What they do and how they do it: why museums matter

Nicholas Thomas is the director of Cambridges Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a scholar, curator, writer and a museum enthusiast. He likens museums to regions and nations in which all sorts of disparate elements are brought together, which in different ways express the past vividly embodied in the present. The thrust of his ruminations on the nature of collections is that, like collections of people, the sum is greater than the parts because of the dialogues, conversations, connections