Didactic ressources in the museum of Mação

The Museum of Pre-Historic Art Museum of Mação focuses on the meaning of human interaction with the landscape and its transformation in Pre-History, particularly within the last hunter-gatherers and first farmers, their dwellings, burials and art.

Present messages from the past

1 - Archaeology understands past behaviour as cultural adaptations interacting with the environment, stressing both the diversity of cultural behaviour strategies, but never neglecting their that in essence they where common to all mankind all over the planet – a deeper understanding of social and cultural diversity - intercultural mutual understanding.

2 - Archaeological practice combines highly complex technologies but still allows the involvement of yet untrained people, where to a certain extent they can be part of he process of knowledge construction – non formal scientific and cultural education.

3 - Archaeology doesn’t separate human sciences from natural and earth sciences, therefore is developed without knowledge segmentation or isolation – awareness of the fact that knowledge is built through a combination of rigorous disciplines, methods and dialogue.

4 - When studying prehistory we realize that humans used to live in harmony and balance with their environment, nowadays the disequilibrium is evident and furthermore we are losing consciousness that we still depend on the environment – Natural resources sustainable exploitation awareness.

5- As well the study of our past show us how far the climatic changes affect human communities, however the climatic changes we are facing now, caused by us, are a enormous problem because of their catastrophic consequences, since in the last 10 000 years human beings expanded to almost all regions of the Earth Planet – reflection about climatic changes and stimulation to struggle against it.

We do that using different strategies we try to develop didactical tools that:

• enhance knowledge of the diversity and complementarities of cultural adaptations in Pre-history

• effectively transmit the mentioned concepts

Our activities rely strongly on a "learn by doing" process with dominant performing attitude, that favours a bridge between culture (archaeological heritage - Prehistory) science, technology and arts - EXPERIMENTATION

Didactic ressources in the museum of Mação