The formation of museum activity in Chukotka has passed through several stages. In 1888, a new independent administrative unit, the Anadyr District, was formed as part of the Amur Region. The first district chief, Russian military doctor Leonid Frantsevich Grinevetsky, on the instructions of the military governor of the Primorsky Region P.F. Unterberger, collected an extensive collection of ethnography of Lamuts, Chuvans, Chukchi. After his death, in 1892, all the collections of L.F. Grinevetsky were transferred to the stock collection of the V.K. Arsenyev Primorsky Museum.

  On November 14, 1931, on the recommendation of the First All-Russian Museum Congress, the Bureau of Local Lore was opened in Anadyr and this date is considered the day of the foundation of the Chukotka District Museum of Local Lore. In the 1939-1940s, part of the collection of L.F. Grinevetsky was transferred from the Primorsky Museum to the funds of the district Museum of Local Lore and it became the first collection of ethnographic objects of the peoples of Chukotka at the end of the XIX century.

 In 2002, the Chukotka Regional Museum and the State Center for the Protection and Restoration of Historical and Cultural Monuments of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug merged to form the Chukotka Heritage Museum Center.

  The museum's collections contain more than 40,000 exhibits that tell about the history of the region, about culture, and about the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Chukotka. The museum center also implements a number of programs: "Man and Chukotka" "Museum and Children" (based on an ethno-historical playground), "Ecology through the eyes of children", "Folklore lessons", "Return of lost relics".