Lump

Eugene A. Golomshtok came to the United States from Russia in 1918, perhaps because of the recent revolution, and received his bachelor degree at Berkeley in December 1922. Since the Fall 1921 Golomshtok is seldom employed by the museum and the records show that he worked in Monterey, Tehama and Shasta counties where he collected archaeological assemblages complemented by a small selection of ethnographic objects and photographs. Some of his early findings were noted by Alfred Kroeber who wrote to the landowner in 1922:
"I was greatly interested in some broken pieces of pottery that Mr. Golomshtok found in Cypress Point. It is too crude and irregular to be of American or of Mexican make, and on the other hand, there has been no previous authentic report of pottery having been manufactured by the Indians of the region"
Despite Kroeber's interest, Golomshtok experience at Berkeley ended in the fall of 1925 and the museum didn't undertake any further archaeological work in the sites he discovered.

Hearst Museum 1-23591

lump

California, Monterey County, CA-Mnt-159

Collected by Eugene A. Golomshtok, 1921

Hearst Museum 1-23556

spear point, broken

California, Monterey County, CA-Mnt-159

Collected by Eugene A. Golomshtok, 1921

An interesting contribution for the Day of Archaeology 2014 said that Golomshtok was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Museum from 1930 to around 1938, a period he used to travel several times back to Russia on archaeological and ethnographic expeditions. Pre-war times were a period of turmoil in Europe and despite more than one agreement between Germany and Russia, he was no longer able to secure a working visa after 1934.

He spent the following years reading all possible Russian archaeological literature available in the United States and, in 1938, published The Old Stone Age in European Russia that he hoped to be especially useful to those who did not know the Russian language. Golomshtok's thorough survey was highly praised by many reviewers, notably by Sir Gordon Child, but surprisingly it remained the last of his publications. Eugene Golomshtok died in 1950.

Archaeology in the 19th century

We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man must have put his rude and ineffective weapons; we can only wonder that with such he was able to maintain his existence among the savage beasts by which he was surrounded; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of the way in which he got the better of their huge strength as well as of his dwelling place, his habits, and his appearance. Rude as his weapons are, and showing no trace of improvement, it seems as though man of the drift period must have lived through long ages of the world's history. These implements are found associated with the remains of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally belonging to the arctic or semi arctic climate which succeeded the glacial era; but like implements are found associated with the remains of the bones of the lion the tiger and the hippopotamus all of which, and the last especially, are rarely found outside the torrid zone. This would imply that the drift implements lasted through the change from a frigid to a torrid climate and probably back again to a cold temperate one. Still the age of the drift implements does not seem to comprise the whole period of man's life before what is called the polished stone age begins.


Hearst Museum # 7-4881
handaxe; brown flint
England; Swanscombe
Collected by the British Museum of Natural History, unknown date 

There is a remarkable series of discoveries made in caves in various parts of Europe which are of a more interesting character than the drift remains and appear to carry us farther down in the history of man. These caves are natural caverns generally formed in the limestone rocks and at present the most remarkable finds have been obtained from the caves of Devonshire, of the Department of the Dordogne in France, from various caves in Belgium, and from a very remarkable cavern in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf in Germany; but there is scarcely any country in Europe where some caves containing human bones and weapons have not been opened. The rudest drift implements seem older than almost any of those found in caves and on the whole the cave remains seem to give us a picture of man in a more civilized condition. They show us more of his way of life and a greater variety in his implements which are made not of stone only but of wood and bone as well. We have various worked bone implements harpoons with many barbs whereby no doubt man slew the animals which afforded him food and clothing. Some implements of stone and bone which have been found in caves have been called arrow heads; but they are in all probability lance heads, for it seems doubtful whether these primitive men had made the great discovery of the use of the bow and arrow. We may imagine that their lance or harpoon was their great weapon; and a curious and close inquiry has discovered by the marks on some of the animal bones which are found mixed up with the cave implements, that the sinews had been cut from these bones, and used, it may be conjectured as thongs for the bone harpoons. Other implements of a more domestic character have been found - bone awls, doubtless for piercing the animals' skins that they might be sewn together with sinew thread, and bone knives and needles.


