The Rockefeller Museum, formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum, is an archaeological museum located in East Jerusalem that houses a large collection of artifacts unearthed in the excavations conducted in Mandate Palestine, in the 1920s and 1930s.

The museum is under the management of the Israel Museum and houses the head office of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

In 1906, the Jewish National Fund planned to purchase a site known as Karm el-Sheikh to house the Bezalel School of Art and Crafts. The founder of the school, Boris Schatz envisaged a museum and university that would overlook the Temple Mount. In 1919, British Mandate authorities designated the site for an archaeological museum.

Visiting Palestine in 1925, during the days of the British Mandate, James Henry Breasted, founder and director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, decided that Jerusalem needed an archaeological museum to house important regional finds. Encouraged by Lord Plumer, the British High Commissioner, Breasted approached American philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who agreed to donate two million dollars toward the project. Previously, he had offered to build an archeological museum in Cairo, Egypt, but he was turned down, possibly due to pressure from the British government, which was anxious to keep America from establishing a foothold in the region.

David Rockefeller, Sr. (born June 12, 1915) is the current patriarch of the Rockefeller family. He is the youngest and only surviving child of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and the only surviving grandchild of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil. His five siblings were Abby, John D. III, Nelson, Laurance and Winthrop.

Rockefeller was born in New York City and grew up in a nine-story mansion at 10 West 54th Street, the then-largest private residence in the city. The home contained rare, ancient, medieval and Renaissance treasures collected by his father — with some, such as the Unicorn Tapestries, held in an adjoining building at 12 West 54th Street. On the seventh floor was his mother Abby's private modern art gallery. The mansion was subsequently donated by David's father as a site for the sculpture garden in his wife's name and memory, now part of the complex that is the Museum of Modern Art.

He spent much time as a child at the vast family estate of Pocantico (see Kykuit), where, in his memoirs, he recalls visits by powerful associates of his father, including General George C. Marshall, the adventurer Admiral Richard Byrd (whose Antarctic expeditions had been funded by the family), and the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Summer vacations were spent at the Eyrie, a vast 100-room mansion in Seal Harbor on the southeast shore of Mount Desert Island, in Maine. The mansion was demolished by the family in the early 1960s.