author
Cyrus Thomas
1825–1910
A 19th-century American scholar who moved from law and ministry into entomology, ethnology, and archaeology, he became especially known for investigating the prehistoric mounds of North America. His work helped challenge the old myth that these earthworks had been built by a vanished non-Native race.
5 Audiobooks
Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States
by Cyrus Thomas
The Problem of the Ohio Mounds
by Cyrus Thomas
About the author
Born in Tennessee in 1825, Cyrus Thomas followed an unusual path through several careers. He studied law, served as a Lutheran minister for a time, and then built a reputation in natural science through work in entomology and surveys of the American West.
Later, he turned to ethnology and archaeology, working with the Smithsonian Institution and becoming closely associated with research on the mound sites of the eastern United States. He is best remembered for arguing, on the basis of evidence, that these mounds were built by Native American peoples rather than by a lost civilization, an idea that had long circulated in popular writing.
Thomas died in 1910. Today he is remembered as a wide-ranging investigator whose career linked the natural sciences with early American archaeology and whose mound studies played an important role in correcting a major historical misconception.