Arizona State Museum

The draw here is the Pottery Vault, a climate-controlled room holding more than 20,000 whole vessels, the world's largest collection of Southwest Indian pottery, with a Wall of Pots setting a hundred of them side by side in a single 2,000-year sweep. The museum began with an 1893 act of the Arizona Territorial Legislature, created as the territory's official repository for archaeological finds, and remains the region's oldest and largest anthropology museum. It sits at the University of Arizona's main gate, where Park Avenue meets University Boulevard, inside the century-old Raymond H. Thompson Building. Its holdings reach beyond pottery into basketry, textiles, jewelry, and a photographic archive of more than 350,000 images of Southwest and northern Mexico's Indigenous peoples, some shot by early anthropologists Emil Haury and Greenville Goodwin. The museum is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution and keeps up research, teaching, and tribal repatriation work regardless of what the public can see.