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MWAC
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Hopewell
Archeology:
The Newsletter
of Hopewell Archeology in the Ohio River Valley
Volume 6, Number 1, September 2004
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3. The Field Museum Hopewell Catalogue
Project: Getting the Word Out
By Tristan T. Almazan, Stephen E. Nash, and Lauren
Zych
The Hopewell Collection at the
Field Museum is the world’s second-largest (next to the Ohio
Historical Society’s) collection of material
culture from the Hopewell site. Recently, Field
Museum staff rediscovered cataloging forms from
the 1980s and decided to use the information from
this unfinished project as a starting block for
creating a Hopewell catalogue. The catalogue (which
we hope will be published) will act as a tool for
disseminating data on the collection as well as
serving to pique the interest of additional scholars
in the Field Museum’s collection.
The Collection
The Field Museum’s Hopewell Collection comes
primarily from one source — the 1891 and
1892 excavations by Warren K. Moorehead. Frederick
W. Putnum, director of the Department of Ethnology
and Archaeology for the 1893 World’s Columbian
Exposition, hired Moorehead (along with dozens
of others), to collect material representing cultures
of the Americas. Moorehead, a native Ohioan who
had already excavated at Fort Ancient and published
his findings (Moorehead 1890), was a natural choice
for gathering material from the Hopewell site.
He spent the fall and winter of 1891–1892
excavating there and keeping notes on his finds.
Although he did not always keep detailed records,
he and his crew nevertheless uncovered the most
significant material to be collected from the site.
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 Figure
1. Stone disks from Mound 2. © The Field
Museum, CSA39671.
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The Field Museum’s collection
of Moorehead material encompasses roughly 800
catalogue
numbers, although the number of individual
pieces is much higher. The scope and content
of the Hopewell Collection are impressive.
For example, one storage room in the museum
holds more than 7,000 chipped stone disks unearthed
from Mound 2 (Figure 1). |
| Not only is this impressive for
sheer quantity, but the fact that the disks
are made of Wyandotte chert from Southern Indiana
makes it even more astonishing. Hundreds of
pounds of obsidian came from the Obsidian Cliffs
in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. |
| Thousands of sheets of mica
from Tennessee or North Carolina composed
some of the
strata of Moorehead Mound 17, while a large
quantity of galena is believed to have
accompanied a burial from that mound. One
obsidian blade, among many others, measures
30 cm long by 12.5 cm wide (Figure
2). There
are also many pearl beads, bear claws and
teeth, copper ear spools, carved stone
effigy figures, and mica and copper sheet
ornaments (Figure 3). |
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click
on image to enlarge |
 Figure
2. Obsidian blade. © The Field
Museum, A113969_11c; Cat. No. 56803.
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on image to enlarge |
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Figure 3. Bear claws and
teeth ornaments. © The Field
Museum, A110123c; Cat. Nos. 56402
and 56427. |
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The remainder of the
museum’s
Hopewell Collection came from the Ohio
Historical Society and the Kalamazoo
Valley Museum. In 1925, the Field Museum
gave material from its anthropology
collections to the Ohio Historical
Society in exchange for Hopewell material
excavated by Henry C. Shetrone from
1922 to 1925. This
collection contains casts and replicas,
effigy pipes, celts, mica ornaments, and
raw materials. |
In
1999, the Kalamazoo Valley Museum donated
a collection of Hopewell
and prehistoric Woodlands material to The
Field Museum, as these materials had once
been at The Field Museum and did not fit
within the Kalamazoo Valley Museum’s
collecting purview. Taken together, the
Ohio Historical Society and Kalamazoo Valley
Museum components compose less than a quarter
of the Field Museum’s total Hopewell
Collection. |
Mound 25
One of the most fascinating group of
objects in the Field Museum collection
comes
from Mound 25. This mound is the largest
at the Hopewell site and contains the
most interesting and complex array
of material. Originally, Mound 25 was
the
site of a central building complex
with plazas. Over time, burials were
created
in the building, as were separate deposits
of exotic materials. The mound is in
three sections, with burials only being
in the middle and largest section.
When excavated, Mound 25 held at least
100
burials, but the greatest groupings
of material were in the “altar” deposits
and a copper deposit. For example, large
obsidian bifaces were found in “Altar
2.” Nonetheless, some burials did
hold unusual objects and unusual amounts
of material. One burial (Moorehead Burial
248) is especially noteworthy . In Moorehead’s
words (Field Museum Library Archives,
p. 125):
At the head
of the skeleton was a remarkable
deposit of copper. Wood covered
with copper in the form of deer
antlers … The antler shaped
ornament was composed of wood
covered with and incased in thin
sheets
of copper one-sixteenth of an
inch thick. There were 4 prongs
on each
side of nearly equal length.
