Data Providers

The Abteilungen für Urgeschichtliche Archäologie sowie Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie und Archäologie des Mittelalters am Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften der Universität Freiburg houses an extensive educational collection. This includes more than 11,000 individual objects spanning from the Paleolithic era to modern times, from hand axes to coins, and from Freiburg to Patagonia, forming a diverse spectrum in every respect. The collection’s primary focus is on prehistory as well as regional sites in Germany and its neighboring regions.

The history of the collection dates back well into the 19th century. In 1867, a “Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography” ("Museum für Urgeschichte und Ethnographie") was founded at the university at the initiative of the anatomist and anthropologist Alexander Ecker (1816–1887) and the geologist and mineralogist Heinrich Fischer (1817–1886). In addition to archaeological finds from the region, the museum included numerous objects from non-European regions from the very beginning. The collection was subsequently expanded through donations and purchases. Ecker is known in Freiburg primarily for the anatomical-anthropological collection, which includes, among other things, human skulls from colonial contexts and has been the subject of provenance research and restitution efforts.

In 1904, the ethnographic section of the museum was transferred to the city of Freiburg on permanent loan and merged with the local natural history and ethnographic collection (today the Museum Natur und Mensch). The prehistoric finds remained affiliated with the geology department at the university. Thus, as in other parts of Germany, the prehistoric collection existed long before the establishment of a corresponding academic discipline or chair. The founding of an independent Institute for Prehistory and Early History took place in 1936–1937 and was accompanied by a (temporary) physical and personnel merger of the teaching collection and university instruction, archaeological heritage preservation, and the city’s prehistoric and early history collection. The collection survived World War II largely unscathed.

The collection’s most active period, marked by significant expansions of its holdings, occurred at the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. Until the 1930s, the active directors of the collection were primarily geologists (some of whom were interested in and active in prehistory), a fact reflected both in the composition of the collection and in the contacts that contributed to its expansion.

The Aquazoo Löbbecke Museum is a cultural and scientific institution in the state capital Düsseldorf, and represents an inseparable combination of zoo, aquarium and natural history museum. In a unique synergy of living animals, vivid exhibits and interactive media, it enables visitors to experience and understand the origin, evolution and diversity of animals and plants. The institute houses a collection of approximately 1 million natural objects from the fields of biology, geology and palaeontology.

Among the most significant parts of the collection are a malacological collection with approximately 360,000 objects and an entomological collection with approximately 500,000 objects. Other parts of the collection include rocks and fossils, a herbarium, and other specimens and models of a wide variety of animal groups. Historical diving equipment, an archive with contemporary documents from almost 200 years of museum history, and a library are also part of the collection.

The collection also includes a collection of around 100 ethnological objects whose origins have been forgotten over the decades. These include sculptures, masks, jewellery, weapons, tools and vessels. As part of an ‘initial check’ project carried out in 2024, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, China and Cameroon, among others, were identified as regions of origin. The latter are connected to a Cameroon expedition led by the Löbbecke Museum in 1936 and a subsequent colonial exhibition in 1937 at the Löbbecke Museum and the Zoological Garden in Düsseldorf.

The BASA Museum of the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn holds more than 10,000 objects, the majority of which are from the Americas. A smaller part of the collection also includes objects from Africa, Asia and Oceania. The collection focuses on archaeological objects from the Andean region and Mesoamerica as well as ethnographic objects from the Amazon region and the Andean highlands. The provenances of these objects lie outside of formal colonial rule (case group 2) as defined by the German Museums Association (DMB) guidelines for handling of collection items from colonial contexts. Determining the quantity and value of objects from colonial contexts is only possible through provenance research.

In the WissKI database, used by the BASA Museum since late 2019, around 950 objects are currently publicly accessible. The long-term objective is to gradually make the entire collection accessible through the database.

Currently accessible objects mainly include those from the Trimborn and Oberem collections from Central and South America. Hermann Trimborn founded the Department of Ethnology and the Ethnological Teaching and Study Collection at the University of Bonn in 1948, thereafter acting as director of both. Udo Oberem was Trimborn's student and successor. The objects from both collections were transferred to the Teaching and Study Collection in the 1950s and 1960s. They originate predominantly from the Andean highlands and Costa Rica and include a roughly equal number of archaeological and ethnographic artifacts acquired on research trips.

The information on objects from the Trimborn and Oberem collections in the database is taken from the respective inventory book and index cards. The latter were created retrospectively for individual artifacts with the help of student assistants from the 1970s onwards. The provided information may therefore not be up-to-date with the current state of research. The research database will be updated with new findings about the objects from ongoing and future projects conducted by students and researchers as well as from collaborative research with members of the societies of origin.

The Deutsche Institut für Tropische und Subtropische Landwirtschaft (DITSL) is the successor institution to the Deutschen Kolonialschule für Landwirtschaft, Handel und Gewerbe (DKS). From 1899 to 1944, young men were trained at the DKS to work as farmers, economic and plantation officials in the German colonies and other overseas territories. The students were to be trained as “German cultural pioneers” who would bring a Christian-minded, ethnically and morally stable “German culture” to the colonies and advance the colonial project. Although the former colonies of the German Empire had been confiscated at the end of the First World War and placed under the control of the League of Nations, the DKS resumed teaching in 1919 and remained in operation until 1944.

