The Stone Implements of the Adelaide Tribe of Aborigines, now extinct
Adelaide, Gillingham & Co., 1934.
Quarto, viii, 94 pages with 19 illustrations (from photographs) featuring approximately 150 implements.
Cloth a little scuffed, and rubbed and bumped at the extremities, with minimal wear; endpapers unevenly offset; a few mild signs of handling; a very good copy.
With the ownership signature of Stanley Robert Mitchell (1881-1963), 'ethnologist, mineralogist, metallurgist and businessman ... In the 1930s and 1940s he belonged to a distinguished group of "amateur" ethnologists and collectors who gathered around Sir Baldwin Spencer. They collected massive numbers of Aboriginal implements and championed the value of field-work over "armchair theorists". They believed that the raw geological material was the dominant factor in determining the forms of stone implements and that these forms had not changed from earliest times to the period of European contact' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). One correction in ink ('lava' for 'land', near the end of the first paragraph on page 14) and some light marginal emphases in pencil are presumably by Mitchell. The original four-page prospectus (a little chipped and torn at the edges) is loosely inserted.
Item #108344
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