Mound Builders

For other uses, see Mound builder.

Monks Mound, located at the Cahokia Mounds UNESCO World Heritage Site near Collinsville, Illinois, is the largest Pre-Columbian earthwork in America north of Mesoamerica.

Grave Creek Mound, located in Moundsville, West Virginia, is the largest conical mound in the United States. It was built by the Adena culture.

Mound Builder is a general term referring to prehistoric inhabitants of North America who constructed various styles of earthen mounds for burial, residential and ceremonial purposes. These included Archaic, Woodland period (Adena and Hopewell cultures), and Mississippian period Pre-Columbian cultures dating from roughly 3000 BCE to the 16th century CE, and living in the Great Lakes region, the Ohio River region, and the Mississippi River region. Beginning with Watson Brake in present-day Louisiana, indigenous peoples started building earthwork mounds before the pyramids were constructed in Egypt.

Since the 19th century, the prevailing scholarly consensus has been that the mounds were constructed by Indigenous peoples of the Americas, ancestors of Native American tribes extant at the time of European colonization of North America. The Native Americans were not knowledgeable about the civilizations that produced the mounds. Research into these cultures and peoples has been based on archaeology and anthropology.

Name and culture

Alligator Effigy Mound, Ohio

At one time, the term "mound builder" was also applied to an imaginary race believed to have constructed these earthworks. In the 16th-19th centuries, Europeans and Americans generally thought that a race other than one related to the Native Americans had built the mounds.

The namesake cultural trait of the mound builders was the building of mounds and other earthworks. These burial and ceremonial structures were typically flat-topped pyramids or platform mounds, flat-topped or rounded cones, elongated ridges, and sometimes a variety of other forms. They were built as part of complex villages that attracted more dense populations, with a specialization of skills and knowledge. The best-known, flat-topped pyramidal structure, which at over 100 feet (30 m) tall is the largest pre-Columbian earthwork north of Mexico, is Monks Mound at Cahokia Indian Mounds in Collinsville, Illinois.

Some effigy mounds were constructed in the shapes or outlines of culturally significant animals. The most famous effigy mound, Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, is 5 feet (1.5 m) tall, 20 feet (6 m) wide, over 1,330 feet (405 m) long, and shaped as an undulating serpent.

The mound builders included many different tribal groups and chiefdoms, involving an array of beliefs and unique cultures over thousands of years. The general term covered their shared architectural practice of mound construction. This practice, believed to be associated with a cosmology that had a cross-cultural appeal, may indicate common cultural antecedents. The first mound building was an early marker of political and social complexity among the cultures in the Eastern United States. Watson Brake in Louisiana is the oldest dated mound complex in North America and the present-day United States.

Archaeological surveys

The most complete reference for these earthworks is Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, written by Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis. It was published in 1848 by the Smithsonian Institution. Since many of the features which the authors documented have since been destroyed or diminished by farming and development, their surveys, sketches, and descriptions are still used by modern archaeologists. All of the sites which they identified as located in Kentucky came from the manuscripts of C. S. Rafinesque.

A smaller regional study in 1931 by author and archaeologist Fred Dustin charted and examined the mounds and Ogemaw Earthworks near Saginaw, Michigan. Archaeological survey and recording of mounds is an ongoing scholarly task.

Reports of early European explorers

The Nodena Site, possibly the Province of Pacaha encountered by de Soto

The Kincaid Site, a Mississippian settlement in southern Illinois

Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who in 1540-42 traversed what became the southeast United States, encountered many different mound-builder peoples, perhaps descendants of the great Mississippian culture. The mound-building tradition was still alive in the southeast during the mid-sixteenth century. De Soto observed people living in fortified towns with lofty mounds and plazas, and surmised that many of the mounds served as foundations for priestly temples. Near present-day Augusta, Georgia, de Soto encountered a mound-building group ruled over by a queen, Cofitachequi. She told him that the mounds within her territory served as the burial places for nobles.

