Imagine standing in a museum in New York, London, Paris, or Chicago.

Behind a sheet of glass is an African mask.

A small label tells you where it came from. Perhaps it provides an approximate date, the material from which it was made, the name of an ethnic or cultural group, and the person who donated or collected it.

But what if the label is wrong?

Or incomplete?

What if someone living thousands of miles away knows the mask’s real name? What if an elder remembers how it was used? What if a craftsperson recognizes a carving technique? What if there are songs, prohibitions, ceremonies, family histories, or memories connected to it that never entered the museum catalogue?

And what if that person could virtually pick up the object, turn it around, examine it closely, and tell its story?

This is one of the fascinating possibilities emerging at the intersection of anthropology, museums, 3D scanning, photogrammetry, augmented reality, and virtual reality.

Technology cannot undo colonial history.

But perhaps it can help change who gets to interpret it.

The Problem With an Object Behind Glass

Museums are extraordinary places for encountering human creativity. But every object in a collection has two histories.

There is the history of the object itself.

And there is the history of how it arrived at the museum.

For many African objects in European and North American collections, those histories intersect with colonialism, military expeditions, missionaries, archaeological projects, private collectors, international art markets, and unequal systems of power.

Once removed from its original setting, an object can lose much more than its geographical location.

It can lose context.

A ceremonial object may become “art.”

An ancestor may become a “specimen.”

Something that should only be seen under particular circumstances may suddenly be displayed to millions of strangers.

A living cultural object may acquire a catalogue number and spend the next century behind glass.

Anthropologist Craig Stevens explores this problem in his 2026 Northwestern University doctoral dissertation, Immersive Material Culture: 3D Technologies for African Art and Archaeology. His research asks how emerging technologies might allow museums and researchers to rethink relationships between collections and the communities from which they originated.

The question is not simply:

How can we digitize more museum objects?

It is something much more interesting:

Who gets to tell us what those objects mean?

A Museum Label Is an Interpretation

We tend to trust museum labels.

Understandably so.

They look authoritative. They have accession numbers, dates, scientific terminology, provenance information, and carefully written descriptions.

But labels are written by people.

And the history of collecting means that the person describing an object has often belonged to a completely different society from the person who created or used it.

Stevens argues that Western collecting institutions developed systems of classification and interpretation within colonial structures that frequently separated cultural materials from the communities associated with them.

That produces an intriguing paradox.

A museum may physically possess an object while someone thousands of miles away possesses far greater knowledge about it.

This is where digital technology becomes particularly interesting.

What If You Could Send the Object Home Without Moving It?

Imagine a ceremonial object housed in an American museum.

Moving it internationally might involve insurance, conservation concerns, security, transportation costs, institutional negotiations, and perhaps legal questions.

But a sufficiently detailed digital model can travel almost instantly.

Using photogrammetry, researchers can photograph an object from many angles and use software to reconstruct its three-dimensional form.

Other technologies use laser or structured-light scanning.

The resulting digital model can be rotated, enlarged, examined from unusual angles, placed inside a virtual environment, or potentially viewed through augmented reality.

A person thousands of miles away can encounter a remarkably detailed representation of an object that may have been inaccessible to their community for generations.

Stevens describes these technologies not merely as visualization tools but as potential mechanisms for reconnecting dispersed collections with cultural knowledge holders.

And his research tested that possibility in the real world.

When Liberian Elders Encountered Museum Objects in Virtual Reality

One of the most compelling parts of Stevens’s research involved 13 Liberian cultural objects held across six institutions in the United States.

Digital versions of those objects were incorporated into virtual environments and used during research in Liberia.

There, Stevens conducted 41 interpretation sessions involving Liberian elders, town chiefs, and community historians.

The encounters produced information that museum records frequently did not contain—including names, uses, memories, social histories, and knowledge about ritual restrictions.

Think about the reversal taking place.

For generations, museums often brought objects from Africa to Western institutions where foreign scholars studied and interpreted them.

Now the digital representation travels in the opposite direction.

The museum object virtually returns to a place where people can recognize it, question it, remember it, interpret it—and sometimes correct the institutional understanding of it.

