Charles Conrad Abbott, Archaeologist and Naturalist

Charles Conrad Abbott
ca.1900

Charles Conrad Abbott (1843-1919) was educated at the Trenton Academy and obtained his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He never practiced medicine, however, and instead engaged in archaeology and natural history.

Abbott made his home along the bluff overlooking the marshlands south of Trenton and it was here that he unearthed man-made implements in the "glacial gravels" of the marsh. In The Stone Age in New Jersey, published in 1872, and Primitive Industry: or, Illustrations of the Handiwork, in stone, bone and clay, of the Native Races of the Northern Atlantic Seaboard of America, published in 1881, he noted that a cache of stone axes had been unearthed during the excavation of the receiving vault at Riverview Cemetery in 1859 and elsewhere along the bluff about the same time.

As "assistant in the field" of Harvard University's Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, his collection of stone implements was placed in the museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and added to yearly until it reached some 20,000 specimens. The journal Science observed at the time that it was "one of the most important series of its kind ever brought together, and one which archaeologists will consult for all time to come."