The Mystery of the Pacific

Record summary

Félix Speiser’s work from the 1910–1912 Swiss expedition to the New Hebrides, published in the 1920s, documented material culture, ritual, architecture, and social life in Vanuatu. It is relevant to comparisons between archaeological interpretation and ethnographic analogy, especially where later writers treated living or recently recorded traditions as windows onto an undifferentiated Pacific past. Speiser’s records remain important historical documentation, but his analytical categories reflect early twentieth-century anthropology and should be checked against contemporary Vanuatu archaeology and Indigenous historical perspectives.