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View specific California Collections text and photos
The Museum's documentation of Californian Native peoples began even before its founding, with the archaeological excavations of Philip M. Jones in 1900, sponsored by Phoebe Hearst. Since the arrival of Alfred L. Kroeber in 1901, the Museum has amassed what is probably the largest and most comprehensive collection devoted to Native California, including archaeological and ethnographic artifacts (now numbering over 259,000 catalogue entries). Regionally, the Museum's holdings are strongest from the northern part of the state.
One of the great strengths of the collections is their systematic nature. That is, they were collected according to a coherent principle of selection, such as all the tribes in the state or representative cultural inventories for each tribe, and their cultural contexts of the artifacts were amply documented in notes, maps, photographs, film, and sound recordings. Much of this material was gathered in the Museum's first decade with the assistance of faculty and students such as Samuel A. Barrett (the University's first Ph.D. in anthropology, 1908), Pliny Goddard, and Thomas T. Waterman. A special collection was produced between 1911 and 1916 by Ishi, the last Yahi Indian. Later researchers included textile specialist Lila O'Neale and archaeologist Robert F. Heizer. Today, the Museum continues to acquire contemporary California Indian objects.
The California ethnology collections are rightly associated with Kroeber, for in reviewing their history one soon sees that the years of the first California survey (c. 1899-1908) represent the most extensive period of collecting of California ethnology in the Museum's entire history. These were supplemented by the smaller second survey (c. 1925-1935), and by a third cluster of private collections, composed mostly of baskets (for example, Edwin L. McLeod's, donated in 1915, and Grace Blair du Pue's, from 1944). For the most part, their beautiful baskets, in excellent condition, had been made for sale and were not well-documented. By contrast, Kroeber encouraged his students to obtain, as much as possible, objects that had been used by Natives in order that they could serve as documents of pre-contact aboriginal culture
Important California archaeology collections resulted from early excavations at San Francisco Bay area sites conducted by Nels C. Nelson, Max L. Uhle, W.D. Strong, Joseph Peterson, and others funded by Phoebe Hearst. In 1902, Uhle pioneered stratigraphic excavations in American archaeology at the deepest site in the greater San Francisco Bay: the Emeryville Shellmound (CA-ALA-309). The manuscript of Nelson's 1906 excavation at Emeryville provides extensive detail about the character and composition of the structure, and the materials obtained from a six-foot square unit sunk to the base of the east side of the mound. Complete with original plates and a large series of detailed maps and figures, the manuscript represents an account of one of only three major excavations at Emeryville. The vast majority of the Museum's California archaeology collections are the result of research by Robert F. Heizer and his students in the 1950s and 1960s, under the auspices of the UC Archaeological Survey (UCAS), later known as the Archaeological Research Facility (ARF). UCAS functioned as the recording center and curatorial facility for university archaeological projects conducted throughout the state. With the advent of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) of 1970, recording and curatorial responsibility for California archaeology was centralized under the authority of the State Historic Preservation Office in Sacramento with regional or county clearinghouses. The archaeological materials collected during this period retain their UCAS catalogue prefix number.
Because of its publication in Kroeber's 1925 Handbook of California Indians and Heizer's 1978 California volume of the Handbook of North American Indians, as well as innumerable other publications, the Hearst's California collection has served as the classic description of what California Indian culture is, with its presences as well as its absences, often unnoticed.
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