The Hopewell Site

A Contemporary Analysis Based On The Work Of Charles C. Willoughby

N'omi Greber, Katharine C Ruhl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000302233
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about Charles Clark Willoughby's studies on the collection of artifacts and field records from the 1891–1892 excavations at the Hopewell Site that were included in the Field Museum. The engineering achievements seen in the geometric earthworks reflect social energy and commitment.

1
Introduction

Charles Clark Willoughby (1857–1943)

Charles Clark Willoughby was born in Winchendon, Massachusetts. As a young man he moved to Augusta, Maine, where he became the successful owner of an art store. Both of his hobbies at that time provided an excellent background for his later career. He was a woodworker, specializing in marquetry inlays, and as an amateur archaeologist, he excavated in the nearby shell heaps of Maine. The latter activity brought him into contact with Frederick Ward Putnam, director of the Peabody Museum of Harvard, who in 1892 persuaded him to leave his business and become an assistant in the Department of Anthropology at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. This first professional activity in archaeology produced the studies and drawings which form the basis of this volume. The hand and eye of the artist and craftsman are evident in the drawings, in the careful descriptions of the artifacts, and particularly, in the impulse to experiment with replication of the artifacts in order to better understand the way in which they could have been made.

After the close of the Exposition, Willoughby joined the staff of the Peabody Museum and rose to the position of director by 1915, a position he held until 1928. During his retirement, he continued to work with collections and published new studies. His study of fabrics from the Spiro Site in Oklahoma was published posthumously. His bibliography, which is included in the list of references cited in this volume, reflects his long career and wide ranging interests within North American archaeology and ethnology.

His colleague Earnest Hooton remembered him as a “museum and specimen man” devoted to the preservation and growth of the collections, and as an artist whose drawings and scale models enhanced many publications and exhibits (Hooton 1943). He zealously guarded the Peabody collections from the careless and disorganized. For this, all of us who study them today can be grateful.

Department M of the Columbian Exposition 1893

Frederick W. Putnam, as director of the Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, also known as Department M, 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (Flinn 1893), brought together a vast array of people and materials in order to present the new discipline of anthropology to the public. His struggles were many (for examples see Dexter 1966), but the enthusiastic reception of the exhibits, and the founding of a museum (now the Field Museum of Natural History) to permanently house many of the collections brought to Chicago, certainly justified the effort. From 1891 into 1893, in addition to receiving many donated materials for exhibit, Putnam supervised more than four dozen field assistants who directly collected “New World” materials to celebrate the four hundred years of continued contact between the European “Old” and the North American “New” worlds. One of these assistants was Warren K. Moorehead, a native Ohioan, whose excavations and publications on the Fort Ancient Site had brought him to Putnam’s attention. Moorehead was young and enthusiastic. Also, at least in his work at the Hopewell Site, he was frequently willing to promptly share his discoveries with the public but not always inclined towards sufficient attention to details. This latter characteristic, which contrasts so sharply with Willoughby’s personal qualities, led to strained relationships between Putnam and Moorehead. Moorehead received much public praise for his discoveries at the Hopewell Site, and the exposition exhibit won awards.

Fig 1.1 In the Anthropology Exhibits, the World’s Columbian Exposition. Peabody Museum, Harvard University N31842, photographed by Harlan I. Smith.

Fig. 1.1 shows a private photograph taken at the Exposition by Harlan Smith, another of Putnam’s assistants. Smith was apparently taking a photograph of his reconstruction of a grave from the Turner Site, shown in the foreground. The objects from the amazing deposits found within “altars” of the great mound at the Hopewell Site are in the cases in the background. The general melange of this exhibit appears to have been typical of many in the Anthropology Building. The materials recovered from the Hopewell Site under Moorehead’s field supervision do form, from both public and professional viewpoints, one of the most spectacular collections recovered from any archaeological site in the Eastern Woodlands.

