Warren K. Moorehead

Warren King Moorehead
1898
Born	(1866-03-10)March 10, 1866 Siena
Died	January 5, 1939(1939-01-05) (aged 72) Xenia, Ohio
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Warren King Moorehead was known in his time as the 'Dean of

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 "

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

Some of the field work Moorehead did for Putnam resulted in the

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

Illness and recovery

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

Moorehead worked at the Cahokia site between 1921-1927. Cahokia is now a

In the 1920s Moorehead excavated the Von Mach Site on the property of Edmund von Mach in Brooksville, Maine. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 17, 1989.

Etowah

Moorehead began excavation at the

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" ([2]), 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]

Publications

• Moorehead, Warren K (1891). World's Columbian Exposition Expedition to Southern Ohio. Field Museum of Natural History.
• Moorehead, Warren K (1895). The Examination of Fort Ancient, Ohio. Field Museum of Natural History.
• Moorehead, Warren K (1900). Prehistoric Implements - A Reference Book.
  The Robert Clarke Company
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• Moorehead, Warren K (1931). Archaeology of the Arkansas River Valley. Yale University Press.

References