The Museum of Anthropology is a research facility and does not have permanent exhibit space. The following Virtual Exhibits highlight a small portion of the collections housed at the Museum. Please click on the underlined headings to view more images and read more about a particular collection.

In 1918 and 1927, University of Michigan Professor Harley Harris Bartlett (1886-1960) traveled to Sumatra, Indonesia to conduct botanical research and collect specimens for the University of Michigan Herbarium and Smithsonian Institution. Some of his travel took him to the upland mountains of northern Sumatra and into contact with the Batak people. While visiting Batak villages, he collected various anthropological materials in addition to botanical materials and gave the Museum of Anthropology 155 written Batak texts and other materials for its collections. The following Batak Exhibit illustrates a handful of these wonderful objects.

During the 1930s, the Museum of Anthropology acquired 512 South Asian objects through the generous donation of Dr. Walter Koelz. A curator in the Museum of Zoology, Dr. Koelz traveled through the India and Himalayan regions during 1932-1933. During his journeys he collected all types of ethnographic and zoological materials. Part of his collection includes 48 Tibetan Thang-ka paintings collected from Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh and Kashmir, and is one of the few well documented Thang-ka collections in existence. The Koelz Collection also includes other textiles, such as embroidered and pieced woolen shawls from the Kashmir and Delhi/Jaipur regions, silver jewelry, and various objects of metal and wood.

The Museum has a collection of over 100 Sago Spathe paintings from New Guinea. Most of the paintings come from a ritual house built in the early 1980s. The initiation cycle was not completed due to dissension among the senior men who were responsible for keeping the initiation going. The paintings were recovered from the ruins of the structure in 1987 by Phillip Guddemi, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. Some paintings that would normally be present were not found. Examples of these were commissioned from local artists.