For six short months in 1893, Jackson Park in Chicago was home to one of the largest and most spectacular expositions of the 19th Century. Near the close of the Fair, The Field Columbian Museum (now The Field Museum) was founded. When the Museum opened in 1894, visitors could once again experience many of the exhibits they had seen at the fair. Thousands of objects exhibited at the Fair were donated or sold to the new museum, and they have been cared for by the Anthropology Department since then. Many of those objects have not been viewed by the public since 1893!

Anthropology in 1893 was a very new branch of social science, and leading anthropologists came together to build the anthropology exhibits at the 1893 World's Fair. Some went on trips dedicated to collecting objects to display at the World's Fair; others worked to construct exhibits inside and outside the Anthropology Building.

This web site features some of the thousands of objects brought into the Anthropology Department of the Field Columbian Museum from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Please be our guest in this virtual museum, and explore and examine the many different types of objects in our collections from different cultures around the world.


Continue to History of the Collection. >>