After reopening under the name DITSL in 1957, the educational institution took on a new role in training for development cooperation with countries in the Global South. Since 2005, it has been a scientific institute focusing on development-oriented agricultural research and also offering academic teaching, professional training and extracurricular educational programmes in this field. Together with the town of Witzenhausen, DITSL is the sponsor of the Witzenhausen Museum. The museum displays and preserves a collection of approximately 2,600 objects from various countries, about half of which were collected by former DKS graduates and the other half by DITSL students and staff. In addition to natural history and geological objects, the majority of these are items made by people from the regions of origin and used in everyday life or for cultural and ceremonial purposes.

In the project “Provenienzforschung zum Ostafrika-Bestand des Museum Witzenhausen”, just over 300 objects of East African origin were scientifically catalogued and a selection of 53 objects were examined in greater depth for their provenance. For the in-depth investigation, the work at the Witzenhausen site was complemented by ethnographic field research in possible communities of origin in Tanzania, carried out by the local cooperation partner, the NGO fahari yetu Tanzania. Initially, the 53 objects researched, together with the information collected about them, will be presented here on the portal. In the future, the presentation is to be expanded to include the entire East Africa collection as well as other collections of the Museum Witzenhausen.

Philipps University of Marburg’s Ethnographic Collection, established in the 1920s, includes objects from the Wiesbaden Collection of Nassau Antiquities, which sold its non-European collections in the 1960s. These are predominantly objects from the 19th century that colonial civil servants and officers gifted to the Wiesbaden Museum. The Ethnographic Collection also includes the scientific collections of Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924), a scholar who studied South America. Between 800 and 1,000 objects are presumed to have originated from formal colonies, while another 2500 potentially originated from colonial contexts outside formal colonial rule. Together with the Ethnographic Collection of the Oberhessisches Museum (Museum of Upper Hesse) in Gießen, UMR’s Ethnographic Collection is currently investigating the colonial origins of some of its sub-collections thanks to funding from the German Lost Art Foundation. One objective of the research project is to reconstruct the biographies of around 60 objects from the East African region (particularly Tanzania) and Cameroon.

The Ethnographic Collection of the University of Göttingen is one of the most important teaching and research collections in the German-speaking world. Its beginnings date back to the time of the Enlightenment.

The history of the Ethnographic Collection began 1773 with the establishment of the Academic Museum at Göttingen University. Thanks to the initiative of the professor of medicine Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, cultural artefacts from the South Seas ("Cook/Forster Collection") and the Arctic polar region ("Baron von Asch Collection") were brought to Göttingen in the second half of the 18th century. After Blumenbach's death in 1840, the collection was initially cared for by scholars from other disciplines. In 1928, anthropological teaching began in Göttingen with the available objects.

At present, the collection comprises of about 18,000 objects from all continents. Furthermore, graphics and paintings, archival materials, photographs as well as hands-on objects of museum education are part of its inventory. As part of digitization measures, the collection has been increasingly viewable in the online collection portal of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Holdings from colonial contexts are also included in the database of the Lower Saxony provenance research project PAESE. The analog inventory catalogs are available for download as .pdf files.

The objects preserved here are explored in research projects under a variety of questions. They are used in seminars for the education of students. In addition, the collection is open to the public in the form of permanent and special exhibitions (currently: closed due to building refurbishment).

The Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, which emerged from the royal Kunstkammer, has been one of the largest and most important of its kind in the world since it was founded in 1873. Its collections contain around 500,000 ethnographic, archaeological and cultural-historical objects from Africa, Asia, America and Oceania. These are supplemented by around 500,000 media (ethnographic photographs, films, videos and audio documents) and more than 588,000 pages of written material.

The Ethnologisches Museum of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin critically examines the legacy and consequences of colonialism and the role and perspective of Europe. Reflections on its own point of view and partnerships with the societies of origin in Africa, Asia, Oceania and America are intended to reveal one-sided Eurocentric views without denying the existing European references. Since September 2021, the Ethnologisches Museum has been showing its newly designed exhibitions in the Humboldt Forum in the center of Berlin.

The often complex acquisition and appropriation processes of the objects in the Ethnologisches Museum are difficult to reconstruct today. It is therefore difficult to decide whether they were produced, collected or exported in colonial contexts. Even when information is available, different people do not always come to the same conclusions. In order to facilitate the discussion about the colonial contexts of collection objects with a broader public and with partners from the regions of origin, the Ethnologisches Museum not only shows objects on this portal that undoubtedly originate from colonial contexts, but all of the museum's published object. In an effort to maximize transparency, this is intended to support the discussion about the colonial contexts of the collections. The data of the Ethnologisches Museum is continuously revised, enriched with new findings and updated twice a year in this portal.

