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Mound builder (people) |
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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2008) |
Mound Builder is a general term referring to the American Indians 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 BC to the 16th century AD, and living in the Great Lakes region, the Ohio River region, and the Mississippi River region.
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The term "mound builder" was also applied to an imaginary race believed to have constructed these earthworks, because Americans from the 16th-19th centuries generally thought that Native Americans did not build 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. The best known flat-topped pyramidal structure, which is also the largest pre-Columbian earthwork north of Mexico at over 100 feet (30 m) tall, is Monk's Mound in Illinois at Cahokia.
Some effigy mounds were made in unusual shapes, such as the outline of culturally significant animals. The most famous effigy mound, Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, is 5 feet (1.5 m) tall, 20 (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, probably involving an array of beliefs and unique cultures, united only by the 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 is an early marker of incipient political and social complexity among the cultures in the Eastern United States.
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 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 their sites 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 task.
Hernando de Soto, the conquistador who traversed what became the southeast United States in 1540-42, encountered many different Mound-builder peoples, perhaps the descendants of the great Mississippian culture. The Mound-building tradition was still alive in the southeast during the mid-sixteenth century. De Soto observed Creek Indians, for example, 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 who told him that the mounds within her territory served as the burial places for Indian 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:
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. With a population of some 4,000 people, the Natchez were devout worshippers of the sun, occupying at least nine villages and presided over by a paramount chief—known as the Great Sun—who wielded absolute power. Both observers noted the high temple mounds the Natchez had built so that the Great Sun could commune with God, the sun. His large cabin 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."123
Later explorers to the same regions only a few decades after mound-building settlements had been reported found the regions largely depopulated, the settlements vanished, and the mounds untended. Since there had been little violent conflict with Europeans there during that period, the most plausible explanation is that European diseases like smallpox and influenza had wiped out most of the Native Americans who had comprised the Mound-builder civilization.45 67
Mound builder cultures can be divided into roughly three eras:
Poverty Point in what is now Louisiana is a prominent example of early archaic mound builder construction (c. 2500 BC - 1000 BC). While earlier Archaic mound centers are known, Poverty Point remains one of the best-known early examples.
The Archaic period was followed by the Woodland period (c. 1000 BC). Some well-understood examples would be the Adena culture of Ohio and nearby states and the subsequent Hopewell culture known from Illinois to Ohio and 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.
Around 900–1450 AD the Mississippian culture developed and spread through the Eastern United States, primarily along the river valleys. The location where the Mississippian culture is first clearly developed is located in Illinois, and is referred to today as Cahokia.
Through the mid-nineteenth century, European Americans did not recognize that Native Americans built the mounds of the eastern U.S.
A key work in increasing awareness 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 noted similarities between mound builder funeral practices and the funeral practices of Native Americans in his time.
Several alternate explanations were put forward as to the origins of the mound builders:
Benjamin Smith Barton proposed the theory that the mound builders were Vikings who came to North America and eventually disappeared.
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.
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) contains the most enduring evidence of this belief, with a narrative that describes two waves of immigration to the the Americas from Mesopotamia: the Jaredites (ca. 3000 - 2000 B.C.) and an Israelite group in 590 B.C. (called Nephites, Lamanites and Mulekites). The Book of Mormon depicts these settlers building magnificent cities, only to be later destroyed by warfare around A.D. 385.
Mormon apologists have argued the The Book of Mormon narrative describes mound builder and other Native American cultures, but mainstream non-Mormon scientists have rejected these arguments as due to lack of corroborative evidence.
Other groups that have developed explanations about the mound builders are certain sects affiliated with the Black nationalist Moorish Science philosophy. 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. Like other mound builder explanations, these black groups also posit that the American Indians were too uncivilized and unable to develop cities and the technology necessary for building these mounds.
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, which apparently was in Ohio.
Some people went so far as to attribute the mounds to mythical cultures: Lafcadio Hearn suggested that the mounds were built by people from the Lost Continent of Atlantis.
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.8
The removal of most Indians from the mound builder regions by the 1830s, by means of the Trail of Tears, was partly justified by the theory that the Indians had destroyed the mound builders. Because one theory was that the mound builders may have been ancient Europeans, the removal of the savage Indian tribes was justified in order to reclaim European land, as well as to ensure the safety of civilization.
One belief was that American Indians were simple beings who could not have constructed such magnificent earthworks and artifacts. The stone, metal, and clay artifacts were thought to be too complex for the primitive Indians to make. However, in the American Southeast, Northeast, and Midwest, there were numerous Indian cultures that were sedentary and participated in agriculture. Numerous Indian towns had walls surrounding them for defense. If they were capable of this type of construction, building mounds should have been no more difficult. People who believed that the Indians were not responsible for the earthworks also used the more plausible argument that they could have not built them because they were nomadic peoples who followed their food. 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 there were numerous written accounts about the Indians' construction of the mounds by Europeans. One detailed account was by Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote about how they built the mounds and the temples that were placed on top of the mounds. There were even French expeditions that stayed with Indian societies who built mounds.
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 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. The Europeans did not know of any Indian cultures that had a writing system, so they assumed a different group had created them.
Several hoaxes were based on the mound builders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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