José Leite de Vasconcelos

José Leite de Vasconcelos
José Leite de Vasconcelos
Born	7 July 1858 Ucanha, Tarouca, Portugal
Died	17 May 1941 (1941-05-18) (aged 82) Lisbon, Portugal
Occupation	Ethnographer, author
Nationality	Portuguese
Period	1881–1941
Genre	Academic publishing
Subject	Ethnography, popular culture

José Leite de Vasconcelos Cardoso Pereira de Melo (7 July 1858 – 17 May 1941) was a Portuguese ethnographer, archaeologist and prolific author who wrote extensively on Portuguese philology and prehistory. He was the founder and the first director of the Portuguese National Museum of Archaeology.

From childhood, Leite de Vasconcelos was attentive to his surroundings, recording in small notebooks everything that interested him. At the age of 18 he went to Porto, where in 1881 he completed a degree in natural sciences and, in 1886, a second degree in medicine. However, he practiced as a physician for only one year, serving as a health care administrator in Cadaval during 1887.

His 1886 thesis, Evolução da linguagem (Evolution of Language) demonstrated an early interest that would come to occupy all his long life. His scientific training had imparted a rigorous and exhaustive investigative discipline to his work, whether in philology, archaeology or ethnography. He began the journals Revista Lusitana (1889) and Arqueólogo Português (1895), and founded the Museu Etnológico de Belém in 1893.

At the University of Paris, he completed a doctoral thesis, Esquisse d'une dialectologie portugaise (1901), the first important compendium of Portuguese dialects (work that was later continued and advanced by Manuel de Paiva Boléo and Luís Lindley Cintra). He also pioneered the study of Portuguese names with the work Antroponímia Portuguesa and studied numismatics and Portuguese philology after his 1887 appointment as curator of the National Library in Lisbon. On the founding of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon in 1911, he was appointed professor of Latin and Medieval French.