National Museum of Anthropology

The National Museum of Anthropology (NMA) is one of the most important museographic precincts in Mexico and Latin America. It was designed to harbor and exhibit the archaeological legacy of the people of Mesoamerica, as well as to show the country's current ethnic diversity. The NMA was built between 1963 and 1964 in the Bosque de Chapultepec and has 24 rooms of which 22 are permanent exhibitions, 11 are devoted to Ethnography, 11 to Anthropology and 2 are for temporary exhibitions; It has 2 auditoriums and, in addition, it is the headquarters of the National Library of Anthropology and History.

The collection of the NMA is made up of numerous archaeological and ethnographic pieces from all over Mexico. One of the most emblematic pieces of the collection is the Piedra del Sol (The Stone of the Sun) also known as the Aztec Calendar -which is the heart of the museum-, the monumental Teotihuacan sculptures dedicated to the gods of water, the treasure of King Pakal's tomb, as a Toltec Atlante brought from Tollan-Xicocotitlan and the Tlaloc Monolith at the entrance of the museum.

Images

This impressive museum receives a little more than two million visits per year and is distributed as follows: The permanent rooms are distributed on both floors of the building. The rooms dedicated to the introduction to anthropology and the archaeological cultures of the Mexican territory, from the Settlement of America to the Mesoamerican Postclassical Period are located on the ground floor. On the second level there are the 11 ethnography rooms, where samples of the material culture of the indigenous peoples living in Mexico today are exposed.

The anthropology and archeology rooms are arranged around the uncovered part of the central square, which is where the lily pond is located, and are arranged according to a chronological criterion starting from the right side until arriving at the Mexica room. From Oaxaca Cultures room, the order of presentation is geographical. It should be noted that the northern cultures room is dedicated to towns that belonged to the area known as Arid America, a region that extends north of the limits of Mesoamerica.

The architectural concept of the National Museum of Anthropology is governed by two fundamental criteria that are intertwined: the chronological and the regional developments.

Mesoamerica was a cultural area and a historical reality in which its inhabitants created relationships that allowed to develop a common culture; nevertheless, each region presents its particular characteristics due to the geography, the language and the historical development of each one of them.

With nearly 8,000 objects made of -stone, ceramics, bone, shell, paper, feather, metals and wood-, these rooms allow us to know the cultural richness of the different peoples that inhabited Mesoamerica as well as their cultural areas: housing, religion, customs funeral, food, worldview, productive activities, political-social organization and the environment that surrounded them.

Images

GENERAL INFORMATION