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The Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology, formerly the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, was founded in 1901. Its major patron, Phoebe Hearst, supported systematic collecting efforts by both archaeologists and ethnologists to provide the University of California with the materials for a museum to support a department of anthropology. Hearst hoped that the anthropology program at the University of California, the first anthropology department and museum established west of the Mississippi, would become a center for the discipline.
Other important early figures in the University of California Anthropology Museum were: Frederic Ward Putnam, the first director, who was simultaneously director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard; Alfred L. Kroeber, who acted as director from 1909 to 1947; the archaeologists Max Uhle and George Reisner, who conducted archaeological expeditions in Peru and Egypt resulting in major museum collections; and a variety of researchers specializing in California ethnography and archaeology (including Alfred L. Kroeber, Pliny E. Goddard, Samuel A. Barrett, Thomas T. Waterman, Edward W. Gifford, and Nels Nelson). The museum's collections have grown from an initial nucleus of approximately 230,000 objects gathered under the patronage of Phoebe Hearst to an estimated 3.8 million items. The museum was accredited by the American Association of Museums in 1973, and re-accredited in 1990.
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The Museum was physically housed from 1903 to 1931 in San Francisco, where exhibits opened to the public in October, 1911. A key attraction during these years was Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, who lived at the Museum from 1911 until his death in 1916 and worked with the anthropologists to document the ways of his people. When the Museum moved back to the Berkeley campus in 1931, there was no space for public exhibitions, and the Museum focused on research and teaching. With the construction of a new building housing the Museum and anthropology department in 1959, space for exhibition again became available. The building, which the Museum continues to occupy, was named Kroeber Hall, and the Museum was named in honor of Robert H. Lowie, a pioneer in the Berkeley anthropology department. In 1991, the Museum's name was changed to recognize the crucial role of Phoebe Apperson Hearst as founder and patron, and professor Lowie was honored by the designation of the exhibition hall as the Robert H. Lowie gallery.
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Further information about the museum's history can be found in our virtual Centennial exhibit and in a Newsletter article on a century of collecting.
Centennial Exhibit
A Century of Collecting
A biography of Phoebe Hearst can be found among the Hearst (Phoebe A.) Papers, one of hundreds of Finding Aids produced by the Bancroft Library and other units of UC Berkeley for the California Digital Library, Online Archive of California.
Phoebe Hearst Biography
Online Archive of California
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