The Museum of Us is a museum of anthropology that is housed in historic landmark buildings located in Balboa Park, San Diego. The museum traces its origins to the Panama-California Exposition, which opened in 1915.
The museum is housed in four original buildings from the 1915 Exposition. The central exhibit of the 1915 exposition was “The Story of Man through the Ages.”
Between 1935 and 1936, the museum’s name briefly changed to the “Palace of Science” to effectively participate in the California-Pacific International Exposition.
The name of the museum then changed to “Museum of Man” in 1942 to emphasize the museum’s concentration on anthropology.
The museum’s collections grew substantially after World War II and today contains nearly two million individual objects.
The main museum is housed in the ornate California Building with its landmark tower. The tower contains a carillon and quarterly-hour chimes, which can be heard all over Balboa Park.
In 2020 the museum changed its name to the “Museum of Us” in the spirit of inclusiveness and decolonization.
The museum’s holdings include more than 100,000 documented ethnographic items, more than 300,000 archaeological items, and more than 25,000 photographic images.
Ancient Egyptian Tomb artifacts
Highlights of the Museum of Us
- Pre-Columbian exhibits of the Americas
- Native American cultural artifacts
- Mesoamerican civilizations exhibits
- Ancient Egyptian antiquities exhibits – burial masks, figurines, and seven painted wooden coffins
- A rare Ptolemaic child’s coffin
- An exhibition featuring 10,000 years of beer history
- Significant Maya monuments or stelae
Mummy from near Lupo, the Peruvian Andes, about 550 years old
Museum of Us
- Museum: Museum of Us
- Formerly: San Diego Museum of Man
- City: San Diego, California
- Country: United States
- State: California
- Established: 1915
- Type: Anthropology Museum, Specialist Museum
- Location: 1350 El Prado, San Diego, CA, United States
Shrunken heads, Shuar people of the Jivaroan and a tree sloth – Ecuador
Museum of Us – Map
Museum of Us – 360 Views
Museum of Us – 360 Views
Museum of Us – 360 Views
Museum of Us – 360 Views
Museum of Us – 360 Views
Museum of Us – 360 Views
Virtual Tour of Museums in California
- Museums in Los Angeles
- Museums in San Francisco
- Museums in Pasadena
- Museums in San Diego
Museums in San Diego
- San Diego Natural History Museum
- USS Midway Museum
- Museum of Us
Museum of Us
Museum of Us
Los Angeles Museums
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
- Getty Museum
- California Science Center
- Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
- The Broad
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
- Petersen Automotive Museum
- Griffith Observatory
- Autry Museum of the American West
- Japanese American National Museum
- The GRAMMY Museum
- The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
- California African American Museum
- Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Museum of Us
Pasadena, California Museums
- Norton Simon Museum
San Francisco Museums
- Asian Art Museum – San Francisco
- De Young Museum
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
- Legion of Honor Museum
- Walt Disney Family Museum
- Exploratorium
Museum of Us
Museum of Us
Museum of Us
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“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”
– W. H. Auden
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Photo Credit: Christopher Jonathan McClendon / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0); Daderot / CC0
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