Museums - Buffalo Museum of Science

The Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences was founded in 1861 and collected materials in the fields of anthropology, botany, geology, and zoology. After housing the growing collections in two short-term facilities, the current Buffalo Museum of Science opened to the public in 1929. In 1990, an adjoining Science Magnet School was constructed. With this addition, the museum received additional space for a library, administrative offices, and a large atrium.
The Anthropology Division collection numbers 102,355 artifacts, with some seventy-eight percent being North American, and the rest divided between Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Oceania, and South America. Since its inception, the museum has continued to build its collections through gifts from individuals, purchases, exchanges with institutions, and field collection activities. From 1920–1948, the museum was headed by Chauncey J. Hamlin, whose collecting efforts benefited all curatorial divisions but particularly the anthropology department. Hamlin developed a large collection of Chinese material, secured a collection of South Pacific artifacts for the museum, and facilitated many exchanges with the Louvre, the American Museum of Natural History, and other renowned institutions.
The age of the museum places many of the collections in particularly high regard. The museum’s collection of Mississippian pottery from C. W. Riggs and
C. B. Moore are some of the earliest collected examples from the region. In 1901, after the Pan American Exposition was held in Buffalo, the museum received ethnographic materials from the exposition’s African Village. The museum’s anthropology collection is strong in the areas of China, the South Pacific, Mississippian and other North American pottery, and objects from the continent of Africa. Archaeological specimens constitute approximately half of the entire collection. The P. G. T. Black Collection of 6,200 artifacts collected between 1886 and 1914 in Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands is the second-largest and oldest collection of its kind in North America. The sub-Saharan African collection of over 2,700 objects is another collection of note. The museum’s collection of Ainu material is the tenth largest in North America.
The anthropology collection is included in many of the museum’s permanent exhibits. In addition, cases showing representative examples of the major collections are on display. Access to the anthropology collection in storage is restricted to serious research requests only.