The Roof Of The World

Humans have lived in the Arctic Circle for more than 30,000 years, overcoming environmental challenges to produce objects of great beauty, usefulness, and ingenuity. Maev Kennedy looks forward to a new exhibition at the British Museum, the first to be devoted to the region’s history and culture, and to the changes in its climate which now threaten its future.

- Maev Kennedy

When the British Museum’s major exhibition on the Arctic finally opens, there will be many objects on display far more beautiful than one discoloured 15cm lump of mammoth tusk. Among intricate carvings of the people and animals of the region, superbly fashioned garments that made it possible to live and flourish in some of the coldest places on earth, bone tools so ingeniously made they were copied in iron and became standard equipment for whale hunters, works of contemporary art, and – dating to the 16th century – some of the earliest outsiders’ images of the Indigenous Peoples, it would be easy to overlook the dull brown ivory.

The piece of tusk is among finds from habitation sites in the Siberian Arctic that date back more than 30,000 years. They include decorated jewellery, such as slender bone bracelets and ornamental diadems, and a richly decorated mammoth ivory ladle, which was used for long enough for it to need a careful repair. These valuable pieces were excavated in the 21st century and only published in 2014, and will go on display for the first time in the first major exhibition devoted to the Arctic and its indigenous people, culture, and climate.

The exhibition, postponed from its planned opening in May 2020 by the coronavirus pandemic, will bring objects out of the British Museum stores which date back to its foundation but have never before been seen by the public, augmented by remarkable loans from other institutions, both in the eight modern countries that now encircle the roof of the world and beyond. The show’s co-curator Amber Lincoln, who is also the curator of the Americas section at the British Museum, describes the incised mammoth tusk as an astonishing object – ‘the first Arctic art, the oldest piece of Arctic art we know of’.