Main Street, Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology and National Museum Guide

Running north from St. George's Cathedral toward Kingston, Main Street is Georgetown's grandest nineteenth-century boulevard. A wide grassy median shaded by giant interlocking rain trees (Samanea saman) and scarlet flamboyants divides two lanes of colonial wooden villas, historic libraries, the presidential compound of State House, and Guyana's two most important museums of anthropology and natural history.

Main Street, the 1923 Cenotaph, and State House (1858)

At the southern entrance to Main Street (where it meets Church Street and Avenue of the Republic) rises the white marble Cenotaph, unveiled on 14 August 1923 in memory of Guyanese soldiers who fell in the First and Second World Wars. Immediately next door stands the National Library of Guyana (opened in 1909 as a Carnegie Free Library in red-and-white tropical colonial style). Walking north under the saman canopy brings you past the green-and-white wooden compound of State House (built in 1858 as the residence of the British colonial governors and now the official residence of the President of Guyana, with the Prime Minister's Residence just up the avenue).

Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology (61 Main Street)

Housed inside a beautifully preserved nineteenth-century wooden colonial residence with Demerara windows at 61 Main Street, the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology was established in 1974 (opening to the public in 1982) as the oldest dedicated museum of anthropology in the English-speaking Caribbean. It is named in honour of Dr Walter Edmund Roth (1861 to 1933), the English-born physician, magistrate, and Protector of Indians who spent three decades documenting the languages, crafts, and customs of the interior tribes of Guyana, combined with the prehistoric archaeological excavations of founding director Dr Denis Williams (1923 to 1998).

Across its two timber-floored levels, the museum introduces visitors to the heritage of Guyana's nine Indigenous Amerindian nations: the coastal Arawak (Lokono), Carib (Kari'na), and Warrau, and the interior rainforest and savannah nations of the Wai-Wai, Macushi, Wapishana, Patamona, Akawaio, and Arecuna. Highlights include ancient shell-mound pottery and stone axes, timehri petroglyph rubbings, intricate Wai-Wai bead aprons and macaw-feather crowns, blowpipes and curare-tipped darts, and a full demonstration of how toxic bitter cassava is grated, squeezed in a woven matapee tube, and baked into cassava bread and cassareep for pepperpot.

Guyana National Museum (1868) on Company Path

Five minutes southwest on North Road and Hincks Street (beside the main post office and Company Path Gardens) stands the Guyana National Museum, founded on 13 February 1868 by the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society and housed in its current 1951 building after the Great Fire of 1945. Inside, natural history dioramas display Guyana's interior megafauna (giant river otters, jaguars, harpy eagles, black caimans, and the giant arapaima freshwater fish), alongside the beloved life-size replica of a prehistoric Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium americanum), a historic pork-knocker gold-and-diamond mining exhibit, scale architectural models of old Georgetown, and the 1966 Independence state limousine; check the official site for weekday visiting hours (admission is free to both museums).