Accession books of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Ethnologisches Museum Berlin

Reporting period 1822 – 2005

The accession books of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums) still serve as the inventory records for the museum collections and reflect the eventful history of the collection's development and the provenance of the holdings. The volumes of the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) document the previous ownership and formal conditions of acquisition of mostly extensive collections of objects.

The catalogues, their historical titles and the vocabulary used in them are to be understood as contemporary documents that today provide only limited information about the current location, the responsible department or even the institution responsible for their preservation. For example, departments with the names ‘India’ or ‘American Indigenous Peoples’ no longer exist, and the holdings of the Kunstkammer are now scattered across various institutions.