Willoughby’s Studies of the 1891–1892 Hopewell Site Collections

The artifacts and field records from the 1891–1892 excavations at the Hopewell Site became part of the Field Museum collections in October 1893, where they are cared for and available for study today. Willoughby apparently worked with the materials from 1892 into 1894. He tabulated field records, edited maps, and commented on catalogue entries. In contrast with several anonymous remarks whose origins and meaning add to interpretative problems in the records, Willoughby signed his comments. He compiled inventories of several artifact categories and completed detailed studies of many specimens. A set of working notes he made during these studies are now preserved in the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology field record archives (see Fig. 1.2). Willoughby translated the substance of these notes into the manuscript which constitutes the sections of this book written by him. In instances where they contain important additional information, we have directly quoted these working notes in our chapter endnotes. The first eighteen pages of Willoughby’s notes, dealing with the copper earspools and the textiles, are missing. The notes are keyed to the drawings which Willoughby made as he studied each artifact, and which illustrate this volume.

Willoughby’s manuscript is a report on the 1891–1892 excavations by the Commission and on his studies and replication of artifacts recovered during those excavations. It is written in longhand with relatively few revisions and some blanks. Some sections are not finished, and simply break off. Although the manuscript is quite readable as it stands, it is clearly not in finished form. In editing it for publication we have followed it as faithfully as possible, thus leaving intact both his ideas and his late nineteenth century writing style. We have made few changes or additions, and these occur largely when Willoughby’s later writings justify them. The manuscript was used as a source for some of his later papers and for Moorehead’s 1922 publication on the Hopewell Site. Many of the original drawings are preserved in the Peabody files, and of these, some are reproduced here for the first time. When Willoughby gave Moorehead permission to use his studies and drawings, it was agreed that the drawings would be returned to Cambridge. These are not now in the Peabody archives, but we have identified them in Moorehead’s 1922 report and Willoughby’s 1916 paper. The relatively few drawings not yet found are identified in parenthesis in the text by figure numbers from Willoughby’s working notes, viz. (CCW fig 153). The high quality of the drawings is evident, and in many ways they provide much more information than an equivalent photograph.

The Intellectual Climate for Willoughby’s Studies

The 1890s were exciting times in North American archaeology. The long standing question of the identity of the “Mound Builders” was at last yielding to efforts, among them Willoughby’s, to provide an answer based on research rather than speculation. Attempts to identify the builders of the impressive earthen mounds and embankments found in many parts of eastern North America west of the Appalachians, had begun at the end of the eighteenth century, and soon generated a stream of written words, which still flows, as the “myths of the Mound Builders” became an interest of the

Fig. 1.2a. Sample, Notes of Charles Willoughby. On file, Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

Fig. 1.2b. Sample, Notes of Charles Willoughby. On file, Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

literate general public, of avocational archaeologists and, as the discipline became established, of professional archaeologists (see for example Baldwin 1871, Silverberg 1968, Willey and Sabloff 1974, Blakeslee 1987). For many different reasons, including racial prejudices and ignorance or misreading of ethnohistoric sources, by the middle of the nineteenth century the major candidate for the “Mound Builders” was a lost race which was believed to have built a great civilization in the valleys of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, particularly the Ohio, and then had been overrun by barbarian relatives of the modern “Indians”. The mythical character of the “lost race” is reflected in its suggested origins which include Atlantis, lost Israelite tribes, etc. Advocates with a more “scientific” bent suggested Mexico (e.g. Squier and Davis 1848). The ancestors of the Eastern Woodland Indians themselves were less commonly put forth as the “Mound Builders” at this time, but by the end of the century the reports on the extensive archaeological and ethnographic field work supported by the Smithsonian, particularly the archaeological reports of Cyrus Thomas, provided data which left no doubts that the mound builders had been Indians. Willoughby’s replication experiments were explicitly designed to prove that the sophisticated and complicated artifacts which were found at the Hopewell Site could have been made with the tools and technologies historically recorded for Native North American peoples, and thus were not recent European imports.

The acceptance of a possibility that the Ohio earthworks had been constructed in post rather than in Precolumbian times and thus could contain modern imports, reflects another major question of the late nineteenth century, which is in fact not settled yet. It was generally agreed by the 1890s that the peopling of the Americas had been accomplished by emigrants from Asia. The timing of these travels was not agreed upon. This question was of particular interest to Putnam, who directed several expeditions in various parts of the country looking for evidence of early human occupations similar to those found by Boucher de Perthe in early geologic strata in Europe.