Hearst Museum # 7-3783
Lump of flint flakes and bone fragments in breccia
France; Dordogne; Cavern of Les Eyzies
Collected by the University of California Paleontology Department, 1963

What is still more interesting than all these, we here find the rudiments of art. Some of the bone implements as well as some stones are engraved or even rudely sculptured generally with the representation of an animal. These drawings are singularly faithful and really give us a picture of the animals which were man's contemporaries upon the earth so that we have the most positive proof that man lived the contemporary of animals long since extinct. The cave of La Madeleine in the Dordogne, for instance, contained a piece of a mammoth's tusk engraved with an outline of that animal; and as the mammoth was probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter part even of the old stone age this gives an immense antiquity to the first dawnings of art. How little did the scratcher of this rough sketch - for it is not equal in skill to which have been found in other caves - dream of the interest his performance would thousands of years after his death! Not greatest painter of subsequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope for near an approach to immortality for their works. Had man's bones been only found juxtaposition with those of the mammoth his contemporary animals, this might possibly have been attributed to chance of the soil, to the accumulation river deposits, or to many other accidental occurrences; or had the mammoth's bone only been found worked by man, there was nothing positive to show that the animal had not been long since extinct, and this a chance bone which had come into the hands of a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since into our hands; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as it sometimes almost seen fabulous, animal by one who actual saw him in real life, gives a strange picture the antiquity of our race, and withal a feeling of fellowship with this stone-age man who drew so much in the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn to-day.



Hearst Museum # 7-202
scratched bone
France, Dordogne, La Madeleine
Collected by the Musee de Toulouse, unknown date

Excerpts from:

THE DAWN OF HISTORY: An introduction to pre-historic study.

Edited by C. F. Keary M.A. of the British Museum

Humboldt Publishing Co., 1883

Old

Yesterday, one of our volunteers was very excited to learn that the PAHMA curates some of the oldest stone tools ever fabricated. Coincidentally, two of them were briefly featured two years ago for the University Cal-Day event. Before presenting them here I would like to sincerely thank our many volunteers without whose work many projects at the museum would simply not happen.

This chopper from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was dated to 1.8 million years ago. It was likely made by Homo abilis that is considered to be the first tool-maker. The Oldowan tradition will continue until 800.000 years ago overlapping in places with the later and more elaborate Acheulean tools.

Hearst Museum 5-1997
Chopper or bashing stone, quartz
Tanzania, Olduvai Gorge, Site FLK I
Collected by J. Desmond Clark, September 1960.

The hand-axe, also from the gorge, was dated to 1 million years ago and attributed to the Early Acheulean. Similar hand-axes were originally crafted by Homo ergaster/erectus as early as 1.5 million years ago. A few millennia later they accompanied him in his early forays to the Middle East and Europe where they represent the oldest evidence of human presence outside of Africa.

Hearst Museum 5-7826
Hand axe, nephelenite lava
Tanzania, Olduvai Gorge, Site KRK-III or IV, surface
Collected by Richard L. Hay, 1962 or 1964.

Below you can read the short text that accompanied the objects in the gallery with a philosophical commentary. 

Chopper

The Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley was established in 1901. In the words of Frederick W. Putnam the department and the museum were "necessary" to properly organize several archaeological and ethnological expeditions maintained on behalf of the University by Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst*.
Phoebe Hearst didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about European prehistory although she had few objects - such as this scraper from Sweden - in her personal collection. As patron of the museum she financially supported Alfred Emerson in his collecting trips to Europe and around the Mediterranean. The turn of the last century witnessed a wealth of prehistoric research in the Old World but he largely focused on classical archaeology.
Between the world wars, a few single objects and small lithic assemblages from important paleolithic sites - mostly in France - were acquired. By the late 1960's these accessions had ceased and only few exchanges with other institutions took place. Old World archaeology at UC Berkeley was then mostly dedicated to Africa while European prehistory remained in the background. By the time professors Ruth Tringham and Meg Conkey came to the department in 1978 and 1987 respectively archaeology had greatly changed its modus operandi since the days of Putnam and Emerson. Large shipments of artifacts across the globe were no longer the norm as maintaining the relationship between objects and their original context was more highly valued and European governments began to restrict the trade in archaeological objects.
Laws on the export of cultural heritage are now very strict worldwide. Although, in the course of my own archaeological research, the Croatian government always granted me permission to borrow archaeological materials to study, traveling through customs was often challenging.

