This paper introduces an important group of unpublished ethnographic and archival materials deriving from nine separate expeditions to Kashmir and Ladakh, between 1891 and 1915, by the American naturalist collector William Louis Abbott (1860-1935), and re-assesses the importance of this region to him and to Smithsonian scientists of the time. The ethnographic collections from Kashmir and Ladakh Abbott assembled, along with his archival correspondence and field notes, form a little-known and largely unpublished resource at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Abbott is better known for biological collections he brought to America's "national museum," the Smithsonian, from those expeditions; his ethnographic collections and fieldnotes remain largely unstudied. Abbott's trips to Kashmir and Ladakh are unlike his visits to other regions, because he returned so many times after his first trip, over a 24-year time span interspersed by many expeditions elsewhere. His collecting goals changed over time. This paper assesses the role Abbott and other "naturalist" collectors of this period played within the history of anthropology and museums, and points to some of the many new 21st-century uses of "legacy" collections and records of the kind he assembled about this region.