The artist Jacques Le Moyne, who had accompanied French settlers to northeastern Florida in the 1560s, likewise noted many Native American groups using existing mounds and constructing others. He produced a series of watercolor paintings depicting scenes of native life. Although most of his paintings have been lost, some engravings were copied from the originals and published in 1591 by a Flemish company. Among these is a depiction of the burial of an aboriginal Floridian tribal chief, an occasion of great mourning and ceremony. The original caption reads:

Sometimes the deceased king of this province is buried with great solemnity, and his great cup from which he was accustomed to drink is placed on a tumulus with many arrows set about it.

— - Jacques Le Moyne 1650's

Maturin Le Petit, a Jesuit priest (1619), and Le Page du Pratz (1758), a French explorer, both observed the Natchez in what was later Mississippi. Having a population of some 4,000, the Natchez were devout worshippers of the sun. They occupied at least nine villages and were presided over by a paramount chief— known as the Great Sun— who wielded absolute power. Both observers noted the high temple mounds which the Natchez had built so that the Great Sun could commune with God, the sun. His large residence was built atop the highest mound, from

which, every morning, he greeted the rising sun, invoking thanks and blowing tobacco smoke to the four cardinal directions.

— - Le Page du Pratz 1758

Later explorers to the same regions, only a few decades after mound-building settlements had been reported, found the regions largely depopulated, the residential settlements vanished, and the mounds untended. Since there had been little violent conflict with Europeans during that period, the most plausible explanation is that European diseases such as smallpox and influenza had decimated most of the Native Americans who had comprised the last mound-builder civilization.

Mound building cultures

The Poverty Point site in Louisiana

The mound of the Great Sun of the Natchez

• Archaic era

Watson Brake, located in the floodplain of the Ouachita River near Monroe in northern Louisiana, United States. Watson Brake consists of an oval formation of 11 mounds from three to 25 feet tall connected by ridges to form an oval nearly 900 feet across. It has been dated to about 5400 years ago (approx. 3400 BCE). In the Americas, mound building started at an early date, well before the pyramids of Egypt were constructed. Watson Brake is considered the earliest mound complex in North America and is the earliest dated complex construction in the Americas. Watson Brake's dating is nearly 2,000 years before the better-known Poverty Point. The latter was previously thought to be the earliest mound site in the United States. With the discovery and dating of Watson Brake, scholars demonstrated that pre-agricultural, pre-ceramic American societies were more complex than previously thought.

Poverty Point in what is now Louisiana is a prominent example of early archaic mound-builder construction (c. 2500 BCE - 1000 BCE). While earlier Archaic mound centers are known, Poverty Point remains one of the best-known early examples.

• Woodland period

The Archaic period was followed by the Woodland period (c. 1000 BCE). Some well-understood examples would be the Adena culture of Ohio and nearby states. The subsequent Hopewell culture built monuments from Illinois to Ohio and was renowned for their geometric earthworks. The Adena and Hopewell were not, however, the only mound-building peoples during this time period. There were contemporaneous mound-building cultures throughout the Eastern United States.

• Mississippian culture

Around 900–1450 CE, the Mississippian culture developed and spread through the Eastern United States, primarily along the river valleys. The largest regional center where the Mississippian culture is first clearly developed is located in Illinois, and is referred to today as Cahokia Indian Mounds.

• Fort Ancient

Fort Ancient is the name for a Native American culture that flourished from 1000-1650 C.E. among a people who predominantly inhabited land along the Ohio River in areas of southern modern-day Ohio, northern Kentucky and western West Virginia. Scholars once thought this was an expansion of the Mississippian cultures, but they now believe the Fort Ancient culture was an independently developed culture descended from the Hopewell culture.

• Plaquemine culture

This was an archaeological culture in the lower Mississippi River Valley in western Mississippi and eastern Louisiana. Good examples of this culture are the Medora Site, in West Baton Rouge Parish, La; and the Anna, Emerald Mound, Winterville and Holly Bluff (Lake George) sites located in Mississippi. Plaquemine culture was contemporaneous with the Middle Mississippian culture at the Cahokia site in Illinois. It is considered ancestral to the Natchez and Taensa peoples.

