Migration, mobility, movement, encounter, hybridity, fusion, heterogeneity, are just a few of the words from an extensive vocabulary in the social sciences today made pertinent as Europe seeks ways to cope with the latest conflict- and economy-induced mass movements of people. One strategy in this coping is to seek to understand its historical dimension, its sheer fundamentality to the European project and to share that knowledge and understanding as widely as possible. Two concrete examples of this sharing are reviewed here, the on-going temporary exhibitions Crossroads and Interactions. Both have different foci—the early Middle Ages (Crossroads) and a span from ancient Greece to the twentieth century (Interactions)—but both share a wider concern with human connectivity and conflict and a practical underpinning of European Union/Parliament funding. The deepening economic and migration crises afflicting Europe have seen the European Union increasingly seek to rely on culture as part of its strategy to hold things together. 2018 has been designated the first ‘Year of European Culture’ and the most recent policy initiative from the Council of Europe seeks to ‘bring the cultural heritage to the fore across policies in the European Union’ (Council of Europe, 2018).

Both projects are concerned with how museums articulate that shared story through their collections. Crossroads stems from the Creative Europe Programme project, Connecting Early Medieval Collections (CEMEC) and brings together partners in the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, England, Denmark, and Hungary. At the time of writing, it is currently on show in the Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, from where it moves to the LVR-Landes Museum, Bonn. It started its run at the Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam, the staging on which this review is based. Interactions is the first temporary exhibition in the newly opened (late 2017) House of European History, Brussels (a museum project of the European Parliament) and has been running since October 2017, with no end date yet specified. Both exhibitions are imaginatively titled to suggest a historical dimension and a here-and-now engagement by visitors with that past.

Of course, museum collections and exhibitions are not the only means by which European Union cultural endeavour and support is fostered—the Roman Frontiers Project is a good example of another approach (Hingley, Reference Hingley2018) but which deals essentially with the same underlying theme: Europe as an arena for the movement of peoples and ideas. The grand exhibition however remains a key response to articulating these issues. The litany is long, but notable in more recent times are the Europe and Mediterranean-wide Bronze Age connectedness explored in the Nebra Sky-disc exhibition (‘The Forged Sky’, Meller, Reference Meller2004) which was staged in Halle, Copenhagen, and Mannheim, and the birth of Christian Europe explored in ‘Rome and the Barbarians’ (Aillagon, Reference Aillagon2008), staged in Venice and Bonn. In addition, we could cite a long sequence of exhibitions about the Celts (Hall, Reference Hall2016). The emphasis on Europe-wide stories is shared with the exhibitions reviewed here but there is a marked difference in approach. The clutch of older exhibitions took some pains to foreground objects as art and art's propensity to reveal identity. This art primacy was also reflected in some of the contemporary academic texts, including the examination of artistic exchange between the Christian East and West (Hourihane, Reference Hourihane2007) and the exploration of the interconnections revealed by the Hoen Hoard (Fuglesang & Wilson, Reference Fuglesang and Wilson2006—this work was carried out as a transformation project of the Centre for Viking and Medieval Studies, Oslo University, a concept relevant to the discussion that follows). More recent exhibitions—including the two reviewed here—have moved away from the primacy of the testament of art and are more rooted in the recognition that objects have biographical trajectories and are/were part of people-thing networks. Other exhibitions reflecting this change include ‘Odin, Thor, and Freyja’ in Frankfurt and Copenhagen in 2017 (Holst et al., Reference Holst, Jørgensen and Wamers2017; Hall, Reference Hall2017), and the permanent galleries of Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus, Denmark (opened successively from 2012–2017), notably its display of the Ilerup Hoard and its Europe-wide connections.

The wider research context exploring these themes includes: Lund (Reference Lund2017) on Viking Age biographical objects; Rosenow and colleagues (Reference Rosenow, Phelps, Meek and Freestone2018) on the movement of Mediterranean glass in the first millennium ad; Bradley (Reference Bradley2017) exploring votive practices in prehistory and the early Middle Ages; and Bergerbrant and Wessman (Reference Bergerbrant and Wessman2017) on several new approaches to understanding the Bronze Age and its European connectedness. The big change in the wider research arena that has not yet reached the exhibition stage is the explosion in ancient genomic and isotopic studies, proving to be pivotal in studies of migration, movement, and linguistic development. The Bronze Age migration of the Yamnaya Culture (Klein et al., Reference Klein, Haak, Lazaridid, Patterson, Reich and Kristiansen2018) has been followed by a Europe-wide study of biology and beakers that has revealed early farmers migrating across Northern Europe, with their pots (Olalde et al., Reference Olalde, Brace, Allentoft, Armit, Kristiansen and Booth2018). Other elements of science do infuse the exhibitions reviewed here, chiefly around technological solutions to interpretation and knowledge access. In Interactions there are wide-ranging interactive elements, notably the ‘Tracking My Europe’ activity, and ‘The Bed of Dreams’ (see below). Crossroads boasts a large-scale projected floor-map, a 3D focus on several key objects and the cross-culture timeline (see below). Both exhibitions display a consciousness of this technological connectivity and articulate its value in their respective catalogues (Interactions, pp. 11–28, and Crossroads, pp. 193–200).

