author
E. H. (Edwin Hamilton) Davis
1811–1888
A physician by profession and a pioneering archaeologist by passion, he helped shape early understanding of the ancient earthworks of the Mississippi Valley. His careful fieldwork and collecting made him one of the key figures in 19th-century American archaeology.
1 Audiobook
Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Vol. I.
by E. G. (Ephraim George) Squier, E. H. (Edwin Hamilton) Davis
About the author
Born in Ohio in 1811, Edwin Hamilton Davis trained as a doctor at Cincinnati Medical College and practiced medicine in Chillicothe. Alongside his medical career, he developed a deep interest in the region’s ancient earthworks and became one of the earliest serious investigators of the mounds built by Indigenous peoples in the Mississippi Valley.
Davis is best remembered for his collaboration with Ephraim George Squier on Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, a landmark study published by the Smithsonian Institution. Their work brought unusually careful description, mapping, and illustration to sites that were already being damaged or lost, and it became a foundation text for American archaeology.
He also assembled a major collection of prehistoric artifacts, noted in his time as one of the largest private collections of its kind in the United States. Though largely self-taught as an archaeologist, his work earned lasting recognition for its ambition, detail, and importance to the study of North America’s ancient past.