Research, teaching and the public

The Archaeological Museum of the University of Münster© WWU - Kathrin Nolte The re-opening of the Archaeological Museum and the Bible Museum at the University of Münster enriches the museum landscape in a city steeped in science and culture, as well as extending university research and teaching to the public in a new and innovative way. Both museums have impressive collections. The Archaeological Museum has on display a significant collection of casts of well-known sculptures, as well as models of important sites of antiquity. The Bible Museum is deemed to have the most comprehensive collection in Germany relating to the history of the Bible, and it documents the New Testament from its beginnings in manuscript form up to the present day, all based on over 700 Latin, Greek and Syrian-Aramaic editions of the Bible. University museums have a variety of tasks. First of all, their collections have a teaching purpose because they provide students with haptic experiences of stone and metallic objects or of various types of pottery - which, especially in prehistoric archaeology and in the area of preand early history, is indispensable for a deeper understanding of how things were made and worked. Classical archaeology, on the other hand - which has traditionally had a stronger art-historical orientation - has always worked with casts of masterworks of antique sculpture for teaching and training purposes, thus making sculptures accessible in a three-dimensional way.