| Abstract: |
Introduction: The A. B. Lewis collection of material culture from New Guinea and the smaller islands of Melanesia comprises more than fourteen thousand ethnographic objects at Field Museum of Natural History collected during the 1909-1913 Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition. This collection (roughly one-third of the Museum's holdings from Melanesia) was assembled by the anthropologist-and former Field Museum curator-Albert Buell Lewis (1867-1940) during his nearly four years of field research in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Papua, German New Guinea, and Dutch New Guinea. The Lewis Collection, one of the largest and best documented early ethnographic collections in the world, was amassed to help secure the position of the fledgling Field Museum as a world-class scientific and educational institution. In addition to the astonishing number of cultural artifacts gathered from virtually all of the regions of Melanesia then explored, the museum today also preserves the Lewis archives of nearly sixteen hundred original glass-plate photographic negatives, A. B. Lewis's field work diaries (as well as his expedition correspondence and specimen lists), and sundry other notes, maps, and sketches. Ironically, despite the size and quality of the Lewis Collection and its associated archives, these remarkable cultural and historical resources have been largely overlooked by anthropologists since the 1930s.
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