Mobility of Museum objects, in the form of gifts and exchanges, is a well-established practice in the large metropolitan museums as early as the 19th c. Archaeological objects are transferred from the field to different contexts with their assigned meaning to be kept, to be abolished, to be reconnected or disconnected. In general with their layers of meaning to be the subject of continuous formation, reconstruction and negotiation.

The present paper attempts to explore the complex biographies and the entanglements of a constructed assemblage of Neolithic objects in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion with vague provenance and to explore their role in the production of museum practices, in the negotiation of identities and moreover in the formulation of archaeological narratives. Through archaeological ethnography it attempts to map starting points, nodes and routes in a complex network of people and objects. At the same time, it seeks to track the multifarious connections of their mobility with various forms of modernism, colonial archaeology and also with archaeological transnationalism.

Moreover, through the entanglements of people and objects around the Cretan Museum it attempts to identify the role of the Museum within the European museumscape of the first decades of the 20th c. and to investigate an early attempt by I. Hazzidakis to establish a multicultural Neolithic Collection in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion and also a wider museum context for the Cretan Neolithic.