The Hopewell Site: A Contemporary Analysis Based on the Work of Charles C. Willoughby

Abstract

This book is the result of a fruitful dialogue between the living, the recently dead, and the long dead. centerpiece is a manuscript on the Hopewell site written by Charles C. Willoughby in 1892-1894. This document provides the only sane and coherent description of work done at the site by Warren King Moorehead in 18911892, and it comprises Willoughby's descriptions, drawings, and experimental replications of the artifacts recovered during that campaign. former parts were incorporated, with-as Greber and Ruhl point out-few thanks and no quotation marks, in Moorehead's report of his work, written three decades after the fact (Moorehead 1922). Willoughby's replications of Hopewell artifacts and many of his drawings of objects recovered by Moorehead have not been published previously. Moorehead made free, and only marginally acknowledged, use of a number of these drawings in his report, and Willoughby incorporated several more in his articles, most notably The Art of the Great Earthwork Builders of (Willoughby 1916). value of this publication is not merely the reproduction of an important manuscript that slid undeservedly into obscurity. Greber's knowledge of Hopewell archaeology and Ruhl's technical understanding of their material life adds substantial value. They place Willoughby's work and Moorehead's spoliation in the context of earlier (Squier and Davis 1848) and later (Shetrone 1926) excavations at the Hopewell site, and situate the whole firmly within modern Middle Woodland studies so ably undertaken by Greber and her colleagues at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Ohio Historical Society-a tradition best exemplified by the papers given at the Chillicothe Conference in 1978 (Brose and Greber 1979). They also locate Willoughby's experimental studies within modern material culture studies and experimental archaeology. C. C. Willoughby (1857-1943) was a craftsman, artist, and avocational archaeologist who was lured from a bucolic but seemingly lucrative life as proprietor of an art store in Augusta, Maine, by Frederick Ward Putnam of the Harvard Peabody Museum (Hooten 1943). Putnam recruited Willoughby to be an assistant in the Department of Anthropology at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. Moorehead, for his part, led one of the many teams of archaeologists Putnam had set loose to scour the New World for artifacts suitable for inclusion in the anthropology exhibits at the Exposition-materials which later became an important part of the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History. Willoughby took on the materials from the Hopewell site, and worked with them well into 1894, after the Columbian Exposition had closed and they were being transferred to the Field Museum. Thereafter, Willoughby joined the Harvard Peabody Museum as chief assistant; after several promotions he became its Director (1915-1928). Working with Moorehead's notes and collections from the Hopewell site must have tried Willoughby's patience and good humor on more than one occasion. Almost 50 years later, Glenn A. Black, in a letter to Eli Lilly, noted, on the basis of firsthand experience, that Moorehead's data are . .. not always too reliable. His inspection of collections was always hastily done and in a highly superficial manner and his notes were not always too clear (Black to Lilly 26 February 1943, Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology archives, Indiana University). Nonetheless, Willoughby made some sense out of Moorehead's field notes, produced detailed observations on several thousand artifacts, and illustrated several hundred of the most important pieces. results of Willoughby's labors, as the title indicated, form the core of this volume. Greber, in turn, sets Willoughby's work in the context of earlier observations made by Squier and Davis (1848: Journal of FieldArchaeologylVol. 17, 1990 345