Alfred Kroeber as Museum Anthropologist
Ira Jacknis
W hile Alfred Kroeber is not remem-
bered today as a museum anthro-
pologist, he devoted most of the first
decade of his professional life to museum work,
and he returned continually to museums and
material culture throughout the rest of his life.
This brief overview attempts to fill the gap in our
knowledge about Kroeber.
Early career and institutional context
Born in 1876, Alfred Kroeber grew up in
Manhattan, where he spent much of his youth
collecting natural history specimens, an orienta-
tion that was to mark much of his later anthro-
pology. During graduate work at Columbia in the
late 1890s, Kroeber came under the influence of
Franz Boas, who initiated him into anthropology
in its museum incarnation (Jacknis 1985). During
the summers of 1899, 1900, and 1901, Kroeber
made three collecting trips to the Arapaho and
other Plains tribes, sponsored by the American
Museum of Natural History. The young anthro-
pologist purchased, catalogued, documented, and
helped install artifacts (T. Kroeber 1970:53).
In August 1900, Kroeber was appointed curator
at the California Academy of Sciences in San
Francisco. After six weeks spent reviewing the
collections, Kroeber set out on a collecting trip,
first to the north and the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok
around the Klamath River and then south to the
Mojave. As the academy could not afford to pay
for collections, which were usually donated, he
left by Christmas.
In late spring of the following year, Kroeber
was offered a position in the new museum and
Department of Anthropology at the University of
California, then being formed under the patron-
age of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (Kroeber 1946,
Thoresen 1975). At its inception, the program's
mission was collecting and research; teaching was
to be postponed. This institutional pattern—the
joining of museum research with university
instruction—was common at the turn of the cen-
tury; in fact, it was the norm (for Harvard, cf.
Hinsley 1992; for Pennsylvania, cf. Darnell 1970).
Between 1903 and 1931 this dual context in
California was marked by a physical separation,
with the museum in San Francisco and the uni-
versity in Berkeley.
At the museum, Kroeber began with an un-
specified curatorial position under the supervi-
sion of Frederic W. Putnam, who continued to
serve as director of Harvard's Peabody Museum.
Over the next decade Putnam became Kroeber's
mentor in practical museum methods (Dexter
1989). Kroeber was officially appointed curator in
1908, a year before Putnam's retirement, and he
became the Museum's director in 1925.1
Kroeber's initial academic position was that of
instructor (1901 to 1906), although he did not
start teaching until spring of 1902.2 Gradually,
teaching occupied more and more of his time. In
1907, Kroeber was spending two days a week in
Berkeley; by 1910, three days; and by 1914, four
of the five teaching days (T. Kroeber 1970:95).
Collecting
Almost all of Kroeber's artifact collecting came
in his first decade in California, when he did the
bulk of his ethnographic fieldwork. A review of
the scope of Kroeber's collections readily indicates
their wide span in cultures—at least eighteen dif-
ferent groups before 1918, when he finished work
on his summarizing Handbook of the Indians of
California (1925).
This broad, but essentially shallow, approach
stemmed from Kroeber's fundamental ethnologi-
cal goals. Building on the Boasian premise of sal-
vaging the remnants of pre-contact cultures,
Kroeber confronted the enormous cultural, social,
and linguistic diversity of Native California. His
response was survey and mapping (Darnell
1969:299-318, Harner and McLendon in Wolf
1981:58-60, Buckley 1989). As Kroeber noted to
Boas in 1903, 'Virtually all of my field work has
been essentially comparative" (AMNH: 5/19/03). In
that year, this on-going work was formally insti-
tutionalized as the Archaeological and Ethnologi-
cal Survey of California, with the financial
support of Phoebe Hearst (Kroeber and Putnam
1905).
Of these Californian groups, the two that
Kroeber collected from repeatedly were the Yurok
and the Mojave. Within a given culture, Kroeber
28 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2
1. California Room, Museum of Anthropology, University of California, 1911. Photograph by S. M. Grow. (neg. no. 15-5397)
tried to collect as representative a sampling as he
could of their material inventory. His Yurok col-
lection, for instance, includes tools, some raw ma-
terials, and unfinished objects (bow, elk-horn
spoon). Specimens also come in multiples and
sets, such as net mesh-measures in different ma-
terials (wood, horn), used for different kinds of
fish (sturgeon, salmon, eel, sucker); for different
kinds of nets (drag, set); or for salmon at different
times of the year (spring, summer, fall) (Ace. 86,
May-July 1902, 469 Yurok, Karok pieces). Among
the more unusual items are a stick, paddle
shaped, inserted in the mouth of a salmon to
break its head,' and a shell used to cover the
thumb in making string" (Ace. 17, 1901).
