Museo de La Plata (Argentina)

BONOMO, M.

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Springer

Lugar: New York; Año: 2020; p. 7509 - 7512

The Museo de La Plata (La Plata Museum) belongs to the Facultad de CienciasNaturales y Museo (School of Natural Sciences and Museum) of Universidad Nacional de La Plata (La Plata National University), Argentina. It was founded in 1884 as a museum of Buenos Aires Province dedicated to research and the display of Natural History, Archaeology, and Fine Arts, among other disciplines. In 1906 it became part of the public university. Since then it has played a key role at national level in academic training in Anthropology in close proximity to the Natural Sciences, a field that has been the main focus of the institution since the early 1920s. It is currently an important center for paleontological, zoological, botanical, and geological research and for studies of the differentanthropological fields organized within the Anthropology, Ethnography, and Archaeology Divisions. Since its inception, the museum has significantly contributed to education through its exhibits, three of them dedicated to the Archaeology of Argentina, Latin America, and Egypt. The museum?s magnificent neoclassic building were designed by the Swedish Henrik Gustav Adam Aberg and the German Carl Ludwig Wilhelm Heynemann. The building was inspired by the European museums of the time, but it had a delicate Americanist influence on its decoration, with designs depicted on textiles, metal objects, and pottery of Aztec, Maya, Andean, and Mapuche origins.