After the last prisoners were transferred to the new facilities, the Panóptico underwent two years of restoration and adapted for museum functions, but the inauguration, scheduled for April 9, 1948, had to be postponed due to the riots that occurred in the city following the assassination of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the first purely archaeological investigations took place, including the excavations carried out by Konrad Theodor Preuss in San Agustín (1913-1914), John Alden Mason in Pueblito and other Tairona areas (1922-1923), and Carlos Cuervo and Gerardo Arrubla in Sogamoso (1924).

In this context, Gregorio Hernández de Alba highlighted the idea of considering objects as revealing documents of the culture of their creators and with this he promoted a new concept in the field of archaeological museums.

In recent years, emphasis has been placed on research into environmental conditions with important results regarding soils, pollen and bone remains, contributing to further clarifying the panorama of the pre-Hispanic past.

Today, the archaeological collections bring together representative pieces from the different periods of settlement of the Colombian territory, ranging from hunter-gatherer groups - approximately 12,000 years ago - to the complex societies that existed upon the arrival of the Spanish.

In addition, the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) is carrying out a project to incorporate the systematized information into a National Archaeology Network that will allow open consultation for students, researchers, and people interested in these collections.

Under the guidance of Paul Rivet, Gregorio Hernández de Alba, and Justus Wolfran Schottelius, among many other outstanding professors, numerous pioneers carried out expeditions that covered a large part of the national territory.

The ethnographic studies that were carried out brought to light the great diversity of indigenous communities, their forms of sociocultural organization, oral tradition, and religious life; the objects collected were eloquent testimony to this.

In this way, nearly four thousand pieces of diverse nature were gathered and recorded, such as basketry, clothing, everyday and ritual attire, hunting weapons, featherwork, musical instruments, necklaces, ceramics, and tools that today make up the ethnographic collection.

The interest in beauty, the encounter with plastic expression through bright color and loose brushstrokes, the search for identity in indigenism, the international projection of local artists and the development of conceptual communication accounts for the richness of this collection.

[3] The drawing area includes works by artists and scientists: painters, sculptors, miniaturists, geographers, caricaturists and architects, through techniques such as charcoal, pencil, ink, pastel, watercolor and miniature; The latter is an important section of the collection, made up of 92 pieces.

The collection includes among its most notable pieces the first objects produced by the La Bogotana pottery factory, donated by Francisco de Paula Santander in 1834, and the hand-operated organ for domestic use made by Juan P. Silgado, a craftsman from Sahagún, Bolívar, in 1899.

To date, 1,347 pieces have been classified as such, including photographs, business cards, books, brochures, maps, atlases, sheet music, official documents, and letters.

There are two important groups: one formed by the donation of former President Eduardo Santos Montejo in 1959, made up of the series of 19th-century travelers' books, photographs, manuscripts, and printed material that illustrate different aspects of the country's history during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The collection also includes bonds, vouchers, and other public debt documents circulated together with banknotes and coins while the country's economy was recovering, until the founding of the Bank of the Republic in the 1920s, from which time on, this institution was in charge of issuing the national currency.

Other early pieces that made up this collection are the Royal Standard of Castile, with which Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru in 1531, and captured during the Independence Campaign in 1824 along with four other flags sent by General Antonio José de Sucre to the Government of Colombia.

For this reason, the current National Museum preserves a small sample of instruments and objects related to scientific research, which serve as a reference to this important aspect of Colombian history.