The door to Room 150 looks like any other in McGraw Hall. But it opens to reveal the last vestiges of Cornell's original museum, with exotic objects from times and places far and near.

A Hawaiian chief's necklace ("lei niho palaoa"), prehistoric stone tools and three mummies -- two from Peru, one from Egypt -- are some 20,000 objects in McGraw Hall Museum, home to the anthropology department's teaching collections.

Some of the most stunning -- and anthropologically important -- objects include masks and body suits collected by the late Cornell anthropologist Victor Turner and his wife, Edie, in Zambia in the 1960s. Turner's analysis of the materials, used by the Ndembu people during male initiation rites, made him one of the 20th century's leading anthropologists, says museum director Frederic Gleach. "If you take an anthropology course anywhere in the world, it's likely you'll read Victor Turner's work on symbolic anthropology."

The museum also houses one of the country's better collections of 1960s clothing from the Hmong people of Thailand, gathered by the late Cornell professor Lauriston Sharp. Amazonian collections include modern featherwork donated by emeritus professor of anthropology Terence Turner from his work since 1962 among the Kayapo of Central Brazil.

McGraw Hall Museum used to hold all university collections when A.D. White founded it in 1868. As the campus grew, only the anthropology collections stayed at McGraw: geological samples went to Snee Hall, bird-related objects to the Lab of Ornithology, and so on.

Now it's easy to think of the remaining artifacts, like the Ndembu body suits and their bulging navels, as curio cabinet oddities.

But Gleach strives to teach museum visitors, from kindergarteners to Ph.D. candidates, that the objects often meant something more profound to their owners. "Some of these things were seen as having souls and lives and spirits of their own," Gleach says. "They were living members of their communities. All of these things were part of people's lives."