The archive materials and the historical collection registers in the Ethnologisches Museum are of particular importance for reconstructing the historical acquisition and appropriation processes. Digital copies of the acquisition books can be viewed on the museum website. The acquisition books were digitized as part of the DFG project "Digitization of the historical archive in the Ethnological Museum - 1830-1947" . As part of the project, all collection catalogs and archive materials from the period from 1830 to 1947 currently held by the Ethnologisches Museum were digitized and made accessible online. The finding aid created as part of the project provides central access to the digitized collection. In addition, the digitized documents and their associated indexing data can be accessed via the online database of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

The collection holdings within African studies at the University of Bayreuth are situated within various academic disciplines. As an umbrella institution consolidating all specifically African-related departments at the university, the Institute for African Studies supports their research and teaching. Thus, literary studies and linguistics are likewise linked to the research and collections of Africa Studies, as are religious studies, ethnology, art history and Bildwissenschaften, theatre, music and media studies.

Some of the bequeathed collections comprise large quantities of travel, documentary and portrait photography from colonial contexts. The earliest photographic documentations of research trips to eastern and south-western Africa date to 1933. Other image collections comprise photographs from teaching and research activities on the territories of today’s South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe from the 1930s to 1960s. In addition to the documentary images from the holdings, the digital collection also includes portrait and studio photographs from 1910 onwards that were taken in Nairobi in what was then “British East Africa”.

The collection at the Iwalewahaus encompasses internationally reputed objects of modern and contemporary art as well as posters, photographs and supplementary documentation materials pertaining to research and to the history of exhibitions and individual objects. As well as African countries, India, Papua New Guinea, and Australia, among other countries, are listed as regions of origin for the very wide-ranging objects in the collection.

During the 1920s, illustrative works on paper were created in what was then the colony of the “Belgian Congo”. These are among the oldest works in the art collection. The collection also includes drawings by 12 patients at the Lantoro Mental Home in Abeokuta, Nigeria, created during the colonial area. This group of works by Abeokuta artists was created during the years 1951–52.

The collections with a connection to Africa at the University of Bayreuth are available for digital access by degrees via Collections@UBT, supported by the team of the Research Data Management. The digital presentation will be continuously revisited and enhanced.

You can find further information about the Institute for Africa Studies and the Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth as well as contact information for the collection’s curators at the following websites:

• Sammlungen Digital unter Collections@UBT (Link: https://collections.uni-bayreuth.de/)
• Institut für Afrikastudien der Universität Bayreuth (Link: https://www.ias.uni-bayreuth.de/de/index.html)
• Iwalewahaus der Universität Bayreuth (Link: https://www.iwalewahaus.uni-bayreuth.de/de/index.html)

The Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch is a multi-disciplinary museum in Oldenburg. Parts of the collection date back to the 1770s. It includes objects from archaeology, natural history and ethnology. The unique permanent exhibition was designed in collaboration with artists as one of the first exhibitions in Germany to be consistently scenographic. It serves as a model for many archaeological exhibitions in Germany. Changing special exhibitions are dedicated to supra-regional topics - often interdisciplinary and with a focus on the museum's main collection areas: archaeology, natural history and ethnology.

In society and thus also in museums, the next few years will be determined by migration, immigration and demographic change, as well as increasing participation of everyone in cultural events. This requires not only a broader opening of the museum in its offerings, but also the positioning as a place for current issues and debates. Museums compete in credibility only with universities, but they are considered to be of a much lower threshold. Therefore, the Natur und Mensch museum will seize the opportunity to develop into a centre of competence for the region. One focus will be on collection-related research and questions of biodiversity and provenance. In addition, data will be made available and the population will be involved in citizen science projects.

The Natur und Mensch museum conducts its own research, but also enables research by others by making the collection available as a research infrastructure. The important collection is currently the subject of provenance research, for example. The ethnological and natural history objects from the colonial period are made accessible to the societies of origin via a multilingual database. This creates transparency with regard to the collection.

With around 160,000 everyday objects, works of art and sacred objects from Africa, the Islamic Orient and Siberia, North and Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania as well as East, Southeast and South Asia, the Linden Museum Stuttgart, which opened in 1911, houses one of the important ethnological collections in Europe.

Through exhibitions and a multi-faceted events and communication programs, the Linden Museum enables encounters with other living environments and promotes understanding between different worldviews. The museum sees itself as the guardian and mediator of cultural heritage; it explains, differentiates and connects.

The museum is currently confronting former practices of ethnographic collecting, its own colonial history, the provenance of its collections as well as the colonial structures and their consequences in the present. It is furthermore reflecting on the contemporary role of ethnological museums. Projects are created in participatory processes together with representatives and stakeholders from the societies of origin, citizens of Stuttgart as well as international experts

As part of a realignment, the Linden Museum is currently developing and testing new forms of museum knowledge production, communication and presentation within the framework of the “LindenLAB Project”, funded as part of the initiative for ethnological collections of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes). In addition, the museum participates actively in international networks.