Museums - Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde München

The Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde München was founded in 1868. The first collectors of the non-European objects which make up the museum's present-day collections were members of the Wittelsbacher family, the royal dynasty of Bavaria. In 1830, for example, King Ludwig I bought a large collection of ethnographic objects from India and Oceania which later came under the museum's care. Today, the total collections comprise some 200,000 objects from Africa, the Americas, South and East Asia, the Muslim world, and Oceania. Important contributions to the pre-Columbian American collections were made by zoologist Johann Baptist Spix and botanist Karl Friedrich Philipp Martius, who explored the Amazon from 1817 to 1820. In 1888, Princess Therese von Bayern undertook a five-month expedition to the area and returned with a rich collection of objects originating from many different native cultures. Von Bayern also traveled to North America in 1893, contributing greatly to the museum's collection of North American Indian art, which includes the earliest collected kayak in the world (ca. 1577).
A number of the museum's most important treasures are held in the extensive collections of Oceanic art. The earliest of these objects originate from Polynesia, and some date back to the time of Captain Cook. Much of the material of highest quality was collected between 1884 and 1914 in Melanesia and Micronesia, during the German colonial period.