Denver Museum of Nature and Science

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Visit our Tour Destination: Colorado page to see the entire tour of the state’s Save America’s Treasures sites.

Exterior of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Photo by Chris Schneider/Chris Schneider Photography.
© Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Denver Museum of Nature and Science

2001 Colorado Boulevard

Denver, CO

Website:  Denver Museum of Nature and Science

The Treasure:  The anthropology collections at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science comprise over 5,000 archaeological and ethnological artifacts that illuminate the Native American cultures of North America with a special emphasis on the Rocky Mountain region.

Accessibility:  The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is open daily from 9 to 5. Selected items from the anthropology collections are always on view at the North American Indian Hall. Many past special exhibitions have drawn from the collections. Over 300 digitized images from the anthropology collections can be viewed online at the Denver Museum’s Image Archives.

A Peace medal with the image
of Thomas Jefferson. Peace
Medals were passed to Native
American leaders as tokens
of  friendship and concord.
© Denver Museum of Nature
and Science 

Background:  While the museum was officially founded in 1900, its roots extend even further back into Colorado’s history. Twenty-five years earlier, Edwin Carter (1830-1900) established a log cabin museum in Breckenridge, Colorado, where he showcased his collection of over 3,000 natural history specimens. At Carter’s death in 1900, this collection was purchased to form the core of Denver’s new museum.

In 1937, under the leadership of its new director Dr. Alfred Marshall Bailey, the Denver Museum established a Department of Archaeology with a focus on Paleoindian and Archaic archaeology. The museum further expanded to include a Department of Anthropology upon the donation of the 12,000-item Crane Collection of North American Indians in 1968.

Today, the Denver Museum’s Department of Anthropology strives to be the best understood and most ethically held anthropology collection in North America. They endeavor to achieve this goal through scientific research, educational outreach, and programs that support in-depth research by Native American students and scholars.

The White Horse Winter Count is a historical narrative in pictorial form
from the Cheyenne River Reservation. It begins in 1789 with a dark bird
at its center and then spirals clockwise until 1912, telling the stories of
people and important events such as the Leonid meteor shower in 1833
and Haley's Comet in 1910.
© Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Rare split-twig figurine found in a cave in southwestern Colorado.
© Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Captain William Clark used this English-made telescope during his famous
1804-1806 expedition with Meriwether Lewis.
© Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Notes from the Editor:  While the Save America’s Treasures grant broadly supported conservation, improved storage, and archival processing of the wide range of artifacts in the collection, it also enabled the Denver Museum to process, preserve, catalog, and digitize the remarkable Ruth Underhill Collection.

At the age of 47, Ruth Underhill (1883-1984) decided to become an anthropologist, studying in the graduate anthropology program at Columbia University under Professor Franz Boas (whose archive was conserved as a Save America’s Treasures project at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia). Boas suggested that Underhill conduct a field study of the culture of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose people live in the Sonoran Desert of southeastern Arizona and northwest Mexico. The Tohono O’odham welcomed Dr. Underhill into their community and trusted her to respectfully learn their ways.

A Tohono O'odham basket presents a rare and observant
design of a steam locomotive.
© Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Although middle-aged at the outset of her new career, Dr. Underhill lived to enjoy a long and very active professional life primarily focused on the cultures of the Native Americans of the Southwestern United States. Her field journals, and many of her personal papers, films, sound recordings, and photographs, were donated to the Denver Museum at her death in 1984. Included within this invaluable record of her scholarly investigations and field work are the earliest known transcriptions of the Tohono O’odham language.

Of her time with the Tohono O’odham, Dr. Underhill recalled, “They thought I was a witch because I could write those things down [using a phonetic alphabet] and read them back to them. Often, those songs, as the old people sang them, contained archaic words no longer used… then I would have to have one of them tell me what the old words meant, and finally I would translate the whole thing to English.”

Other Recommended Sites:  In Denver, an old organization is opening a brand new museum this year. Dating all the way back to 1879, the Colorado Historical Society is reinventing itself for the 21st century with a new name (Colorado History) and a new museum, the History Colorado Center, scheduled to open on April 28, 2012 in downtown Denver. The History Colorado Center will celebrate the organization’s sizeable historic collections and offer high-tech exhibits and hands-on education programs. Along with the public museum space, the new building will be home to a research library, the State Historical Fund offices, and the Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation.

Renowned Hopi woodcarver Michael Calnimptewa
made this Koyaala, a northeastern Pueblo-type
clown that is often present during the Hopi
kachina dances.
© Denver Museum of Nature and Science

This T. rex greets visitors at the Denver Museum of
Nature and Science.  Photo by Chris Schneider/
Chris Schneider Photography.
© Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Tour America's History Itinerary

Friday’s destination:  Hutchinson Homestead Ranch
Monday’s destination:  Crow Canyon Archaeological Center

© 2012 Lee Price