That is much more profound than simply putting a museum collection online.

A Digital Object Can Become a Meeting Place

We often think of a 3D model as a copy.

But perhaps that definition is too limited.

A digital object can also become a meeting place.

An elder might recognize something.

A student might ask a question.

A historian might add a forgotten name.

A craftsperson might explain how it was manufactured.

Someone might remember seeing a similar object as a child.

Another person might say that certain information should not be publicly displayed.

Suddenly the digital model isn’t merely pixels representing wood, bronze, fiber, clay, or ivory.

It becomes a catalyst for conversation.

This is close to what Stevens calls Interpretive Agency: shifting authority toward source communities and cultural knowledge holders so they participate in defining objects and explaining their significance.

That distinction is crucial.

Because digitization alone does not decolonize anything.

Technology Is Not Automatically Democratic

It is tempting to assume that putting thousands of museum objects online automatically makes collections accessible.

But access is more complicated than clicking a mouse.

Who created the scan?

Who owns it?

Who controls the metadata?

Who decides what information accompanies it?

Can anyone download it?

Can it be commercially reproduced?

What happens if the object contains sacred knowledge?

Should every cultural object be available to everyone?

These questions become increasingly important as artificial intelligence, 3D printing, digital archives, and immersive technologies make cultural information easier to reproduce.

Stevens explicitly warns against treating technology itself as the solution. His framework argues that what matters is the research design and governance surrounding the technology—particularly whether communities actually gain interpretive authority.

That principle reaches far beyond museums.

Should Everything Be Open Access?

For years, “open access” has often been treated as an unquestioned good.

More information.

More photographs.

More scans.

More databases.

More people able to see them.

But cultural heritage introduces an important complication:

Access without context can become another form of extraction.

Some knowledge is communal.

Some is sacred.

Some belongs to initiates.

Some may have gender, age, family, ceremonial, or seasonal restrictions.

And some communities may simply decide that a cultural object should not circulate freely on the internet.

The dissertation connects this challenge with the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance: Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics.

In other words, the technological question—

“Can we digitize this?”

—may be less important than the cultural question:

“Should we, and under whose rules?”

The Strange New Life of a Museum Object

There is another fascinating possibility.

Digital replicas can give objects entirely new biographies.

Consider an African sculpture collected a century ago.

Its first life may have been ceremonial or practical.

Its second life begins when it enters a private collection.

Its third begins when a museum acquires it.

Then someone scans it.

Suddenly there is another version.

That version can travel.

It can enter a classroom in Nigeria.

Appear through augmented reality in Chicago.

Be examined through VR in Liberia.

Become part of an online archive.

Perhaps eventually it could even be recreated physically with a 3D printer.

The physical object hasn’t moved.

Yet its cultural presence has multiplied.

Stevens proposes thinking of 3D models, metadata, oral histories, and immersive interfaces as forms of heritage infrastructure, carrying responsibilities concerning access, attribution, circulation, and reuse.

That may become one of the defining heritage questions of our century.

Can Virtual Reality Replace Repatriation?

No.

And this distinction matters enormously.

Creating a beautiful 3D scan of an object does not resolve the question of whether the physical object should be returned.

A digital Benin Bronze is not a Benin Bronze.

A virtual sacred object is not the physical object whose material, history, spiritual significance, and displacement may be central to its meaning.

Stevens instead positions immersive technologies as something that can support restitution, repatriation, collaborative research, and shared stewardship, including relationships that exist before, during, and after physical return.

That is a far more compelling possibility.

Digital heritage doesn’t have to answer:

digital access or physical restitution?

It can ask:

How can digital technology support better relationships around cultural heritage?

From Cabinets of Curiosity to Virtual Reality

There is a beautiful historical symmetry here.

Beginning in early modern Europe, wealthy collectors assembled Wunderkammern—Cabinets of Curiosity—filled with unusual objects gathered from distant parts of the world.

These collections helped lay foundations for modern museums, but they also reflected systems of privilege, colonial expansion, and the idea that possessing and classifying objects was a way of possessing knowledge about the world. Stevens traces this history as part of the problem contemporary museums have inherited.

