History
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.
The institution joined two others in Munich in collecting and exhibiting prehistoric and early historic finds: the Historischer Verein von Oberbayern and the ancient history division of the Bavarian National Museum. In 1927 and 1934, respectively, these transferred their holdings in the field to the institution founded by Ranke.
The collection was originally exhibited in the Old Academy or Wilhelminum, but beginning in 1939 was no longer on permanent public view, and in 1944 the exhibition space was destroyed. After the war, since it was no longer together with the other natural science museums, it was also made an independent organisation; in 1954 it reverted to the name Prähistorische Staatssammlung. Until 1975, it was housed in the Bavarian National Museum. Beginning in February 1976, it reopened one department at a time in a specially designed building on the Englischer Garten, next to the Bavarian National Museum. The building is of reinforced concrete with weathering steel panels designed to rust, and was designed by Helmut von Werz, Johann-Christoph Ottow, Erhard Bachmann and Michel Marx. The new building was the culmination of many years of effort by Hans-Jörg Kellner, curator of the State Prehistoric Collection from 1960 to 1984, and the Vereinigung der Freunde der Bayerischen Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Association of Friends of Bavarian Pre- and Early History), which he founded in 1973.
On 11 May 2000 the museum was renamed to the State Archaeological Collection in response to the wishes of its then curator, Ludwig Wammser, to better reflect its scope, which had come to include medieval and early modern periods both in and outside Bavaria.
In 2010 Wammser was succeeded as director by Rupert Gebhard.
Read more about this topic: Bavarian State Archaeological Collection
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)