Rudolf Pöch, Austrian ethnographer and physical anthropologist, studied in Vienna, Zürich and Berlin and qualified as Doctor of Medicine (Dr Med) in 1895. He spent most of his professional career in Vienna. In 1898 he went to Bombay (now Mumbai), India, with the Austrian Plague Commission. After working in hospitals in Vienna for two years he entered the University of Berlin to study anthropology and ethnology and work at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Then the Hamburg Institute for Tropical Diseases sent him on a malaria expedition to West Africa. In 1904-1906 he visited the island New Guinea and Australia to study the indigenous people and made phonographic recordings of their spoken languages. These recordings he described in two reports to the Phonogram-Archivs-Kommission der kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. A general account of his visit was published in the Sitzungsberichte of the Academy.
Pöch spent the years 1907-1909 in southern Africa, mainly to study the physical anthropology of the indigenous people of German South West Africa (now Namibia) and the Kalahari. A general account of his visit, "Berichte von meinen Reisen nach Südafrika von 1907 bis 1909" was published in the Akademischen Anzeiger, Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, in 1908-1909. He visited the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria to study the San skeletal remains in its collection and wrote "Untersuchung von Buschmann-schädeln und skeletten aus dem Transvaal Museum" for the Annals of the Transvaal Museum (1909, Vol. 1(4), pp. 199-218). Several papers dealt with his encounters with and studies of living San, for example: "Reisen im Innern Südafrikas zum Studium der Buschmänner in den Jahren 1907-1909" (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1910); and "Ethnographische und geographische Ergebnisse meiner Kalaharireisen" (Petermanns Mitteilungen, 1912). A further paper dealt with San art, the relationship of the San to other human races, and South African stone tools of different ages: "1. Ueber die kunst der Buschmänner. 2. Die Stellung der Buschmannrasse unter den übrigen Menschenrassen. 3. Südafrikanische Steinwerkzeuge aus verschiedenen Perioden" (Korrespondenzblatt der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, 1911). He gave some attention to the fauna and flora of the Kalahari region in "Ueber die Kalahari" (Verhandlungen der K.K. zoologisch-botanischen Gesellschaft in Wien, 1911), and to the physical geography of the region in "Meine beiden Kalaharireisen, 1908 und 1909" (Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1911). Long after his death the anthropological results of his visit to southern Africa were published in a book entitled Völkerkundliche ergebnisse der Südafrikanischen reisen Rudolf Pöch's in der jahren 1907 bis 1909 (Vienna, 1936).
From 1910 to 1913 Pöch worked as an assistant at the Phonogram-Archiv of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He continued his pioneering anthropological studies by means of phonographic recordings, publishing three papers on the technical aspects of such recordings and a report to the Phonogram-Archivs-Kommission on phonographic recordings of prisoners of war made during World War I (1914-1918). Meanwhile in 1915 he submitted a thesis at the University of München, Germany, on the craniology of the indigenous population of New South Wales, Australia, for which he was awarded the degree Doctor of Philosophy.