Beyond making general collections, Kroeber
collected for specific research purposes He
wanted to hold back baskets from an exchange if
they possessed "designs that are unusual or new
to me. I have collected very considerable material
on the basket designs of the region and should
like to complete it" (AMNH: ALK/Boas: 4/18/02, Ace.
1902-61).
In the interest of salvaging pre-contact
cultures, Kroeber tried to avoid—not always
successfully—acculturated objects and objects
made for sale (cf. Washburn 1984). Outlining his
philosophy to a trader, Kroeber wrote: "The
requirements of our Museum make it most
desirable that we should obtain old pieces that
have seen use" (ALK/A.M. Benham, 5/15/07, Ace.
279). Nonetheless, he was willing to accept repro
ductions, which he noted in his inventories as
"models."
The quality and quantity of Kroeber's artifac
tual documentation seems to have improved over
time, though it was r a r e l y as specific as
Merriam's or Culin's. He usually recorded the
tribe and object type, and occasionally noted
native names for basket designs. By 1904, as he
became more familiar with collecting sites, with
native cultures and environments, and perhaps
with the collecting process itself, he began to list
the names of vendors (rarely the maker), and the
place and date of collection (Diegueno/Luiseno
Ace. 124; Yurok, 1907, Ace. 286).

The reasons for Kroeber's inattention to docu-
mentation are unknown, but students have noted
his p h e n o m e n a l memory (Harner in Wolf
1981:58), and John Rowe (1962:409) observed re
garding Kroeber's archaeological documentation
in Peru, "He kept no journal in the field, and his
notes were extremely sketchy.
One reason, perhaps, is that unlike collectors
such as Stewart Culin, for Kroeber the artifact
was not the goal of ethnography. From the start,
Kroeber adopted a basically Boasian approach to
fieldwork and the collection of artifacts, that is,
they were only one part of a multi-media
approach to recording Native cultures, which
included texts (primarily in Native languages),
ethnographic observations, sound recordings,
photographs, as well as artifacts. All were objects
in some way, and all could ultimately be pre-
served in the museum. J
Commenting on Kroeber's fieldwork methodol-
ogy, Thoresen (1976:xxi) has noted that,
A trip that began with a search for baskets
among the Yurok, for example, might well result
also in notebooks full of lists of names for Yurok
habitation sites with estimated population,
information on house types, statements of both
reported and observed practices, and several
myths with comments on the informants.
For Kroeber, however, artifacts were secondary to
linguistic notes and texts (folklore), and an
examination of his field work activity reveals that
he spent relatively little time in collecting.
2. California Room, Museum of
Anthropology, University of California,
ca. 1911. Photographer unknown.
ALFRED KROEBER AS MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGIST 29
Kroeber's institutional setting in a museum,
with Putnam as director and Hearst as patron,
impelled him to return with artifactual collec
tions, but he was always pushing to expand the
limits of collecting. Tb their credit, both Putnam
and Hearst supported Kroeber s more embracing,
Boasian model of ethnography.
Collection management, exhibition, and
publication
Kroeber spent considerable time in what we
would today call "collection management." A
sense of his day-to-day work in the museum can
be gleaned from one of Putnam's review letters to
Mrs. Hearst: "Dr. Kroeber is a most energetic and
faithful worker and is at the building early and
late looking after everything—cataloguing, pre
paring labels to be type-written, and in arranging
the specimens. He has identified nearly all the
baskets you sent. He has also added to the
labels many little figures explaining the meaning
of the symbolical decorations on the baskets" (PP:
FWP PAH, 12 11 04). Once, when complaining of
the lack of qualified assistance, Kroeber wrote.
"Practically every specimen that is catalogued
has to be handled, placed, and named by me" (PP:
ALK/FWP, 5 7 05).
It took a decade before the collections were
fully opened to the public, and only after 1905
were they accessible to students and scholars As
Kroeber described the situation, ' As fast as possi
ble, all collections were removed from their pack-
ing cases, catalogued, and made accessible in a
system of classified storage The next step was to
30 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2
glass in on shelves a selection of the more notable
specimens in six of the larger rooms, as well as on
stairs and hallways, and to put these on public
exhibition. . . This system of public exhibition
began to be installed in 1910, and was formally
opened October 4, 1911, with a reception by Mrs.
