The discipline of ethnology in the late nineteenth century has been characterized as a period of “armchair theorizing,” in contrast to the field work methodology which became the distinguishing characteristic of socio-cultural anthropology after the Great War (Conklin, 2002; 260 cf Stocking, 1995). The term obscures the aims and activities of German museum directors who envisioned extensive interaction with collected material culture as the primary means of knowledge collection and production for their discipline. Unlike in Britain and France, many of the larger towns of Germany created major ethnographic museums which competed with the capital for visitors. Directors sought to make their museum a destination site for both tourists and international scholars. The formation of international standards for museum organization, facilities and display technologies was supported by a culture of travel and publication which reviewed collections around the world. For Director A. B. Meyer of the Dresden Museum for Zoology, Anthropology and Ethnology (ZAEM), studying museum collections was just as important as well-qualified, long-term investigations in the field in order to make sense of the material that filled museum galleries and storage rooms. Meyer trained his museum staff to collaborate extensively with researchers with long term residencies among the ethnic groups under investigation. Furthermore, ZAEM's ethnologists studied how indigenous knowledge, practices and material culture traveled among ethnic groups. The ethnographic questions they asked mirrored their own activities as researchers on expedition. In this way, the practitioners of this new discipline wrote themselves into the history of humankind that they sought after through ethnographic research.