Inventories of the Rudolf Pöch Collection at the Department of Anthropology, Vienna University

Today’s Department of Anthropology at Vienna University was founded by Rudolf Pöch in 1919 under the name of Institut für Anthropologie und Ethnographie. The Department holds a considerable amount of Pöch’s anthropological collection, whose diversity of material and media indeed reflects the diversity of his entire bequest.

From his expeditions to India, Papua New-Guinea and South Africa, Pöch brought back about 200 human skeletons and ancestral skulls, hair samples, hand and foot profiles, hand line drawings, numerous reports on anthropological findings, approx. 1700 glass slide negatives and many prints and stereo photographs. His infamous physical examinations of prisoners of war performed during World War I resulted in about 200 plaster busts, 500 epidermal ridge patterns, 1500 glass-slide negatives as well as 2400 anthropological report sheets and name lists. In addition, the collection contains private correspondence as well as some photographs, including from the estate of his wife Hella Pöch.