The Man Who Comes after; or, Careful How You Curate

HE TITLE of my presentation derives from a comment made to me in T the summer of 1934 by Clifford C. Anderson, who at the time owned a portion of the narrow flood plain along the Little Miami River below the northwest part of Fort Ancient in Warren County, Ohio. He also owned a small museum building in which he installed exhibits of burials, and of his other finds from the prehistoric village that he had excavated over a number of decades. Anderson as a young man had been hired as a laborer by W. K. Moorehead for the excavations made at Fort Ancient in the fall of 1891 for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He then went to the Hopewell site with Moorehead's crew, and later conducted excavations for the Robert s. Peabody Foundation in northeastern Arkansas and in southwestern Indiana. By the time I arrived at his door to study the material he had collected, Anderson had slackened his excavation activities and spent most of his time maintaining the museum from which he obtained a small income. Anderson felt that his work of gathering and preserving the data from the village was largely unappreciated by the archaeological community and he was therefore pleased to have his materials studied and the results published. He called me "the man who comes after" because the results of his labors were at last to become part of the archaeological literature and interpreted as a part of the growing knowledge of American prehistory. It was his fond hope that his collection would be acquired by the Ohio Historical and Archaeological Society and be preseved for posterity by means of exhibits and continuing study. Following acquisition by the state the collection was given additional study by Richard G. Morgan, Curator of Archaeology in the 1940s and by Patricia Essenpreis in the early 1970s. Some of Anderson's collection is on exhibit in the small