Alternative explanations

Through the mid-nineteenth century, European Americans did not recognize that ancestors of the Native Americans built the mounds of the eastern U.S. They believed that the complex earthworks and large ceremonial complexes were built by a different people. The antiquarian author William Pidgeon epitomized this view; Pidgeon supported his conclusions by creating fraudulent surveys of mound groups that did not exist. A key work in increasing public knowledge of the origins of the mounds was the lengthy 1894 report by Cyrus Thomas of the Bureau of American Ethnology. He concluded that the prehistoric earthworks of the eastern United States were the work of Native Americans. A small number of people had earlier reached similar conclusions: Thomas Jefferson, for example, excavated a mound and from the artifacts and burial practices, noted similarities between mound-builder funeral practices and those of Native Americans in his time, and Theodore H. Lewis had refuted Pidgeon's fradulent claims of pre-Native American moundbuilders in 1886.

Writers and scholars put forward numerous alternative origins for the mound builders:

Vikings

Benjamin Smith Barton proposed the theory that the mound builders were Vikings who came to North America and eventually disappeared.

Ancient world immigrants

Other people believed that Greeks, Africans, Chinese or assorted Europeans built the mounds. Euroamericans who embraced a Biblical worldview sometimes thought the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel had built the mounds.

Book of Mormon inhabitants

During the 1800s, a common folklore was that Jews -- particularly the Lost Ten Tribes -- were the ancestors of Native Americans and the mound builders. The Book of Mormon (first published in 1830) provides an example of this belief, as its narrative describes two waves of immigration to the the Americas from Mesopotamia: the Jaredites (ca. 3000 - 2000 BCE) and an Israelite group in 590 BCE (called Nephites, Lamanites and Mulekites). The Book of Mormon depicts these settlers' building magnificent cities, only to be later destroyed by warfare around 385 CE.

Some Mormon scholars have considered The Book of Mormon narrative a description of the mound-building cultures; other Mormon apologists argue for a Mesoamerican or even South American setting. Theories about a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon did not arise until after Latter-day Saints (LDS)(Mormons) were influenced by publicized findings about the Central American stone ruins. This occurred after the Book of Mormon was published..

Black civilizations

Certain sects affiliated with the 20th-century Black nationalist Moorish Science philosophy theorized a connection with the mound builders. They argue that the mound builders were an ancient advanced Black civilization that developed the legendary continents of Atlantis and Mu, as well as ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica. These black groups, similar to European Americans in earlier periods, propose that the American Indians were too uncivilized to develop cities and the technology necessary to build these mounds.

Divine creation

The Reverend Landon West claimed that Serpent Mound in Ohio was built by God. He believed that God built the mound himself and placed it in Eden, apparently located in Ohio.

Mythical cultures

Some people attributed the mounds to mythical cultures: Lafcadio Hearn suggested that the mounds were built by people from the Lost Continent of Atlantis.

Effects of alternative explanations

The mound builder explanations were not just hoaxes but honest misinterpretations of real data from valid sources. Both scholars and laymen accepted some of these explanations. Reference to an alleged race appears in the poem "The Prairies" (1832) by William Cullen Bryant.

Justification to remove Indians

The US removal in the 1830s of most American Indians from the mound builder regions, by means of the forced Trail of Tears, was partly justified by the theory that the Indians had destroyed the mound builders. Because some thought that the mound builders may have been ancient Europeans, the removal of the Indian tribes was justified to reclaim European land, as well as to ensure the safety of civilization.

Assumption construction too complex for Indians

One belief was that American Indians were too simple to have have constructed such complex earthworks and artifacts. The associated stone, metal, and clay artifacts were thought to be too complex for the Indians to make. However, in the American Southeast, Northeast, and Midwest, numerous Indian cultures were sedentary and participated in agriculture. Numerous Indian towns had built surrounding stockades for defense. Capable of this type of construction, they and ancestors could have built mounds. People who believed that the Indians did not build the earthworks thought their nomadic cultures meant they would not build such monuments. In this view, they could not have devoted the time and effort to construct mounds and other time-consuming projects.

