Walter Hartmut Traugott Erdmann Lehmann (16 September 1878 – 7 February 1939) was a German
ethnologist,
linguist and
archeologist, known for his documentation of many indigenous cultures and languages of
Central America. He studied under
Eduard Seler, a renowned specialist in
Mesoamerican cultures. Between 1907 and 1909 he undertook an expedition traveling from Panama to Mexico, in which he collected artefacts and ethnographic and linguistic data. He collected the only known documentation of several indigenous languages of Central America before they went extinct. His 1915 habilitation thesis was a vocabulary of the
Rama language, and an historical analysis of the
Subtiaba language. In 1921 he became director of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.