'The ablest Australian Anthropologists': two early anthropologists and Oxford

摘要

In the Pitt Rivers Museum manuscript collections, there is a series of letters betweentwo key early Australian anthropologists,2 Alfred William Howitt (1830-1908) andLorimer Fison (1832-1907) (shown in Figure 1, a photograph taken in November1887 in Howitt’s back garden),3 and two key figures in the development of Oxfordanthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) and Walter Baldwin Spencer(1860-1929).