Warren K. Moorehead

Warren King Moorehead (March 10, 1866 – January 5, 1939) was an American archaeologist and writer who worked on excavating and surveying various Native American sites, including Fort Ancient. Moorehead the first curator of the Ohio Archaeological Society and was deemed the "Dean of American archaeology". He died on January 5, 1939, at the age of 72, and is buried in his hometown of Xenia, Ohio. 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. That said, Moorehead was influential in the preservation of some historical sites such as Fort Ancient.

Early life Warren King Moorehead was born on March 10, 1866, in Siena, Italy. His parents, Helen King and Dr. William G. Moorehead, were missionaries. 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 and graduated in 1887. 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.

Efforts to have Fort Ancient purchased and cared for by the state were spurred by Moorehead's publications on that site and other Ohio cultural marvels. The Ohio General Assembly voted to purchase Fort Ancient based on Moorehead's work.

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.

Personal life Moorehead married Evelyn Ludwig in Circleville, Ohio in November 1892. 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.

Today, Moorehead is often considered a "pillager" within the field of archaeology. 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.

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. 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.

Publications

Moorehead, Warren K (1910) The stone age in North America Vol. 1 of 2, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company