Search for a command to run...
Lower Mississippi Valley Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore. Edited by Dan F. Morse and Phyllis A. Morse. (Tuscaloosa: Uni versity of Alabama Press, 1999. Pp. vii, 438. Acknowledgments, intro duction, indexes, maps, and illustrations. $39.95.) One of the most remarkable archeological explorers of the southeastern United States was Clarence B. Moore, who used his steamboat Gopher to gain access to hundreds of sites along major waterways in the first decades of the 1900s. Moore's focus was on burial assemblages. He looked for pots primarily, in cemeteries at villages and fortified towns with mounds. Although his techniques were . . . well . . . rapid, most of the artifacts at least ended up at the Smithsonian. His findings were published in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in a number of large format volumes. These volumes became and remain one of the basic references for anyone trying to understand the complex Native American cultures of the 1400s and 1500s, just before Europeans arrived and those cultures were largely extinguished. Now, a remarkable series of full-size, facsimile editions of Moore's works are being released in a joint effort by the Southeastern Archeological Conference (now in its fifty-sixth year) and the University of Alabama Press as part of its Classics in Southeastern Archaeology. Each separate volume is edited by major scholars in their respective parts of the Southeast. most recent volume in the series deals with Moore's fieldwork in the Lower Mississippi Valley in 1907 and 1910-1911, which covered eastern Arkansas, northeastern Louisiana, and western Mississippi. Publication of this volume also received support from the Arkansas Archeological Survey and the Arkansas Archeological Society. editors are Dan and Phyllis Morse, professionally concerned with the region for over thirty years. They prepared an introduction that summarizes Moore's career and briefly discusses many of the more prominent sites. They also put together a map that shows where Moore worked, and most importantly, a table that attempts to correlate Moore's name for a site, the numbers given to the site by Harvard's Lower Mississippi Valley Survey and by the various states, and citations to other work done at the site. present volume includes works previously published as Some Aboriginal Sites on Mississippi River; Additional Investigation on Mississippi River; extracts from The Northwest Coast of Florida Revisited, including sites in Arkansas and Louisiana; Certain Mounds of Arkansas and of Mississippi, including the Lower Arkansas River and the Lower Yazoo and Lower Sunflower Rivers and Blum Mounds in Mississippi; and Antiquities of the St. …