Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, shortly Burke Museum is a natural history and ethnographic museum on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in the United States, which was founded in 1899. It is the only major natural history museum in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and the oldest museum in the state of Washington. Its collection includes more than 12 million artifacts and specimens, including totem poles and dinosaur fossils. The objects in his collection come primarily from the area of Washington State.

History

The Burke Museum can be traced back to the Young Naturalists ' Society, a natural history association, which was founded in the early 1880s. This association had contacts with Professor Bennet Orson Johnson of the Washington Territorial University, later the University of Washington emerged from the. Johnson gave the club professional structures and helped the members in your activities, including the collection and storage of artifacts. He also called for to make the resulting collection of public responsibility and reached that the University presented for space on the campus.

The first museum building had to be evacuated when the university moved its campus in the north of the city of Seattle. The members of the association erected on the new campus a temporary building, which was declared in 1899 by the State Parliament to Washington State Museum. The Young Naturalists ' Society was dissolved in 1904.

The current building of the museum was built in 1963 to designs by James Chiarelli. The construction was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and in addition also supported by funds from the estate of Thomas Burke (1849-1925), which was changed in honor of the name of the museum in Burke Museum.

Collections

The museum is divided into an anthropological, biological and geological department. Worth mentioning are:

  • The world's largest collection of stuffed birds wings.
  • The world's second largest collection of frozen bird tissues for genetic research.
  • The Kennewick Man, a controversial finding that does not fit to other prehistoric human remains from the same area.
  • The fifth largest collection of artifacts of the Coastal Salish, the inland Salish and Alaska Natives in the United States.
  • The fourth largest collection ichthyologic west of the Mississippi.
  • Over one million archaeological artifacts from the state of Washington.

Exhibitions

Permanent exhibitions

The Burke Museum presents three permanent exhibitions: Life and Times of Washington State is a natural history exhibition that represents the evolution of living beings on the present territory of the State of Washington 545 million years. This includes among other things a skeleton cast of Allosaurus and fossils of a giant sloth. Pacific Voices is an ethnographic exhibition on various peoples of the Pacific coast with special reference to coastal Salish. Treasures of the Burke Finally, some of the most popular shows objects from the collections of the museum.

Temporary exhibitions

The Burke Museum houses next to its three permanent exhibitions and temporary exhibitions, both from his own collection and from other museums. Also traveling exhibitions are regularly seen.

Management

The museum is administered by the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Washington. The members of the Board of Trustees are elected by the Board of Regents of the University. In addition, the Burke Museum Association, whose Board of Trustees is responsible for the public relations of the museum in cooperation with the Advisory Council exists. The museum has an annual budget of 3.5 million U.S. dollars, which is composed of State contributions, private donations and the sale of tickets.

Ethnology Washington (state) Biology
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