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On June 30, 1909, Marius Archambault, Director of the Posts and Telegraphs in Nouméa, was entrusted by the French State with an archaeological mission in New Caledonia. For more than ten years, the civil servant had been interested in the main island’s petroglyphs, which he believed to be foreign to the Kanak people. Looking elsewhere for the origin of these rock engravings, Marius Archambault nevertheless collected and documented various types of Kanak objects, which – a posteriori – endowed his mission with an ethnographic character. Through the study of a corpus coming from various institutions and now gathered at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, this article aims, to shed light on the unfolding of a mission, the thought processes of the man behind it, and their consequences on the materiality of a collection and the persistence of preconceived ideas.