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  The Field Museum curates 55,000 objects representing the many and varied cultures of Oceania. The cultural diversity present in that region has, from the earliest days of anthropological research, given rise to seminal publications and theories that were later applied to cultures around the globe. As such, the collection of Oceanic material culture at The Field Museum stands as an invaluable source of anthropological data for the professional and layperson alike.The Field Museum curates more than 1,000 objects from Vanuatu, a collection of 83 islands situated in the South Pacific Ocean about three-quarters of the way from Hawaii to Australia. This collection, curated by John Edward Terrell, includes musical instruments, ceremonial objects, figurines, subsistence technology, clothing, weapons, and a host of other objects.  The bulk (approx. 930 objects) of the Vanuatu Collection came to the Museum in 1913 when curator A.B. Lewis returned from the South Pacific. Having joined The Field Museum's Department of Anthropology in 1908 as Assistant Curator of African and Melanesian Ethnology, Albert Buell Lewis immediately went to Melanesia to lead the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition. His four-year long expedition netted some 12,000 objects of Pacific material culture that Lewis spent most of the rest of his career cataloguing. A complete analysis of the expedition was recently published by The Field Museum's Adjunct Curator Robert Welsch (1998; An American Anthropologist in Melanesia: A.B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition, 1909-1913. University of Hawai'i Press). Other significant collections from Vanuatu include the original 600-piece 1893 accession, as well as the 180-piece Capt. A.W.F. Fuller Collection, donated to the Museum in 1958, as well as many smaller accessions that arrived at the Museum between 1920 and the present. Collections from Vanuatu continued to be incorporated into The Field Museum's collections in almost every decade of the twentieth century, with the most recent addition arriving in 1998. View Selected MLN Vanuatu pieces |
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