 Every one of these objects tells not just one story, but many stories. Between them, they span time and continents. They take us across oceans and deserts into jungles and rainforests. They take us from the other side of the road to the far corners of the inhabited earth. They allow us to look back into the past and to take that past with us into the future. Each of these objects is literally one in a million. That's how many objects we have to choose from. Because we have so many, but we can only show a few, each one has been specifically chosen for the stories they can tell, for the knowledge that they contain, and for the secrets that they reveal. They tell us about the history of humanity from our earliest ancestors to today's indigenous populations spread across the globe. They encourage us to look, and then to look again. They tell us about humanity's trials and triumphs, privations and celebrations, and they speak to us of love and loss, of conflict and of war. Everything in here was made by somebody, somewhere, and at some time across the span of human history and prehistory. There are so many different stories to tell, we can't tell them all, but each one tells us something about the life and the death of people. The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is an institution that brings to life the history and the prehistory of humanity from all over the world and across human time. Effectively it's a museum about everything, everywhere, ever, but it's also a museum that tells stories about how these things from all over the world came to be in Cambridge and the people and the relationships that brought them here. Well, the museum's reopening its doors after 18 months of being closed for redevelopment that cost £1.8 million. That redevelopment involved re-displaying our archaeology galleries. We have new archaeology galleries for Cambridge and the World Galleries on the top floor. We have a new temporary exhibition space and perhaps most importantly, after 127 years, we now have a front door that opens directly onto Dining Street. It's a front door from the museum to the rest of the world outside the university and will hopefully make our amazing collections even more accessible than they were before. This redevelopment has been a massive job for us. We've had to close all of our galleries and remove almost all of the objects from them in order to do this work. From the ground floor alone, we had to remove and put into storage over 4,000 objects that have been on display. Our collections here are unique. The museum here has one of the largest collections and the strongest collections of world prehistory and it's got one of the greatest collections of ethnography, of anthropology, from across the world. When people come to see the museum, they're going to be able to see things that either have never been on display before or indeed things that haven't been on display for decades. But more than that, we hope that people will be able to see things that they haven't really been able to engage with before. What we're trying to do is shed new light on old things, on things that have been here but have never really received that kind of attention before. The biggest thing in the museum is a totem pole from the northwest coast of British Columbia. It was brought to the museum in the 1920s and it stands about 14 meters tall in our main anthropology gallery. Our oldest thing is this stone shopping tool from Aldevaigorge in Tanzania. It was made over 1.8 million years ago. And one of our most mysterious things is this wooden carving, which is probably from the Austral Islands in Polynesia. We know it was collected by Captain Cook but the object has confounded curators. There's a lot about it but it's almost impossible to say what it is or where it comes from. There's nothing like it in the world and it might be the pro of a canoe but its significance is unknown, although double figures did tend to express divine power. This Roman coffin of a woman was found in Arbery in Cambridge when new housing estates were being created there in the 1950s. Found with her in the coffin were the skeleton of a mouse and a shrew. The skeleton's ankle bone had been gnawed by a mouse, presumably the same one that was found with her. The coffin was on display in the museum at the time that Sylvia Plath was a student in Cambridge from 1955 to 57 and was the inspiration for her poem All the Dead Deers. This Roman beaker was probably made in the Neen Valley near Peterborough and it's remarkable for its images. The scene is entirely composed of sexual images and mostly male genitals. The riots are driven by naked women and pulled by penises instead of horses. There's a couple making love and other penises dotted around the scene. This pot confirms the view that the Romans were the opposite of being prudes. One of our rarest things is this snakes and ladders board from North India. It's one of only four known examples of the Muslim version of the game and the only one to be made of wood. The others are made out of paper or parchment. The game of snakes and ladders originated in India. They were Hindu, Jain and Buddhist versions before it was exported to Britain. This one was made in the early 19th century. These collections are important, I guess, because they show that museums are places that things happen in. They're not just dead places where the objects go to die. These are collections that are continually used by researchers from Cambridge University and from places all over the world. They tell us about human past. They tell us about human present and ways of being in the world that are immensely important as sources of inspiration. Inspiration for school teachers, inspiration for local and international artists, poets and performers, inspiration for everyone. There's an awful lot that people can get from these collections.