Warren King Moorehead was known in his time as the 'Dean of American archaeology'; born in Siena, Italy to missionary parents on March 10, 1866, he died on January 5, 1939, at the age of 72, and is buried in his hometown of Xenia, Ohio.
Moorehead is credited with excavating more ancient earthworks than all archaeologists before and after him.[1] Due to Moorehead's primary focus on artifact recovery in his early career, his often careless documentation of excavated sites, and the fact that he lost many of his own important field notes (including those from 1891 at the Hopewell Site), Moorehead is often remembered as a destructive force among modern archaeologists.[2][3] That said, Moorehead was influential in the preservation of some historical sites such as Fort Ancient.[4]
Early life
His mother died when he was quite young, and while his father remarried and became head of a Presbyterian seminary in Xenia, Ohio, his travels for keeping that institution open left young Warren and his sister in the care of two aunts, who are recalled vividly in Helen Hooven Santmyer's non-fictional "Ohio Town" and the novel "And Ladies of the Club."
Their brother, Moorehead's grandfather, was Joseph Warren King, whose wealth from the King's Powder Mills fortune rooted in the American Civil War became both an opportunity and a curse for the fledgeling archaeologist. Digging about in the earth and soil was considered beneath a refined family, and for much of his life Warren King Moorehead was pressured to enter the family business.[5] Parts of the 19th century infrastructure remain in the Little Miami River Valley near Kings Mills, Ohio, a near- ghost town next to the Peters Cartridge Company once the King's Powder Mills, desolate except for the now more famous neighbor named after it, "Kings Island," the Cincinnati area amusement park.
Education
Moorehead attended Denison University, near Moorehead family interests in Muskingum County (from which is descended his collateral relation, actress Agnes Moorehead). By 1887 Moorehead left without graduating, and his relationship with academic archaeology was complicated throughout his life, adding to the speedy dismissal of Moorehead's work after his death by most of professional archaeology.
Excavations and collections begun as a schoolboy continued through self-financed work taking him to a display of his own at the 1888 Cincinnati Centennial Exposition, and contact with Dr. Thomas Wilson of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Wilson encouraged and possibly helped Moorehead to enter the University of Pennsylvania for study under the famous Dr. Edward Drinker Cope, but opportunities to lecture and write for publication led Warren away from class work. His publication of the novel "Wanneta, The Sioux," in 1890 led to a lecture tour and opportunities to write for a larger audience than just his professors.
The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
A contract to write for a national magazine about the "Ghost Dance" phenomenon on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation put Moorehead on the scene for the critical weeks leading up to what is now known as the Wounded Knee Massacre of Dec. 29, 1890. Moorehead was not present, though his camera was used by journalists who were still on the scene to record the horrific aftermath; Gen. John Rutter Brooke ordered Moorehead off the reservation under armed military escort on Dec. 28, according to Moorehead's journal because he was the only reporter present who spoke some of the language and was permitted to stay overnight with the Sioux in their encampments.
1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago
After a frustrating period trying to influence legislators to give justice to the Sioux and publish his account of events leading up to the massacre, Moorehead returned to Ohio and found a position developing the state display for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago World's Fair), which led him to work with Frederic Ward Putnam, the Harvard professor who began the academic field of archaeology in the United States.
Some of the field work Moorehead did for Putnam resulted in the Hopewell culture "type site", now Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, near Chillicothe, Ohio, setting the parameters for the study of Native American Mound Builders of the Ohio River valley around 2000 years ago. This interest went back to his high school days at Fort Ancient, just up the Little Miami River from his grandfather's King's Mills. This work also went into the World's Fair display, became a published volume for Moorehead, and caught the attention of the organizers of the Ohio Historical & Archaeological Society (now the Ohio Historical Society) which was just begun in 1885. Regrettably, Moorehead's destruction and lack of documentation regarding the Hopewell Type Site (and many of his other sites) has left many archaeological questions unable to be answered [6][7][2] For example, when Moorehead encountered Mound 25 of the Hopewell Mound Group, he observed that the mound had rocks and boulders making two large panther effigies. Regardless of such observation, he did not document these findings in a systematic way and proceeded to nearly level the mound.[6][8]
Efforts to have Fort Ancient purchased and cared for by the state were spurred by Moorehead's publications on that site[9] and other Ohio cultural marvels. The Ohio General Assembly voted to purchase Fort Ancient based on Moorehead's work.[10]
Curator of Archaeology
When the 1893 WCE ended, and a hoped for faculty position with the new college on the site (soon to be the University of Chicago) did not work out quickly, Moorehead accepted the position as what would be the first curator of archaeology for the OAHS. With the support of President Orton of Ohio State University, a museum was established in what is now Orton Hall on the OSU Oval, and Moorehead was made a professor of archaeology at OSU, the only part of his work that was paid. OAHS, with little money from the state and sites already to manage (Fort Ancient, and Serpent Mound which had been purchased by Dr. Putnam with money raised at society teas in Newport, RI, but now a local obligation to manage), encouraged Moorehead to pay for his travel and speaking and research by selling duplicate artifacts. This process would today not only be discouraged but is now both unethical and illegal; the 1890s found it unremarkable.
