Our curatorial departments conduct research programmes across the broad range of collections disciplines.

Research in our collections directorate fits broadly under three major themes – Scotland's Material Heritage, Identities and Cultural Contacts, and Sustainability.

Cross-cultural Encounters through Indian Paintings
A multidisciplinary project examining mid-18th century paintings from India as sites of cross-cultural encounters between Bengali artisans and Scottish collector, Archibald Swinton (1731–1804).
Chitrali Shu
The mountainous region of Chitral in northern Pakistan is home to a pure woollen fabric called 'shu' or 'patti'. This project will document this living tradition through film and interviews.
Entangled Knowledges
Entangled Knowledges aims to highlight Menang Nyungar knowledge embedded in a historical fish collection held at National Museums Scotland and return this knowledge to the Menang community in Western Australia.

Reveal and Connect
Our collaborative projects relating to African and Caribbean collections held in museums across Scotland.
Materialising the Cold War
Three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, our collaborative project explores how the Cold War is represented in museums.
Chinese Dress and Textiles
This three-month project will survey and study a selection of nineteenth-century Chinese textiles and clothing in the museum’s permanent and loan collections.

Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard
This 3-year project aims to challenge current understanding of the process of hoarding through an interdisciplinary study of one of the best-preserved hoards found in Britain to date.
The Birth of Mammals
This project makes use of new fossil material from Scotland, and the latest techniques in digital palaeo-histology, to pinpoint the origin of live birth in mammals for the first time.
People and Plants
People and Plants will investigate the interplay between natural history and ethnography collections in museums, emphasising their value as material archives of indigenous ecological knowledge.

Buying Power: British Archaeology and the Antiquities Market in Egypt and Sudan 1880 - 1939
This research project will investigate how archaeologists involved in British-led excavations in Egypt and Sudan engaged with the antiquities market between 1880 - 1939.