San Diego Museum of Man

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San Diego Museum of Man

Established	1915
Location	1350 El Prado, Balboa Park San Diego, California, USA
Type	anthropological museum
Director	Dr. Mari Lyn Salvador, CEO
Curator	Phil Hoog (Curatorial and NAGPRA Coordinator)
Website	www.museumofman.org

Coordinates: 32°43′53″N 117°09′06″W / 32.7314, -117.1517

The San Diego Museum of Man is a museum of anthropology located in Balboa Park, San Diego, California. The museum's collections and permanent exhibits focus on the pre-Columbian history of the western Americas, with materials drawn from Native American cultures of the Southern California region, Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Maya, and the Andean civilizations such as the Moche. The museum also holds a collection of Ancient Egyptian antiquities, and several others from around the world. Total holdings number over 72,000 artefacts across all collections, together with some 37,000 historical photographs, mainly of Native Americans.^[1]

The museum traces its origins to the Panama-California Exposition, which opened in 1915 on the occasion of the inauguration of the Panama Canal. The central exhibit of the exposition, "The Story of Man through the Ages", was assembled under the direction of noted archaeologist Dr. Edgar Lee Hewett of the School of American Archaeology,^[2] who organized expeditions to gather pre-Columbian pottery from the American Southwest and to Guatemala for objects and reproductions of Maya civilization monuments. Numerous other materials were gathered from expeditions sent by anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička of the Smithsonian Institution, which gathered casts and specimens from Africa, Siberia, Alaska and Southeast Asia. Osteological remains and trepanated crania from Peruvian sites were also obtained.^[3]

[edit] Notes

^ "About the Museum — History", San Diego Museum of Man (n.d.).
^ Later renamed the School of American Research, and from 2007 now the School for Advanced Research.
^ "About the Museum — History", San Diego Museum of Man (n.d.).