The mass of copper in the center
originally
was in the form of a semicircle
reaching from the lower jaw to
the crown of the head. It has
been pressed flat by the weight
of the
earth, but part of the original
contour is still apparent (Figure
4). |
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Another
burial (Moorehead Burial 260-261)
contained a large amount
of copper including several
celts and adzes. Others held shell
and
bone beads, textile imprints,
carved effigies, pearls, and copper
plates (Figure
5).
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click
on image to enlarge |
 Figure
4. Copper and shell objects. © The
Field Museum, A108265c; Cat.
Nos. 56080, 56091, 56114, 56128,
56200,
56201, 56371, and 56751. (Note:
The objects pictured above are
from several different proveniences
within the Hopewell site.)
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click
on image to enlarge |
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 Figure
5. Copper ornament
with pearl eye. © The
Field Museum, A110028c;
Cat.
No. 56356.
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The Cataloging
Project
The Field Museum’s project to
catalogue the Hopewell Collection is
ongoing. It began last year, when museum
staff funded by the Save America’s
Treasures program (NEH PT-50004-03)
were busy organizing and creating finding
aids for the North American anthropology
archives. They found two boxes containing
cataloging forms, notes, and photos
from a project started, but never finished,
in the mid-1980s. Michael Moseley and
the late Pat Essenpreis headed the
project, and N’omi Greber acted
as a consultant. David Jessup, then
a student at the University of Chicago,
completed most of the catalogue forms.
A large amount of data had been recorded
about the individual Hopewell objects
as a result of their efforts, but
the project fizzled, and the unfinished
product ended up in the archives.
We
contacted Greber, and Jim Brown of
Northwestern University, about the
project and they agreed to help us
make a final effort to complete it
and, if possible, publish a catalogue
containing a summary and synthesis
of these descriptive data.
The first step in this process
was to put the data in electronic
format,
not as a matter of preservation
(the cards and writing in No.
2 pencil
will be around a lot longer than
electronic
media), but to ease data manipulation
and access. We enlisted the help
of graduate student Lauren Zych
of the
University of Chicago, and in
the fall of 2003 we began entering
the data
from 1,300 forms into a project-specific
FileMaker Pro database. Syeda
Razeen,
a summer intern from Loyola University,
has joined in the project to
assist with the data entry and
to inventory
the collection. The information
from Zych’s database will be combined
with Razeen’s inventory data
to create a complete catalogue of
extant Field Museum holdings. The
next step
will be to compile the data into
coherent and useful sets for publication.
The collection is definitely
not without problems, however.
There
are missing
objects, missing data, and
missing associations between
objects
and excavation contexts. Provenience
information,
where it exists, will have
to be
closely scrutinized because
Moorehead’s
notes were not always accurate,
much less precise. The project
will not
be halted by these problems,
however. We will do what we can,
but we believe
it is more important to disseminate
these data, even if they are
less than perfect, than to keep
them in
archival
purgatory because of a few
errors that we cannot solve.
Science is
a cumulative
and iterative process. Our
goal is to provide scholars with
basic data
about a world-class collection,
thereby exciting them to a world
of analytical
possibilities, the surface
of which has barely been scratched
at The
Field Museum.
Conclusion Museums are continuously engaged
in the effort to gather more
information on their collections
and The Field
Museum is no different in
this regard. Because many researchers
use these
materials, we especially
value
scholarly data that will
increase the scholarly
utility of our collections.
The rediscovery of the Hopewell
catalogue
forms is
allowing us to expand our
knowledge of the collection and
of the
Hopewell site itself. Disseminating
this
information will hopefully
bring in more scholars
and even more findings in
a positive-feedback loop. Some
of these data may
enrich labels for Hopewell
objects to be exhibited
in the Field Museum’s new Hall
of Americas, which opens in 2006.
No matter the results of our Hopewell
Catalogue Project, the presence of
an electronic catalogue of this important
collection will allow us to better
serve the scholarly community in
engaging
new and innovative research on the
fascinating Hopewell culture.
References Cited
The Field Museum Library Archives
World’s Columbian Exposition
Expedition to Southern Ohio, 1891,
1892, n.d. Box 1, Field Museum
Library Archives, Chicago, Illinois.
Moorehead, Warren K.
1890 Fort Ancient, Ohio. Robert
Clarke & Co.,
Cincinnati.
Nash, Stephen E., and Jonathan
R. Haas
2000 Mounds, Myths and Museums:
The Hopewell Culture of Central
Ohio,
100 B.C. – A.D. 400. In
the Field, November-December 2000:2–5.
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