The recent news that the Oman National Museum will implement a Historic Muscat Rehabilitation Project is a very exciting one for tourists, visitors, locals, as well as academics specialising in diverse areas like history, sociology and other related fields.
It will make the area along historic Muscat resemble a living museum.
While traditional museums have themselves been transformed from passively exhibiting historical objects to becoming interactive spaces of learning, living museums offer a whole different way of understanding our past.
Effectively, a living museum recreates historical settings in real time to simulate a specific time period. This offers visitors experiences to show how life was lived, the languages spoken, as well as the challenges faced by a community within a given time frame. This allows spectators to understand a culture within a natural environment and in a specific historical period.
Living museums hold a unique and invaluable place today.
There are a number of examples of living museums around the world. One of the earliest examples was in the town of Skansen in Stockholm which was opened in 1891 by Artur Hazelius to recreate life in pre-industrial Sweden.
Colonial Williamsburg in the United States also showcases life in an 18th-century town, with public squares, blacksmiths and a market with ‘locals’ conversing in old English, as well as trained historians strolling around to answer questions about colonial America.
The Beamish Museum in England offers a peek into the life of ordinary workers in Durham. It contains objects of everyday use that visitors can touch and feel, giving a sense of life in Northern England in the early 19th century.
Such museums offer spaces for experiential learning. In fact, even traditional museums today are collaborating with local communities, as well as researchers and students, to create alternative ways of learning about the past.
Part of this learning process is to include participatory archaeology, giving an opportunity to aspiring or amateur historians to literally get their hands dirty, digging for old and hidden objects. There are also opportunities for role play in traditional costumes.
Today, digital tools like augmented reality and virtual reality devices are used to further enhance and complement the human experience in such living museums to further improve our understanding of the past.
While skeptics regard living museum spaces as encouraging nostalgia, there is no doubt that they serve a much broader purpose. Open-air museums offer important emotional connections that traditional museums cannot. By engaging stakeholders in dialogue with the past, they make history become real, relevant and immediate.
While history has always been an important way of understanding the present and our future, making history come alive to a digital generation continues to be challenging. Creating spaces that point to a rich and vibrant past by providing experiential learning opportunities will create rich opportunities to showcase the past in ways that are vibrant and animated.
Museums are more than silent storehouses of past glory. They are active arenas for learning and recreation. Today, they also offer opportunities for immersive learning and engagement.
Sandhya Rao Mehta
The writer is Associate Professor, Sultan Qaboos University
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