As we discuss in various sections of this book, the interpretations of archaeological data which appear to be “acceptable” and “reasonable” depend upon some sense of the chronological placement of that data. Professional estimates of the time when the Hopewell Site was occupied have differed by more than a thousand years. Thus, it is obviously important for an understanding of any views presented, to have in mind the time frame used by the writer of these views. From the time of Willoughby’s entry into archaeology until 1926, archaeological interpretations were usually made with an assumption, sometimes unconscious, of either a short few thousand years, or a long ten thousand or more years, for the span of time during which the many different historic and prehistoric Native American cultures waxed, waned, and interacted. In 1926, the long chronology was established when the coexistence of humans and long extinct fauna was documented in a sealed stratum at Folsom, New Mexico. However, the relative ordering of many prehistoric cultures, including Hopewell, was not agreed upon. In the 1950s archaeologists gained a significant new tool from the work of the chemist, W. F. Libbey, who developed techniques for obtaining absolute dates from specimens containing carbon. Using such dates, the Ohio Hopewell era is now placed in time approximately 1500 to 2000 years ago (Griffin 1958, 1967).

Coda

It is unfortunate that, due to a combination of circumstances which are not unique within the history of archaeologists and archaeology, the report prepared by Willoughby was not promptly published and made available as a source of scientific data and inspirations for both scholars and layman interested in the Hopewell culture. During his career Willoughby was well regarded as a specialist in prehistoric technology and in the symbolism of prehistoric art, but the value of his organization and the depth of his understanding of the Hopewell technology evident in this manuscript was probably not fully recognized at that time. Moorehead’s use of the manuscript is disjointed and at times confused. The type of archaeological questions asked of course have changed, as have the technical tools available to aid in answering them. As ethnoarchaeology and replication experiments come back into style, and more recently, studies of the symbolic aspects of artifacts and other cultural remains, it is well to emulate his careful observations.

In preparing this manuscript for publication, we have grouped Willoughby’s sections by topic into Chapters 2 through 6. Our comments on specific points are made in chapter endnotes, while more general comments appear in chapter introductions or in separate sections. We have added data from the 1922–1925 excavations at the Hopewell Site, which were conducted by the Ohio Historical Society under the direction of Henry C. Shetrone, and some results of our own studies where pertinent. The authorship of each section is indicated by initials at its head: CCW, Charles C. Willoughby; NBG, N’omi B. Greber; KCR, Katharine C. Ruhl.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the site overall. To CCW’s description of the Moorehead excavation, NBG has added a discussion of other excavations at the site, a newly discovered 1892 site map, and a reconstruction of the floor plan of Mound 25. In Chapter 3 NBG discusses the other major deposits at the site in addition to CCW’s section on the contents of the altars in Mound 25. CCW’s sections on metal artifacts and metal working techniques are grouped together in Chapter 4, to which KCR has added some observations on the earspools and copper symbols. Chapter 5 includes CCW’s replication experiments with textiles and stone rings. Chapter 6 groups all remaining sections by CCW which deal with artifacts from various contexts classified by form or by raw material.

It is our intent to let Charles Willoughby speak in his own voice, which is clear and informative. Although we may at times have an opinion different from his, we have found that his careful observations and his recording of these observations are still pertinent today, almost a century after he made them.

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A View of the Hopewell Site

Introduction (NBG)

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 A VIEW OF THE HOPEWELL SITE
• 3 CONTENTS OF SEVERAL CLAY BASINS AT THE HOPEWELL SITE
• 4 METALS: ARTIFACTS AND REPLICATIONS
• 5 STONE AND TEXTILE REPLICATION EXPERIMENTS
• 6 OTHER ARTIFACTS
• 7 PERSPECTIVES ON WILLOUGHBY AND THE HOPEWELL SITE
• Appendix A: Artifacts in the Peabody Museum Collections from the Hopewell Site
• Appendix B: Credits for Figure Sources
• References Cited
• Index