author
Walter Hough
1859–1935
A Smithsonian ethnologist with a gift for turning everyday objects into stories, he explored how people made fire, built tools, and shaped daily life in the American Southwest. His work helped bring Native American material culture into museum study in a more systematic way.
2 Audiobooks
Fire-making Apparatus in the U. S. National Museum
by Walter Hough
The Hopi Indians
by Walter Hough
About the author
Born in Morgantown, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1859, Walter Hough studied at West Virginia University and went on to spend most of his career at the Smithsonian. He joined the U.S. National Museum in the 1880s and later served as curator of ethnology and, eventually, head curator in the Department of Anthropology.
Hough is best remembered as an ethnologist and museum scholar whose research ranged widely across material culture. The Smithsonian's records describe work on fire, illumination, heating, archaeology, and ethnology, especially in the American Southwest, and he also wrote on the Hopi. That mix of field interest and museum research made him one of the figures who helped define how objects were studied and interpreted in early American anthropology.
He died in 1935, leaving behind publications, photographs, notes, and other papers that still give a sense of his curiosity and breadth. For listeners today, he stands out as one of those early museum researchers who believed that tools, household objects, and crafts could reveal whole ways of life.