The Moundville Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore: Clarence Bloomfield Moore

By Clarence Bloomfield Moore

The two works reprinted in this volume represent the pinnacle of the career of one of the most remarkable American archaeologists of the early 20th century, Clarence Bloomfield Moore.

Moore's Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Black Warrior River (1905) and Moundville Revisited (1907) brought the Moundville site in Alabama to the attention of the scholarly world in dramatic fashion by offering a splendid photographic display and expert commentary on its artifactual richness. Moore was the leading southeastern specialist of his day and the most prolific excavator of southern sites during the early part of the 20th century. Today Moore gives the impression of having been everywhere, having excavated everything, and having published on all of it. Moundville Expeditions contains facsimile reprints of these two classic works, along with a new scholarly introduction by one of the leading authorities on the Moundville archaeological site. Once again these rare materials on Moundville are available both for scholars and for a general audience.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 1996
• ISBN: 9780817384975

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Revisited

Preface

The notion to reprint the classic Moore volumes on southeastern archaeology has been, without doubt, lurking just beneath the surface for some time. How could it not? After nearly a century the originals are now scarce and expensive, if copies can be found at all. So it has gradually occurred to some—I first heard it mentioned by Jerald Milanich—that a republication would help to bring a new generation of enthusiasts of southeastern prehistoric art and archaeology face to face with Moore’s fascinating and lavishly illustrated works.

About forty years ago, Professor Stephen Williams tells us, a remaindered stock of Moore volumes could still be had free of charge from the publisher, the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Philadelphia. And more recently, during my own college years in the early 1970s, there were second-hand copies yet to be had, even within reach of a student. A favored source was the venerable Mrs. Lazarus at the Fort Walton Indian Mound Museum. Heaven only knows where she got them, but she managed to find copies of Moore volumes, which she would part with for 25 or 35 dollars. Several of my fellow students—those really intent on building up their libraries—picked up individual issues or even sets in this manner. As attractive as it seemed, however, this cost was still almost half a week’s take home pay at the time, and I did not take advantage. Over the ensuing years these same volumes have become truly scarce among book dealers, and the prices have soared commensurately. Now, after all, it appears that I may yet see the day when a set of Moore volumes graces my personal library.

At the 1992 Executive Committee meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, Treasurer Jay Johnson suggested expanding the publications program of the Conference to include reprints of classic, out-of-print works. President Vincas Steponaitis appointed Patricia Galloway and Kenneth Sassaman to a committee to look into this matter and to collect suggestions about worthy projects. By the following year consensus had converged to make Clarence B. Moore’s two Moundville volumes the initial venture. This decision dovetailed nicely with plans by The University of Alabama Press to inaugurate a new series of Classics in Southeastern Archaeology, leading to a cooperative agreement between SEAC and the Press. I was pleased to be asked to edit this first reprint edition and to write its introductory essay.

Now the Press plans are to reissue other of Moore’s works, so scholars have been contacted about preparing introductions to these. This is gratifying news; the sites and the artifacts photographed so expertly by Moore are about to come alive again. As many times as I have consulted Moore’s works, each time I invariably notice something new, some detail previously missed, and now many more can share in the delight of turning these pages. And, as I point out in the essay that opens the present volume, it is my hope that this effort will turn more attention to Clarence Bloomfield Moore himself and to his career as an early practitioner of archaeology.

For this edition the publisher and I have decided to preserve Moore’s original indexes. The page numbers in those indexes refer to numbers in the original running heads, maintained in this edition.

We have added running feet and folios that run consecutively from the first page of the introduction to the last page of the index. This arrangement represents an editorial decision that we hope will enhance the usefulness of the volume.

Introduction The Expeditions of Clarence B. Moore to Moundville in 1905 and 1906

Vernon James Knight, Jr.

The two works reprinted in this volume represent the pinnacle of the career of one of the most remarkable American archaeologists of the early twentieth century. Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Black Warrior River and Moundville Revisited brought the Moundville site in Alabama to the attention of the scholarly world in dramatic fashion, by offering a splendid photographic display and expert commentary on its artifactual richness. The author, Clarence Bloomfield Moore, was the leading southeastern specialist of his day and certainly the most prolific excavator of southern sites during the early years of the twentieth century. Today, Moore gives the impression of having been everywhere, having excavated everything, and having published on all of it.

BACKGROUND

Like many other natural scientists coming out of the Victorian era, Clarence Moore seems to have lived several lives—adventurer, paper company executive, archaeologist—yet he is now remembered only in the latter role. Despite his public accomplishments he is a very hard man to pin down. No real biography exists. It is entirely symptomatic of the situation that we do not even possess a likeness of Moore made during his long career in archaeology. All we have is the graduation photograph from his college yearbook (Figure 1), which merely shows a meticulously groomed college student with an incipient mustache. His appearance must have been very different thirty-three years later, when, as a seasoned researcher, he labored at Moundville.

