Thomas Wilson

Thomas Wilson (1832–1902) was an American lawyer, diplomat and archaeologist who became curator of prehistoric anthropology at the United States National Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1887. After serving as a Union officer in the Civil War and as American consul in Belgium and France, where he studied European prehistory, he devoted his later years to the museum's collections of stone implements and to comparing the prehistoric arts of the Old and New Worlds. The Swastika, the Earliest Known Symbol, and Its Migration (1896), published in the Smithsonian's annual report, was his most widely read monograph.