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Alfred L. Kroeber began his field collecting in California in 1900 as a curator for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, traveling from the northwestern coast (Yurok) into the central valley (Tule River Yokuts), and to the southeastern region along the Colorado River (Mohave). Within a relatively short time, he was thus able to gain a sense of the scale and the cultural diversity of the state. His developing interest in California was also affected by the ongoing research being conducted by his colleagues Roland B. Dixon with the Maidu, Shasta, and neighboring groups (for the American Museum of Natural History, New York), and John W. Hudson with the Pomo, and subsequently other groups (for the Field Museum, Chicago).
After receiving his anthropology doctorate in 1901, the first supervised by Franz Boas at Columbia University, Kroeber returned to the state as an instructor and curator in the University of California department and museum of anthropology, founded in September of that year by Phoebe Hearst. In October of 1903, the University's work was formalized by the establishment of an "Ethnological and Archaeological Survey of California." The survey's principal goal was the mapping of ethnographic areas that were largely unknown at the time. By tracing the distribution of discrete culture traits into larger geographic patterns, Kroeber produced a preliminary map of Indian languages and cultures within seven years.
All of Alfred Kroeber's artifact collecting was conducted as part of this larger cultural survey. Motivated partly by his competitive desire to build the Museum's California collections into the country's largest and most comprehensive, he wanted the UC museum to have a sampling of each of the state's aboriginal cultures. Although he worked collaboratively with students and colleagues, he himself made many short visits to a wide range of tribes in order to broadly review the entire region. Yet he also attempted to gather a complete inventory of pre-contact artifacts from two diverse but representative groups: the Yurok, and the Mohave, to a somewhat lesser extent.
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