Definition: American ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft was influential in studies of indigenous people in the North American continent. He travelled with an early geological survey through what is now Wisconsin (the Cass and Doty expedition), and was eventually superintendent for Indian Affairs for the territory of Michigan in the 1830s.
Although best known in general for recording stories and language of the Native American tribes, Schoolcraft is most important to archaeology in that he was among the first to identify evidence that the people who built the thousands of raised earthen structures throughout North America were the ancestors of the people being displaced by European in-migration, and not the mythical lost tribe of Israel called 'mound builders'.
Although best known in general for recording stories and language of the Native American tribes, Schoolcraft is most important to archaeology in that he was among the first to identify evidence that the people who built the thousands of raised earthen structures throughout North America were the ancestors of the people being displaced by European in-migration, and not the mythical lost tribe of Israel called 'mound builders'.
Publications Still in Print
It is perhaps a measure of Schoolcraft's influence that so many of his publications are still in press, more than 140 years since his death.Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe and Abraham La Fort. 2000. Schoolcraft's vocabulary of Onondaga. Evolution Pub. Southampton, Pa.
---1993. Schoolcraft's expedition to Lake Itasca: the discovery of the source of the Mississippi, edited by Philip P. Mason. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing.
---1978. Personal memoirs of a residence of thirty years with the Indian tribes on the American frontiers. AMS Press, New York.
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
