The Hall of Mexico and Central America presents an anthropologically oriented overview of pre-Hispanic culture.
The Virtual Hall complements the existing hall by providing visitors and researchers with digital images and detailed information on artifacts displayed in the hall and by presenting new information about pre-Hispanic culture gleaned from research taking place since the hall's inauguration in 1970. | |
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Textiles tell a great deal about the history, daily life, aesthetics, environment, and technology of people all over the world. Used to make clothing, accessories, and domestic goods, textiles vary in complexity from plain and utilitarian, to decorative and ceremonial. Since the Museum's founding in 1869, the Anthropology Division's ethnographic collection has grown to include 10,500 textiles from Africa, Europe, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas.
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The set of over 1000 objects is a compilation of images related to the Buddha and Buddhist practice collected from the AMNH Asian Ethnographic Collections.
The project was funded by the Anthropology Division with the support of the Jane Belo Tanenbaum Fund and the Whitney Tibetan Fund.
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This rare, complete set of 79 Tibetan medical tangkas was painted by the Nepalese tangka artist Romio Shrestha and his Tibetan, Nepalese, and Bhutanese students in Kathmandu during seven years in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The paintings were donated to this Museum by Emily Fisher, a Museum Trustee.
The medical tangkas form a unique document in the history of medicine. |
Mammalogist Herbert Lang and his assistant James P. Chapin collected and documented zoological, botanical, and anthropological collections and produced painted and photographic images of the natural and human environment.
The Anthropology collection that resulted from the Congo Expedition includes carvings made of wood and ivory, incised gourds, bark cloth, metalworking and musical instruments. | |
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American Anthropologist Frederick Starr joined the missionary/explorer Samuel Verner on a collecting expedition to the Congo from 1905-1906. He collected nearly 5,000 artifacts including musical instruments, shields, baskets, masks, stools and games that have become part of the Museum's collection of material culture from the Congo region. | |
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Berthold Laufer, who would become one of the most distinguished sinologists of his generation, led the Jacob H. Schiff expedition to China where he was to make a comprehensive ethnographic collection and to conduct scholarly research on the history and culture of a sophisticated people that had not yet experienced the industrial transformation.
Laufer made an extinsive collection of representative objects used in daily life, agriculture, folk religion, medicine, and crafts.
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The anthropologists Berthold Laufer, Waldemar Jochelson, Waldemar Bogoras conducted ethnographic research and made collections in Siberia, Manchuria, and on Sakhalin Island in Asia.
On the American side of the Bering Strait, their colleagues Franz Boas, George Hunt, John Swanton, and Harlan Smith studied and collected among the Northwest Coast tribes.
Directed by Franz Boas, this expedition was financed by Museum president Morris K. Jesup.
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