With the aunts refusing to release any money for "that dirty work," Moorehead launched into an ambitious plan to create an atlas of Ohio mounds and earthworks, which he saw eroding and destroyed wherever he went across the Midwest, and even in forays into the American southwest, becoming one of the first surveyors of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.
Illness and recovery
Tuberculosis was nearly always fatal in Moorehead's day, and when he was clearly diagnosed with the disease, a second trip to the desert southwest became part of what turned into a permanent leave from OAHS after 1898. (His assistant, William Corless Mills, completed what is now known as the Mills Atlas of 1904, but Moorehead laid out much of the material that is in the volume.) Finding no relief in the southwest, he returned to meet with Robert Singleton Peabody at his home near Philadelphia, a wealthy descendant of George Peabody, trader and philanthropist, who collected pottery and baskets from Indigenous cultures throughout the New World.
Peabody, seeing how ill Moorehead had become, generously offered a season of treatment at Saranac Lake, New York, the famous tuberculosis sanitarium where just a few years earlier Robert Louis Stevenson had sought relief. The season turned into almost three years, and due to blood loss and anemia Moorehead's wife Evelyn Ludwig (of Circleville, Ohio) and their son Ludwig King Moorehead were told repeatedly to prepare for Warren's death, through 1899 to 1901.
Rebirth
With the dawn of a new century, Warren King Moorehead began almost literally a new life in 1901. Moorehead was based at the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, from 1901-1938. He and Evelyn had a second son, Singleton Peabody Moorehead, who would become a key architect with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and is buried on the grounds of Bruton Parish Church there. With Peabody's influence and money, a museum and program was established at Phillips Andover Academy, with the dedication program including a fellowship from the Peabody-established Victoria Institute and the award of an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College (also a recipient of significant Peabody largesse). He was also Curator of the University Museum of Ohio State University (1894–1897), worked at archaeological sites along the Ohio River, and at Chaco Canyon and up into Mesa Verde. As head of the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Andover, Massachusetts from 1902 to 1920, Moorehead launched into a program of research and publication that went on to include the Red Paint People of the Atlantic coast, Cahokia Mounds in Illinois from 1921, and Etowah Indian Mounds in Georgia from 1925. His approach was not without detractors. In 1923, the fledgling Central Section of the American Anthropological Association sent him a rebuke concerning a flyer he had distributed which had laid out a manner in which collectors of artifacts could cooperate with him or other archaeologists.[11]
Moorehead worked at the Cahokia site between 1921-1927. Cahokia is now a UNESCOWorld Heritage Site. He was instrumental in getting the State of Illinois to buy a portion of the Cahokia site in order to create a state park. From 1927 to 1939 he worked on sites in the Illinois River Valley. Major collections from Cahokia are at the Illinois State Museum and the University of Illinois ().
Moorehead began excavation at the Etowah mounds site in Georgia during the winter of 1925. His work lasted four winter seasons, conducting excavations on Mound C and the surrounding village area. Moorehead's work on Mound C led to the discovery of a rich array of Mississippian culture goods. While working on Mound C, Moorehead also worked a small amount on Mounds A and B, but his excavation was object-oriented and ceased soon after no exotic goods were encountered. The Etowah Papers, Moorehead's report, were published in 1932. Moorehead found several Mississippian copper plates decorated by human dancers wearing eagle paraphernalia. The site is culturally affiliated with and protected by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, currently owned by the state of Georgia, and has been considered a protected National Historic Landmark since 1965.
The Spirit of Wounded Knee
He was named by President Theodore Roosevelt a member of the board of commissioners for the Bureau of Indian Affairs with the Department of Interior in 1909, and his work on behalf of Indian Land Claims, exposing fraudulent Indian agents, and seeking better health care on reservations probably made many Washington bureaucrats feel the same way Gen. Brooke did in 1890. After many attempts to remove him and silence the commission, especially after his leadership of the White Earth Indian Reservation hearings on injustices following the Dawes Act and Moorehead's book "The American Indian in the United States, Period 1850-1914" (), the Great Depression was used as pretext to dissolve the commission in 1933, after almost 25 years of service by Moorehead.
