Jago Cooper’s engaging presence will be familiar to any television viewer who has enjoyed his BBC Four series on the peoples of South and Central America and Easter Island. But his remit as Curator of the Americas at the British Museum also covers the northwest coast of North America and soon visitors to the British Museum will be able to see some of the intriguing objects made by the indigenous peoples of that region. Entitled Where the Thunderbird Lives: Cultural Resilience on the Northwest Coast of North America, the exhibition, which opens on 23 February, is curated by Dr Cooper and his colleague Dr Amber Lincoln.
Apart from the fascination this culturally rich region holds for archaeologists, Jago Cooper has a personal connection to it, too.
‘My parents lived in Canada before I was born, and after they returned to England we used to visit,’ he recalls. ‘I still have vivid memories of that vast landscape and the huge trees there. It made a big impression on me as a child, so I have kept returning to the area. There is nowhere else like it: everything there is on an immense scale.’
The longue durée at Dion