To fulfill its mission and ensure continuing excellence, the Museum of Anthropology seeks to fully support the following areas:
Collection Care and Conservation
Goal: $1 million endowed
The Museum of Anthropology cares for more than three million archaeological and ethnographic artifacts. Our collections primarily derive from curatorial research exploring the evolution of human cultures around the globe, and span from more than a million years ago until the present. The Museum is actively working to update collection storage and care and to digitize information on all of our collections to make them more widely accessible to scholars and the interested public. In addition, many of our collections are fragile and in urgent need of conservation care. To meet these goals at the highest levels of curatorial excellence and contemporary Museum standards requires substantial resources. An endowment of $1 million will generate $50,000 per year for collection care, documentation, and conservation.
Publications Program
Goal: $200,000 endowed
The Museum’s publication series play a critically important role in the dissemination of primary archaeological research, presenting the results of major archaeological field projects as well as reports and analyses of the Museum’s collections. As major academic and private publishers are increasingly reluctant to publishing data‐rich reports—which ultimately are source documents containing primary evidence for all future research— the Museum’s commitment to publishing archaeological monographs and reports becomes increasingly important. Producing high quality, richly illustrated archaeological print and digital publications is costly. An endowment of $200,000 will provide $10,000 per year for support of manuscript production and publication.
Graduate Fellowship and Research Support
Goal: $2.5 million endowed
The University of Michigan has long been recognized as the nation’s preeminent graduate program in anthropological archaeology—and has trained many of the leading scholars who now occupy prominent positions in leading universities and museums in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. To sustain this excellence, we seek an endowment of $2.5 million, which will allow us to offer three graduate student fellowships per year and assist us in our commitment to excellence in graduate education.
Postdoctoral Fellowships in Anthropological Archaeology
Goal: $2.4 million endowed
The Museum’s collections provide rich potential for intensive research by young scholars seeking to make significant contributions to anthropological and archaeological theory and knowledge. Postdoctoral fellowships will benefit the museum by bringing the best and brightest young archaeologists to Ann Arbor to conduct important research and collaborate with our students and curators. They will also allow us to nurture exciting cutting‐edge scholarship on a range of topics exploring human cultural evolution and transformations. An endowment of $2.4 million will generate approximately $120,000 per year, sufficient to allow us to support two post‐doctoral fellows in anthropological archaeology.
Archaeological Field Research Endowments
To maintain the Museum of Anthropology’s leading position as a center of innovative research in archaeology around the globe, we seek an interlocking set of endowments to provide seed money to support archaeological field research in the US and abroad. These funds will allow us to develop and sustain research collaborations, engage in the rapid deployment of new methods of analysis and dating, and nurture the rapid dissemination of research results. Areas of interest to the Museum include:
Endowment for Asian Archaeology Endowment for Eastern European Archaeology
Endowment for Latin American Archaeology
Endowment for Near Eastern Archaeology
Endowment for North American Archaeology
Endowment for Underwater Archaeology
Please contact the relevant curator or Museum Director if you are interested in creating a field research endowment.
Undergraduate Research Support:
Goal: $500,000 endowed
The Museum’s curators and research staff seek to involve undergraduates in the excitement of archaeological field and laboratory research. U‐M Undergraduates participate in Museum and Anthropology Department sponsored archaeological field training projects in Michigan, the Southwest US, and Senegal, and conduct original research on the Museum’s Collections from these areas as well as Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. The Museum’s irreplaceable collections constitute an extraordinary resource for undergraduate education; several hundred students per year visit and work with our collections as part of courses and independent research projects. Endowments of $500,000 will generate $25,000 per year, and will allow us to grant individual fellowships for students seeking to participate in archaeological fieldwork, to provide equipment and funds for costly analyses, such as radiocarbon dating, and to assist students wishing to attend professional conferences to present their original research.
Director’s Strategic Fund
Goal: $50,000 annually
Each year, expendable funds are essential to address urgent needs of the Museum, providing important resources and enhancing our ability to quickly respond to new opportunities and initiatives. Gifts to the Director’s Strategic Fund are critical to the well‐being and ongoing growth of the Museum. In addition to areas of support described above, Strategic Fund resources are used to:
- Provide seed money to exploratory field projects to provide curators and research staff with preliminary results to enable them to apply for major research grants.
- Provide supplementary research or matching funds to meet external granting agency requirements.
- Purchase equipment for field and laboratory research.
- Support museum events and gatherings at national meetings.
- Provide professional development opportunities to museum staff.