Regarding his background we do know the following (Brigham 1936; Wardle 1956). He was born in Philadelphia in 1852 to Bloomfield H. and Clara (Jessup) Moore. The fruits of the Industrial Revolution left him a sizable inheritance at the death of his father, and in 1879, at the age of twenty-seven, Clarence ascended to the presidency of the Jessup and Moore Paper Company, a position he held for twenty years. Nevertheless the seeds of restlessness that would later carry him, in the mode of a big game hunter in search of trophies, to practically every accessible major archaeological site on every navigable waterway in every part of the South, were already sown.

His father’s demise apparently coincided with his graduation from Harvard, and he used the windfall of an inheritance in combination with his personal savings to embark immediately upon a tour of the world. He spent the next six years alternately living the life of a Philadelphia socialite and traveling, first through Europe, thence to Central America, from there to Lima and across the Andes on foot and horseback, and down the headwaters of the Amazon on a raft. A subsequent world tour found him primarily in Asia, but he seems to have lost some of his enthusiasm for this lifestyle as a result of a permanent eye injury caused by a tennis ball, an accident inflicted while he was on safari.

Even as Moore settled down into the relatively sedentary life of a paper company executive, his mind was obviously on more tropical climates. In 1891, at the age of thirty-nine—and for reasons that are unclear—he adopted archaeology as a serious vocation, making the first of his well-organized expeditions to investigate the shell mounds of the St. Johns River in Florida. These shell mounds had been previously explored by Jeffries Wyman, the first curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Regarding Moore’s source of inspiration for this plunge into the field of southeastern archaeology, Robert Murowchick (1990:64) points out that Moore had wintered in Florida as early as 1873, and that, within a year of graduating from college, he was already making observations on the shell mounds of the St. Johns. Murowchick raises the intriguing possibility that Moore had come into contact with Professor Wyman and may actually have been working with the senior scientist on one or more of his expeditions. There is no direct proof of this possibility, unfortunately, but the timing is right, and such an exposure would make sense of Moore’s choice of an initial topic for his archaeological work. Moore’s first publications of his results were in the journal American Naturalist, the same forum in which Wyman had published his own initial research on the Florida shell mounds. Stephen Williams points out that Moore’s early career was also strongly influenced by Frederic W. Putnam, who succeeded Wyman as curator of the Peabody Museum and who was the editor of the American Naturalist.¹ From 1891 onward, Clarence Moore found the time to organize annual forays into southeastern archaeology, gradually expanding out of Florida into adjacent states. He finally retired as president of Jessup and Moore in 1899, an event, one must imagine, that was a relief to the remainder of the managerial staff of that business. Afterward he would devote his full energies to archaeological research.

At the time of Clarence Moore’s first exploration of Moundville, in the spring of 1905, he was nearing the end of his fifteenth consecutive field season in southeastern archaeology. His customary methods of operation and logistics had been long since worked out in earlier years and were by now routine. His headquarters was the Gopher of Philadelphia, a sternwheel work boat, upon which lived thirteen trained excavators and five supervisors (Figure 2).² Its captain was J. S. Raybon of Tampa, who also played the role of advance scout, patrolling the rivers in the off season in a small boat, stopping at every landing to inquire about Indian sites, and acquiring the names and addresses of landowners so that Moore could get advance permissions to excavate. Moore was accompanied by Dr. Milo G. Miller, a friend and secretary who also served as osteological consultant in the excavation of human burials. This crew was supplemented as needed by local laborers hired to do simple chores like excavating trial holes and backfilling.

Field seasons aboard the Gopher typically began in late fall and lasted through the spring, after which Moore would return to Philadelphia by rail with notes and artifacts. His sponsoring institution in that city was the Academy of Natural Sciences, with which he was under contract. The Academy displayed Moore’s southeastern collections in its archaeological hall and published his findings in its Journal at his personal expense. On the Academy’s curatorial staff in the Department of Archaeology was Moore’s steadfast booster and champion, Miss Harriet Newell Wardle, who would play a role in the publicizing of the Moundville discoveries. During the summer Moore would restore, study, and photograph the specimens from the current season, would prepare the results for prompt publication in the fall, and would make preparations for the next expedition. This cycle was repeated with only minor deviations over a period lasting more than a quarter of a century, until 1918.

In 1905 Moore was already a well-known figure in American archaeology and an acknowledged authority on the southeastern states. Besides the reports published by the Academy, in the previous two years Moore had published four papers on special topics in the American Anthropologist. Moore’s ultimate goal was to assemble distributional data on prehistoric earthworks, burial customs, and artifacts from sites on every southern waterway accessible to the Gopher, and in 1905 he was well on his way toward fulfilling it. He explicitly conceived of this goal as a single life project, and, as such, it was easily the most ambitious archaeological project then underway in Eastern North America.

