The Pratt Museum is dedicated to the process of education by exploring the natural environment and human experience relative to the Kachemak Bay region of Alaska and its place in the world. The Museum seeks to inspire self-reflection and dialogue in its community and visitors through exhibitions, programs, and collections in arts, sciences, and humanities.
Our collections include over 17,000 materials and are divided into six main areas:
ANTHROPOLOGY COLLECTIONS The Pratt Museum’s Anthropology Collections comprise over 2,650 materials. These include archaeological artifacts excavated from local sites, which form well-documented research collections of the earliest known human inhabitants of Kachemak Bay, ranging from the Oceean Bay Culture, approximately 4,500 years ago, through the Kachemak Tradition, to the prehistoric Dena’ina around 1,400 AD.
The ethnographic materials encompass basketry, dolls, fishing and hunting tools, watercraft, household implements, clothing, and decorative items representing Dena’ina, Unungax, Sugpiaq, and Alutiiq cultures. Among the rarest items is a well-preserved birch bark basket from the Kachemak Tradition, estimated to be 1,00 years old, which remarkably survived in a tide-swept cliff.
BIOLOGY COLLECTIONS The Museum’s Biology Collections encompass a remarkable total of over 2,692 specimens or units. A marine life collection represents a baseline study of marine plants and animals (wet-preserved) and drift/beach materials (dry-preserved) of Kachemak Bay. Thirty mounts of marine and freshwater fish feature common species of the region. Mounts, study skins, and skeletons of birds represent the over 220 species documented locally. A collection of 30 locally salvaged marine mammals prepared largely as articulated skeletons is supplemented by a representative collection of mammal study skins, furs, and skeletons of local species.
An herbarium of over 1,130 specimens represents 347 species of plants from around the Bay and remote, offshore islands. The Pratt Museum Botanical Gardens include forest ecology trails, homestead garden varieties, and a Native Plant Collection with over 150 living plants native to the Kenai Peninsula.
FINE ART COLLECTION This varied collection includes visual arts by regional artists from the 18th century to the present.
EARTH SCIENCES COLLECTIONS Over 401 geological and paleontological specimens are featured, including rare fossil imprints and glacial erratics carried to Homer beaches. Additionally, this valuable collection includes fossil mollusks representing the diverse, prolific life of our ancient seas. Volcanic ash, pumice, and lava bombs represent active regional volcanic activity.
HISTORY COLLECTIONS Our History Collections include over 4,249 materials demonstrating Russian and American influences through items related to trapping, whaling, fishing, mining, fox farming, agricultural tools, religious artifacts, and household goods. The historic Harrington cabin and homestead garden represents a comprehensive time capsule of homestead life in Homer from 1920 – 1960, alongside the 1929 Nordby outhouse, which is the oldest two-seater in town.
Additional resources such as manuscripts, maps, nautical charts, surveys, correspondence, newspapers, oral history recordings, and films document the history of western community development in the area.
PHOTO ARCHIVES This collection consists of over 6,308 historical images documenting community and ecological development in the Kachemak Bay Region.
Conservation of our collections is governed by our public trust responsibility and by respect for the physical, historical, cultural, scientific, and aesthetic integrity of the material or specimen. The Museum is committed to collecting, caring for, exhibiting, and interpreting materials in a manner that respects the diversity of human cultures and religions and that adheres to the highest ethical standards of museum practice.