A Bit of History, Museo de America

This entry on the Museo de America draws on the museum's own institutional account of its founding in 1941, its 1965 public opening, and the growth of its pre-Columbian, ethnographic and colonial-era collection from origins in an eighteenth century royal natural history cabinet. As a museum's self-description it is a reliable source for the collection's provenance and administrative history. It is not an independent scholarly assessment of any individual object's cultural or religious significance, and given that much of the collection entered Spanish hands during and after the colonial period, questions of an object's original context and meaning within the tradition it came from are better answered by specialist ethnographic and archaeological scholarship than by the museum's own institutional history.