With approximately 40,000 objects in its artifact collection, the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign celebrates our shared humanity by collecting, preserving, documenting, exhibiting, and studying objects of cultural heritage.

The Spurlock Museum celebrates our shared humanity by collecting, preserving, documenting, exhibiting, and studying objects of cultural heritage. The Museum's primary function is education in service to students, scholarly communities, and the general public, interpreting the diversity of cultures through time and across the globe. Its collections constitute a public trust to be responsibly maintained for future generations as a permanent record of the cultural world.

In 1911, the University of Illinois established museums of classical and European culture on the fourth floor of Lincoln Hall, drawing upon the university's 1874 Gregory collection. An Oriental museum was added in 1917. Over time, the museums were combined and eventually renamed the World Heritage Museum in 1971. A generous gift from William and Clarice Spurlock of Indianapolis funded the construction of the new Museum facility. Opened in 2002, the Spurlock Museum features cultural galleries that reflect the diversity of the museum's collections, augmented with noteworthy artifacts from the Museum of Natural History and the Department of Anthropology.