The Arclayne Institute of Antiquities was founded in 936 ref. mod. by the Arclayne, a group of 11 researcher-artists affiliated with the failing Faylesh court whose goal was to catalog and collect all available knowledge of Galest's peoples, material cultures, and histories. When the Faylesh monarchy failed in 947, the Arclayne Institute reorganized from a private royal archive to a public endowment-funded institution and moved to a modest building on the river at the outskirts of Statmus Roen.
Over the next century, the Arclayne Institute of Antiquities developed a reputation for rigorous academic standards and a wide-ranging appetite for geographical knowledge. In 1079, they used a portion of the Century Endowment to fund Mr. Alan J. Merton's expedition north, during which he famously discovered the Hatharat Hieroglyphs and cemented himself as a household name. Upon his return, he relinquished his field journals to the Institute, kicking off the modern archives and establishing the Institute as a leader in the writing and interpreting of both history and culture in Normark.
The Institute continued to push the boundaries of archaeology and art history, always maintaining its position as a leader in both academic rigor and cultural tastemaking. Then, in 1174, the Arclayne Institute paired with the Preston Expeditionary Society and a half dozen other government and research institutions to send a team of archaeologists to our neighboring planet Mameth in the first successful interplanetary expedition Galest had ever seen, which resulted in a truly spectacular discovery of a "bog burial," in which a perfectly-preserved corpse was found in the bogs of the northern pineland region known as "Ironmoor." The success was repeated three years later, at Mameth's next close pass, when a cave was discovered to be full of petroglyphs and artifacts at the Starkweather site, just north of the equatorial line.
The Arclayne Institute of Antiquities continues to follow its guiding star to this day, prioritizing the preservation, reverential treatment, and diligent study of the long-forgotten material cultures of the past, now at an interplanetary scale.