From the Royal National Prehistoric Ethnographic Museum (1875) to the Museum of Civilizations (2016)

The Royal National Prehistoric Ethnographic Museum of Rome, originally housed in the building of the former Roman College, was founded in 1875 by archaeologist Luigi Pigorini. These were the years immediately following the unification of Italian territories as a new kingdom, and in keeping with the intentions of its founder, the aim of the institution was to serve as a national repository for the documentation and study of the prehistoric cultures of Italy, but also of Europe and the larger world, and of non-European ethnographic cultures in general, all of which considered as “primitive.”

The Roman College, built by the Order of Jesuits, had since the 1600s housed the collection of antiquities and curiosities assembled by Father Athanasius Kircher, and it was this “Kircherian museum” that Pigorini assumed as the nucleus of the Royal Museum. The first collections of an ethnographic nature had thus been assembled between 1635 and 1680 by Father Kircher himself, from Capuchin missions in the Congo and Angola and Jesuit missions in China, Brazil and Canada. Along with the Kircherian core there were also exotic “curiosities” brought from the New World and preserved in the most important collections of 18th-century Italy – such as those of Cardinal Flavio Chigi Senior and Cardinal Stefano Borgia – as well as others brought from around the world by merchants, missionaries and travelers, up to the late 19th century and continuing after the museum’s founding.

The museum developed its ethnographic collections further through purchases and gifts. The House of Savoy, for example, donated numerous objects, including musical instruments from Hindustan and women’s ornaments from the nomadic cultures of North Africa. Pigorini also worked out personal agreements, and others through the Ministry of Education, with the commanders of transoceanic scientific expeditions organized by the Ministry of the Navy, seeking objects and photographs from the lands explored. In addition the Italian Geographical Society, headquartered on the main floor of the Roman College, conducted its own expeditions, and from these turned over objects of ethnographic interest to the Royal Museum. Particularly fruitful in this regard were the expeditions of Giacomo Bove in Tierra del Fuego, and Romolo Gessi in the regions of East Africa.

The first layout of the Royal Museum derived from worldviews that placed human civilizations on an imaginary evolutionary scale, also of service in colonial narratives and practices. Among the non-Europeans, the Asian continent was at the apex, as seen in the first rooms of the exhibition itinerary. The visitor would then continue their visit through the rooms devoted to the Americas, beginning with the north and continuing south, then the rooms devoted to the Oceanian collections, and finally those focusing on Africa.

Roughly a century later, and renamed the National Prehistoric Ethnographic Museum following the founding of the Italian republic, the museum left the premises of the Roman College to the new Ministry of Cultural and Environmental Heritage and transferred entirely to the EUR Palace of Sciences, originally constructed for the Universal Rome Exhibition of 1942. At this time, around 1975-77, the museum still retained its original organization in two sectors: Prehistory and Extra-European Ethnography. However by now the academic device of comparison between prehistoric societies and societies of ethnographic interest had largely come to a halt, following on the progressive divide between paleo-ethnology and ethno-anthropology starting in the first decades of the 20th century. The foundations of the Pigorini museum, in particular, had already been shaken as early as 1911, with the Congress of Italian Ethnography, and by the time of the move to EUR the crisis of institutional mission had reached an apex. In the 1990s, in fact, the museum began a critical re-examination of its history, extracting many insights that have served in revitalizing the mission, including through exhibitions focused on new scientific and academic perspectives.

Picking up the legacy of previous interpretations, the Museum of Civilizations, since its establishment in 2016, has carried out methodological and theoretical research in critical departure from the assumptions characteristic of the institution’s long-ago birth, and some of its still positivist research methods. Thus the museum no longer deals in comparisons between prehistoric and ethnographic “primitives”, and with this same logic, the presentations of the extra-European collections are currently being redeveloped, and will be subject to periodic renewal and deepening.

The term “America” originated with Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer inspired by the name of Amerigo Vespucci, who during his navigations of the late 15th-early 16th centuries, had documented parts the continents he himself considered the “New World”.

In recent decades, the exhibitions of the Collections of American Arts and Cultures, comprising some 20,000 primarily archaeological items, have been focused on Mesoamerica, Central America, and the Andean Area, illustrating the lives of the peoples who inhabited these areas, including domestic activities and ritual practices.

• Mesoamerica and Central America

The exhibitions begin with an introduction to the peopling of the American continents and the encounters with the first European colonizers, evidenced by the figure of a cemi from the Taíno civilization of the Caribbean. Also illustrated are the history of cultural developments in ancient Mesoamerica, from the Olmecs (1700-300 BC), to the artistic expressions of the Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Totonacs and Aztecs (1300-1521 AD), as well as the peoples of the American West (1300-1521 AD).

• Andean Area

Beginning around 1000 BC, the Andean peoples, taking advantage of the many resources of their varied environments, developed a series of societies marked by refined cultures and technologies. As documentary evidence, the main materials are pottery, textiles, objects of metal and carved stone. Among the important sites was Chavín de Huántar, serving as the cultural center for a large part of the Peruvian territory. Later (200 BC – 600 AD) came a number of regional cultures, both coastal (Moche, Paracas, Nazca) and Andean (Recuay, Pukara), represented in the exhibitions by their sophisticated productions in textiles and pottery. Around 600 AD, the southern Andean territories came under control of the Tiwanaku society, centered around Lake Titicaca. The exhibitions also deal with several local cultures of later dates (1000-1450 AD), among which the Chimú and Chincha, respectively of the northern and southern coasts, the so-called “Aymara kingdoms“, and finally the last of the great societies of the Andean area, that of the Inca, who succeeded in politically unifying the Andean territories from the mid-1400s through the early 1500s. The exhibitions then discuss the encounter of the Inca Empire with the armies of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, and with other Europeans.

The Museum of Civilizations is currently reorganizing its presentations of American Arts and Cultures. New works and archival materials will include some devoted to populations, cultures and arts not formerly considered, as well as insights into how historical figures and events enter in the provenance of the museum’s collections.