The Americas collections include more than 10,000 indigenous artifacts and art objects, from prehistoric stone tools to Peruvian pottery, from Plains Indian beadwork to Mohawk baskets. Of particular note is a large and distinguished collection of stone figures, masks, amulets and other objects from West Mexico. In recent years, the Longyear Museum has acquired substantial gifts of contemporary Native American art, including over five hundred original works on paper by twenty-one Canadian Indian and Metis artists. In addition, a small but important group of contemporary Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) objects has been acquired by gift and purchase.
Early acquisitions of the local archaeological collections of Herbert Bigford in 1959 and Walter Bennett in 1965 established the museum as an important repository of Haudenosaunee materials.
Since that time, the Longyear Museum of Anthropology collections have grown to include archaeological and ethnological cultural heritage materials from elsewhere in North America, Central and South America, Africa, Oceania, Asia, and Europe.