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Kroeber Hall and Berkeley Anthropology: What's in an Un-Naming?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
The University of California, Berkeley, is considering a proposal to un-name a building that honors Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), one of the leading liberal anthropologists in the United States. Tony Platt describes the controversy and explains why it is time to come to terms with Berkeley's “salvage archaeology” that deepened the misery of survivors of genocide by plundering the graves of 10,000 ancestors on Kroeber's watch.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Authors 2020
References
Notes
1 Interview with Joy Sundberg, cited in Platt, Grave Matters: Excavating California's Buried Past, Heyday, 2011, 46. See, also, Thomas Buckley, Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 16.
2 A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1923, 85; see, also, A. L Kroeber, “18 Professions,” American Anthropologist, 1915, 283-288.
3 Cited in Platt, Grave Matters, 44-45.
4 Kroeber, cited in Platt, Grave Matters, 48.
5 Cited in Platt, Grave Matters, 51.
6 Kroeber, “Yurok National Character,” 1971, cited in Platt, Grave Matters, 48.
7 Cited in Platt, Grave Matters, 160, 164.
8 See, generally, Platt, Grave Matters; Edward Winslow Gifford, “California Anthropometry,” University of California Publications in American Archology and Ethnology, 22, 2, 1926, 217-390; E. W. Gifford, “California Indian Physical Types,” (1926), in R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple, eds., The California Indians: A Source Book, University of California Press, 1971, 97-104.
9 Tony Platt, “The Yokayo Vs. The University of California: An Untold Story of Repatriation,” News of Native California 26, 2, Winter 2012-13: 9-14; Platt, Grave Matters, 128-141.
10 Orin Starn, Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last “Wild” Indian, W. W. Norton & Co., 2005; Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America, Oxford University Press, 2010.
11 Kroeber, Anthropology, 323. A recent geoarchaeological study makes the case that there was “nearly 4,000 years of continuous occupation” in the area in and around Berkeley. See Christopher D. Dore, Stephen Bryne, Michal McFaul, and Garry L. Running IV, “Why Here? Settlement, Geoarchaeology, Paleoenvironment at the West Berkeley Site (CA-ALA-307),” Proceedings of the Society for California Archaeology 17, 2004, 27-33.
12 “University of California: A Photographic Essay,” Life, October 25, 1948, 96.
13 Cited in Platt, Grave Matters, 46.
14 A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (1925), Dover Publications, 1976, 464, 466. Costanoan was a generic term used by anthropologists to define Native groups living on the Pacific Coast from the San Francisco Bay Area to Point Sur. Ohlone is the preferred term today.
15 Alan Levanthal, Les Field, Hank Alvarez, and Rosemary Cambra, “The Ohlone Back From Extinction,” in Lowell John Beam, ed., The Ohlone Past and Present, Ballena Press, 1994, 298, 312.
16 Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News, April 2020.
17 The relationship between deaths attributed to so-called natural causes during the period of Spanish rule and deaths attributed to colonial massacres is explored in Tai S. Edwards and Paul Kelton, “Germs, Genocides, and America's Indigenous Peoples,” Journal of American History 107, 1, June 2020, 52-76.