why this initiative works.

Justine surveyed and interviewed people who saw our museum for her master’s research. The main lessons we learnt are that:

people learn best from touching something, not just listening to a talk

visits with the museum should be short and frequent

people respond to seeing something that’s locally relevant

“experts” can learn from community engagement. To make it work, a travelling museum needs maintenance. Objects must be durable or replaceable. Facilitators need training. And the initiative needs funding.

But taking the museum to rural schools and communities matters. Giving people a chance to engage with their past signals that the past is theirs and that expertise grows where they are.

What it is (and why touch matters)

Children looking at the mobile museum displays. Justine van Heerden, Author provided (no reuse) The oldest display in our mobile museum cabinet is from Earlier and Middle Stone Age tool makers. Younger items include a Later Stone Age or hunter-gatherer display, and the top drawer includes a display on our current research. Inside each are artefacts, replicas and teaching aids designed to be handled. No glass. No alarms. No “do not touch” signs.

Ceramic sherds. Justine van Heerden, Author provided (no reuse) We emphasised touching because learning changes when your hands are involved. Feeling the edge of a stone tool or the weight of a ceramic sherd (a piece of broken pottery) transforms an abstract idea (“people lived here a thousand years ago”) into something immediate (“someone shaped this with their hands”).

For people who are learning about concepts in the museum for the first time, that moment of contact is powerful. They are learning from their fingertips.

Who we work with

We use the travelling museum in three main settings:

Schools and community centres in our research area of northern South Africa, where many artefacts we study originate. Teachers tell us it’s far easier (and cheaper) than bussing students to a city museum. But it is not confined to the area we work in and we’ve brought the museum to South Africa’s capital city, Pretoria, and Skukuza in the east of the country to present heritage to interested groups, including students from abroad.

Field visits and public talks, where elders, park staff and local guides share knowledge that seldom makes it into display labels. On a tour to the northern Kruger National Park, when we visited local archaeological sites such as Thulamela with the South African Archaeology Society, the museum accompanied us and we presented it to the group as an evening lecture.

Importantly, the museum visits university classrooms regularly. Here, it acts as a bridge between lectures and excavations; students practise describing, recording and interpreting real materials before heading into the field. Showing up with something useful – something that makes learning easier and more enjoyable – goes a long way.

Learning from a travelling museum

A mobile display doesn’t replace a traditional museum, which stores, conserves, researches and presents a variety of items. But it does what big buildings can’t: reach people where they are, on their terms, at short notice, without a ticket price.

Rock art reproduction. Justine van Heerden, Author provided (no reuse) We’ve learnt that even 30 minutes of guided handling beats an hour of talking. Holding an artefact, which might be hundreds of years old, can be a profound experience.

We plan multiple small sessions instead of one large event. This allows us to regularly engage, revisit groups and present our museum in various ways. We’ve also produced posters, videos and slideshows about the exhibit.

Local relevance is key. People light up when objects and stories come from places they know, where they live, or where they’ve travelled to.

There is a risk with our approach. Letting the public touch objects means wear and tear. We manage that with robust replicas and careful choice of what we present. We believe that respectful risk is necessary because of the benefits it leads to.

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• ** Read more: What it’s like curating ancient fossils: a palaeontologist shares her story***

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A travelling museum takes upkeep, money, planning and partners. Incorporating it into our research programme overcomes many of these challenges and tells the story of what we’re doing.

Why this matters beyond archaeology

Mobile museums are about equity as much as education. If cultural heritage remains behind glass in places that may be difficult to visit, it quietly reinforces the idea that knowledge lives elsewhere and belongs to someone else.

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• ** Read more: Looting of the Sudan National Museum – more is at stake than priceless ancient treasures***

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It is also not only about facts, but about exchange and connections. It’s about ownership and voice. When people handle the finds that came from their region, they ask different questions and offer different insights. Those conversations often redirect our research questions too. We’ve often been struck by people’s desire for a deep connection with the past.

Heritage is a public good, and it surrounds us in South Africa – it’s in the hills, caves, under earth and in our backyards. If it clusters around privilege, it narrows the stories a society can tell about itself.