The Royal Ontario Museum is the largest museum in Canada, with an internationally renowned collection numbering more than five million objects (about 3,900,000 scientific specimens and 1,100,000 artworks and archaeology artifacts). It is located next to the University of Toronto and features galleries for art, archaeology, and science that showcase the world’s culture and natural history. The ROM was created by an act of the provincial government on April 16, 1912, and opened to the public on March 19, 1914. There have since been two major expansions of the four-story building, the most recent concluding in 1984.
The museum’s anthropology department is extensive and contains material ranging from Canadian Native cultures to pre-Columbian objects, including a collection of Zapotec objects purchased in 1919 from Constantine Rickards, the then British vice-consul in Oaxaca. The main thrust of the department is Native material, however, and the ROM has a long tradition of working with Native communities to share their history, both past and present, with museum visitors.