La Mont West

He recorded traditional didgeridoo music by Aboriginal Elders. These are some of the earliest known recordings, and selections were released commercially in 1963 as Arnhem Land Popular Classics. He spent time at the Lockhart River Mission, Queensland, where he managed to film the local initiation ceremony (bora).

West attended Cornell University, majoring in economics, from September 1947 to February 1951, and also from February 1955 to June 1955. He attended Indiana University as a PhD candidate, majoring in anthropology, and became a protégé of Charles F. Voegelin, his doctoral supervisor, and Alfred L. Kroeber, who were concerned with the neglect suffered by the topic since the late 19th century. He was at Indiana University from June 1955 to June 1959, doing field work among Plain Indian the results of which were published with his doctoral dissertation, entitled "The Sign Language, An Analysis," a study of Plains Indian Sign Language, which was the most sophisticated non-verbal language among North American Indians. Both Kroeber and Voegelin had done some work on sign languages, building on the pioneering work of Garrick Mallery and West's two volumes constituted what was the most comprehensive fieldwork survey and analysis of the American native sign system. He discovered this variety had two distinct dialects, and expanded the inventory of known signs, hitherto numbered as ranging from one to three thousand, into a repertoire of 3,500 distinct signs. It was often thought that use of sign language indicated lack of linguistic acumen, with an inability to master English: West's informants often proved to be multi-lingual, fluent in English also. Far from dying out, he discovered that the sign language had expanded its geographic horizons by spreading up into Canada from British Columbia through Manitoba, into areas where it had formerly been unknown.

La Mont West, Jr. (born 2 July 1930) is an anthropologist. He received his PhD in anthropology from Indiana University in 1960. He specializes in sign languages, which he has studied among Native American Indians and Aboriginal Australians.