Hearst" (Kroeber 1946:7). From the surviving
photographic documentation, it is clear that
Kroeber's exhibits essentially amounted to open
or visible storage. Although large crowds visited
the museum, especially during the time of Ishi
(October, 1911-March, 1916), Kroeber's exhibits
seem to h a v e been d i r e c t e d p r i m a r i l y to
researchers and students. 4
Kroeber's principal writings on Californian
material culture came in the form of three papers
on basketry: the first, in 1905, on the basketry of
the northwestern part of the state, 5 the second, in
1909, on Porno basketry (based on Barrett's work,
cf. Bernstein 1985), and the last in 1922, on the
containers of the so-called "Mission" Indians from
southern California. This basketry research grew
directly out of his Plains research, embodied, for
example, in his 1901 doctoral dissertation on the
decorative symbolism of the Arapaho. Kroeber
was principally concerned with the evolution and
spread of design elements, and the relationship of
form and meaning (Thoresen 1977). This work
was part of a coordinated system of research,
3. Office, Museum of Anthropology,
University of California, 1907.
Photograph by Alfred Kroeber.
(neg. no. 15-4216).
encouraged by Boas, which for California bas-
ketry was conducted by Roland Dixon (1902)
among the Maidu and Samuel Barrett (1905,
1908) among the Porno.
Post-1911 museum work
Between 1908 and 1912, Kroeber's most active
years of museum anthropology began to taper off.
In 1908, Mrs. Hearst's funding was substantially
reduced. As the university took over, the role of
the museum was diminished relative to the aca-
demic department, with less funds for field
research. Putnam, Kroeber's museum mentor re-
tired in 1909. In 1911, the museum was opened to
the public, and the following year Edward W.
Gifford was appointed assistant curator. Gifford
gradually assumed day-ti>-day responsibility for
the running of the museum.
Kroeber, however, did not relinquish museum
anthropology. Between September, 1911 and
March of 1916, he worked with Ishi, the last Yahi,
who lived in the museum and spent much of his
time creating artifacts. As exemplified in the 1914
field trip to Ishi's Mill Creek homeland, much of
this work was self-consciously re-creative, as
Kroeber struggled to construct a picture of pre-
contact Yahi culture (T. Kroeber 1961).
Kroeber's orientation to material evidence
underwent a change after 1915, during his sum-

4. Work and storage area, Museum of
Anthropology, University of California,
1907. Photograph by Alfred Kroeber.
(neg. no. 15-4214).
mer field work in Zuni, when his seriation of pot-
sherds stimulated his fundamental interest in
cultural change and process (Rowe 1962, T.
Kroeber 1970:143-54, Thoresen 1971:199-211).
This initial work was sponsored by the American
Museum of Natural History, where he spent a
year's sabbatical in 1917-18, curating their
Philippines collections (1919a, 1919b). He also
made two ethnological collections in Zuni, one for
the American Museum of Natural History in 1915
and one for his own museum in 1918. During the
1920s, Kroeber became preoccupied with Peru-
vian archaeology, which he investigated with his
students, but this must be a story for another
occasion.
Conclusion
Theodora Kroeber (1970:94) has claimed that
her husband was not a "museum man." She
writes that Kroeber
was meticulous in his care of the collections
orderly and businesslike in its bookkeeping and
administration; he respected and advanced the
role of the museum in the university and the
community; and he enjoyed setting up exhibits
that were aesthetically satisfying and scientifi-
cally and historically meaningful.
After all this, she sets limits to his museum an-
thropology: "But for him the daily confrontation
ALFRED KROEBER AS MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGIST 31
must be of people, and as humanist, not as admin-
istrator" (1970:94).
The problem with Theodora Kroeber's view is
not that it is untrue (as she is essentially correct),
but that—like much of her perspective on her
husband—it is retrospective, written with hind-
sight. During his first decade in California,
Kroeber took museum work very seriously, devot-
ing a great deal of time to all of its aspects. This
paper has been an attempt to restore Kroeber to
his early context in the world of museum anthro
pology. •
Abbreviations
AMNH = American Museum of Natural History, Dept. of
Anthropology.
PP- Frederic Ward Putnam Papers Correspondence, 1901-
1910, Re: University of California, Dept. of Anthropology;
Harvard University Archives.
Notes
Kroeber retired from the Museum in 1941, Berving ats
director emeritus until his death in 1960.
Kroebers academic positions were: instructor (1901-
06), assistant professor (1906-11), associate professor
(1911-19), full profesBor (1919-46), professor emeritus
(1946-60).
Outlining this strategy in 1903 testimony to a com-
mittee investigating the Bureau of American Ethnol-
ogy, Boas explained that he instructed his students "to
collect certain things [artifacts] and to collect with
everything they get information in the native lan-
guage and to obtain grammatical information that is
32 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2
necessary to explain their texts" (quoted in Hinsley
1981:268, cf. Jacknis ms)
4. An alternative approach to exhibition, directed to the
general public, was adopted by Stewart Culin at The
Brooklyn Museum (Jacknis 1991).
5. "I have had all the material in hand since last Sep-
tember [1902], but until now have not been able to
devote any time to it" (PP.ALK/FWP, 4/29/03).
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