James Mooney was an American ethnographer who lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the Great Plains. He did ethnographic studies of the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement among various Native American culture groups, after Sitting Bull's death in 1890. His works on the Cherokee include The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891), and Myths of the Cherokee (1900). All were published by the US Bureau of American Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institution.
John Wesley Powell was an American geologist, U.S. Army soldier, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. He is famous for his 1869 geographic expedition, a three-month river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers, including the first official U.S. government-sponsored passage through the Grand Canyon.
Edward Palmer was a self-taught British botanist and an early American archaeologist.
John Reed Swanton was an American anthropologist, folklorist, and linguist who worked with Native American peoples throughout the United States. Swanton achieved recognition in the fields of ethnology and ethnohistory. He is particularly noted for his work with indigenous peoples of the Southeast and Pacific Northwest.
Cyrus Thomas was an American ethnologist and entomologist prominent in the late 19th century and noted for his studies of the natural history of the American West.
William Henry Holmes, known as W. H. Holmes, was an American explorer, anthropologist, archaeologist, artist, scientific illustrator, cartographer, mountain climber, geologist and museum curator and director.
The Criel Mound, also known as the South Charleston Mound, is a Native American burial mound located in South Charleston, West Virginia. It is one of the few surviving mounds of the Kanawha Valley Mounds that were probably built in the Woodland period after 500 B.C. The mound was built by the Adena culture, probably around 250–150 BC, and lay equidistant between two “sacred circles”, earthwork enclosures each 556 feet (169 m) in diameter. It was originally 33 feet (10 m) high and 173 feet (53 m) in diameter at the base, making it the second-largest such burial mound in the state of West Virginia. This archaeological site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Matilda Coxe Stevenson, who also wrote under the name Tilly E. Stevenson, was an American ethnologist, geologist, explorer, and activist. She was a supporter of women in science, helping to establish the Women's Anthropological Society in Washington DC. Stevenson was also the first woman hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) to research southwestern Indigenous people. In doing so, she published multiple monographs and one long text on the Zuni people. Her work was supported by some of her male colleagues at the time and was seen as a contemporary by some of her fellow ethnologists or anthropologists. However, she faced barriers as a woman scientist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in order to compete, she defied societal expectation which pushed some to regard her as stubborn and aggressive.
The Fort Walton Mound (8OK6) is an archaeological site located in present-day Fort Walton Beach, Florida, United States. The large platform mound was built about 850 CE by the Pensacola culture, a local form of the Mississippian culture. Because of its significance, the mound was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964.
Matthew Williams Stirling was an American ethnologist, archaeologist and later an administrator at several scientific institutions in the field. He is best known for his discoveries relating to the Olmec civilization. Much of his work was done with his "wife and constant collaborator" of 42 years Marion Stirling.
William Curtis Sturtevant was an anthropologist and ethnologist. He is best known as the general editor of the 20-volume Handbook of North American Indians. Renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work as "an absolutely indispensable tool that should be found on the shelves of all libraries, public and private alike."
Frederick Webb Hodge was an American editor, anthropologist, archaeologist, and historian. Born in England, he immigrated at the age of seven with his family to Washington, DC. He was educated at American schools, and graduated from Cambridge College.
The Bat Creek inscription is an inscribed stone tablet found by John W. Emmert on February 14, 1889. Emmert claimed to have found the tablet in Tipton Mound 3 during an excavation of Hopewell mounds in Loudon County, Tennessee. This excavation was part of a larger series of excavations that aimed to clarify the controversy regarding who is responsible for building the various mounds found in the Eastern United States.
The National Anthropological Archives is the third largest archive in the Smithsonian Institution and a sister archive to the Human Studies Film Archive. The collection documents the history of anthropology and the world's peoples and cultures, and is used in indigenous language revitalization. It is located in the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, and is part of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History.
James Constantine Pilling was a Congressional stenographer-transcriptionist and a pioneering ethnologist chiefly known for compiling a series of extensive bibliographies of the cultures, mythologies and languages of the North and Central American aboriginal peoples. Beginning in 1875, when he joined the survey of the American West led by Maj. John Wesley Powell, and continuing through 1881, Pilling did extensive fieldwork and proofread Powell's Report on the lands of the arid region of the United States (1879).
Colonel James D. Stevenson was an executive officer of the U.S. Geological Survey and a self-taught ethnologist, anthropologist, geologist, and naturalist. His geological surveys included Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. He collected extensively among the Zuni and Hopi, and also documented the Ute and Arapaho people.
The Carson Mounds,, also known as the Carson Site and Carson-Montgomery- is a large Mississippian culture archaeological site located near Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi in the Yazoo Basin. Only a few large earthen mounds are still present at Carson to this day. Archaeologists have suggested that Carson is one of the more important archaeological sites in the state of Mississippi.
Lucile Eleanor St. Hoyme was an American biological anthropologist who conducted research related to human variation, bioarcheology, and paleopathology. St. Hoyme served as an Assistant Curator in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. St. Hoyme analyzed human remains excavated from the John Kerr Reservoir Basin using a new bioarcheological approach combining data from other disciplines. Beyond her work with the Smithsonian collections, St. Hoyme also worked on FBI forensic cases in the 1960s with National Museum of Natural History Anthropology Curator J. Lawrence Angel.
Indian Land Cessions in the United States is a widely used atlas and chronology compiled by Charles C. Royce of Native American treaties with the U.S. government until 1896–97. Royce's maps are considered "the foundation of cartographic testimony in Indian land claims litigation."
Giant skeletons reported in the United States until the early twentieth century were a combination of hoaxes, scams, fabrications, and the misidentifications of extinct megafauna. Many were reported to have been found in Native American burial mounds. Examples from 7 ft (2.1 m) to 20 ft (6.1 m) tall were reported in many parts of the United states.
