The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (formerly the Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology) is an anthropology museum located in Berkeley, California, on the University of California, Berkeley, campus.
Founded in 1901 under the patronage of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the original goal of the museum was to support systematic collecting efforts by archaeologists and ethnologists in order to support a department of anthropology at the University of California. The museum was originally located in San Francisco from 1903 (open to the public as of 1911) until 1931, when it moved to the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. On the Berkeley campus, the museum was located in the former Civil Engineering Building until 1959, when, as the Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, it was moved to the newly built Kroeber Hall. For decades, the museum was considered as having the largest collection of its kind on the west coast. In 1991, the museum's name was changed to recognize the essential role of Phoebe Apperson Hearst as founder and patron. Today the museum functions as a research unit of the University of California.
Many notable names in American anthropology have been associated with the museum. These include the museum's first director Frederic Ward Putnam, the anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert Lowie, and William Bascom, paleoanthropologists Francis Clark Howell and Tim D. White, Egyptologists Klaus Baer and Cathleen Keller, and archaeologists Max Uhle, George Reisner, John Howland Rowe, J. Desmond Clark, David Stronach, Crawford Hallock Greenewalt Jr. and Patrick Vinton Kirch. It was also the final residence of Ishi, who lived there, in San Francisco, from 1911 until his death in 1916.
The museum houses an estimated 3 million objects plus extensive documentation that includes fieldnotes, photographs, and sound and film recordings.
Major collections include:
In addition to supporting scholarly research and publication, the museum mounts exhibitions in a gallery located on the UC Berkeley campus and sponsors public educational programs.
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The Hearst Museum's directors have regularly been practicing anthropologists:
