History
Childhood excursions with his father and older brother led the 14-year-old Francisco Moreno to mount a display of his growing collection of anthropological, fossil and bone findings at his family's Buenos Aires home in 1866, unwittingly laying the foundations for the future La Plata Museum.
Moreno spent the time between 1873 and 1877 exploring his country's then-remote and largely unmapped Patagonia, becoming the first white Argentine to reach Lake Nahuel Huapi and what was later named Lago Argentino ("Argentine Lake") and its imposing glacier (named Perito Moreno Glacier in his honor). The large body of man-made and paleontological samples he gathered and carefully classified during this survey (which also led to the first border demarcation treaty with neighboring Chile, in 1881) led to his establishment of the Buenos Aires Archaeological and Anthropological Museum in 1877.
Internationally respected naturalists such as Paul Broca and Rudolf Virchow contributed valuable donations to the institution, which was incorporated into the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum. The 1882 establishment of the city of La Plata as the new capital of the Province of Buenos Aires led the provincial legislature to requisition the collection in 1884 for the construction of a new facility set in a northside park, designed by renowned urbanist Charles Thays.
The La Plata Museum was inaugurated on November 19, 1888 (the sixth anniversary of the city's founding). As his collections had been the museum's leitmotif, Moreno was named its first director.
An early contributor to its paleontological collection was Santiago Roth, whom Moreno named as head of the Paleontology Department of the museum in 1895.
Moreno initially struggled to maintain the institution and its collections, a result of sparing legislative appropriations which budgeted for only nine assistants. These limitations helped persuade Moreno to incorporate the museum into the new and growing University of La Plata (today Argentina's second-largest) in 1906. This led to his retirement as director, though by no means of his role as its preeminent caretaker, which occupied him until his death in 1919.
Its collections drew the attention of the world's anthropological community from the beginning, attracting numerous visiting international scholars. It earned the American Alliance of Museums' accreditation, as well as plaudits from one of the United States' most prestigious naturalists at the time, Henry Augustus Ward, who deemed the museum to be the fourth most important of its kind in the world.
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