This book reexamines photographs from an early anthropological expedition to the North Pacific after a century of change. In 1897 Morris Jesup, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, sponsored a five-year expedition to Alaska and Siberia. This immense research project left a legacy of classic ethnographies, irreplaceable museum collections, and some three thousand photographs.

Thomas Ross Miller and Barbara Mathe examine how early anthropologists saw their task and how they used photographs as cultural and biological data, as documentation of places, events, and artifacts, and as models for future exhibits.