When compared to holdings from other geographic regions, today PAHMA curates a smaller collection of prehistoric artifacts of European provenience. It contains type tools of most cultures and traditions with the notable exception of the neolithic. Featured today is the biggest (and also one of the oldest) object in the European prehistoric collection. The chopper was collected in the Tagus Valley, in Portugal, by J. Desmond Clark; it measures 14 x 23.5 cm (5'5" x 9'2" in). Acheulean tools appeared in Europe around half million years ago.



















Hearst Museum 7-5064
Early Acheulean cobble chopper
Europe, Portugal, Barreiras do Vale do Forno
Collected by J. Desmond Clark, September, 1964
...............................................................................

*Dr. Ira Jacknis, the museum anthropologist, wrote a thorough history on the origins of the museum and the roles of its early constituents. For those who'd like to read it, please follow this link.

Palette

Frederick C. Gamst collected this small grinding stone from the surface of the site at Koken, Eritrea, in 1964. His research in the horn of Africa in the 1960's led him to argue that civilization and urban centers are not necessarily related or codependent and that in preliterate western Africa urbanism existed without civilization.
Gamst collection included two other objects from Koken; all them dated back to the Neolithic. The catalogue card includes a bibliographic reference for a 1954 paper written by A.J. Arkell, a British Army lieutenant stationed in Khartoum, Sudan.
I previously mentioned that a complete inventory of the African archaeological collections was one of the first projects I started in my tenure at the museum. The accession file didn't include a copy of the paper and to my disappointment it was not available in any of the University of California libraries or the United States.
A few internet searches later I was surprised to find out that my friend and colleague Cinzia Perlingieri was involved with the archaeological site of Koken - as ceramic expert - in the late 1990's. She provided a copy of the paper for the museum file, told me stories about the site and the people who worked there and what doing archaeological research in difficult places like the Horn of Africa entailed.
Arkell's paper is historically significant albeit a little too technical and dry. Cinzia and her colleagues wrote shorter summaries of their research at Koken.You can read them here and here.















Hearst Museum 5-4711
palette
Africa, Eritrea, Agordat, Koken
Collected by Frederick C. Gamst, March 1965

Point

Whether or not a landowner has the right of possession of any archaeological resource that may exist on his land differs from country to country. Here in the United States the law favors the property rights of the landowner, in Italy - my native country - it does not.
Albert Viereck was born at his family farm at Neuhof-Kowas, not far from the city of Windhoek. A man with many interests, Viereck introduction to archaeology happened later in life after a visit to the painted shelters in the Brandberg mountains. Since South Africa then favored the rights of landowners (I don't know if the law had since changed) Viereck began collecting and recording artifacts and archaeological features on his farmland. He spent the following three decades researching and studying those artifacts and also ventured to investigate further away from his property; he recorded 129 archaeological sites, presented his results to international conferences and published papers and reports; all the while self-educating himself in the field. His largest collections were donated to the South West Africa Scientific Society a few years before his passing in 1982.

This quartzite point was presented to the museum by Viereck himself; I imagine through the auspices of prof. Clark who had  joined the faculty at UC Berkeley  in 1961 after his tenure at the National Museum of Zambia. The two men met in 1960 when Viereck participated to the Archaeological Winter School in Livingstone.
This type of tool is called a Stillbay point, after the prehistoric period during which it was made and used. It is the "type" point for the Stillbay period. The makers of similar points were hunter-gatherers of the Middle Stone Age who lived in southern Africa around and possibly before 65,000-70,000 years ago.
PAHMA has 17 Stillbay points and other tools, mostly from the Republic of South Africa and Kenya.


















Hearst Museum #5-2467
Point; uniface; ovate
Namibia; Neuhof Kowas
Collected by Albert Viereck, 1962

Sickle

With the obvious exception of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, PAHMA curates the largest collections of the predynastic period (that began in the 4th millennium BC) in the world. 
Harvard graduate George A. Reisner received funding from Phoebe Hearst in 1898 for five years of research. By the end of 1901 he had excavated parts of two large pre-dynastic necropoli at Ballas and El Ahaiwah and the more recent cemetery at Naga ed-Der. In addition he excavated portions of the large town of Der el-Ballas with palaces and commoner houses that he dated to the middle and new kingdoms although new excavations in the 1980s revealed earlier levels.

This sickle blade found outside of a house at Der el-Ballas was used to harvest one of the many grain fields that likely surrounded the town. Grain stems contain silicates that transfer onto the blade's edge during reaping, leaving a glossy deposit along the border. The small notches are also the result of such activity. In predynastic, late neolithic times harvesting was accomplished by groups of men and women whose tools included sickles made by inserting a line of these flint blades in a wood or bone handle. One beautiful wooden handle is featured on the British Museum web site.

