LEGENDS OF ARCHAEOLOGY: MAKING A SCIENCE OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Making a Science of Archaeology

Cyrus Thomas advanced archaeology by employing scientific methods.

By Jon Muller

Cyrus Thomas was one of the first persons to be paid to do archaeology on a full-time basis,and he was also a purveyor of a new and professional archaeology.Though he had a great impact on the science,he came to archaeology rather late in his career and in a roundabout fashion.

Thomas was born in 1825 and raised in East Tennessee.He moved to Murphysboro,Illinois,in 1849, staying at a hotel called the Logan House,which was run by the nationally known Logan family.While he was clerking and beginning a law practice,he married the innkeeper’s daughter, the sister of U. S.Congressman John A.Logan.

While working as a lawyer,Thomas became interested in a broad range of natural phenomena.He was associated with John Wesley Powell,the geologist and ethnologist of Grand Canyon fame,as well as numerous members of various state natural history organizations,and was a founder of the Illinois Natural History Society. He became the curator and commissioner for entomology and ichthyology for that organization.He gained respect for his work as a natural scientist,and his interests ranged from plant lice to Maya writing.He received an honorary Ph.D. from Gettysburg College that was most likely awarded for his work in entomology.

Thomas’s first wife died during the Civil War, and he then went to Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary to

Cyrus Thomas

study for the ministry. During this time,he published essays on Darwin’s theory of evolution in Lutheran journals, revealing that even his theology was intertwined with his scientific interests.While in Pennsylvania,he met and married his second wife,who assisted him with much of his later work, and who herself published a Bibliography of the Earthworks of Ohio in 1887.

In the 1870s,Thomas served as the State Entomologist for Illinois and he became one of the founders of Southern Illinois Normal College,which is now Southern Illinois University. During this time he published works on entomology as well as Ancient Mounds of Dakota, one of his first archaeological publications.

Meanwhile,the American Association for the Advancement of Science had been calling for scientific investigations to settle the “moundbuilder question”— the issue of who had built the largescale earthworks of the eastern United States.It seems that John Wesley Powell,who became the director of the U.S.Geological Survey, encouraged supporters in Congress and other persons of power to make the Smithsonian undertake this task.Thus in 1881, the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution (later Bureau of American Ethnology)— also directed by Powell—began a Division of Mound Exploration and hired Wills de Hass,a St. Louis physician who had lobbied for the investigations,as its first director. Under mysterious circumstances,Thomas soon replaced de Hass.

After Thomas had taken over direction of the mound exploration,he began a surprisingly modern survey to map the distribution of the mounds.This application of natural science methods to archaeology was in stark contrast to the rip-it-out methods used by so many early collectors.But this was the “Museum Period”of American archaeology, a time that focused on the acquisition of collections which institutions were eager to display.

Given the methods of this period,which one British archaeologist described as “like digging up potatoes,” it was not surprising that Thomas encountered opposition. Upon reporting his survey program,he ran headlong into the interests of the National Museum,whose chief clerk icily informed Thomas that “Referring to that portion of your letter of November 8 concerning the subject of mounds, you say that no attempt at digging has yet been made. I am instructed by Major Powell to ask if you cannot open some of the mounds of Southern Illinois, or Missouri,with a view to obtain the contents thereof.The Director of the National Museum is of the opinion that a sufficient number of mounds have been located and their positions described,and he is more anxious that their contents should be secured than that others

Though Thomas did very little digging during the mound explorations, a good deal of excavating took place under his direction. This ceramic image vessel was found at Pecan Point in Arkansas. The vessel is thought to be from the 17th century.

A shell gorget discovered at Nelson Triangle in North Carolina during the mound explorations. Nelson Triangle was probably a Cherokee burial ground and the gorget likely dates to the 17th century.

should be discovered and mapped.”

His first major report was included in the 5th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, published in 1888. Subsequently, he collaborated on some general surveys of North American archaeology and of Native American cultures that were generally well received.Shortly before his death he began writing about the huge Cahokia Mounds in Illinois.

His landmark publication,however, was the Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1894.This work devotes nearly 600 pages to reporting the excavations and surveys undertaken in each state.The last 100 or so pages argue in detail that the Native Americans built the mounds of the East.In this section Thomas presented a scientific argument,emphasizing the continuity between the historic and prehistoric mounds in their construction styles and methods,as well as the kinds of artifacts found within them.He stated that the Eastern tribes were agricultural and capable of such mound construction.He also pointed to historic artifacts of European origin present in some mounds,indicating that the builders were not some lost race (at that time, some people claimed the mounds were constructed by the Lost Tribes of Israel),but the very peoples who interacted with the European invaders.

It was thought in some quarters that the Native Americans lacked the sophistication required to build the mounds.But Thomas was convinced they were capable of such complex works, and his report served as proof that the Native Americans were in fact responsible for the mounds. This period between the Civil War and the end of the century was a time during which Native Americans were considered a force of nature to be tamed, or vermin to be extirpated in the inexorable march of civilization. It’s been suggested that Thomas was a racist because there is evidence that he,too,thought of them as less than human.But,in the context of his times,his belief that the Native Americans built the mounds of the East was a progressive, rather than racist,view.

As W. H.Holmes put it in an 1899 review in American Anthropologist of a book by Thomas,“The difficulty with archeology as it stands today is not that it is unlike any other field of scientific research in character, but that it has been so often treated in an unscientific manner and by writers having little conception of scientific method.It is a science in so far as its complex and obscure data are correctly observed,treated, and applied to the elucidation of human history.” Holmes recognized one of the credits due Thomas was that he brought the methods of science to a field sorely needing those methods.

Though Thomas’s route to the field of archaeology was a circuitous one,once he arrived he stayed put,holding the title of archaeologist at the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution until his death in 1910.

JON MULLER is Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.