Description: Anthropologist Albert Buell Lewis spent four arduous years traveling through the former colonies of Melanesia as an ethnological researcher for Chicago's Field Museum. The field diaries that he maintained during this period reveal the fascinating story of how Lewis overcame extraordinary difficulties to assemble the remarkable collection of artifacts now preserved in the museum. In An American Anthropologist in Melanesia, Robert Welsch has beautifully contextualized the diaries through a descriptive, interwoven commentary, extensive annotations, and a wealth of visual materials. The two volumes offer readers a firsthand account of conditions in Melanesia before the First World War, a rare glimpse into a little-known chapter in the history of anthropology, and an inside look at how the world's great natural history and ethnological museums built their collections.

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