William Henry Holmes

William Henry Holmes
William Henry Holmes, c.1918
Born	December 1, 1846 Harrison County, Ohio
Died	April 20, 1933(1933-04-20) (aged 86)
Nationality	United States
Fields	anthropology

William Henry Holmes (December 1, 1846 – April 20, 1933) was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, geologist and museum director.

Life

Born in Harrison County, Ohio, Holmes graduated from McNeely Normal College in 1870 and briefly went into teaching. In 1872 he became an artist with the F.V. Hayden survey. After it was absorbed into the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, he was assigned to work as a geologist in the southwestern United States. He contributed pioneering reports on the terrain and geologic phenomena of Yellowstone Park, and completed early geological reconnaissance work in Colorado. As an artist, he was responsible for illustrative material in an atlas of the Grand Canyon. Holmes was a noted mountain climber, and peaks in Yellowstone National Park, Mount Holmes, and the Henry Mountains of Utah were later named in his honor. In 1875, Holmes began studying the remains of the Anasazi culture in the San Juan River region of Utah. He became particularly interested in prehistoric pottery and shell art, producing published works including "Art in Shell of the American Indians (1883)" and "Pottery of the Ancient Pueblos (1886)". He expanded these studies into textiles, and became well known as an expert in both ancient and existing arts produced by Native Americans of the Southwest.

Holmes left the Geological Survey in 1889 to become an archaeologist with the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology. He left Washington temporarily, from 1894 to 1897, to serve as curator of anthropology at the Field Columbian Museum. He returned to the Smithsonian in 1897 to serve as head curator of anthropology at the U.S. National Museum. From 1902 to 1909 he served as Chief (i.e. director) of the Bureau of American Ethnology, where he worked directly under Cyrus Thomas; during this period he studied the Etowah Indian Mounds of the Mississippian culture in Georgia, and in 1903, he published his Synthesis of Pottery. In 1910, he became chairman of the Division of Anthropology of the U.S. National Museum. In 1920, Holmes became the director of National Gallery of Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), where he assembled exhibits of Indian arts from the Northwest Coast. He published many works on archæological and anthropological subjects. He edited geological publications including Hayden's Atlas of Colorado and the eleventh and twelfth reports of the Geological Survey. His books include: "Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities" (1919).

Published works

Published works by Holmes include:

• Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896 pages 3–46.
• Natural History of Flaked Stone Implements. In Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, edited by C. S. Wake, pp. 120–139. Schulte, Chicago, Il. (1894)
• Archaeological Studies among the Ancient Cities of Mexico (1895)
• Stone Implements of the Potomac-Chesapeake Tidewater Province. In Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report, pp. 13–152. vol. 15. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. (1897)
• Random Records of a Lifetime, 1846-1931: Cullings, largely personal, from the scrap heap of three score years and ten, devoted to science, literature and art. 1932. Description: 21 v. in 22. illus. (mounted, part col.) clippings, letters. 27 cm. Held in the American Art Portrait Gallery Rare Book Collection.

Gallery

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  Grand Canyon at the foot of the Toroweap - looking east, sheet VI, in Clarence E. Dutton, The Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District (Holmes, 1882)

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  Panorama from Point Sublime, illustration of the Grand Canyon by Holmes, published in Clarence E. Dutton, The Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District (1882), sheet XV.

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  Sunset on the Kanab Desert. From the brink of the Permian Cliff - a Permian butte in the foreground, the Vermillion Cliffs in the distance, and the Jurassic white sandstone in the extreme background. Grand Canyon District, Mohave County, Arizona. (Holmes, 1877)

References

Gleach, Frederic W. (2002). "William Henry Holmes, 1909–1910". In Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach (eds.). Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 13–15. ISBN 0-8032-1720-X. OCLC 49225637. 

Hough, Walter (October–December 1933). "William Henry Holmes" (PDF online reproduction at the AAA). American Anthropologist New Series (Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association and affiliated societies) 35 (4): 752–764. doi:10.1525/aa.1933.35.4.02a00110. ISSN 0002-7294. OCLC 1479294. http://www.aaanet.org/sections/gad/history/067Holmesobit.pdf. 

Swanton, John R. (1936). "Biographical Memoir of William Henry Holmes, 1846–1933" (PDF online facsimile at the NAS). Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 17 - Tenth Memoir. Bibliography compiled by Ella Leary (Presented to the Academy at the Autumn meeting, 1935. ed.). Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. ISSN 0077-2933. OCLC 37424036. http://books.nap.edu/html/biomems/wholmes.pdf. 

Willey, Gordon R.; Meltzer, David J.; Dunnell, Robert C. (Spring 1994). "[Review of] The Archaeology of William Henry Holmes by David J. Meltzer; Robert C. Dunnell". Journal of Field Archaeology (Boston, MA: Association for Field Archaeology, Boston University) 21 (1): 119–123. doi:10.2307/530250. ISSN 0093-4690. JSTOR 530250. OCLC 8560818. 

External links

• William Henry Holmes page at the Smithsonian
• Works by William Henry Holmes at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Henry Holmes in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Holmes' 1895 Monuments of Yucatan, at Reed College website
• Works by William Henry Holmes. Archived at the Internet Archive.