When most Europeans first arrived in America, they never witnessed the American Indians building mounds; when asked about the mounds, most of the Indians did not know anything about them. Yet earlier Europeans, especially the Spanish, had written numerous accounts about the Indians' construction of mounds. These works were not translated into English for some time. Garcilaso de la Vega reported how the Indians built the mounds and the temples placed on top of them. A few French expeditions reported staying with Indian societies who built mounds.

Assumption construction older than Indians

People also claimed that the Indians were not the mound builders because the mounds and related artifacts were older than Indian cultures. Caleb Atwater's misunderstanding of stratigraphy led him to believe that the mound builders were a much older civilization than the Indians. In his book, Antiquities Discovered in the Western States (1820), Atwater claimed that Indian remains were always found right beneath the surface of the earth. Since the artifacts associated with the mound builders were found fairly deep in the ground, Atwater argued that they must be from a different group of people. The discovery of metal artifacts further convinced people that the mound builders were not Native Americans. The Indians encountered by the Europeans and Americans were not known to engage in metallurgy. This was another incorrect conclusion based on the false assumption that all Indian cultures are similar. Some artifacts that were found in relation to the mounds were inscribed with symbols. As the Europeans did not know of any Indian cultures that had a writing system, they assumed a different group had created them.

Hoaxes

Several hoaxes were based on the mound builders.

Newark Holy Stones

In 1860, David Wyrick discovered the "Keystone tablet", containing Hebrew language inscriptions written on it in Newark, Ohio. Soon after, he found the "Newark Decalogue Stone" nearby, also claimed to contain Hebrew. It was later discovered that Reverend John W. McCarty created these "Newark Holy Stones" and put them in a place where Wyrick would find them.

Davenport tablets

Another hoax related to the mound builders was the discovery of the Davenport tablets by Reverend Jacob Gass. These also bore inscriptions that later were found to be fake.

Walam Olum hoax

The Walam Olum hoax had considerable influence on perceptions of the mound builders. In 1836 Constantine Samuel Rafinesque published his translation of a text he claimed had been written in pictographs on wooden tablets. This text explained the origin of the Lenape Indians in Asia, told of their passage over the Bering Strait, and narrated their subsequent migration across the North American continent. This “Walam Olum” tells of battles with native peoples already in America before the Lenape arrived. It was assumed by others that these original people were the mound builders, and that the Lenape Indians overthrew them and destroyed their culture. David Oestreicher later branded Rafinesque's story a hoax. He argued that the Walam Olum glyphs derived from Chinese, Egyptian, and Mayan alphabets. Meanwhile, the belief that the Native Americans destroyed the mound builder culture had earned widespread acceptance.

Kinderhook Plates

The Kinderhook plates, "discovered" in 1843, were another hoax of material planted in Native American mounds. This hoax, however, had the aim of discrediting the supposed translation powers of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.

See also

Panoramic view from within the Great Circle at the Newark Earthworks in Newark, Ohio (wall of which can be seen in the background)

• Adena culture
• Coles Creek culture
• Effigy mounds
• Fort Ancient
• Hopewell tradition
• List of burial mounds in the United States
• Mississippian culture
• Petroforms
• Plaquemine culture
• Serpent Mound
• Southeastern Ceremonial Complex
• Tumulus, Mounds (or barrows) of Europe and Asia

References

• Abrams, Elliot M. (2005). The Emergence of the Moundbuilders: The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio. Athens: Ohio University Press. ISBN 9780821416099. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Thomas, Cyrus. Report on the mound explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology. Pp. 3–730. Twelfth annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890-91, by J. W. Powell, Director. XLVIII+742 pp., 42 pls., 344 figs. 1894.
• Feder, Kenneth L.. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology’’. 5th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2006.
• Squier, A.M., E.G. (1847). Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Lost Race Myth
• LostWorlds.org | An Interactive Museum of the American Indian
• LenaweeHistory.com | Mound Builders section, The Western Historical Society 1909, reprint.
• Artist Hideout, Art of the Ancients
• Ancient Monuments Placemarks
• The Mound Builders at Project Gutenberg
• With Climate Swing, a Culture Bloomed in Americas (mound builders in Peru)