Unknown Mexico : A Record of Five Years' Exploration among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre

Carl Lumholtz (1851–1922) was a Norwegian ethnographer and explorer who, soon after publishing an influential study of Australian Aborigines (also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection), spent five years researching native peoples in Mexico.This two-volume work, published in 1903, describes his expeditions to remote parts of north-west Mexico, inspired by reports about indigenous peoples who lived in cliff dwellings along mountainsides.While in the US in 1890 on a lecture tour, Lumholtz was able to raise sufficient funds for the expedition.He arrived in Mexico City that summer, and after meeting the president, Porfirio Díaz, he set off with a team of scientists for the Sierra Madre del Norte mountains in the north-west of Mexico, to find the cave-dwelling Tarahumare Indians.Volume 1 covers the start of the expedition and Tarahumare life, etiquette and beliefs, as well as details of the natural history of this little-explored region.