SEATTLE — Long before the Pacific Northwest evolved into a home for high-tech startups and coffee chains, Native American cultures colored the landscape and prehistoric creatures roamed the terrain.
It is this history of the region that is explored at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
The only major science museum north of San Francisco and west of the Rockies, the Burke Museum allows visitors to see the Pacific Northwest 545 million years ago and follow it into present day.
The highlight of the museum is the "Life and Times of Washington State" exhibit.
This hands-on interactive adventure shows visitors the only real dinosaur skeleton found in the Northwest, the allosaurus, and takes them inside a replica cave formed when an ancient rhino was trapped by a lava flow in eastern Washington.
Visitors see the creatures that lived here millions of years ago, including skeletal displays of a mastodon and Ice Age mammals such as the oldest baleen whale fossil in the world, at 30 million years old.
"I like how the animals show what Seattle was like before the people existed," says Sarah Hiraki, 9, visiting the museum with her mother.
The museum was named for Seattle Judge Thomas Burke (1849-1925), whose wife, Caroline McGilvra Burke, left a bequest to the University of Washington to create a memorial to him.
It started as the Washington State Museum in 1899 and was renamed when the present building opened in 1964.
Aside from the permanent Washington state history exhibit, the Burke museum has a permanent exhibit on "Pacific Voices," which highlights the stories, ceremonies, languages and teachings that kept alive cultures of the Pacific Rim, including native North Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders.
"I think the museum does a good job of relating the cultures of the people to the residents of Washington," says first-time visitor Cindy Hiraki, 40, of Seattle. "They bring the past and the present together."
Displays feature a Korean wedding ceremony, a Laotian fire rocket festival, Samoans bestowing chiefly titles, and the Japanese celebrating life. Each exhibit is interactive. For example, visitors viewing a Chinese New Year dinner table press a button representing each dish served to learn the significance of each food.
Other displays include the first salmon ceremony and a Hawaiian hula dance. Each includes objects central to the culture, such as a cannibal mask, a grouse rattle, fire rockets, a raven headdress for a Tlingit chief, and carved puppets of wood, buffalo hide, human hair and silk.
Each object also tells a story. For example, a storyknife of a Yup'ik girl of western Alaska was not used to carve meat but to illustrate stories in the mud or snow.
A recent museum exhibit was titled "Mountain Patterns: Survival of Nuosu Culture in China." Put together with the help of two Chinese scholars, it was the first major North American exhibit of the handiwork of China's mountain-dwellers.
Displays included patterned clothing, silver jewelry, colorfully lacquered wood utensils and religious icons, all of which reveals a culture currently undergoing a revival and relying heavily on the spirit world.