E. G. (Ephraim George) Squier

Born in Bethlehem, New York, in 1821, Ephraim George Squier was largely self-educated and worked first as a journalist and editor before becoming known for his research on the ancient past of the Americas. He moved to Ohio in the 1840s, where his interest in prehistoric earthworks led to the work that made his reputation.

With physician Edwin H. Davis, he coauthored Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley in 1848, a landmark early study of the mound sites of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and one of the Smithsonian Institution's first major publications. He later served in diplomatic posts in Central America and Peru, and his travels fed a long series of books and reports on archaeology, geography, and Indigenous cultures.

Squier's writing reflects both the curiosity and the limitations of 19th-century scholarship, but his fieldwork and energetic reporting helped preserve descriptions of sites that were changing quickly. He died in Brooklyn in 1888, remembered as an important early American archaeologist as well as a prolific travel writer and public interpreter of the ancient Americas.