Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

Welcome to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Initially founded in 1901 in San Francisco, the museum moved to Berkeley’s campus in 1931. The institution’s namesake was a global anthropologist, feminist, and suffragist who donated a portion of her personal collection to start the museum. Today, the museum’s collection spans the breadth of human history with 3.8 million artifacts from all over the world, such as Oceanic masks and figurines, cuneiform tablets, and Peruvian textiles. In 2022, the museum closed for over a year to the public in order to focus its resources on returning some of these artifacts to their rightful owners. Acting in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA 1990) and CalNAGPRA (2001), the university is repatriating over 209,000 human remains and cultural artifacts to Indigenous peoples from whom they were stolen. Given the 30-year gap since the laws were passed, the museum has faced strong criticism for being too slow to act.