The People of the Stone

                EARLIEST EXPLANATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS FOR MOUNDBUILDING IN U.S.

When Cyrus Thomas began his excavations of the thousands of earthen structures across the eastern and central United States for the Smithsonian in the late 19th century he began to unravel for the first time the true meaning of these amazing and enigmatic piles of dirt, which had generated every form of fantastic speculation since the first Europeans had arrived.  Almost from the time the pioneers began to move out of the eastern floodplains and into the vast continental interior, they began to encounter many complex and extensive burial and other earth structures. Many of the most elaborate of these were located in the vast Ohio River Valley system and its extended environs throughout the midwest and southeast, often covering many acres of cleared land.

It quickly became apparent to even these early settlers that the native tribes and peoples they had thus far run into (and over--in most cases) lacked the apparent technological or social organizational level to construct these often immense individual mounds or complexes.  The ignorance (or reluctance to speak) of these mounds by the native peoples themselves led some ethnocentric Europeans to quickly assume that those large, artificial structure could not have been built by the peoples they were then encountering.  Of course, this was a most convenient oversight for those pioneers to make; because, for whatever reason either deliberate or otherwise, it was in their collective best interest to deny any potential long term relationship with the existing tribes and these earlier, more advanced cultures.  It was, afterall, always morally easier to take the land from those who could not otherwise establish a long, pre-existing claim to it.  Then, too, there was the problem of dating the mounds and complexes themselves.  Archaeology was not even in its infancy yet, and the parallel cultures of central and south America had already entered into the realm of myth by the arrival of the 19th cent.  Ironically, it would be Thomas Jefferson (advanced as always in his thinking) who would conduct the first "scientific" excavation of a small burial mound on his own property in VA (using the earliest recorded example of stratigraphic digging) and come to the conclusion that the distance in time between the mounds and the present was, indeed, considerable.

                    DELIBERATE AND OTHER DESTRUCTIONS OF MOUNDS BEFORE 1900

Iin the meantime mounds had been looted, leveled, or incorporated into more modern layouts. (A trip through the Scioto Valley in Ohio--the very center of the moundbuilders' world--will reveal a mound in every old cemetery, or as property line boundaries, and other such convenient markers.)  As burials were exposedd the apparent differences in head shape, body size, and artistic expression of the mound occupants led many to speculate some connection with many different, more distant peoples.  They were descendants of the Aztecs (either lost or on some missionary trek north).  Conversely, others preferred to make them the more distant progenitors of those central American high civilizations, correctly guessing at the relative antiquity of the moundbuilders. Then, of course, the most popular theory relegated them to the biblical mystery of the lost tribes of Israel, a more popular idea and one that had religious backing to help off-set a little of the moral dilemma of displacing those who could not possibly then be descendants of those travelers.  At any rate, whatever the source of these unknown peoples, they had to be accounted for in some way other than as the direct ancestors of the obviously heathen and less advanced tribes the pioneers were bumping into wherever they went.

       CYRUS THOMAS AND EARLY ATTEMPTS TO SCIENTIFICALLY EXPLAIN MOUNDBUILDING

When Cyrus Thomas and his disciples began their excavations in many parts of the midwest and southeast in the late 1800's popular mythology played these many mistaken ideas against one another. New ideas of 'science', such as phrenology (the study of skull shape and measurements) often fueled the speculation that the mounbuilders could not have been the ancestors of living native peoples.  However, as Thomas and his associates, employing for the first time meticulous excavation and recording techniques, began to correlate their finds, they observed many obvious similarities in burial practices (stone box graves similar to recent Shawnee burials in Tenn., for example) and pottery manufacturing styles with unbroken stylistic sequences to early existing types which could not be ignored.  More importantly, they were also able to clearly distinguish three separate, but continous phases of mound building across a wide area.  We now call these Adena (early), Hopewell (middle) and Mississippian (late) and the entire period The Woodland Peiod.

By establishiing long, uninterrupted sequences from the earliest to the latest types, which had been shown to have existed into historic times among tribes like the Natchez, Thomas was finally able to put to rest the myths of the moundbuilders as anything but the natural descendants of earlier stone age peoples and the ancestors of the then modern tribes of what we would call the Woodland Peoples.  The birth of modern American archaeology also got its first big boost from those trying to solve the moundbuilder problem, leading to the excavations and preservation of these remarkable structures at a time when their continued destruction and loss from our landscape due to ignorance or wanton indulgence had seemed inevitable in the face of "Progress".  Even today, we are still tapping into the mysteries of these amazing peoples and their knowledge of the heavens, plant domestication, and other universal human accomplishments for which they remain one of the closest and clearest windows reaching into our own stone age past.

For more informantion on the origins of the moundbuilders, their place in American prehistory, and their impact on our own geography and mythology, the reader is encouraged to read the fourth novel in The People of the Stone series. A Dark Winged Shadow, is set in the central Ohio Valley at the very beginnings of the amazing Adena culture and is based upon the actual findings of the excavation of the Criel mound of the Kanawha Valley in WVA by Cyrus Thomas and others.  The next novel in the series, The Corn Maiden's Gift (coming in 2010), will focus on the rise and fall of the great Hopewell cultural explosion, perhaps the very highlight of Woodland prehistory in native North America.