Early missionary and colonial perspectives on the indigenous cultures and languages of Western Cape York Peninsula, Australia, and the documentation of the cultural changes in this region based on written documents, ethnographic artefacts and historical p

通过文字、照片和文化手工艺品记录的与土著人民的第一次实质性文化接触是人类学中最有趣和最罕见的证据之一。在澳大利亚北部，在昆士兰北部的约克角半岛，这一过程是通过殖民当局进行接触的，主要是通过德国摩拉维亚传教士(Herrnhuter)，这些传教士在20世纪之交和20世纪初故意为他们的使命寻找偏远地区。今天，这些跨越近30年的早期系统文化接触的文件仍然保存在萨克森州民族志收藏馆和位于德国赫尔恩胡特的摩拉维亚传教档案馆。自那以后，人们再也没有对它们进行过研究。有三类：大量的书面文件(德文)，文化文物收藏，以及传教士珍贵的历史照片收藏(纸质印刷品、彩色玻璃幻灯片和玻璃底片)。这三个来源共同提供了对德国人和土著人民之间文化接触的早期历史的独特和互补的见解。它们以一种独特的方式揭示了德国传教士如何看待和观察当地的土著人口。这一研究项目旨在以创新和全面的方法对这些文件、照片和文物进行首次研究，以统一这三个不同的来源。这项研究的民族学、殖民学、摄影史和传教史背景在于约克角半岛西部的特定土著文化和语言、他们的研究历史、独特的物质文化、摩拉维亚传教士的殖民和会众特有的方法以及殖民背景下的传教摄影史。这项研究包括以多层次的研究问题为基础，对当地土著文化和语言的殖民和传教士观点进行来源批判性分析。其中包括殖民地参与者，主要是传教士，根据他们的任务和使命采取的立场，对土著文化的接受和解释模式，以及他们了解外国文化的主要机会和限制。它还包括关于(重新)演示的形式和内容的问题，以及对他们在书面文件、他们的照片和艺术品收藏中的经历的反思。这项对原始资料来源的首次全面研究及其出版填补了与早期接触时的一个重要研究空白。它为德国和澳大利亚公众提供了重要的研究数据，并对原始传教和殖民文件中关于土著人民的看法和思考的科学论述做出了重大贡献。

The first substantial cultural contacts with indigenous peoples documented in writing as well as by photographs and cultural artefacts rank among the most interesting and rarest pieces of evidence in anthropology. In northern Australia, at the Cape York Peninsula in north Queensland, this process occurred through contacts made by colonial authorities, in the main through German Moravian missionaries (Herrnhuter) who deliberately sought out remote areas for their missions at the turn of and at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, the documents of these early systematic cultural contacts spanning a total of almost three decades are still extant in the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxonia and in the Moravian Mission Archive in Herrnhut, Germany. They have never been researched since. There are three categories: extensive written documents (in German), a collection of cultural artefacts, and a rare and valuable collection of historical photographs by the missionaries (paper prints, coloured glas slides and glas negatives). Together, these three sources provide unique and complementary insights into the early history of the cultural encounters between Germans and indigenous peoples. They reveal in a singular way how the German missionaries viewed and observed the local indigenous population. This research project aims to conduct the first ever research into these documents, photos and artefacts in an innovative and comprehensive approach to uniting these three different sources. The ethnological, colonial, photohistorical and mission-history context of the research lies in the specific indigenous cultures and languages of the western Cape York Peninsula, their research history, the characteristic material culture, the colonial and congregational-specific approach of the Moravian missionaries as well as the history of missionary photography in a colonial context. This research includes a source-critical analysis of the colonial and missionary views of the local indigenous cultures and languages based on multi-tiered research questions. These comprise the positions taken by the colonial, mainly missionary, players based on their mandate and their mission, the patterns of reception and interpretation of the indigenous cultures and the principal chances and limitations to their understanding of foreign cultures. It also includes questions concerning the form and contents of the (re)presentations and reflections on their experiences in their written documents, their photographs and their artefact collection. This first comprehensive research into the original sources and the publication thereof closes an important research gap from a very early time of contact. It provides access to important research data for the German and Australian public, and it makes substantial contributions to the scientific discourse concerning the perception of and reflections on indigenous peoples presented in original missionary and colonial documents.