Bavarian State Archaeological Collection

The Bavarian State Archaeological Collection (German: Archäologische Staatssammlung, until 2000 known as the Prähistorische Staatssammlung, State Prehistoric Collection) in Munich is the central museum of prehistory of the State of Bavaria, considered to be one of the most important archaeological collections and cultural history museums in Germany.

The museum was founded on 14 October 1885 on the initiative of the physiologist and anthropologist Johannes Ranke, a nephew of Leopold von Ranke. As part of his teaching at the University of Munich, he had assembled a private collection of both original prehistoric objects of Bavarian origin and copies and held a well received exhibition of them in March–April that year, after which he donated them to the Kingdom of Bavaria. He had previously founded the Museums-Verein für Vorgeschichtliche Alterthümer Baierns (Museum Association for Prehistoric Artifacts of Bavaria).

That same autumn, holdings of the Royal Ethnographic Museum were integrated into the new institution, and with the assistance of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, a collection of major finds from the Little Switzerland region of Franconia, including from tumuli, was built up in 1885 and 1886. Initially the museum was an independent division of the Conservatory of the Palaeontological Collection in the Museum of Ethnography (today the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology). On 7 February 1889, at Ranke's urging, it became an independent subsidiary of the General Conservatory of Natural Science Collections of the Kingdom of Bavaria, with him as curator. In 1902 it was renamed the Anthropologisch-Prähistorisches Sammlung des Staates (Anthropological-Prehistoric Collection of the State), in 1927, separated from the anthropology collection, and in 1935, named the Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Staatssammlung.

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