Acquisition Logs of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte

Reporting period 1876 – 2012

Since its founding in 1829, the Berlin Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Berlin Museum of Prehistory and Early History ) has acquired artefacts from archaeological excavations through purchase, donation, and its own excavations. The collation of information about the circumstances of the discovery of the artefacts and the provenance of the objects acceded to the collection was from the outset an essential component of their cataloguing and scholarly description.

From 1880 onwards, the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte possessed a multi-tier documentation system comprising accession journals, inventory logs, acquisition documentation and scholarly collection catalogues. Three of these documentation categories are represented among the acquisition logs presented here.

During the Second World War, the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte suffered significant losses to its archaeological collections. Almost every second object included in the scholarly catalogues is recorded as having been lost in the war, or is among the artefacts that were relocated due to the war. A dozen volumes of the acquisition logs of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte along with a great deal of secondary collection documentation went missing at the end of the war and is thus unable to be shown here.