Anthopological Publications

For information regarding Publications please contact: laila@amnh.org
The PDF files of more than 200 anthropological publications herein were created by the AMNH Library. They are available for downloading free of charge.
The Division of Anthropology has been publishing anthropological studies since 1896 when the first such publication appeared in the AMNH Bulletin. The large special reports were published in the Memoirs series. The most important of those were the classic ethnographies of the tribes of the Northwest Coast and Siberia based on the groundbreaking investigations of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition of 1897-1902. These irreplaceable monographs were written by the American, Russian and German ethnographers who spent years in the field under most difficult conditions studying several tribes of the Northwest Coast and Siberia. This work cannot be duplicated and the resulting monographs will never lose their value to anthropology.

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition publications consist of eleven volumes of Memoirs each divided into from one to seven parts. Several other outstanding anthropological reports were published in the Memoirs series, such as Carl Lumholtz on the Huichol, Washington Matthews on the Navajo, and George T. Emmons on the Tlingit.

The Anthropological Papers, published continuously since 1907, include some of the great ethnographies of the 20th century, particularly on North American Indians. Several illustrious anthropologists of this time period published their work in the Anthropological Papers, e.g. Clark Wissler, Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, and Margaret Mead. The early Anthropological Papers dealing with the cultures of the Plains Indians are still the foremost publications on this culture area. Several past and present curators of the Division of Anthropology have published reports of their fieldwork in the Anthropological Papers, such as S. and R. Freed's North Indian village series, I. Tattersall's studies of the lemurs of Madagascar, and D. Thomas's work on the archaeology of St. Catharines Island and Nevada.

The Museum has also published, since 1955, the James Arthur Lectures on the Evolution of Human Brain which regularly contain material of anthropological interest. These series of anthropological publications are available for purchase from the Division of Anthropology.