Treasure Trove of History Hides in Basement of UC Berkeley Museum

Bronzed and noble, the Egyptian prince dominates the limestone painting, his fist clasped to his chest, his face fixed in a patrician stare that survived millenniums buried in the Nile Valley.

But 91 wet Northern California winters have proved too much for the 4,500-year-old relic, now consigned--with a trove of other anthropological treasures--to the basement of UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Museum curator Rosemary Joyce isn’t happy about putting the prince back underground. “This is a national treasure,” she said.

Faced with a tiny display space--and one without the climate control necessary to keep exhibits from falling apart--she doesn’t have much choice but to keep more than 99% of the Hearst’s collection locked away.

“People like to use the tip of the iceberg metaphor. I’m not so certain that’s actually the right way to think of it,” Joyce said of the stored artifacts. “It’s more like particle accelerators where you get a few little lines . . . that tell you there’s this massive number of particles out there.”

A trip through some of the Hearst storage rooms, located in the basement of a gym next door and at an off-campus former factory, illustrates the point.

Thousands of baskets woven by California Indians are stacked on shelves. Alaskan kayaks from the turn of the century hang from the ceiling. Shrouded in dim recesses lie sarcophagi, mummies and relics of the myriad possessions well-to-do Egyptians thought would come in handy for the afterlife.

“We have all this great stuff that people rarely get to see,” said Ira Jacknis, the museum’s research anthropologist.

Most museums struggle with limited storage and exhibition space, but comparable institutions exhibit about 5% of their collection, Joyce said--five times as much as the Hearst.

Joyce estimates it would take 300 years to rotate the museum’s 4 million or so artifacts through the 4,000-square-foot gallery.

Space is not the only problem.

There also is the California climate, which has been having its way with exhibits. Paint is flaking off; baskets are crumbling. Insects are a constant threat.

It’s probably not what founder Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, had in mind.

After her first husband died, leaving her $20 million, Hearst traveled the world. In 1897, she became UC’s first woman regent and started planning a museum for Berkeley. Unlike many early collectors who preferred only certain types of artifacts, she hired top archeologists and sent them out to collect a broad range of items.

It was an ideal approach for an anthropological museum, where the goal is to present a period in context, showing many similar items to illustrate variations.

Among other things, Hearst’s experts gathered a world-class collection of California Indian artifacts, from full-size canoes to thimble-size baskets.

“They’re sitting on really the great Indian treasures from California, especially from northwest California,” said Malcolm Margolin, publisher of the quarterly News From Native California.

“What you have is this amazing world-class collection of just startling beauty and startling value and it’s all stored away,” he said.

The problem began in 1901, when regents created a Department of Anthropology but didn’t provide any money for a building. The collection was shown in a San Francisco building for a while, but that space was taken over by the expanding UCSF medical school in 1931.

The artifacts then went into a civil engineering building where they were rarely seen.

In 1959, UC built Kroeber Hall, which the museum shares with two other departments. But officials built it with research in mind, hence the small gallery.

Joyce and her staff are trying to find ways to rehouse and protect their possessions and pursuing lending programs to other museums to keep objects in circulation. They’re also trying to raise funds to get more up-to-date storage space.

Meanwhile, in the basement, Prince Wepemnofret waits.

Wepemnofret was a notable personage of the family of King Cheops. The painted low-relief sculpture limestone slab marking the front of his tomb was discovered by George Reisner in 1905.

The exhibit was displayed for several years. But California’s damp winters followed by dry summers set off an expand-and-contract cycle that is causing the stone to deteriorate. So, for now, the prince sits in a glass case shrouded by a piece of cardboard to ward off light.

The painting is wonderfully preserved. The broad-shouldered, slim-hipped prince is a vibrant reddish-brown; the square-cut beard jutting from his chin jet black.

Delicately painted hieroglyphics accompanying the portrait list some of the things Wepemnofret hoped to take with him. Among them was a quantity of eye paint (1,000 bowls of green and 1,000 bowls of black), which was used for decoration and to cut the glare of the Egyptian sun, as well as to keep away flies. Also on tap--wine, fruit, linen, “every sweet thing,” and 1,000 jars of beer.

The prince may be coming out of exile soon.

Jacknis said the gallery hopes to be able to display the slab in new airtight cases, which should be enough protection.

He hopes more of the Hearst’s riches will see the light of an exhibit case.

“It’s great, great stuff,” he said.