Avant le retour. Biographie du fragment présumé du "maro 'ura de Wallis" (musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Te Fare Iamanaha-Musée de Tahiti et des Îles)

This presentation looks back at the history of the presumed fragment of the "Wallis maro “ura”, (re)discovered in the storage of the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (mqB-JC) in 2016. This object, which probably left Tahiti around 1818, has been in the Parisian collections since 1964. Although it has long gone unnoticed, unlike the to'o it accompanied, it was nevertheless the focus of an exhibition at the mqB-JC in 2019 and it is one of the seventeen objects that the previous Polynesian Ministry of Culture and the Te Fare Iamanaha brought back to French Polynesia for the museum's reopening (2023). Through this example, I want to share how research is carried out in a museum context and show the potential of collections of ancient Polynesian objects to help us better understand the Polynesian past, present and future.