ABSTRACT
The influence of the colonial government outside the Gazelle Peninsula was relatively, as were the plantations and the whole structure of colonial influence. Albert Buell Lewis worked through these structures to a great extent, making the plantation in the Arawe Islands his base whilst on the south coast of New Britain. Lewis was thirty-nine when he joined the staff of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago in 1907, as a temporary assistant in the Department of Anthropology. George Dorsey, the Curator of Anthropology, engaged him on the understanding that if and when finances became available he would be made an assistant curator and would be contracted to conduct fieldwork and collect for the museum. The differences between the pre-Columbian cultures of North America and the field experience Lewis was to have in the Pacific will be immediately clear in terms of terrain, linguistics and period of contact.
