National Museums Scotland is one of the leading museum groups in Europe. With one of the largest and most diverse collections in the world, we are responsible for the acquisition, preservation and display of a substantial part of Scotland’s cultural, historic and national heritage.
Millions of local and international visitors enjoy our four museums each year, and we also introduce our collections to a much wider audience than can physically visit our museums through, touring exhibitions, loans, community engagement, digital programmes and research.
Over the last decade, we have invested over £120 million in our sites and have more than doubled our visitor numbers, with over 3 million people now visiting our four museums. Alongside this, we have continued to transform how we communicate and engage with our audiences. 2019 has seen the completion of our Masterplan for the National Museum of Scotland with the opening of three new galleries dedicated to Ancient Egypt, East Asia and the Art of Ceramics.
The Americas collections within the Department of Global Arts, Cultures and Design (GACD) at National Museums Scotland (NMS) include approximately 7,700 cultural belongings from South, Central, and North America, most of which were originally collected as archaeological, anthropological or art objects. The Americas collections are on display in the Living Lands, Patterns of Life and Artistic Legacies galleries.
Some of the collections are connected to early voyages of British colonial exploration (e.g. Captain James Cook (1776-1779), Sir William Parry (1790–1855), Frederick Beechey (1796–1856), and Dr John Rae (1813–1893)). Early museum policy also established international links that yielded significant collections including those by Hudson’s Bay Company factors in Canada from Arctic and Subarctic peoples in the late 1850s. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, archaeologists and private collectors contributed to the collections from South America, which are particularly strong in Peruvian textiles, as well as Chimu, Moche and Nasca pottery. Material was also transferred from the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Since the 1970s contemporary material from North America has been collected with a focus on jewellery from the Southwestern United States and contemporary art from the Northwest Coast.