Ephraim George Squier and the Development of American Anthropology (review)

Ephraim Squier stands as one of the most important figures in the history of American archaeology and anthropology in the era before both those fields, along with the rest of American intellectual life, became professionalized. In the history of anthropology, Squier has been seen as a precursor rather than a predecessor, a footnote rather than a founder. When he died in 1888 the federal government's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) had been up and running for nearly ten years. Squier had nothing to do with its founding or with its early work. By the time John Wesley Powell took the helm of the BAE, Squier's important work was well behind him, and he had gone through a nasty divorce and a stint in an insane asylum.

The purpose of Terry Barnhart's biography is to recover Squier's career as a serious student of Native America and to elevate his accomplishments beyond their usual assignment. Barnhart believes that Squier is "a transitional figure in the history of American anthropology in many ways," and that he "is indeed a worthy intellectual ancestor" (5).

To make this case, Barnhart spends most of this book with Squier's own writings, published and unpublished. It is an impressive—indeed, daunting—accumulation. Squier published widely during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, corresponding with most of the major American researchers of Native Americans. Barnhart has assembled a bibliography of Squier's anthropological writings that runs to nearly six pages.

Squier received national attention in 1848 with the publication of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first volume in the Smithsonian's Contributions to Knowledge. That book resulted from a three-year collaboration with Edwin Davis exploring, surveying, and excavating the Indian mounds that so fascinated Americans through the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.

Ancient Monuments remains Squier's best-known book, but no sooner had it come out than Squier moved his investigations from Ohio to New York. There he worked to some extent with Lewis Henry Morgan, and the result was his Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York, published in 1851. By the time this book came out, Squier had accepted a diplomatic posting to Nicaragua and wrote Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments and the Proposed Inter-Oceanic Canal, which first appeared in 1852 and was revised and excerpted several times. In the midst of all this, Squier found time to collect his ideas about "the origin and development of religious ideas and symbols" (187) and publish them as The Serpent Symbol and the Reciprocal Principles of Nature in 1851. By 1853 he was back in Central America; this trip yielded three more publications, in 1853, 1860, and 1861. Between 1863 and 1865, Squier served as U.S. claims commissioner in Peru. In 1877, as the last major publication of his remarkable career, he issued Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas.

Even this cursory listing of Squier's major works makes clear that he was thinking about Native America in hemispheric rather than strictly nationalistic terms. He wanted always to synthesize, compare, and draw connections between the mounds of Ohio, the earthworks of New York, the constructions of Central America, and the civilizations of Peru. Whether or not his conclusions still pass anthropological muster, he should be given credit as being among the first to think so broadly. By any measure, his was an extraordinarily productive career, and Barnhart has worked through this mass of publication with thoroughness and care.

Barnhart has endeavored to write an "intellectual biography," one that "concerns itself with the origin and development of ideas and with their embodiment in the works of particular writers and in the collective discourse of their era" (6). Yet the goal of understanding Squier's ideas on their own terms in their own time is often lost in Barnhart's desire to restore Squier as a founder of modern anthropology. His considerations...