John Wesley Powell summary

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John Wesley Powell, (born March 24, 1834, Mount Morris, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 23, 1902, Haven, Maine), U.S. geologist and ethnologist. Powell took many expeditions (1871–79) down the Colorado River, describing the earliest of these in Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875). He developed the first comprehensive classification of American Indian languages (1877) and was the first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology (1879–1902). In 1881 he became director of the U.S. Geological Survey, where he worked extensively on mapping water sources and advancing irrigation projects.

Indigenous American peoples Summary

Indigenous American peoples, any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Inuit, Yupik/Yupiit, and Unangan (Aleuts) are sometimes excluded from this category, because their closest genetic and cultural relations were and are with other Arctic peoples rather than with the groups to their

Rocky Mountains Summary

Rocky Mountains, mountain range forming the cordilleran backbone of the great upland system that dominates the western North American continent. Generally, the ranges included in the Rockies stretch from northern Alberta and British Columbia southward to New Mexico, a distance of some 3,000 miles

cultural anthropology Summary

Cultural anthropology, a major division of anthropology that deals with the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.

Figure 1: Photogrammetric photographs from two short, overlapping flight strips arranged for supplying mapping details. Photo-control points are shown on only one photograph; shading indicates a typical terrain feature such as a lake (see text).

surveying Summary

Surveying, a means of making relatively large-scale, accurate measurements of the Earth’s surfaces. It includes the determination of the measurement data, the reduction and interpretation of the data to usable form, and, conversely, the establishment of relative position and size according to given