Arizona State Museum

In 1893, when Arizona was still a territory and statehood was nineteen years off, the legislature created a museum — not for paintings or taxidermy, but for the ground itself. What started as a few scholars gathering artifacts in the 1890s became the oldest anthropology museum in the American Southwest, and today it holds the world's largest collection of Southwest Native pottery: twenty thousand whole vessels, stored in a state-of-the-art vault designed to undo the damage humidity and time had already done.

The founding mattered because the sites were vanishing. Native peoples had lived in the Sonoran Desert and the Santa Cruz River Valley for more than ten millennia — Paleo-Indian plant farmers, Archaic irrigation builders who dug some of the first canals in North America around 1200 BCE, the Hohokam with their red-on-brown pottery and complex agricultural society. By the 1890s, those sites were crumbling or had been destroyed by natural forces, and the Arizona Territorial Legislature understood that every shard and tool held keys to how people had adapted and thrived here. The museum was their answer: a repository tasked with collecting, protecting, and interpreting what remained.

It sits just inside the University of Arizona's main gate on Park Avenue, and since 1893 it has served as the state's official archaeological repository — meaning virtually every artifact recovered from state and federal lands in Arizona ends up here. The photographic collection alone runs to more than 350,000 prints, negatives, and transparencies documenting the prehistory and ethnology of the Southwest and northern Mexico. The library holds over 100,000 monographs, rare titles, field notes, grey literature — the working archive of a place that has been continuously inhabited longer than most American cities have existed.

The exhibits building closed in August 2024 — outdated electrical, plumbing, HVAC, faulty fire alarms — but the work continues. Pop-up exhibits, online programming, travel expeditions. The collection doesn't stop because the lights went out.