The database provides access to the complete collections relating to the South American Mapuche people held by the Náprstek Museum. The objects were acquired from the late nineteenth century to the present day and constitute valuable evidence of Mapuche material culture and of their everyday, social, and religious life.
The core of the collection consists of larger assemblages gathered by the Czech ethnographers and Americanists Milan Stuchlík (1932–1980) and Václav Šolc (1919–1995) during their field research in the Chilean Araucanía region in the 1960s and 1970s. Stuchlík’s comprehensive collection comes primarily from the Cholchol area and the community of Coipuco, while Šolc’s collection originates mainly from Huapi Island in Lake Budi. The database also presents smaller but historically significant collections of Mapuche silver jewellery. The earliest objects were acquired by the museum as early as 1896 from Eduard Tauer; further pieces entered the collection in 2024 from the estate of the diplomat Stanislav Svoboda (1926–2015).
The database also includes three scholarly studies devoted to the collections, presented in the introductory section:
Milan Stuchlík and Mapuche: The Ethnographic Collection in the Náprstek Museum
Mapuche Artifacts: The Václav Šolc and Olga Kandertová Collection in the Náprstek Museum
Mapuche Jewellery Collection in the Náprstek Museum
In addition to assessing these exceptional collections, the studies examine their provenance, the circumstances of their acquisition, the original owners of the objects, and the individuals who assembled them. They also seek to place the museum’s historical collections within a broader cultural and social context and, wherever possible, to incorporate the perspectives of contemporary Mapuche communities.