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In 1897, the Bureau of Ethnology's name was changed to the Bureau of American Ethnology to emphasize the geographic limit of its interests, although its staff also briefly conducted research in US possessions such as Hawaii and the Philippines. In 1965, the BAE merged with the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology to form the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology within the United States National Museum (now the National Museum Of Natural History ). In 1968, the SOA archives became the National Anthropological Archives. RESEARCH The BAE's staff included some of America's earliest field anthropologists, including Frank Hamilton Cushing , J.O. Dorsey, Jesse Walter Fewkes , Alice Cunningham Fletcher , John N.B. Hewitt, Francis LaFlesche, Cosmo and Victor Mindeleff, John Stevenson, and Matilda Coxe Stevenson. In the 20th century, the BAEs staff included such notable anthropologists as Neil Judd and John Peabody Harrington -- a legendary linguist who spent more than 40 years collecting specimens of endangered languages from their last speakers. The BAE also supported the work of many non-Smithsonian researchers (known as collaborators), most notably Franz Boas , Francis Densmore, Garrick Mallery, Washington Matthews, Paul Radin, Cyrus Thomas and T.T. Waterman. The BAE had three subunits: the Mounds Survey (1882-1895); the Institute of Social Anthropology (1943-1952), and the River Basin Surveys (1946-1969). Mounds Survey At the time the BAE was founded, there was intense controversy over the identity of the Mound Builders . Archaeologists, both amateur and professional, were divided between believing the mounds were built by passing groups of people who settled in various places elsewhere, or believing they could have been built by native Americans. The Bureau's appointed head of the Division of Mound Exploration, Cyrus Thomas , eventually published his conclusions on the origins of the mounds in the Bureau's Annual Report of 1894, which is considered to be the last word in the controversy over the Mound builders' identities. After Thomas' publication, it was generally accepted among scholars that Native Americans were indeed the Moundbuilders. REFERENCES
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