Ethnological museums are archives for documents on the diversity of humankind and the changes in world cultures.  They show a portion of the objects that they safeguard in exhibitions dedicated to a better understanding of individual cultures or regions of the world, or which compare the breadth of human cultural products and the similarities of cultures.  In their examination of cultural foreignness and that which joins all people together, ethnological museums render an important contribution to the understanding of a world shrunken by improved possibilities of mobility and communication and increasingly multicultural through migration.

Research represents the link between the role of museums as archives and their duty to education, which can reconstruct or reveal lost or obscured contexts.  These research activities include the development of the collections through fieldwork and historical investigations of culture, collections, and academic history as well as technical and materials analyses.

The origins of the Museum of Ethnology date to the year 1806, as with the acquisition of a portion of the Cook collection a separate “imperial and royal ethnographic collection” was established in the imperial Hofnaturalienkabinett  (lit. court cabinet of natural objects).  From 1876, the anthropological-ethnographic department of the Natural History Museum administered the rapidly growing holdings. Nineteen twenty-eight ultimately saw the creation of an autonomous Museum of Ethnology in the corps de logis of the Neue Burg palace.  Since 2001, the museum is a part of the scholarly institute “Kunsthistorisches Museum with the Museum of Ethnology and the Austrian Theatre Museum.”