The conservation project for the Vatican Museums Ethnological Collections was initiated in 1997. Held in the rooms of the Passarelli Wing up to the second half of the 1990s, the collections were found to be in a very precarious state of conservation, requiring timely action by the restorers. The coordination of the conservation project was entrusted to Stefania Pandozy, who constituted and continues to coordinate an all-female working group made up of specialists in the various types of material, organic and inorganic, present in the collections.
In 2001 the “Laboratory for demo-ethno-anthropological materials”, now the Ethnological Materials Restoration Laboratory, was formally instituted.