After a century of collecting, primarily by university faculty and graduate students in anthropology, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology now preserves approximately 3.8 million objects, spanning the world and several thousand years. This makes it the oldest and largest anthropological museum in the West.
Most anthropology museums, almost all of them at universities, are largely regional in nature. Although it, too, has a regional specialty in California, the Hearst Museum is one of a handful of such museums with large, encyclopedic collections, joining its sisters, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, both of which share historical ties to the Hearst.
Such comprehensive collections were slowly amassed over the century, according to shifting collecting priorities. Perhaps none of the cultures represented here have been equally and consistently collected from the beginning through the present. Rather, in different times with different personnel, resources, and circumstances, different kinds of objects have entered the Museum. Taken together, these shifting factors allow us to delineate at least five main periods of collecting.
When the University of California Museum of Anthropology was founded in September of 1901, it inherited anthropological collections that the university had been accumulating since its establishment in 1868. These miscellaneous collections, housed with the natural history collections in South Hall, were transferred to the new museum founded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, a philanthropist and UC regent. As early as 1897, Mrs. Hearst had been planning for a anthropology museum in California, and the following year she began funding two large-scale field expeditions: Max Uhle in Peru and George Reisner in Egypt. Along with the subsequent expeditions of Alfred Emerson in Greece and Italy and Alfred Kroeber in California, the collecting by these scholars was systematic. Intended as the foundations for research and teaching, all were gathered according to some sort of coherent plan, such as items from every tribe or all the contents from a tomb, and richly documented by field notes, photographs, maps, or sound recordings.
Important collections also came from other regions: Alaska (donated by the Alaska Commercial Company), the American Southwest (both ethnographic and archaeological), Guatemala (mostly textiles from Gustavus Eisen), and the Philippines. The North American collections were gathered primarily by university students; while the others came from independent agents. In most of these regions—Egypt, Peru, Native California—this was the period of the museum's greatest collections growth. Phoebe Hearst supplemented these objects with treasures from her personal collections—crafts and artwork acquired from dealers and from her world-wide travels.
The first two decades of the museum's history came at a time of tremendous growth nationally in American anthropology, especially in universities. Berkeley's museum was first directed by Harvard anthropologist Frederic W. Putnam, but Alfred Kroeber, the university's first professor and curator of anthropology, played the most active role, officially as director from 1909 until 1946. In 1903 the burgeoning collections were transferred to an unused university building in San Francisco, where exhibits were opened to the public in 1911. It was here, between 1911 and 1916, that the Yahi Indian named Ishi lived and worked. Although the university took over the support of the museum from Mrs. Hearst in 1908, she continued to donate funds and collections. By the time of her death in 1919, she had given or purchased about 64,000 objects.
After these years of great activity came a period of relative decline in collecting, due to the Great Depression and the Second World War. In the mid-1920s, however, the number of anthropology graduate students grew dramatically. Alfred Kroeber initiated a second survey of Californian and neighboring groups, and almost every student was asked to return with a modest but well-documented collection. Along with these came important donations from faculty and the community. For instance, William A. Setchell, a UC professor of botany who was an expert on the tobacco plant, donated a large and diverse collection of pipes. During the 1930s, the museum appointed its first faculty curators from disciplines outside anthropology, such as Classics and Egyptology. Although only a few of them contributed to the collections, they offered critical expertise. In 1931, all the museum's collections were moved back to the Berkeley campus, where they were housed in the old Civil Engineering Building. Displayed only two weeks a year, primarily to illustrate undergraduate classes, they were preserved for researchers.
With the return to a peace-time economy, university enrollment and faculty appointments grew. Following Alfred Kroeber's retirement in 1946, archaeologist Robert F. Heizer was hired. A Berkeley doctorate (1941), Heizer substantially increased the collections in California and Nevada archaeology during the 1950s. Through the UC Archaeological Survey, he and his students emphasized a subject that Kroeber had intentionally neglected. At the same time, with the gradual expansion of American anthropology beyond Native North America, the museum's collections grew in new areas, such as Latin America, Africa, and Oceania. Edward W. Gifford, museum director between 1947 and 1955, directed several archaeological expeditions in Fiji and New Caledonia. After becoming curator of South American Archaeology in 1948, John H. Rowe directed new fieldwork and analysis to document the Peruvian collections. George M. Foster, another Berkeley doctorate (1941), joined the faculty in 1953. Part of his long-term fieldwork in the Mexican village of Tzintzuntzan was devoted to pottery, which he documented for the museum.
The museum's second great period of collecting came during the directorship of William R. Bascom (1957-79). As an Africanist, he vastly increased the museum's holdings from that continent. This was a time of tremendous growth of anthropology faculty and graduate enrollment, at UC Berkeley and across the nation. Graduate students working in India, Indonesia, Japan, and Oceania returned with many important collections. As well, formerly shunned kinds of objects, such as tourist arts, were now avidly collected. Nelson H. H. Graburn, a pioneer in this subject and a scholar of Canadian Inuit art, directed many dissertations on material culture and museums. In 1974, the rich collections of the Design (formerly, Decorative Art) Department were transferred to the museum. Ever since the 1932 appointment of Berkeley doctorate Lila M. O'Neale, they had been the subject of creative study by students of both anthropology and decorative art. On the other hand, this period marked the virtual end of archaeological collecting, due primarily to the introduction of restrictive national and international laws. The collecting revival of this period was marked by a new name and a new building. In 1959, the museum was renamed after distinguished Berkeley anthropologist Robert H. Lowie; simultaneously moving into its current home, Kroeber Hall, with new exhibit space and expanded storage.
In 1991, the museum's name was changed to recognize the critical role of founding patron Phoebe A. Hearst, and to acknowledge the establishment of an endowment from the Hearst Foundations. The recognition was appropriate, for without her foresight there may never have been an anthropology museum at Berkeley.
The nature of the current period of collecting will only become clear in the future. It is apparent, however, that in the period since William Bascom, the museum's directors have served shorter terms, and collecting has again declined in sheer volume. With limited storage space and funding, as well as changed inter-cultural relations, the size of accessions is smaller. Graduate students, however, continue to make significant collections during their field work. New subjects, such as historical archeology, are now represented, and old ones, such as Native California, are addressed in contemporary ways. For example, in the mid-1990s, research anthropologist Ira Jacknis documented contemporary carving of the Klamath River region of Northwest California, thus extending Kroeber's turn-of-the-century collections.
As the Hearst Museum begins its second century, it faces many challenges: to preserve the collections, while making them accessible to researchers and the general public. No institution can ever have a complete collection of all the world's objects, so the museum must build on its strengths of documented and systematic collections. In this way, it can fulfill Phoebe Hearst's vision of being "a great educator."
Ira Jacknis, Associate Reasearch Anthropologist and Curator of A Century of Collecting. |
