The staff of the Anthropology Collections and Archives Program (CAP) cares for more than 2.5 million extremely diverse artifacts, specimens, and archival materials at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center (MSC) in Suitland, Maryland. During the 1990s the Department of Anthropology’s holdings were moved from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., to the MSC, where the collections were housed in state-of-the-art storage equipment. Since that time, the CAP staff has continued to make selective improvements to storage and access. Staff, however, had never considered the potential impact of a seismic event. This essay reviews procedures related to the damage assessment of the diverse and varied anthropological collections and the lessons learned from this assessment by the CAP director and staff in the aftermath of the earthquake of 23 August 2011.