The museum was founded in 1878 by the Ministry of Public
Education as the Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques (Ethnographic
Museum of Scientific Expeditions) and was housed in the Trocadéro Palace, which
had been built for the third Paris World's Fair that year.
The palace, whose architect was Gabriel Davioud, had two
wings flanking a central concert hall.
The Musée national des Monuments Français was created at the
same time in the other wing.
The first director of the anthropological museum was Ernest
Hamy, an anthropologist with the Natural History Museum who had urged the
foundation of such an institution in Paris since 1874.
Other
French cities already had such museums, and there were many collections of
materials brought back by French explorers, particularly from South America.
A
temporary museum was housed in the three rooms of the Palace of Industry at the
Exposition from January to mid-March 1878, featuring a major collection of
Peruvian artifacts recently brought back by Charles Wiener, Columbian and
Equatorial exhibits contributed by Edouard André, American exhibits contributed
by Jules Crevaux, Léon de Cessac, and Alphonse Pinart,
a collection from Central Asia contributed by Charles-Eugène
Ujfalvy, Cambodian inscriptions from Jules Harmand, exhibits from the Celebes
contributed by de La Savinière and de Ballieu, and items from the Canary
Islands from René Verneau.
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