Miklukho-Maclay Collections: Papuan Artifacts and New Guinea Ethnographic Research

The collections of Nikolay Miklukho-Maclay, together with the drawings of Nikolay Miklukho-Maclay, hold exceptional historical and scientific value. Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, the Russian ethnographer and anthropologist who explored New Guinea and the wider Pacific, regarded the assembling of collections as one of his foremost tasks. Crucially, he gathered objects with their later scientific study in mind, not merely, in his own words, for "filling museums."

What principles and goals guided Miklouho-Maclay's collecting?

Miklouho-Maclay collected objects in order to study phenomena in relation to their surrounding environment. His collections consisted, first and foremost, of items that he considered required detailed indoor, laboratory-style analysis to be understood. This method distinguished his work from casual souvenir gathering: every specimen was intended to answer a research question about the peoples and nature of New Guinea, Melanesia, and Polynesia.

Which objects did Miklouho-Maclay choose to collect?

Miklouho-Maclay believed that collecting also served to confirm his scientific conclusions with indisputable factual material — conclusions that were frequently doubted in foreign scholarship. Because he needed evidence that could withstand scrutiny abroad, he prioritized objects whose analysis could support or refute contested theories about human races, especially the claims of polygenism that ranked human populations into separate hierarchies. His approach tied field collecting directly to broader debates within anthropology and ethnology.

What were the main categories of the collections?

The main categories of Miklouho-Maclay's collections spanned human hair samples, skulls, stone and bone tools, everyday household objects, and ethnographic items acquired across the Pacific. Each category was assembled to document a distinct facet of indigenous life along the Maclay Coast and neighbouring regions, from technology and diet to ornament and belief.

Collections of Papuan hair

Characteristic of Miklouho-Maclay's method was his gathering of collections of Papuan hair. Studying the form of hair requires systematic microscopic examination, so building a physical collection was indispensable to the work. As Miklouho-Maclay wrote in his diary on 17 November 1871, "As is well known, the study of the quality of the hair of representatives of different races is of great importance in anthropology, and therefore I never neglect opportunities to add new samples to my collection." Having assembled a substantial hair collection, he began analyzing it immediately, on New Guinea itself.

Microscopic study of hair form in anthropology

The microscopic study of hair form was central to Miklouho-Maclay's refutation of racial hierarchies. By demonstrating, through comparative anatomical evidence, that Papuan hair did not grow in separate tufts as some European writers claimed but in the ordinary manner of other human populations, he undercut arguments used to portray indigenous peoples as a distinct, lesser species. This kind of comparative anatomy research placed his fieldwork firmly within the wider currents of Darwinian science and the theory of evolution, which he had absorbed during his studies in Europe.

Collections of Papuan skulls

Miklouho-Maclay collected Papuan skulls for the same reason he collected hair: to supply concrete anatomical material that could settle disputes over human variation. Comparative measurement of skulls was a mainstay of nineteenth-century physical anthropology, and Miklouho-Maclay used such evidence to argue against polygenism and the notion of a fixed racial ranking of humankind.

Primitive native tools

Miklouho-Maclay also assembled collections when his stay among a given people was too brief for full field study of their culture. This was the case, for example, on the Admiralty Islands, where he remained only a short time. Unable to study the local culture directly, he decided to gather an ethnographic collection so that he could examine it later. In such situations he sometimes had to collect only those objects that particularly caught his attention: on the southern coast of New Guinea he acquired tattooing instruments on 11 February 1880, and the following day a koro (a weapon used in head-hunting), and so on.

Stone and bone tools

The stone and bone tools in Miklouho-Maclay's collections document the material technology of peoples living without metal. Axes, blades, grinding stones, awls and spatulas fashioned from pig bone illustrate how Papuan communities met everyday needs with locally available materials. Recording these implements systematically gave later researchers a reliable baseline for understanding indigenous craft in Melanesia.

Household objects: pots, bowls and combs

Household objects such as clay pots, dug-out wooden bowls and bamboo combs formed another core group within the collections. These everyday items reveal domestic life, cooking, and personal grooming along the Maclay Coast, and their careful documentation is part of what makes Miklouho-Maclay's record so complete.

Ethnographic collections from the Admiralty Islands

The ethnographic collections from the Admiralty Islands were assembled during a deliberately compressed effort to preserve cultural evidence Miklouho-Maclay could not study on the spot. Because his time there was limited, the objects themselves became his documentation, allowing analysis of a culture he could observe only briefly.

Tattooing instruments and koro weapons

Among the most striking items are tattooing instruments and the koro, a head-hunting weapon from the southern coast of New Guinea. Miklouho-Maclay singled out such objects precisely because they encoded practices — body decoration, ritual violence — that spoke directly to the social organization of the peoples he encountered across Oceania.

What difficulties did Miklouho-Maclay face in assembling his collections?

Assembling the collections forced Miklouho-Maclay to overcome considerable obstacles, beginning with the reluctance of the people themselves. This was true, for instance, of hair collecting: out of fear of magic, Papuans gave no one their nail clippings, food scraps, hair, and similar personal remains, believing these could be used to harm them.