Death and legacy
With many honors and published volumes to his credit, and a thriving and vital field of research and informed speculation well established, Moorehead died in 1939 and was buried near his parents, grandfather, and aunts in Xenia. The family home is now the heart of the Greene County Historical Society; where portraits of his father William and grandfather Joseph are on prominent display. Little is known there, however, about Warren; their papers include a reminiscence from a contemporary on Moorehead's death calling him, from their childhood together, "a born archaeologist." By the time of his death, he had come to be known as the dean of American archaeology.[11] His obituary in the American Anthropologist noted his abhorrence to what he perceived as a growing "aloofness" of some of his "scientific colleagues" in the field of archaeology.[12]
Today, Moorehead is often considered a "pillager" within the field of archaeology.[13] In his early career, Moorehead typically used horses and scrapers to quickly remove dirt layers from ancient mounds, often obliterating important historical sites, working quickly recover artifacts during a brief summer season ranging across the state.[13] While he improved his methodology throughout his career, his youthful work in Ohio left a mark on his reputation that has stuck; the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society quarterly reports he filed in the 1890s included indelible photographs of mounds being razed with the heavy equipment of that day. What is often overlooked is that in the narrative, Moorehead would encounter mounds already being taken down by county road crews and construction laborers, and would negotiate to allow an interval of investigation in the middle of the demolition before the project was completed. In his work after 1900, he and his field workers used the archaeological techniques then becoming standard in excavations.[14]
Also damaging to Moorehead's modern reputation was his support of the amateur and collector communities throughout his career. He believed that collection of artifacts was not necessarily a bad thing, and promoted good relations between professional archaeologists and collectors to the end of his life.[15] But even in his younger days, Moorehead recorded in his diary personal regrets over past practices, and his hopes to be able to do better work in the future.[5]
The Hopewell tradition, also called the Hopewell culture and Hopewellian exchange, describes a network of precontact Native American cultures that flourished in settlements along rivers in the northeastern and midwestern Eastern Woodlands from 500 CE to 100 BCE, in the Middle Woodland period. The Hopewell tradition was not a single culture or society but a widely dispersed set of populations connected by a common network of trade routes.
Etowah Indian Mounds (9BR1) are a 54-acre (220,000 m2) archaeological site in Bartow County, Georgia, south of Cartersville. Built and occupied in three phases, from 1000–1550 CE, the prehistoric site is located on the north shore of the Etowah River.
The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,348-feet-long (411 m), three-feet-high prehistoric effigy mound located in Peebles, Ohio. It was built on what is known as the Serpent Mound crater plateau, running along the Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. The mound is the largest serpent effigy known in the world.
In archaeology, timber circles are rings of upright wooden posts, built mainly by ancient peoples in the British Isles and North America. They survive only as gapped rings of post-holes, with no evidence they formed walls, making them distinct from palisades. Like stone circles, it is believed their purpose was ritual, ceremonial, and/or astronomical.
A number of pre-Columbian cultures in North America were collectively termed "Mound Builders", but the term has no formal meaning. It does not refer to a specific people or archaeological culture, but refers to the characteristic mound earthworks which indigenous peoples erected for an extended period of more than 5,000 years. The "Mound Builder" cultures span the period of roughly 3500 BCE to the 16th century CE, including the Archaic period, Woodland period, and Mississippian period. Geographically, the cultures were present in the region of the Great Lakes, the Ohio River Valley, and the Mississippi River Valley and its tributary waters.
Lake Jackson Mounds Archaeological State Park (8LE1) is one of the most important archaeological sites in Florida, the capital of chiefdom and ceremonial center of the Fort Walton Culture inhabited from 1050–1500. The complex originally included seven earthwork mounds, a public plaza and numerous individual village residences.
Hopewell Culture National Historical Park is a United States national historical park with earthworks and burial mounds from the Hopewell culture, indigenous peoples who flourished from about 200 BC to AD 500. The park is composed of four separate sites open to the public in Ross County, Ohio, including the former Mound City Group National Monument. The park includes archaeological resources of the Hopewell culture. It is administered by the United States Department of the Interior's National Park Service.
Spiro Mounds is an archaeological site located in present-day eastern Oklahoma that remains from an indigenous Indian culture that was part of the major northern Caddoan Mississippian culture. The 80-acre site is located within a floodplain on the southern side of the Arkansas River. The modern town of Spiro developed approximately seven miles to the south.