Crossroads’ main concern is with the Middle Ages as a connected time and geography. It is divided into three sections, ‘Diversity’, ‘Connectivity’, and ‘Early Medieval Europe Today’. Movement, whether physical or intellectual, underpins all of these. Intellectually it allows the project to weave in a strand of medievalism—how we today travel through the Middle Ages—and looks in particular at how the medieval past is displayed in museums. This helps to underpin the project's technologically infused interpretation, and how that past can be engaged with sensorially. With its ‘Diversity’ and ‘Connectivity’ themes it deals with migrations (brilliantly conveyed by a giant projected digital floor map with colour-coded flowing movement arrows) and the founding of kingdoms; a Muslim golden age of expansion; relations with Byzantium; the Roman inheritance; religion (including the recognition that syncretism was an unexceptional everyday practice); warfare; and knowledge and its study. The human-face of connectivity it pursues to link all these is a series of potted biographies of key individuals and one elephant (and the journeys they undertook). The people are the princess Theophano, the Jewish court scholar Hasday Ibn Shaprut, the pilgrim Egeria, the Arab diplomat Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, St Martin of Tours, St Helena, Archbishop Sigeric the Serious, diplomat Olympiodorus of Thebes, and merchant traveller Ohthere. The elephant, of course, is Abul-Abbas, Harun Al-Rashid's gift to Charlemagne (Crossroads, pp. 28–29). It is a well-known story but engagingly told here, including though a piece of digital animation and helping to underline the working of network agency. All the human personalities have a high status, which is of course why written accounts about and by them survive to be re-told. Given though the exhibition's aim I would have liked to have seen an imaginative leap made to try and explore less privileged lives—perhaps an imagined character who was a slave and whose story of movement they told. This would have helped to create an affordance with darker stories of migration in our own time (including the Holocaust and sex-trafficking). The biographical inflection is engagingly extended to objects and how we might understand their life stories—aided by selected 3D digitisations and animations. Biographical trajectories are beginning to play an increasing role in exhibition interpretation as a way of demonstrating the complexity of objects in an accessible way. In Berlin's Islamic, Byzantine, and German History museums it underpins a recent project to reveal the entanglement and movement of Islamic objects across cultures (Bayer et al., Reference Beyer, Dolezalek and Vassilopoulou2016). A similar approach, entitled ‘Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time’, informed the 2009 re-interpretation of the galleries of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The approach of Interactions, the inaugural temporary exhibition at the House of European History, shares much in common with these approaches, whilst also exhibiting some key differences. The crucial underpinning is the desire to encourage debate about migration, movement, and identity through investing them with a historical dimension. Its metaphor of choice is interactions, and this title umbrellas an exploration of cultural encounters, primarily configured through trade and commerce, warfare, and cultural creativity. It reaches back to ancient Greece to do so (a parallel also drawn by the Bronze Age gallery at Moesgaard Museum) in terms of specific examples, whilst focussing on the medieval and modern, though recognising that European civilisation is something that has developed over the preceding ten millennia. As already noted, the catalogue devotes welcome energy to exploring the museological strategy adopted, both in terms of conceptual reach and learning strategies. Spread over two floors, the first is a more conventional, object-centred, approach exploring the more formal encounters of trade and warfare. The second floor aims for something more innovative. It tackles the theme of cultural exchange in Europe:

These, often subjective, categories are present in all our lives and the exhibition elegantly provides visitors with the opportunity to compare them through its technologically innovative installation, ‘Tracking My Europe’, via which visitors can input data on their own experiences and cross-cultural preferences (where they live, where they holiday, and from where their favourite food, music, and sports clubs come) all displayed on an interactive, digital map of Europe. The merging of all responses made creates an ever-changing collective web of interactions (Interactions, p. 16). It does weave some necessarily dark strands into this story, notably around conflict and ethnic cleansing, but whilst it recognises slavery and colonial themes it does so in a rather cursory way (Interactions, pp. 62–66).

The key difference between the two exhibitions is in their approaches to play. There is no gaming material in Crossroads, despite the CEMEC project aims to provide fulfilling visitor experiences through the incorporation of holograms, 3D models, and sound effects, including the Mobile Panoramic Project system, which will enable the accessing of a 3D scanned objects database via hand-held devices, the potential of gaming and play material is ignored. In sharp contrast, Interactions identifies play as a vital form of exchange and interaction (Interactions, pp. 158–62) and playfulness is a key strand of the exhibition's interpretation strategy (Interactions, pp. 25–26). Throughout the exhibition ‘there are opportunities to interact with other visitors through games and playful activities’ (Interactions, p. 25). The playful strand of its interpretation is perhaps its most exciting and includes both games and fairy tales. Through its focus on games it shares with the Berlin ‘Objects in Transfer’ project already mentioned (and includes the Islamic conduit of chess into Europe). In Brussels games are treated as an important exemplar of play (Interactions, p. 158–62), which through their cross-cultural grammar and embodiment of values, facilitate cultural exchange. The exhibition affords many opportunities to visitors to engage in play, both around this theme and all the other themes. Perhaps the most engaging of these is around another playful theme, fairy tales (Interactions, pp. 177–82), and the myriad ways those tales deal with two profound themes—growth and maturation into adulthood. This propensity for helping to articulate an individual's place in the world is something shared with board games. The centre-piece of the theme is a large four poster bed—‘The Bed of Dreams’—on which visitors lie back to watch a ceiling projection which shows a Lotte Reiniger style animated film linking a selection of cross-cultural fairy tales. For me this proved an immensely engaging interaction, fully demonstrative of the project's contention that ‘fairy tale exchanges are good to think with’ (Interactions, p. 180).