The IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (formerly the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology) consist of an estimated 5 million archaeological artifacts, 30,000 ethnographic objects, 20,000 photographs, and supporting library and archive. The collections represent cultures from each of the world's inhabited continents. These materials have been collected and curated to serve the museum's primary mission as a teaching museum within a university setting. The ethnology collections' strengths include traditional musical instruments, photographs of Native Americans and the Bloomington community, Inupiaq and Yupik Eskimo materials, and Pawnee material culture, among others. The archaeology collections piece together the material remains of cultures from the earliest occupations of North American through to the modern period.
