This page highlights Artstor content related to the global study of human behavior, societies, and cultures as represented by images of traditional and contemporary material culture, such as ceremonial masks and objects, as well as photographs and drawings of cultural groups, rituals, and traditions.
Image credit: Tibet. Ritual Crown with the Five Tathagata Buddhas. Late 14th-early 15th century. Image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Artstor’s Anthropology content is sourced from museums, archives, and scholars such as:
Artstor's Education and Content teams curate groups of images in a number of disciplines. The below image groups are available for Anthropology:
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Browse images by geography, then select a classification, particularly Humanities and Social Sciences, Decorative Arts, Utilitarian Objects, and Interior Design, or Fashion, Costume, and Jewelry.
Use the asterisk (*) when keyword searching to truncate your terms and retrieve variant endings (e.g. ceremon* will retrieve ceremony, ceremonies, ceremonial, etc.)
Browse the collections of museums with encyclopedic collections (e.g. The Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Dallas Museum of Art) by classification, such as Costume, Decorative Arts, or Sculpture.
The National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution has shared approximately 1,600 19th-century Plains Indian ledger drawings. Plains Indian artists often executed these drawings on the pages of ruled ledger books acquired through trade, continuing a long tradition of painting on buffalo hides and other available media. The subjects depicted include social and religious ceremonies, warfare, courting rituals, personal dress, material culture, and scenes of daily life. Similarly, the Natural History Museum, London has shared drawings and watercolors related to the First Fleet expedition, which established the first European colony in Australia in 1787. The settlers recorded the landscapes, flora, fauna, and aboriginal people (known as the Eora) they encountered in the early days of the new colony. The ethnographic images represent the only visual record of the Eora people, who became extinct within 20 years of the first landing, whether killed outright by the settlers or by the diseases they brought with them.