Frank hamilton cushing biography for kids
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The Man Who Became an Indian
Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857-1900) was one of those pioneers who get buried by the rush of progress in the very territory they have opened up. Barely known today other than by a few specialists and buffs, Cushing is a central figure in the history of American anthropology. “Probably the first professional ethnologist,”1 he is generally credited (in passing references) with having laid the foundations for scientific study of the ethnology and archaeology of the American Southwest. He was the brightest star of the Bureau of American Ethnology in its illustrious first years under the directorship of Major John Wesley Powell, and he had in fact considerable fame in his own lifetime as an investigator of Indians.
His professional influence, moreover, extended beyond America to such figures in European anthropology and sociology as Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim, and Mauss, and by way of their work ideas of his have filtered down to writers as cur
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Vanished Worlds, Enduring People
F. H. Cushing. Daily Report of Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition. March 4, 1888. [view] | [download a PDF of the entire report (18mb)]
The Hemenway Expedition, named for its patron, Mary Hemenway, was the first major scientific archaeological investigation in the Southwest. Its controversial director, Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857-1900), was already known to the world as the man who had lived with the Zuni Indians. The expedition (1886-1894) was plagued with problems, including the health and erratic behavior of its director. Today, scholars are reevaluating the significance of Cushing’s ethnographic work and the role of the Hemenway Expedition in the history of American anthropology.
Camp Hemenway, the site of this “Daily Report,” was located nine miles southeast of Tempe in Arizona Territory. In its accompanying sketches, Cushing compares objects from the nearby Los Muertos and Los Guanacos archaeological sites,
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Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 1857-1900
Frank Hamilton Cushing, anthropologist, was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, the fourth son of Sarah Harding Crittenden and Thomas Cushing, a physician. Three years later the family moved to a farm outside of Barre Center, New York. A sickly child, Cushing attended school irregularly, teaching himself bygd reading books and investigating the natural world that surrounded his home. When he was eight, he was given a flint arrowhead uncovered during plowing. He would later report that this artifact spurred his life-long interest in native cultures, and he began a thorough study of the tribes that once lived in the area. He started his own collection of Indian objects, which he displayed in a bark lodge he built in a corner of the family property, and he replicated Indian techniques of construction to deepen his understanding of them.
[H]e early fell into a habit of thought not unlike that of the primitive arrow maker, and even before he knew the