Phoebe Apperson Hearst was the mother of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, but her own legacy extends well beyond her famous son. In 1901, she founded the museum with a specific goal: to fund systematic collecting expeditions by archaeologists and ethnologists that would anchor a department of anthropology at the University of California. Her money sent George Reisner to Egypt, where between 1899 and 1905 he excavated the artifacts that form the core of the museum's 20,000-piece Egyptian collection. It sent Max Uhle to Peru, where he gathered 9,200 objects -- pottery, textiles, tools -- that document ancient civilizations predating the Inca. Hearst's patronage was not casual philanthropy. She was building an institution from the ground up, and the scale of her ambition is still visible in the sheer breadth of what her funded expeditions brought back.

The Hearst Museum's holdings span the globe with a depth that few university museums can match. Approximately 9,000 California Indian baskets represent nearly every tribe in the state and every regional basketry technique -- a collection that constitutes an irreplaceable record of indigenous artistry. Nearly 4,000 Etruscan objects make it one of the largest collections of Etruscan artifacts in North America. Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of modern fieldwork anthropology, deposited collections from the Trobriand Islands here in the early 1900s. E.W. Gifford added archaeological material from Fiji and New Caledonia in the 1940s and 1950s. William Bascom and J. Desmond Clark assembled roughly 32,000 African artifacts. The collection also includes extensive fieldnotes, photographs, and sound and film recordings -- the documentation that gives raw objects their context and meaning.

The museum's roster of directors and associated scholars reads like a syllabus of American anthropology. Frederic Ward Putnam, who helped establish anthropology as a professional discipline in the United States, served as the first director from 1903 to 1909. Alfred L. Kroeber -- whose name adorns the hall where the museum now sits -- directed the museum for over two decades and became one of the most influential anthropologists of the twentieth century. Robert Lowie, who gave the museum its previous name, contributed foundational work on kinship systems and social organization. Paleoanthropologist Tim D. White, known for his work on early human fossils in Ethiopia, has been associated with the museum. So has Patrick Vinton Kirch, whose research on Polynesian settlement reshaped understanding of Pacific Island cultures. The museum began in San Francisco in 1903, moved to the Berkeley campus in 1931, and settled into the newly built Kroeber Hall in 1959.

In 1991, the museum changed its name from the Robert H. Lowie Museum to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, recognizing the founder whose money made it all possible. The renaming was also a quiet acknowledgment that institutions evolve, and that the stories told about collections matter as much as the collections themselves. The museum's California Indian baskets, for instance, were gathered during an era when anthropologists often operated under the assumption that indigenous cultures were vanishing and needed to be preserved in glass cases. Ishi's presence in the museum -- living among the artifacts, demonstrating arrow-making for visitors -- embodied that assumption in its most extreme form. Today the Hearst Museum functions as a research unit of the University of California and is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Its three million objects remain a resource of extraordinary scholarly value. But the museum also carries forward an ongoing conversation about who collects, what gets collected, and whose stories those objects are allowed to tell.