Fear of magic among the Papuans and the hair-exchange method

Miklouho-Maclay solved the problem of the Papuans' fear of magic by offering his own hair in exchange. He recorded the difficulty vividly: "It was comical to see the fear with which Tui recoiled at the sight of the scissors I brought up to his hair. He was ready to run and would not come near me the whole time I held the scissors. I could not give up collecting hair in this locality, but how was I to overcome the reluctance of Tui, who of all my new acquaintances was becoming the most tame? If even he would not agree to it, what would the others, more wild, do?"

His solution turned the exchange into a fair trade. "I thought he might accept a few of mine in exchange for his own hair, and cutting off a lock of my own, I offered to take his, of course in exchange. It worked; I chose several locks, cut them, and gave him mine. While I wrapped the sample of hair in paper and noted the sex, approximate age, and the spot on the head from which it had been cut, Tui likewise carefully wrapped my hair in a leaf he had plucked nearby. Thus, by the method of exchanging for my own hair, my collection of natives' hair grew considerably."

The method had a personal cost. "But one fine day," Miklouho-Maclay continued, "Ulson pointed out to me that I had cropped the entire left side of my head. This happened because, holding the scissors in my right hand, it was easy for me to cut the hair on the left side of my head. So I began cutting hair from the other side."

Difficulties collecting wooden and clay figures

Miklouho-Maclay overcame many hardships in collecting the wooden and clay figures of the Maclay Coast, the so-called telum, to which he rightly attached great scientific importance. On one occasion he acquired in the village of Bongu two clay telums, a skull, and provisions — fish and a branch of ripening bananas. "...With both telums in my pockets and the skull in my hands, I set off home. From the weight and the fast walking I became very hot, but then, when the high water splashed over my legs, already thoroughly soaked earlier, I felt a strong chill, trembling and dizziness."

At home Miklouho-Maclay suffered a severe attack of fever. "My jaws under the influence of the fever shook so, and my teeth chattered so, that it was impossible for me to say a few words to Ulson, who was so frightened, thinking I was dying, that he threw himself onto the cot and burst into sobs, grieving over his own fate and the event of my death." Such were the conditions under which he built his collections. To this it should be added that his hut at Garagasi was very small — "It serves me as both bedroom and storage place." The fuller his collections became, the less room remained in the hut for Miklouho-Maclay himself.

Difficulties in transporting the collections

Beyond the trouble of collecting came the difficulties of transport. Miklouho-Maclay owned no yacht of his own in which to stow his collections. He travelled at his own expense, as an ordinary passenger who had bought a ticket, and whether he could visit a given island depended on the will of the skipper aboard whose vessel he happened to be.

The skipper's will also determined how long Miklouho-Maclay could remain on an island and the fate of the collections he had acquired. To keep to his route, he often had to move from one schooner to another, leaving his gathered collections aboard the previous schooner on the skipper's word of honour. After a voyage through the islands of Melanesia, where he assembled large ethnographic, botanical and zoological collections, he was compelled, when transferring to the steamer Ellengowan, to leave those collections behind on the schooner. "The steamer Ellengowan," he wrote, "is very small and will not be able to take all my things."

The later fate of these collections — which must be presumed very valuable and substantial — is a sad one. Miklouho-Maclay asked the schooner's skipper, Webber, to hand his belongings over to the Russian consulate in Sydney, but the schooner never reached Sydney.

Miklouho-Maclay set about searching for his collections. In August, at last, word reached Sydney from the island of Fate that the schooner Sadie F. Caller had called there on its way to San Francisco, that Skipper Webber had died, and that some of the belongings had been transferred to another schooner bound for Sydney. Which items returned to Sydney and how many were carried off to America could not be established without travelling to that city in person. It is certain, however, that part of his ethnographic, zoological and botanical collections from Melanesia never reached us.

Reporting on his travels to the Imperial Russian Geographical Society in 1882, Miklouho-Maclay remarked, "Even at the present time all my things and collections are being kept in Sydney, in one of the government warehouses." Elsewhere he wrote that boxes with his collections were in Japan, in Java, and so on. To what extent he managed to recover his collections is uncertain; it is quite possible that they arrived in Russia incomplete.

That Miklouho-Maclay nonetheless gathered and delivered to Russia anthropological, ethnographic and botanical material of enormous scientific value, despite all these obstacles, is owed to his patriotism, his exceptional scientific devotion, his single-mindedness and persistence, and his unshakeable resolve to reach the scientific goal he had set.

What anthropological research methods did Miklouho-Maclay use in New Guinea?

Miklouho-Maclay's anthropological research methods in New Guinea combined long-term direct observation, systematic specimen collection, and comparative laboratory analysis. Rather than passing judgment from a distance, he lived among the people of Astrolabe Bay and the Maclay Coast, learned their customs, and paired firsthand ethnological observation with physical evidence — hair, skulls, tools — that could be tested against competing scientific claims in Europe. This blend of fieldwork and material documentation made him a formative figure in the discipline of ethnography.

