This chapter explores the complex engagements navigated by heritage professionals and a self-defined and genealogically connected community working together under the auspices of two separately funded but related projects: ‘Artefacts of Encounter’, funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA); and ‘Te Ataakura’, funded by the Māori Centre of Research Excellence Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and based at the Eastern Institute of Technology, Aotearoa-New Zealand.1 These brought together Toi Hauiti, the working arts group of Te Aitanga a Hauiti, a Māori tribal community, and MAA researchers to co-create a digital contact network, a ‘reciprocal system’. Co-authored by representatives of each party and project, this chapter foregrounds the task ostensibly at hand and the work required to establish the ‘relational systems’ prerequisite to this task. In service of the latter, we describe the development of interpersonal relationships and protocols for respectful and generative transactions, where no distinction is made between their application to ‘real world’ or ‘virtual’ exchanges and ‘things’.

Virtual media are among the many mechanisms via which heritage professionals and ‘communities’ engage with each other. These include websites and databases designed to store knowledge and ‘things’ – both digitised and born-digital – as data and to replicate and generate connections between them. The tools of virtual media also facilitate engagement and affect presence via, for example, video conferencing. The ambitious project co-designed by Toi Hauiti and MAA relied heavily upon virtual media. The digital contact network itself would be a custom-built system hosted and shared online, requiring almost daily collaboration between the two groups. Though extended periods of face-to-face engagement were planned and facilitated between Toi Hauiti and MAA, there was also reliance upon virtual media tools so the dispersed team could remain in contact.

THE PROJECTS: ARTEFACTS OF ENCOUNTER AND TE ATAAKURA

The origins of a co-created digital resource lay in the aspirations of Artefacts of Encounter, a three-year project (2010–13) that located and examined artefacts collected on more than 40 voyages that entered Polynesia between 1765 and 1840, and used these artefacts as primary evidence of the nature and legacy of encounters between European explorers and Pacific islanders.