A thousand years after the appearance of domesticated species,  permanent villages were numerous along the Nile Valley and agricultural production had greatly increased in scale and variety of crops. Since earlier times barley was cultivated also for making beer, then a staple in Egyptian diet, the invention of which was attributed to Osiris. A few thousand years later Greek writers praised the quality of Egyptian beer. In the 1st century BC Diodorus Siculus wrote:
They make a drink of barley [...] for smell and sweetness of taste is not much inferior to wine.
Beer was also much appreciated by the Romans and by middle eastern populations.

















 



Hearst Museum #6-9125
Flint knife, small
Egypt; Der-el-Ballas; hill south of House A-L
Collected by George A. Reisner, 1900-1901

Sharp

A few days ago, the radio show This American Life recalled the story of the Georgia Rambler, a 1970s reporter who would travel to small towns across the state searching for regular folks with interesting stories to publish in the Atlanta Journal. A similar project was carried out in the mid 1940s by Lena Creswell, a retired physician from San Diego, California who traveled the United States as a freelance writer. In May 1945 the Desert Magazine (link; page 23) published her short article about a man who lived in a small house in a remote part of the Jacumba Valley in Imperial County, California. His name was Mr. Happy Sharp, an avid collector of Indian artifacts that he picked up on his property and in neighboring counties.
The PAHMA lists about 500 catalogue numbers of items that Mr. Sharp collected between 1930 and 1935, for the most part potsherds that document some of the variations in ceramic typology and decoration of southern California. Among other things he donated or sold to the museum, there are few of the oldest archaeological objects from southern California that are currently curated in this facility. This knife fragment is considered to be associated with early Holocene hunter-gatherers of the so-called San Dieguito culture whose early occurrence have been dated to about 10,200 years ago (BP). Typical tools of the San Dieguito people were domed scrapers - such as the one in the second picture - often in association with rather elaborate lithic flakes retouched into a crescent shape. These tool kits show that no matter their proximity to the Pacific coast these hunter-gatherers were still primarily thriving by hunting large and small mammals like their immediate predecessors.
Mortars, pestles and other grinding implements that broadly indicate the regular exploitation of other kinds of resources - such as seeds and grasses - will appear in the archaeological record of southern California few hundred years later with the people of the so-called La Jolla culture.


















Hearst Museum 1-68609
Knife fragment, San Dieguito type
United States, California, Jacumba Valley
Collected by Happy Sharp, 1930-1947






















Hearst Museum 1-86974
Small scraper plane
United States, California, CA-SDi-175
Collected by Adan E. Treganza, 1949

Quartz

These quartzite tools (a core, a truncation and a geometric) were collected between 1964 and 1965 at Dindori 3, a site along the banks of the Narmada River, India. The tools are included in a sizable collection of paleolithic implements from about 30 discrete localities in the Narmada Valley in India. The archaeological expedition was organized by Theodore D. McCown and one of his students, George V. Shkurkin. Sadly it would be McCown's last field season as he passed away in 1969 after more than 30 years at UC Berkeley, first as a student and later as faculty and museum curator. The collections were then accessioned to the PAHMA and used by prof. J. Desmond Clark (and others) for teaching and research. Professor Clark went himself on archaeological expeditions in India in the 1980's.
Another prominent UC Berkeley anthropologist, Sherwood Washburn, recalled how McCown was convinced that the testing ground to understand human evolution laid to the east. The land between Palestine, where his father worked as biblical archaeologist, and India was where he thought Dryopithecines had space and time to develop the variations that eventually led to modern apes and humans.
Below is what McCown wrote to campus administrators prior to his leave of absence from the university: 
The purpose of my sabbatic leave is to spend from October 1964 to May 1965 in India, investigating and excavating Pleistocene localities containing assemblages of paleolithic tools and/or fossil fauna materials. The principal localities to be tested lie in the central and eastern parts of the state of Madhya Pradesh between the town of Hosangabad and Jubbulpore. The area is one I visited and surveyed during five weeks in the spring and summer of 1958 on sabbatic leave from the University. A number of promising localities were visited, but it became obvious that the main stream of the Narmada River poses problems whose solutions will have to be sought along the tributary systems running it from Vindhya mountains to the north and the Satpuras to the south. No systematic investigation has been made of the remnants of the terrace system, especially where they have been dissected by the Narmada's tributaries.

