Otis Tufton Mason

Otis Tufton Mason (1838 to 1908) was an American ethnologist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution, born in Eastport, Maine. He graduated from Columbian University in 1861 and worked there for 23 years as principal of its preparatory school, while becoming a collaborator in ethnology at the United States National Museum in 1872 and its full time curator in 1884. In 1879 he was one of the founders of the Anthropological Society of Washington and wrote its constitution. As part of his curatorial work he developed the culture area concept, and in 1893 he oversaw, with Frederic Ward Putnam and Sol Bloom, the cultural and anthropological display of the Midway Plaisance at the World's Columbian Exposition. He believed in Gustav Klemm's step-wise evolution of cultures and treated technology as a marker of a culture's stage of development. His publications include Woman's Share in Primitive Culture (1894), The Origins of Invention (1895) and a study of aboriginal American basketry (1904). He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1899.