Museums - Museum of the University of St. Andrews

Founded in 1413, the University of St Andrews is Scotland’s oldest university and the third oldest university in the English-speaking world. The Museum of the University of St Andrews, opened in 2008, displays selections from the university’s collection of over 112,000 artifacts, covering science, ethnography and archaeology, and history. The university became a repository for archaeological and ethnographic artifacts in the years before the city of St Andrews possessed a museum, and thusly accumulated a collection of "curiosities" donated by travelers over the centuries. Many items were also collected in the nineteenth century by the St Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society. This collection has since been augmented by focused acquisitions. The modest ethnographic holdings contain objects from every continent.