THE 1905 AND 1906 EXCAVATIONS AT MOUNDVILLE

Although Moore had made prior arrangements with the landowners, evidence indicates that Moundville caught him somewhat off guard. By all appearances he failed to anticipate a project of the size and complexity necessary to do justice to the site. The initial excavations came at the very end of the 1905 field season, at a time when ordinarily he would have been wrapping things up, as his activities began to come into conflict with the spring plowing of the river plantations. It was now the middle of March, and Moore had been aboard the Gopher since just after Christmas.

To set the stage we must backtrack a bit. Some years earlier Moore had completed the survey of the Upper Tombigbee and the Alabama River up to the head of navigation (Moore 1899, 1901), so in the Alabama area he needed to cover Mississippi Sound, the Lower Tombigbee, and the Black Warrior River. He would fill in these gaps in that order, arriving by rail at Mobile and setting out with the Gopher crew on December 29, 1904. The survey of Mississippi Sound, with a few exceptions, was a disappointment by Moore’s standards. Finishing this portion of the season, the archaeologist hired on a local river pilot to assist Captain Raybon and steamed up the Mobile River on February 6, 1905, beginning the survey of the Lower Tombigbee. By March 14, on his arrival at Demopolis, this segment was complete, and the survey of the Black Warrior River could begin. Rather than going directly to Moundville, Moore surveyed the Black Warrior sites from south to north according to the prearranged plan. He visited Moundville and explored it in its turn before resuming the trip north as far as Tuscaloosa.

The Gopher arrived at Prince’s Landing near the town of Moundville on March 17, 1905.³ Instead of stopping there, Moore had the steamer tied up a few hundred yards beyond, on the cut bank of Hemphill Bend just opposite Mound C. This stop was fortuitous because Moore was to spend a great deal of his time this first season in the exploration of that particular mound. He began work the next day and departed Moundville only thirty-four days later with a large collection of artifacts and documentation.

If Moundville did take Moore by surprise, doing perhaps some violence to his overall survey strategy by the inordinate time and labor it required to explore the site, part of the problem, certainly, was the profound lack of previously published information concerning the site. Moundville is mentioned in Pickett’s History of Alabama (1851), a volume with which Moore was familiar, but for some reason it was overlooked in Cyrus Thomas’s comprehensive study, Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894), despite the fact that one of Thomas’s agents did visit and prepare a sketch map of the site in 1882 (Steponaitis 1983:133–137). Only a few Moundville specimens resided in museums or prominent collections, acquired by Thomas, Frederic W. Putnam, Gates P. Thruston, and Eugene A. Smith. An illustration of the so-called rattlesnake disk, a sandstone paint palette photographed by Moore during a visit to the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa, had been previously published by William H. Holmes (1883:278), but Holmes had doubted its authenticity.

There was no published site map, and it fell to Dr. Miller to prepare one. This map is reproduced in both of Moore’s reports. Miller counted 22 mounds on the adjoining cotton plantations of Hardy Clements and C. S. Prince, straddling the boundary between Hale and Tuscaloosa counties. Miller’s map is remarkable in its accuracy, and it is superior to a number of topographic surveys made decades later. The map is still useful today, particularly as a record of mound ramps that are no longer visible. Although Moore’s text does not mention it, the exactness of the map’s positioning and proportioning of the earthworks and their surroundings is sufficient proof that its preparation was instrument assisted. It seems to have been Dr. Miller who assigned to the mounds the letter designations that are still in use today, and Moore adapted these designations to his field notes as the excavations progressed.⁴

According to the field notes, the 1905 work began at the mound nearest [the] boat, soon to be named Mound C. Moore’s first notation, In search of cemeteries, plainly states his main objective. Gradually he expanded the work to other areas, primarily mound summits but including some off-mound areas as well. The chief limitation was that the planting season was underway, and the digging represented a nuisance to the landowners. While the Gopher crew labored on Mound C and other projects requiring a trained crew, Moore hired extra local laborers to excavate trial holes, and to backfill finished excavations. Trial holes were test excavations of uniform size, all dug to a standard depth of 4 feet. Recent archaeological work in Mounds Q and E have rediscovered several of Moore’s trial holes, some of which are shown in Figures 3 and 4. They are indeed as uniform as Moore states, with straight profile walls, which would have allowed a clear view of the soil stratigraphy, and flat bottoms. Moore’s field notes comment on the effectiveness of the trial hole strategy for locating promising areas for further excavation, even where the trial holes themselves produced few