Museums - Musée d'Aquitaine

The Musée d'Aquitaine inherited the collection of the former Musée Lapidaire, which had been created by the administrators of the Cabinet des Antiques in Bordeaux before the French Revolution. Designated as the "overseas" collections, the ethnographic works from Africa, Oceania, and the Arctic in the museum reflect Bordeaux's traditional position as a capital of maritime commerce. These objects are the result of gifts made to the city in the second half of the nineteenth century by collectors, administrators, businessmen, missionaries, and military personnel. There are some 3,500 pieces—primarily African and Oceanic—and about 200 of them are on permanent display. Noteworthy among them are a large New Caledonian mask with feathers, a mask of painted bark and vegetable fiber from the Banks Islands of Vanuatu, a rare Greenland kayak collected by a Bordeaux fishing company, a Kota reliquary from Gabon, and a large wooden Baga polychrome mask from Equatorial Guinea.