Archaeological museum and teaching collections are repositories of material evidence, ordered through classification, documentation, and analytical protocols. Yet collections also function as interpretive and relational assemblages, in which meaning is made not only through objects and texts, but through spatial, sensory, embodied, narrative, and social forms of engagement. This session will explore multi-modal curation and knowledge mobilization as an approach to integrating different ways of knowing into museum and teaching collections. Here, we consider multimodality as a framework that moves beyond multisensory or multimedia approaches, attending to how different modes of meaning-making, including material, bodily, spatial, visual, oral, and textual, interact to produce knowledge. From this perspective, collections are not passive stores of data, but active assemblages in which knowledge is continually negotiated and transformed. Focusing on narratives, accessibility, and multi-sensorial engagement, we will examine how these practices expand what is understood as curatorial knowledge and transform how collections are used, interpreted, and cared for. Rather than treating narrative, embodied, and community-based knowledges as supplementary to material and documentary records, multi-modal approaches can foreground them as integral to curatorial practice and to archaeological interpretation.

The session welcomes contributions that explore how these multi-modal approaches are implemented in concrete contexts, including collections management, teaching, exhibitions, and community-based projects. We are particularly interested in work that foregrounds embodiment, accessibility, and collaboration with a range of publics and descendant communities. This session asks what it means to curate not only material belongings, but also relationships, experiences, and multiple forms of knowledge, and how multi-modal curation might reshape the ethical and pedagogical work of archaeological museum and teaching collections.