History of the museum

Nobility, clergy and bourgeoisie cultivated interest in exotic and curious objects from the Renaissance. 

The artefacts in their collections were typically of non-European origin and were housed along with natural objects taken from as yet little-known regions of the world. For instance, a Mexican feather shield was designated as a Chinese parasol, a Caribbean belt, initially described as East Indian, was later thought to be of African origin. Carved ivories from Africa were said to be “Indian” (that is, Asian), and a sketchbook from the Great Lakes region was meant to have originated in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

In the early 19th century, Emperor Franz I of Austria (1768–1835) established an Ethnographic Collection as part of the Imperial Cabinets of Natural History. 

Objects from James Cook’s Pacific and North American Collection, purchased at a London auction in 1806 on behalf of the Emperor, were its first new acquisitions. On the occasion of the marriage of his daughter Archduchess Leopoldine (1797–1826) to the Portuguese crown prince, who lived in Brazil and later became Brazilian emperor, Emperor Franz I sent a scientific expedition to Brazil in 1817. The expedition collected extensive specimens for Vienna’s natural history and ethnological collections. The work of the expedition, however, was not only carried out by its European members. They depended on the labor, expertise, and assistance of local people, intermediaries, assistants, and enslaved persons. Artefacts from the expedition reached Vienna by way of a number of large shipments. Due to the resulting lack of space in the Vienna Hofburg, a Brazilian Museum was founded by the emperor in 1821 in Johannesgasse in Vienna, but it was closed again as early as 1836. Again, together with natural history artefacts, the ethnographic collection was presented in one of the 12 rooms of this museum. 

Inspired by Paris, London and Berlin, an anthropological society was also founded in Vienna in 1870; the decision was also taken to establish a museum of anthropology and prehistory complete with library. 

Much like the imperial ethnographic collections that preceded it, this museum also faced problems of storage space. The new building of the Imperial and Royal Court Museum of Natural History was the solution for the ethnological collections of the imperial house and this society. In this museum, opened in 1889, which emancipated itself from the Roman Catholic Church's interpretation of the world with its emphasis on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, an anthropological-ethnographic department was established in whose development the Anthropological Society participated. The department covered not only ethnology and physical anthropology, but also European prehistory. The departments work was animated by misguided notions of evolutionary hierarchies reflected in ideas of “race”. These hierarchies saw so-called non-European “primitive peoples” and prehistoric European peoples as precursors of purported higher stages of human development. This definition of the world celebrated the idea of supremacy of Europe, colonialism, and the triumph of modern science. Some of these classification schemes, e.g., the notion of different human "races" and the distinction between folk art (simple and static), art and high culture (complex and dynamic), are still common today.

Before Austria was annexed to Germany in 1938, a cohort of the museum’s staff was closely linked to the (banned) National Socialists. 

During the National Socialist regime, colonial policy became a focus of new interest as witnessed in the German Colonial Exhibition of 1940 in the Neue Burg organized under the auspices of the Reichskolonialbund (Reich Colonial League). The museum’s exhibition programme, hewed to and promoted the National Socialist ideology. The museum planned a series of displays, such as “Das Hakenkreuz in Ostasien” (The Swastika in East Asia) and a special exhibition on comparative culture; an exhibition devoted to “Großostasien” (Greater East Asia) in collaboration with the Japanese diplomatic missions in Berlin and Vienna was not realised due to the war.

During the war, the museum's most important holdings were removed from the exhibition rooms and moved to safety in cellar depots and salvage locations in Vienna and the countryside.