sentences:  Both the Museum of Cultures and the Natural History Museum Basel trace their origins to the 1840s, when the city of Basel founded its Museum of Natural History and Ethnography to house artifacts and artworks collected by merchants and travelers.In 1849, the museum moved into a large neoclassical edifice designed by Melchior Berri and located on the Münster hill at the heart of Basel, on the site of a former Augustinian monastery.In 1904 the museum created a separate ethnology department ("Abteilung für Völkerkunde"), and in 1917 the ethnographic collection became an independent institution inside the same building as the Natural History Museum.