By a happy coincidence two volumes on the ancient mound builders of eastern North America have appeared at the same time. George Milner’s is new, lavishly illustrated, and contains all the latest scientific information. Henry Clyde Shetrone’s is an old classic first published in 1930 that is rich in the firsthand knowledge of a pioneer archaeologist. Taken together, these volumes tell a fascinating tale of the prehistoric people who have puzzled European-Americans since they found the first mound.
Huge man made mounds of earth can be found from Virginia to Texas, and from the Gulf Coast into Canada. Some are full of burials, others strangely empty. Some are in the shapes of animals, while others are huge geometric designs. Thomas Jefferson was the first to scientifically explore a mound and write about his findings. But it was the mounds of the Ohio Valley that attracted national interest when the first settlers discovered them. Unable to link them to contemporary tribes, a great mythology soon grew up around the moundbuilders. Were they a lost tribe of Israel? Or perhaps Welsh Indians, East Indians, or some other Old World people? Clearly, the mounds were too big and too complicated to have been built by American Indians. The debate raged for a hundred years involving Americans from the White House to the Chautauqua circuit.
Milner, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University, has produced a very readable and superbly illustrated survey including all the latest information about the moundbuilders. A new generation of archaeologists has been taking a hard look at the mounds, and thanks to modern techniques and technology, they have obtained plenty of new information.
There was no one “race of moundbuilders” as was assumed in the 19th century. Rather, different people have been building different types of mounds for the last 5,000 years. Large mound sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, like Watson Brake in Louisiana, date to about 3500 B.C. Milner shows that successive mound building traditions continued uninterrupted right up to the time of European contact, about A.D. 1500.
The latest dating techniques prove that moundbuilding started before pottery and before agriculture in the Archaic period when humans first began to abandon the nomadic lifestyle. When agriculture allowed for large settlements, mound building grew. The largest of all American mounds, Monk’s Mound at Cahokia near St. Louis, was the center of a large agricultural community. Like many of the mounds of that era, it mainly supported a large temple some 100 feet above the Mississippi floodplain.
Shetrone was a self-educated archaeologist who learned his trade by working with the archaeologists of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society (OAHS) in Columbus. He became the organization’s director in 1928. Published in 1930, Shetrone’s The Mound-Builders pulled together all the known information about Ohio Valley mounds and presented it for the general reader. Of particular interest are accounts of excavations at some of the most famous mounds. Under his leadership, several of the largest mound groups in Ohio were preserved by OAHS. Shetrone moved beyond current stereotypes to present Native Americans as innovators capable of great things. He both demystified them and enhanced their importance in American history. Bradley Lepper of the Ohio Historical Society (“archaeological” was dropped in 1954, the year of Shetrone’s death) puts Shetrone in context in an excellent introduction.
What connection is there between various mound building eras? Did one group evolve into another, or were they independent? What is the connection, if any, between the moundbuilders of North America and those of Mesoamerica, where stone replaced earth in monument building? These are some of the many questions that remain for modern archaeologists. Despite all the progress, there is still much to learn about the moundbuilders, and since so much of the work was done in the 19th century, sites need to be revisited by modern archaeologists armed with new techniques.
Sadly, most of the mounds are gone, destroyed by sprawling cities, modern agriculture, and looters. Only a small fraction of this wondrous legacy remains in public parks and Archaeological Conservancy preserves. Shetrone and Milner, in these superlative volumes, give us an introduction to a great American tradition that still excites experts and casual visitors.
