Clarence Bloomfield Moore

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Clarence Bloomfield Moore (1852-1936) was an American archaeologist, son of Clara Jessup Moore, born in Philadelphia on January 4, 1852. As a young man, he studied at Harvard University and earned an AB degree in 1873. He traveled in nearly every part of Europe, in Asia Minor, and in Egypt; crossed the Andes and went down the Amazon River in 1876; and made a trip around the world in 1878-79 before returning home when his father died in 1878. He became the president of the family company, Jessup & Moore Paper Company. He spent a majority of the 1880s as the president and earned millions during his tenure. By the late 1880s he was eager to pursue his life-long interest in archaeology and turned over company management to others. From 1892 to 1894, he performed excavations at St. John's shell middens in Florida. Between 1897 and 1898, he also dug at the Irene Mound and exhumed seven human skeletons. He accessed many of these sites by water in his steamboat named the Gopher. Over a period of 20 years he explored Indian mounds in nearly all the Southern States. His writings, for the most part published by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, include Some Aboriginal Sites in Louisiana and in Arkansas (1913). He died March 24, 1936 in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1990, in his honor, the Lower Mississippi Valley Survey of Harvard University, in conjunction with the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, created the C. B. Moore Award for Excellence in Southeastern Archaeology by a Young Scholar.