Glenn Albert Black was an American archaeologist, author, and part-time university lecturer who was among the first professional archaeologists to study prehistoric sites in Indiana continuously. Black, a pioneer and innovator in developing archaeology field research techniques, is best known for his excavation of Angel Mounds, a Mississippian community near present-day Evansville, Indiana, that he brought to national attention. Angel Mounds was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. Black was largely self-taught and began serious work on archaeological sites in Indiana in the 1930s, before there were many training opportunities in archaeology in the United States. He is considered to have been the first full-time professional archaeologist focusing on Indiana's ancient history, and the only professional archaeologist in the state until the 1960s. During his thirty-five-year career as an archaeologist in Indiana, Black also worked as a part-time lecturer at Indiana University Bloomington from 1944 to 1960 and conducted a field school at the Angel site during the summer months.
Moorehead Circle was a triple woodhenge constructed about two millennia ago at the Fort Ancient Earthworks in the U.S. state of Ohio.
Timothy R. Pauketat is an American archaeologist, director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, the Illinois State Archaeologist, and professor of anthropology and medieval studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is known for his historical theories and his investigations at Cahokia, the major center of precolonial Mississippian culture in the American Bottom region of Illinois near St. Louis, Missouri.
The archaeology of Iowa is the study of the buried remains of human culture within the U.S. state of Iowa from the earliest prehistoric through the late historic periods. When the American Indians first arrived in what is now Iowa more than 13,000 years ago, they were hunters and gatherers living in a Pleistocene glacial landscape. By the time European explorers visited Iowa, American Indians were largely settled farmers with complex economic, social, and political systems. This transformation happened gradually. During the Archaic period American Indians adapted to local environments and ecosystems, slowly becoming more sedentary as populations increased. More than 3,000 years ago, during the Late Archaic period, American Indians in Iowa began utilizing domesticated plants. The subsequent Woodland period saw an increase on the reliance on agriculture and social complexity, with increased use of mounds, ceramics, and specialized subsistence. During the Late Prehistoric period increased use of maize and social changes led to social flourishing and nucleated settlements. The arrival of European trade goods and diseases in the Protohistoric period led to dramatic population shifts and economic and social upheaval, with the arrival of new tribes and early European explorers and traders. During the Historical period European traders and American Indians in Iowa gave way to American settlers and Iowa was transformed into an agricultural state.
The Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, formerly known as the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, is a learning center and archaeological collection in Andover, Massachusetts. Founded in 1901 through a bequest from Robert Singleton Peabody, 1857 Phillips Academy alumnus, the institute initially held the archaeological materials collected by Peabody from Native American cultures. Peabody's passionate interest in archaeology led him to create the institute at Phillips Academy to encourage young people's interest in the sciences, and to foster respect and appreciation for the Native American peoples who have inhabited that hemisphere for thousands of years.
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The Etowah plates, including the Rogan Plates, are a collection of Mississippian copper plates discovered in Mound C at the Etowah Indian Mounds near Cartersville, Georgia. Many of the plates display iconography that archaeologists have classified as part of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (S.E.C.C.), specifically "Birdman" imagery associated with warriors and the priestly elite. The plates are a combination of foreign imports and local items manufactured in emulation of the imported style. The designs of the Rogan plates are in the Classic Braden style from the American Bottom area. It is generally thought that some of the plates were manufactured at Cahokia before ending up at sites in the Southeast.
Mississippian copper plates, or plaques, are plain and repousséd plates of beaten copper crafted by peoples of the various regional expressions of the Mississippian culture between 800 and 1600 CE. They have been found as artifacts in archaeological sites in the American Midwest and Southeast. The plates, found as far afield as Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, were instrumental in the development of the archaeological concept known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Some of the more notable examples are representations of raptorial birds and avian-themed dancing warriors.
Mound 34 is a small platform mound located roughly 400 metres (1,300 ft) to the east of Monks Mound at Cahokia Mounds near Collinsville, Illinois. Excavations near Mound 34 from 2002 to 2010 revealed the remains of a copper workshop, although the one of a kind discovery had been previously found in the late 1950s by archaeologist Gregory Perino, but lost for 60 years. It is so far the only remains of a copper workshop found at a Mississippian culture archaeological site.
The Stubbs Earthworks was a massive Ohio Hopewell culture archaeological site located in Morrow in Warren County, Ohio.
The Shriver Circle Earthworks are an Ohio Hopewell culture archaeological site located in Chillicothe in Ross County, Ohio. At 1,200 feet (370 m) in diameter the site is one of the largest Hopewell circular enclosures in the state of Ohio.
References
↑ Converse, Robert (2003). The archaeology of Ohio. The Archaeological Society of Ohio. p.259. ISBN0-9744311-0-9.
↑ Prufer, Olaf H. (1997). Fort Hill 1964: New data and reflections on Hopewell Hilltop Enclosures in Southern Ohio. In: Ohio Hopewell community organization. Kent University Press. p.315. ISBN0-87338-561-6.
↑ Moorehead, Warren K. Fort Ancient, an Outline Description Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 1891. 3:312-315.
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