Comparative anatomical research on human races

Miklouho-Maclay's comparative anatomical research on human races aimed to demonstrate the fundamental unity of humankind. By comparing the anatomy of Papuans with that of other populations, he sought to prove that observed differences were superficial variations rather than evidence of separate species. His conclusions directly opposed polygenism, the theory that human races had distinct origins and could be arranged in a fixed hierarchy.

Contribution to evolutionary biology and anthropology

Miklouho-Maclay's contribution to evolutionary biology and anthropology grew out of his scientific training in Europe. He studied at Heidelberg University, Leipzig University and the University of Jena, and worked closely with the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, a leading champion of the theory of evolution and the ideas of Charles Darwin. Haeckel's influence shaped Miklouho-Maclay's early career and his conviction that field evidence from peoples such as those of New Guinea could illuminate questions of human origins central to Darwinian science.

How the collections connected to scientific controversy abroad

The collections connected directly to scientific controversy abroad because Miklouho-Maclay assembled them as ammunition against contested theories. His anatomical evidence and correspondence engaged figures such as Rudolph Virchow, and his findings were reported to scientific bodies including the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences. In Australia his standing was recognized by the Linnean Society of New South Wales, and he collaborated with naturalists such as Sir William Macleay, situating his Pacific material within an international scholarly debate over the nature of human races.

How do the drawings fit into Miklouho-Maclay's scientific legacy?

The drawings of Miklouho-Maclay complement the object collections as a second, visual record of the peoples and nature of the Pacific. Where specimens preserved physical form, his sketches captured faces, dwellings, landscapes and artefacts in situ, documenting details that could not be crated and shipped. Together the drawings and the collections form a unified body of evidence, each reinforcing the accuracy of the other.

What became of the collections in museums and later research?

Much of Miklouho-Maclay's surviving material entered the great collections of St. Petersburg, above all the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography — the Kunstkamera — under the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences, where his Pacific artefacts have been studied ever since. His return of anthropological, ethnographic and botanical objects to Russia enriched these institutions, even though part of the Melanesian collections was lost in transit. The care he devoted to labelling every specimen with sex, age and provenance is precisely what made the surviving objects so useful to later generations of researchers.

What does the catalogue of collected objects describe?

The catalogue of Miklouho-Maclay's objects covers the full range of Papuan life along the Maclay Coast and neighbouring regions. It records:

• Musical and ritual items — drums and rattles;
• Personal grooming and ornament — bamboo combs, boar-tusk chest ornaments, shell bracelets and necklaces of dogs' teeth;
• Tools and weapons — stone and shell axes, bone awls and spatulas, tattooing instruments and the koro head-hunting weapon;
• Household and food-related items — clay pots, dug-out wooden bowls, lime calabashes and their spatulas;
• Textiles and carrying goods — banana-fibre and sago-palm skirts, woven bags and baskets, feather and wooden belts;
• Ritual figures — the wooden and clay telum depicting human forms and heads.

Why do the collections matter for the protection of indigenous rights?

Miklouho-Maclay's collections matter for the protection of indigenous rights because the scientific case they supported was inseparable from his humanitarian advocacy. By using anatomical and ethnographic evidence to reject racial hierarchies, he undermined the pseudo-scientific justifications for exploiting Pacific peoples. He campaigned actively against the slave trafficking known as blackbirding and pressed for the protection of native land and self-determination along the Maclay Coast, making his research an instrument of advocacy as much as of scholarship. In this his convictions aligned with the humanitarian outlook of contemporaries such as Leo Tolstoy.

What was the biographical context of his early life and education in Russia?

Nikolay Miklukho-Maclay was born in Russia in 1846 into a family whose ancestry he traced to varied roots, and his early life set the course for his later expeditions. After schooling in Russia and time at St. Petersburg University, he continued his education in German universities — Heidelberg, Leipzig and Jena — where his scientific training in comparative anatomy and zoology took shape under the influence of Ernst Haeckel. This European grounding in Darwinian biology prepared him for the marine, zoological and anthropological work he would pursue across New Guinea, Australia and the Pacific, including his later establishment of a marine biological station near Sydney. His life ended prematurely in St. Petersburg in 1888 following a decline in health, but the collections he left behind secured his place among the founders of modern anthropology and ethnology.

What is the enduring significance of Miklouho-Maclay's collections?

The scientific significance of Miklouho-Maclay's anthropological and ethnographic collections is immense. His collection assembled on the Maclay Coast is, in its completeness, reliability and precision of description, the finest in the world. It documents every aspect of the life of the Papuans of that coast in detail: their economy, tools, utensils, clothing, ornaments, weapons and beliefs.

His collection from Easter Island contains uniquely rare objects: tablets bearing script, a chief's staff, and various human figures in a distinctive style. The inscribed tablets are especially valuable. Analyzing the script on these tablets, the young Soviet researcher B. G. Kudryavtsev made a major scientific discovery: he established that some of the texts ran parallel to one another and was able to reconstruct damaged inscriptions. This marked an important step toward deciphering the writing of Easter Island.