CAETS's group of intrepid anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists set off to map the diffusion of Melanesian cultures in 1898.
CAETS AND A NINETEENTH CENTURY ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENUMERATIVE COSMOLOGY
Alfred Cort Haddon, anthropological specialist in 'primitive' material culture, asked this question on the first page of his final book before setting off to Torres Straits as leader of CAETS. The query was timely; it reflected the need to put British anthropology firmly within the realm of the empirical scientific tradition and represented the culmination of a trend in the wider social sciences that dominated anthropology from the late nineteenth century through to the end of the First World War, finding its apogee in CAETS.
At the time CAETS took to the Pacific, there was a perceived need to mathematicise the understanding of man among the social sciences, and thus propagate a more scientific anthropology, avoiding 'the not unkindly hesitancy on the part of men engaged in the precise operations of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, to admit that the problems of anthropology are amenable to scientific treatment' (Tylor 1889:245).
Dim troi''n l rwan.Hopian i fewn i''r caets (gan fod ei draed wedi rhwymo 'i gilydd) ac edrych yn fwy manwl na wnaeth ar unrhywbeth erioed wrth i''r rhaff gael ei chlymu i''w draed ac i waelod y caets.
I fyny 'r caets hyd nes cyrraedd 160 troedfedd, sydd ddim yn swnio mor uchel a hynny o''r llawr!