[2] Fowke was hired by antiquities collector Warren Moorehead in 1889 to study Native American mounds in Ross County, Ohio.
[8] Fowke worked for the Smithsonian Institution, under the Bureau of Ethnology, from 1885 to 1888, studying Native American sites in the eastern United States.
[9] He travelled in Siberia on the Amur River, looking for evidence that East Asians migrated to North America to become Native Americans.
[2] Working for the American Museum of Natural History of New York City,[10] he travelled to Vladivostok in 1898 with fellow researcher Berthold Laufer.
[12] The two researchers later split up, with Fowke continuing to travel the Amur River by canoe, accompanied only by a stranded sailor and a Tungusic native.
From there, he boated on a canoe for 700 miles along the Amur River to the Channel of Tartary, down the coast to the Sea of Okhotsk, then back to Nikolayevsk-on-Amur.
Fowke also worked for the Jefferson Memorial in Saint Louis, setting up a collection there of Native American relics.
[9] In 1926, he studied Native American burial mounds in the present day Marksville State Historic Site in Louisiana.
[13] Fowke spent much of his life studying ancient mounds of rocks and earth, trying to prove the existence of a civilization that pre-dated what we currently understand to be the Native Americans.
His 1902 book Archaeological History of Ohio, which summarized his research, helped to prove that these mounds were indeed made by the Native Americans.