The foundation of the Ethnology collection was the transfer of ethnographic materials from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology in the early 1920s. This material included items donated by the Smithsonian Institution and objects collected by Joseph Beal Steere. Since then, the collection has grown with the bequests of many personal life collections, single donations, and systematic collections made by curators and graduate students.

The Ethnology collection consists of traditional craft products from all parts of the world. These include workshop productions from complex societies like Mexico and China but excludes objects of recent manufacture using industrial methods. The majority of the collection is from areas characterized by socially less complex societies (e.g., American Indian, New Guinea, Amazonia).

Overall, the collection emphasizes domestic artifacts. The curators of this division assembled many of these collections and they remain important and in constant use. Dr. Melvin R. Gilmore brought bison hide and bone objects from the Arikara on the Prairies. Dr. Volney N. Jones made exceptional collections of birch bark, wooden baskets, and basswood, cattail, and sedge mats from the Great Lakes. Dr. Richard Ford has developed a collection of micaceous pottery from Pueblo, Apache, and Hispanic villages in the American Southwest. Students and visiting researchers regularly study these collections of utilitarian objects.

The Melvin R. Gilmore Library, an unfunded branch of the University Library, also is housed in the Division and was expanded through a bequest by Volney Jones and most recently by Richard I. Ford in 2006. The library consists of an extensive collection of professional journals, books, and reprints for ethnographic and ethnobotanical research. The Museum is currently working on a searchable database of the Library which we hope to have available by December 2009.