Hearst Museum #9-10093; 9-10074; 9-10072

India; Madhya Pradesh; Narmada valley; Dindori 3

Collected by Theodore D. McCown and George V. Shkurkin, 1964-1965

Points

One of the largest accession of Old World archaeology at the PAHMA includes the assemblages collected during the University of California African Expeditions in 1947 and 1948. The availability of these collections for teaching and scholarly research raised an interest that, within few years, contributed to turn the Berkeley campus as one of the world's most active center for African prehistory.

As customary for museum collections devoted to teaching, assemblages were sometimes broken down in smaller sets that represent specific periods or technological phases. Over the years, students and researchers left notes and comments - most often than not on scrap pieces of paper - about the items they were studying. One note was found at the bottom of a small box containing these three objects from a locality near the Taungs Limeworks, Republic of South Africa. The author signed the comment though the signature is unfortunately hard to read making it impossible to date it with certainty. In my personal opinion it could be from the early 1950's. Here is the note's transcription:

The larger specimen (brown) is an excellent evolved Middle Stone Age point with reduction of the bulb of percussion on the cleavage face. Such points occur in developed phases of the M.S.A. but are never common. The dark chert point is also evolved M.S.A. The curvature is probably merely fortuitous. The white quartz specimen is not significant.

Hearst Museum 5-8902
Middle Stone Age Points
Republic of South Africa; Cape Province; Taungs Limeworks
Collected by Charles L. Camp and Frank E. Peabody, 1947-1949

Hearst Museum 5-8901
Quartz crystal
Republic of South Africa; Cape Province; Taungs Limeworks
Collected by Charles L. Camp and Frank E. Peabody, 1947-1949

Blade core

This obsidian core was collected by Robert F. Heizer during one of his archaeological expeditions in Guatemala. Unlike jade, which was circulating primarily among the upper classes of central American societies, obsidian was readily available to most households. Cores and blades were produced and traded in large numbers to be used, with appropriate modifications, in hunting, farming, woodworking, weaponry and  ritual. In a 1971 volume, Heizer and colleagues published an account of blade production among the Atzecs as told by the Spanish missionary Motolinia, soon after the Spanish conquest.

Robert F. Heizer came to UC Berkeley in the 1930s as an undergraduate transfer from Sacramento Junior College, then an active center for archaeological research in northern California. He received his BA (1936) and PHD (1941) working closely with Alfred Kroeber and, soon after World War II, he was appointed Assistant Professor (1946) in the Anthropology Department. He was Curator of North America Archaeology at the PAHMA from 1956 until his death in 1979.

One of the first to realize that archaeological research in pre-war California was rather crude in its field methods and general modus operandi, Heizer was always a strenuous proponent of rigorous methodology and a pioneer of scientific applications. It is thus perhaps surprising that early in his career his attention to detail was apparently a matter of concern, as expressed in this hand-written note archived at the museum. The author of the note was Llewellyn Lemont Loud who had worked for the museum since 1911 and spent years excavating and recording archaeological sites in California and Nevada.

More than 60 years later, the remarks feel more like rivalry between different institutions than personal grudge or criticism. Loud himself was a cause for frustration for Alfred Kroeber who, at times, questioned Loud's commitment to wrapping up his archaeological reports in a timely manner. It took Loud 17 years to complete the publication of his excavation at Lovelock cave, Nevada (1912-1929).

Hearst Museum 3-22955

Obsidian prismatic blade core

Guatemala, Papalhuapa, "Templo de Montezuma"

Collected by Robert F. Heizer, John Graham and H. Williams, 1965

Core

After serving as curator and director of the National Museum of Zambia (1938-1961), J. Desmond Clark came to UC Berkeley in 1961 and for almost thirty years he trained students in anthropology and Old World prehistory.

Prof. Clark was instrumental for increasing the size and scientific value of the Old World prehistoric collections at the PAHMA with assemblages from his research in Africa and Asia and by promoting active programs of exchange with museums in Africa and Europe intended to complement the preexisting collections.

