Bureau of American Ethnology

The BAE's staff included some of America's earliest field anthropologists, including Frank Hamilton Cushing, James Owen Dorsey, Jesse Walter Fewkes, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, John N.B. Hewitt, Francis La Flesche, Cosmos and Victor Mindeleff, James Mooney, William Henry Holmes, Edward Palmer, James Stevenson, and Matilda Coxe Stevenson. In the 20th century, the BAE's staff included such anthropologists as John Peabody Harrington (a linguist who spent more than 40 years documenting endangered languages), Matthew Stirling, and William C. Sturtevant. The BAE supported the work of many non-Smithsonian researchers (known as collaborators), most notably Franz Boas, Frances Densmore, Garrick Mallery, Washington Matthews, Paul Radin, Cyrus Thomas, and T.T. Waterman. The BAE had three subunits: the Mound Survey (1882–1895); the Institute of Social Anthropology (1943–1952), and the River Basin Surveys (1946–1969). Mound Survey At the time the BAE was founded, there was intense controversy over the identity of the Mound Builders, the term for the prehistoric people who had built complex, monumental earthwork mounds. 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. Cyrus Thomas, the Bureau's appointed head of the Division of Mound Exploration, eventually published his conclusions on the origins of the mounds in the Bureau's Annual Report of 1894. It is considered to be the last word in the controversy over the Mound builders' identities. After Thomas' publication, scholars generally accepted that varying cultures of prehistoric indigenous peoples, Native Americans, were the Mound builders. ==See also==