Please note: From Monday, 5 May up to and including Wednesday, 7 May and from Monday, 12 May up to and including Friday, 16 May 2025, the exhibition areas of the Ethnologisches Museum on the 2nd floor of the Humboldt Forum will be closed due to maintenance work. The exhibition areas will be open from Thursday, 8 May up to and including Sunday, 11 May 2025.

Acquisition and Accession Logs of the Ethnologisches Museum

The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s acquisition logs provide a record of the inventories of the museums’ collections and reflect the eventful history of the evolution of the collections and the provenance of the items that make them up. The logs of the Ethnologisches Museum record the previous owners and the formal accession conditions of what were usually extensive groups of objects.

The logbooks, their historical titles and the vocabulary used in them should be viewed as historical documents. The information they contain is often not able to reveal the current location, the relevant department or even the collection to which the objects now belong. For example, departments with designations such as “India” or “Amerikanische Naturvölker” no longer exist, and the inventory of the former Kunstkammer collection is now distributed across various institutions.

The following information is so far only available in German. A translation into English is in progress.

Inv. 1 Journal Kunstkammer
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1822-1829 (1824/Kunstkammer-1824/Ethnographische Merkwürdigkeiten)

Inv. 2 Inventarverzeichnis Kunstkammer
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1824-1833 (Lfd.-Nr. A. 1-O. 340)

Inv. 3 Inventarverzeichnis I MV
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1880-1906 (Lfd.-Nr. 1880/1 – 1906/56)

Inv. 4 Inventarverzeichnis III "Afrika"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1906-2005 (Lfd.-Nr. IIIC 19442/1906 – IIIC 45539/2005)

Inv. 5 Inventarverzeichnis III "Afrika"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1906-1942 (Lfd.-Nr. 1906/1 – 1942/10)

Inv. 6 Inventarverzeichnis VI "Amerikanische Naturvölker"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1960-2004 (Lfd.-Nr. 1960/1 – 2004/45)

Inv. 7 Inventarverzeichnis IV "Südsee"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1906-2004 (Lfd.-Nr. 1906/1 – 2004/7)

Inv. 8 Inventarverzeichnis V "Amerikanische Archäologie"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1960-2005 (Lfd.-Nr. 1960/8 – 2005/2)

Inv. 9 Inventarverzeichnis V "Amerika"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1906-1960 (Lfd.-Nr. 1906/1 – 1960/8)

Inv. 10 Inventarverzeichnis I C "Indien"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1953-2004 (Lfd.-Nr. 1953/1 – 2004/15)

Inv. 11 Inventarverzeichnis I B "Islamischer Orient"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1971-2005 (Lfd.-Nr. 1971/1 – 2005/2)

Inv. 12 Inventarverzeichnis I A "Asien / Ostasien"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1906-2003 (Lfd.-Nr. ID - IA 55/1906 – 5/2003)

Inv. 13 Erwerbungsbuch VII "Musikethnologie"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1998-2004 (Lfd.-Nr. 1998/1 – 2004/1)

Inv. 14 Erwerbungsbuch VII "Musikethnologie"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1963-1983 (Lfd.-Nr. 1963/1 – 1983/40)

Inv. 15 Erwerbungsbuch VII "Musikethnologie"
Nachweiszeitraum der Zugänge 1984-2004 (Lfd.-Nr. 1984/1 – 2004/1)

The acquisition and accession logs of the Ethnologisches Museum have been sifted, digitized and made available online within the framework of the project “Provenance and Collections: Publishing the Acquisition and Accession Logs of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Online”.

This project was initiated and funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

The digitisation of the acquisition logs made available here was carried out between 2018 and 2024 as part of the DFG project Digitisation of the Historical Archive of the Ethnologisches Museum (1830–1947). Through this project, all the collection inventories, files, and other associated documentation currently held by the Ethnologisches Museum, dating from the year 1830 up until 1947 were digitised and published online. The index (PDF, 4 MB) produced through this project offers a central point of access to the digitised holdings. In addition, the digitised documents and their associated data can be accessed via the online database of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (German only).