author
Garrick Mallery
1831–1894
A Civil War officer turned pioneering ethnologist, he devoted much of his later life to studying Native American sign language, pictographs, and petroglyphs. His work helped preserve records and interpretations of Indigenous communication systems at a time when relatively few scholars were paying close attention to them.
3 Audiobooks
About the author
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on April 25, 1831, Garrick Mallery trained in law and practiced as an attorney before the American Civil War changed the course of his life. During the war he served in the Union Army, and his later military service in the American West seems to have deepened his interest in Indigenous cultures and visual forms of communication.
After retiring from the army in 1879, he joined the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology as an ethnologist. He became especially known for his research on Native American sign language and on pictographs and petroglyphs, bringing together field observations, correspondence, and comparative study in works that were widely consulted in their time.
Mallery died on October 24, 1894. Today he is remembered as an important nineteenth-century researcher whose writing preserved a large body of material on sign systems and image-based expression, even as modern readers may also place his work within the limits and assumptions of his era.