Five centuries later, we are building another kind of cabinet.

The virtual cabinet.

Except this time, theoretically, its doors can open in both directions.

A museum curator in Chicago can study an object.

So can an elder in Liberia.

A university student in Nigeria can encounter it.

So can a child thousands of miles away.

And—if designed ethically—the people whose heritage is represented can contribute to what everyone else learns about it.

That transforms digitization from documentation into dialogue.

The Future Museum May Not Have Walls

Museums aren’t disappearing.

Nor should they.

There is something irreplaceable about standing before a physical object made by another human being hundreds—or thousands—of years ago.

Material presence matters.

Scale matters.

Texture matters.

Place matters.

But the museum of the future may extend far beyond the building housing its collections.

Its galleries could simultaneously exist in classrooms, villages, phones, headsets, research centers, and communities across continents.

Its labels might no longer represent a single institutional voice.

A cultural object might carry multiple interpretations: archaeological evidence, an artist’s perspective, a curator’s research, an elder’s memory, a craftsperson’s knowledge, oral histories, and community protocols.

Stevens calls one dimension of his proposed approach Affective Curation, emphasizing emotional, sensory, spiritual, and embodied encounters with heritage. Another, Material Culture Diplomacy, considers how collections and their digital counterparts might foster reciprocal relationships and shared stewardship between institutions and communities.

Together, these ideas suggest a museum less concerned with simply possessing knowledge and more interested in facilitating relationships.

What This Means for Travelers

There is also a lesson here for those of us who travel.

We encounter material culture constantly.

Masks.

Textiles.

Carvings.

Ceramics.

Jewelry.

Religious objects.

Musical instruments.

Architecture.

Tools.

Sometimes we encounter them in museums.

Sometimes in markets.

Sometimes inside homes or workshops.

And sometimes within ceremonies where their meaning cannot possibly be understood merely by looking at them.

Travel teaches us that an object rarely explains itself.

The deeper question is not:

“What is that?”

It is:

“Who should I ask?”

That small shift changes everything.

It moves us from collecting images toward understanding context.

From looking at culture toward listening to people.

And from treating an object as an exotic curiosity toward recognizing it as part of someone’s history.

That is particularly meaningful to me as a photographer. A photograph, after all, presents the same problem.

We can photograph a mask beautifully.

But without understanding who made it, why it exists, when it is worn, who may wear it, what it communicates, and whether it should even be photographed, we may have captured its surface while completely missing its story.

Technology Can Bring Us Closer. Curiosity Must Do the Rest.

Perhaps that is the most intriguing lesson.

A 3D scanner can capture extraordinary detail.

Virtual reality can transport us thousands of miles.

Augmented reality can place an ancient object in our living room.

Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly create still more ways to search, translate, reconstruct, and connect cultural knowledge.

But none of these technologies automatically produces understanding.

Understanding still requires something profoundly human:

listening.

It requires recognizing that knowledge doesn’t always belong to the institution holding the object.

Sometimes the person who knows the most about an object lives an ocean away.

For centuries, museums brought the world’s objects to us.

Perhaps one of the next great transformations in cultural heritage will be finding new ways to bring people back to their objects—and their voices back to the stories we tell about them.

And that may be where technology becomes most powerful: not when it replaces human connection, but when it helps restore it.

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Academic Inspiration & Further Reading

This article is an independent interpretation inspired primarily by:

Stevens, Craig. (2026). Immersive Material Culture: 3D Technologies for African Art and Archaeology. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

The concepts Immersive Material Culture Framework, Affective Curation, Interpretive Agency, and Material Culture Diplomacy are attributed to Stevens and should remain credited to him wherever we use them.

The dissertation itself builds on a much wider scholarly literature, including work by Sonya Atalay on community-based participatory research; Laurajane Smith and Rodney Harrison on critical heritage studies; Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy on African restitution; Dan Hicks on colonial collections and the Benin Bronzes; and Stephanie Russo Carroll and colleagues on the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.

Note: Banner image created for illustrative purposes to represent the relationship between African cultural heritage, museums, community knowledge, and emerging 3D technologies. It does not depict a specific object, community, or documented event.