Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP)

The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) is an unprecedented initiative run by the British Museum. It aims to call attention to, research and preserve the crafts, skills, practices and knowledge of the material world that are in danger of disappearing.

Traditional ways of making things, from clothing and tools, to jewellery and houses, are endangered. In this precarious world, the diversity of material knowledge —the understanding of how to create and make objects, and the social values necessary to maintain the material world around us — is being lost at an alarming rate as mass-produced goods and industrial technologies subsume or replace local practices.

Changes to the environment and habitat loss through industrialisation, deforestation, appropriation of indigenous land and other factors jeopardise local ecologies and raw material sustainability. Meanwhile, large scale urbanisation and rural depopulation threaten long-practiced forms of learning, apprenticeship and knowledge transfer. 

Past EMKP-supported projects have included: work on beekeeping in Kenya; broom and fibre-rope crafts in Nigeria; paper clothes-making in Japan; and threatened traditions of mouth harp-making and playing in Cambodia.

Current grantees are documenting: how social change affects pottery making and exchange in Papua New Guinea; the endangered foodway heritage of the baobab tree among the Mijikenda community of Coastal Kenya; the knowledge, skills, and practices of dry-stone masonry at Great Zimbabwe; and disappearing Tibetan material knowledge.