Museums - California Academy of Sciences

Founded in 1853 to survey and study the vast resources of California and beyond, the California Academy of Sciences is the oldest scientific institution in the West. In its early days, spurred by their concern over the natural environment during the California Gold Rush, the Academy consisted of a group of naturalists who met weekly and presented scientific papers on topics of interest to a growing membership of San Francisco citizens. As the collection of specimens from the field grew in number and scope, the important scientific work of identifying, classifying and naming species, known as “systematics,” began. The museum moved into a six-story building in 1891 and for fifteen years its natural history specimens remained a popular and growing attraction. The building and virtually all of its holdings were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, but even as the city burned, a two-year Academy expedition to the Galapagos Islands was gathering the material that would form the nucleus of the institution’s new collections. The Academy was rebuilt in Golden Gate Park, opposite the de Young Museum, in vastly expanded quarters. Today it ranks among the world’s ten largest natural history museums. The Golden Gate Park complex, which had grown with piecemeal additions over the decades, was recently demolished. A new, integrated building designed by Renzo Piano is scheduled to open in 2008. The Academy is presently operating in temporary administrative offices.
The Academy’s anthropology collection contains approximately 16,000 objects representing material cultures from peoples throughout the world. The department actively collects material of the indigenous cultures of western North America (exclusive of Mexico) and of the Pacific Rim, including all Pacific islands and East Asia. Current strengths of the collection are holdings from the U.S. Southwest and the Pacific Islands, and basketry from California. Earlier years of collecting have yielded both ethnographic and archaeological materials from East Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Central and South America
Highlights of the collection include the Elgueta Collection, consisting of over 1,000 ancient Mayan objects from Chalchitan and Pichikil collected before 1906; the Elkus Collection of Native American art with more than 1,700 Native American objects, including textiles, jewelry, baskets, pottery, works of art on paper, kachina carvings, and beadwork; the Rollo Beck Collection of more than 400 objects from at least fourteen distinct Pacific Island groups, including the Solomon, Fiji, and Santa Cruz Islands; and the Liebes Collection of approximately 1,000 Native Alaskan objects, primarily bone and ivory tools, and ivory craft items.