The museum houses assemblages from a few archaeological sites excavated by his students mainly in the early 1970's. Some of these collections were never fully studied and published by their original investigators. This quartzite core is part of a sizable assemblage from an excavation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1971 and 1973. The stone tools were deposited at the museum a few years later with little information as to their provenience, collection methods or field notes. J. Desmond Clark recalls this project in his memoirs*: 

Various sites in the Congo or Rwanda have a longish sequence from the late Acheulean through the Middle Stone Age. One site in the Katanga Province, in Zaire, it was dug by a delightful old French priest, Pere Anciaux de Faveaux, who had found this site and reported on it in the Third Pan-African Congress [...]. He found a very nice Acheulean site at the Pupa River near Katentania on the Biano River, and a student of mine, Carney Schokkenbroek [...] did a very nice excavation of the Acheulean and overlying Lupenbaum following on from what Anciaux did, and she was out there for probably two years, I think, working on those collections, doing the excavation, et cetera, with Anciaux. But she never wrote it up. We were hoping she would write it up, but she seems to have disappeared now.

Perhaps she had disappeared but the stone tools are still in Berkeley.

Hearst Museum # uncatalogued

Core

Dem. Rep. of the Congo; Katanga Prov.; Pupa River near Katentania

Collected by Carney Schokkenbroek, 1973

* J. Desmond Clark, "An Archaeologist at Work in African Prehistory and Early Human Studies: Teamwork and Insight," an oral history conducted in 2000-2001 by Timothy Troy, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2002.

Neanderthal flint

Dorothy A.E. Garrod was the first woman (1939) to be elected Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge. Her career started in the early 1920's and brought her from Gibraltar, to the east Mediterranean, to Kurdistan. 

Arguably, her most important achievement in the field is the excavation at Mount Carmel where, among thousands of stone tools, she recovered the first Neanderthal burials outside Europe. During the 1931 season Garrod was assisted by Theodore D. McCown, a PhD student at UC Berkeley, who later served as a curator for the museum between 1947 and 1957.

The excavation of the Mt. Carmel caves lasted a few years and the results were published in a large volume in 1939. As was customary for those times, the lithic collections were then split among numerous institutions around the world. Here is a list of all the places one should travel if interested in these assemblages.

Through the study of the skeletal remains and animal bones, Garrod and McCown offered early reconstructions of the changes in the environment from the Middle Paleolithic to the early Neolithic in the Near East.  Reporting on their findings in 1934, The Pittsburgh Press points out that the region was home to the Neanderthals from the early Mousterian until their final demise. The short article doesn't provide any details as to how or why the brutes went eventually extinct but it offers an interesting choice of words to describe their character while they were alive and roaming around: Neanderthals were uncouth and clumsy. 

Think twice before inviting a Neanderthal to a formal dinner: they will probably show up unshaved, half naked, and they will leave all their food scraps on your floor.

Hearst Museum # 9-1286

Acheuleo-Mousterian flint

Palestine; Mt. Carmel region; Tabun Cave; Wady el-Mughara

Collected by Dorothy A.E. Garrod, 1932-1933

Knife

This flint knife was donated to the museum by Heywood W. Seton-Karr, a British Army lieutenant who made his earlier archaeological discoveries while he was stationed in Egypt and, later, as a private consultant. In 1895 he presented his finds to the British Anthropological Institute and in1898 his enterprises were featured in the New York Times.

Not a trained archaeologist, Mr. Seton-Karr benefited from having access to Sir. John Evans type collection of Paleolithic implements. His first sizable collections thus included mostly Paleolithic hand axes that he recovered during his hunting trips in East Africa.
In a letter to the President of the University of California dated to 1925, he listed “twenty-nine expeditions to India, thirteen in Somaliland, nine in the Fayum region, and several in the Eastern and Western Deserts of Egypt”. Mr. Seton-Karr donated portions of his collection to a large number of museums around the world. The stone tools in storage at the PAHMA came via the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum.

In 1905 he published his findings in the Fayum region in a book of  drawings whose reviewer in the MAN journal praised for its usefulness for researcher but also complained that it was hard to obtain a copy.

Mr. Heywood Seton-Karr last donation came to the museum in 1931 but because the donor demanded that the specimen would be on permanent exhibit it was initially rejected. Once he agreed to remove the condition the gift was accepted.
A selection of his stone tools from Egypt and Somalia was exhibited for the first time in Berkeley in the Fall of 1940.

Hearst Museum # 5-557

Flint knife

Fayum, Egypt

Collected and donated by H.W. Seton-Karr