National Anthropological Archives

The National Anthropological Archives is a collection of historical and contemporary documents maintained by the Smithsonian Institution, which document the history of anthropology and the world's peoples and cultures. It is located in the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland and is part of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History.

The National Anthropological Archives (NAA) is the successor to the archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), which was founded in 1879 by John Wesley Powell. In 1968, The NAA was established, incorporating the collections of the BAE, which focused on American Indians, as well as the papers of curators in the National Museum of Natural History's Department of Anthropology, who conducted research around the world. The establishment of the NAA was supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation with the aim of providing a repository of record for personal research materials created by scholars without a home institution (or whose home institution had no archives), in order to promote the preservation of the anthropological record.

The NAA is the only archival repository in the United States dedicated exclusively to preserving ethnographic, archaeological, and linguistic fieldnotes, physical anthropological data, photographs, sound recordings and other media created by American anthropologists. The collection includes documents such as fieldnotes, journals, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, maps, sound recordings, all compiled by prominent researchers from the Smithsonian or other research institutions. Spanning over 150 years of American history and world history, materials held in the archives include nearly 635,000 photographs, 20,000 works of indigenous art, and 11,400 sound recordings.

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