Current paleoanthropology and paleoarchaeology in the museums of Poland in the tourism context. Invisible heritage?

Abstract

The heritage of prehistory, in the fields of both palaeoanthropology and palaeoarchaeology, constitutes a huge physical and interpretative resource, even though the majority of artefacts have never left museum storage rooms. The current significant development in research into human fossils does lead to considerations about the current ways of exhibiting museum collections regarding this kind of heritage. In Poland, artefacts of prehistory, including human fossils, are distributed between different kinds of museums ‒ historical, archaeological, natural history, and geological ones, as well as museums belonging to universities and scientific institutes. None of them builds their brand based on palaeoanthropological artefacts. Moreover, since the excavations have stopped, the sites of discoveries of that kind remain illegible to the general public due to the lack of on-site markers and appropriate educational tourist facilities. All these facts together underline the problem of limited visibility of the recent discoveries and palaeoanthropological and palaeoarchaeological heritage in the Polish museum and tourist market.