Museums - Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture

Members of the Young Naturalist Society founded this museum and in 1885 erected a building on the University of Washington campus. In 1899 the state legislature designated the museum as the Washington State Museum. In 1962 construction of the current building was made possible through a bequest from the Caroline McGilvra Burke estate in honor of Judge Thomas Burke, a forward-looking Seattle resident who worked to advance understanding among the peoples of the Pacific Rim. The Burke celebrated the opening of a greatly expanded temporary exhibits gallery in June 2005, which will allow it to accommodate larger and more significant traveling exhibits.
The Burke’s anthropology division contains two departments, archaeology and ethnology, that hold tribal collections. The archaeology collection includes 500,000 prehistoric objects, primarily of stone and bone, from the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska and British Columbia. It also contains 20,000 historic Native American works, mostly pottery and stone, as well as some material from Mexico and Central and South America. About one-third of the collection was donated by private collectors and the rest is the result of systematic archaeological excavations. The largest private donation was made by Dr. Harold Bergen.
The ethnology collection contains more than 45,000 objects that range from Africa to South America. The most significant portion of the collection is in Native North American materials, some 22,500 objects that include significant works from the Northwest Coast and an encyclopedic collection of baskets. Other objects of note include textiles from Southeast Asia (including Nuosu), Oceanic tapa, storyboards from Palau, and Tibetan thangka paintings.
Less than two percent of the collection is on display. Storage is available to researchers on a limited basis, but the museum is actively working to create a comprehensive online database of its collection.