Seneca dance songs recorded at Allegany Territory in New York and at Six Nations Reserve. Also includes a story, personal narratives, and interview discussions about sickness, medicine, witchcraft, and related Seneca ceremonies and customs.

Musicological analysis of music, with atttempt to relate musical patterns to "present ritual function," with some consideration of speculative questions of chronology and individual creativity.

Interviews and discussions with the Seneca artist Ernest Smith on his paintings of Seneca customs, stories, ceremonies, crafts, food preparation, and other traditional ways. Smith was a Seneca from the Tonawanda Reservation in New York state. The paintings were done in the 1930s and are presently in the Rochester Museum and Science Center in Rochester, New York. The recordings were made by William N. Fenton and his student, Jeanette Collamer, in 1973 at the museum in Rochester. The paintings are referred to on the recordings by the museum's catalog numbers for the paintings. Some of the paintings do not have assigned titles. Sound quality is fair overall, with severe distortion and prominent background noise on the final tape.

Trained as an anthropologist under Frank Speck at the University of Pennsylvania, the ethnohistorian George Snyderman (1908- ) spent his career studying Seneca Indian religion, history, and culture. Snyderman edited the previously unpublished diaries of Halliday Jackson and John Phillips, Quaker missionaries to the Senecas in the late 18th and early 19th century. The Snyderman Papers includes a small volume of correspondence, along with manuscripts of works by Snyderman and colleagues, and copies of primary source materials pertaining to Seneca history. Of particular interest is his correspondence with anthropologists William N. Fenton, Merle Deardorff, and Frank Speck and with his Seneca consultant Clara Redeye and her daughter, Helen Harris, and photographs of the Allegany Senecas taken by Fenton and Speck.

A Yale-educated ethnographer, William Fenton devoted most of his career to study of the Haudenosaunee. Receiving his doctorate in 1937, Fenton worked with the Bureau of American Ethnology for a number of years before becoming Director of the New York State Museum and professor at SUNY Albany. The Fenton Papers covers all aspects of William Fenton's professional life, documenting his varied positions as community worker for the New York Agency of the U.S. Indian Service, 1935-1937 (accounts, reports, correspondence); associate anthropologist and senior ethnologist in the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1939-1951 (includes notebooks, letters from the field); Executive Secretary of Anthropology and Psychology, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, 1952-1954; and Assistant Commissioner, New York State Museum and Science Service, 1954-1968.

Audio recordings recorded by William N. Fenton.

The Anthony F. C. Wallace Papers include correspondence to and from 20th century anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, linguists, and psychiatrists and provides a wealth of resources for the study of technological and social change, American Indians, culture and personality, revitalization movements, the anthropological study of religion, and the cultural and biological bases of behavior. In addition to Wallace's correspondence, research notes, and drafts, the collection includes Wallace family correspondence and photographs, as well as Wallace's writings from childhood through recent years.