Abstract
LOCAL patriotism flourishes perennially in the United States. As part of a campaign “Know your San Diego”, Mr. Malcom J. Rogers, curator in anthropology in the Museum of San Diego, has recently broadcast a lecture, in which he gave ah account of the origin and growth of the collections. The nucleus of the museum was an exhibit at the Panama-California Exposition of 1915-16. The organisers of the exhibition, in consultation with officials of the U.S. National Museum, spent some three years in getting together a collection to illustrate the origin, racial types and culture of man. Expeditions were sent to Asia, Africa, South America, the Pacific and the Arctic for material and the collections then made were housed in the only permanent building in the exhibition, the California Quadrangle, which is still its name, as it had been intended from the first that what, it was hoped, would be a unique educational exhibit, should “not be a thing for the moment, but an enduring institution for the benefit of the people of San Diego and its visitors”. At the close of the exhibition the collections were transferred to a permanent Museum Association in trust for the people of San Diego. Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, of the Archaeological Institute of America, who had been responsible for this department during the exhibition, was made the first director of the Museum. Constant additions have been made to the collections, which are now so extensive that it is possible only to show the exhibits in rotation. They are arranged departmeiitally, to illustrate man's origin (by casts), physical types, and culture in the past and present. The archaeology of Central America and the Mayas is abundantly illustrated, the most striking and bes.t-known buildings and monuments being represented by replicas. The pride of the Museum, however, is the collection from the southwestern States and, more particularly, that from Southern California, the latter being unique and beyond question the most complete in existence.
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San Diego Museum. Nature 131, 903 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131903b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131903b0