The term mound builders arose in the eighteenth century to denote the makers of the prominent mounds and massive earthworks found scattered over lands west of the Appalachians. Since ancient earthworks were rare and inconspicuous east of the Appalachians and north of the Carolinas, recognition of this ancient American architecture had to await the westward penetration of travelers, developers, and settlers in the late colonial and federal periods. Each new discovery sparked fresh debate over the age and identity of the builders. This debate intensified over time as increasing expanses of acreage were taken up by settlers for cultivation and development.
These earthen constructions consisted of picturesque arrangements of mounds, including some impressively large and isolated examples; hilltop crests with circumvallations; and, even more startlingly, metrically precise geometric embankments in the shape of circles, squares, and octagons. As a category of landscape modification obviously of human origin, these earthworks attracted attention as indicating the deployment of numerous people in a wilderness that at the time was depopulated or lightly settled by Native Americans. Their great age was immediately apparent from the growth of large trees found on some. The identity of the people who constructed these earthworks immediately became a source of debate. Were they constructed by the ancestors of Indians, or were they built by some other people?
The Ohio Valley, where the most intensive inquiry took place, was coming under increasing pressure from settlers out of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Here Indians living in the vicinity were generally of little help. They claimed no responsibility for mound construction, which is understandable from today's perspective because we now know that these tribes were newcomers to the valley. Most travelers, missionaries, and settlers were quick to conclude that these constructions were the legacy of a race of people unrelated to the region's current Native American inhabitants. They were confirmed in their ideas by the then prevalent white attitude that Native Americans were too indifferent to labor to have been capable of devoting the effort required in the mounds' construction and would not have had the engineering knowledge to plan and execute the most demanding examples. So entrenched were early Americans in their negative perception of Native American abilities that they paid little attention to any testimony to the contrary.
Numerous theories existed about the identity of the builders of these mounds. Some were quite imaginative and focused on various "lost races." Two had strong popular support. One was that they were the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; the other maintained that they were peoples from the south, identified with one or another of the Mexican groups. The first theory drew upon scriptural inspiration, and the latter upon the number of close correspondences between the architecture of Middle America and the mounds of the midcontinent. The former theory has been enshrined in the Book of Mormon; the latter is represented by names conferred in honor of the southern connection, such as Aztalan (Wisconsin) and Toltec (Arkansas). Although lost-race theories were the most popular, there have always been adherents to a third view—that the earthworks were made by the ancestors of present-day Indians. This line of thinking was particularly strong in the South, where William Bartram and other travelers reported Native American use of mounds firsthand.
A broad spectrum of famous early Americans wrote on the subject of the group that came to be known as the Mound Builders. Among them were Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, George Rogers Clark, and Henry Schoolcraft. It was a primary subject of inquiry for the Smithsonian Institution in its formative years, and American archaeology cut its teeth on explorations to settle the Mound Builder question. Two studies stand out. The first of these is a monograph by Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, published as the initial monograph of the Smithsonian Institution in 1848. This study combined high-quality mapping with detailed field investigations at Mound City, Hopewell, and other Ohio sites. The authors adduced information indicating a Mexican connection for the Mound Builders.
The second study was a federally supported effort to solve the Mound Builder problem under the auspices of the newly created Bureau of Ethnology. From 1881 to 1893 Cyrus Thomas led a coordinated investigation of the problem, with explorations into mounds throughout the East. A massive effort by fieldworkers in many states concluded with a definitive assessment of the Mound Builder problem based on archaeological fieldwork and a thoroughgoing search of the literature. As a result, the effort to identify the Mound Builders was abandoned, and in its place substantive evidence was offered for cultural continuity between the mound-building traditions and indigenous tribal practices. The theory of a distinct race of Mound Builders was declared to be without substance from both an archaeological and an ethnohistorical standpoint.
Archaeological fieldwork undertaken since Thomas's day has demonstrated that cultures in the East were undergoing dramatic changes long before Europeans had an opportunity to became familiar with Native American cultures. Therefore the earthworks attributed to the Mound Builders need to be seen in chronological perspective. They actually belong to a number of distinct periods. The earliest documented mounds were constructed in Louisiana about 4000 b.c., when groups in the lower Mississippi Valley established settled village life. Although these burial mounds were sometimes large, they were isolated constructions associated with distinct villages. Individual mounds and sets of associated mounds built in the millennia that followed are distributed in a manner suggestive of a similar connection with distinct communities inhabiting a particular territory over many generations. One variant of the typical circular, dome-shaped burial mound is the earthwork built in the outline of an animal. Such effigy mounds were particularly common in the upper Great Lakes area from a.d. 500 to 1000. Whatever the shape, the basic mortuary use of the mounds by small, self-contained communities continued up into the historic period.
A different function is indicated by the truly massive mounds and associated earthworks first exemplified by the Poverty Point site (Louisiana). These were mound groups that rose to prominence as a place of multi-group aggregation, where people from distant areas came together. As befitted the role that such sites have in cementing social relations among separate peoples, these assemblages of earthworks were more complicated than the mounded cemeteries of local, self-sufficient villages. At its heyday around 1000 b.c., Poverty Point covered about one hundred acres and featured six concentric rings of low embankments of earth.
Later in the Middle Woodland period, around the time of the beginning of the Common Era, aggregation centers became widely distributed from the edge of the Great Plains to the Appalachians and from southern Ontario to peninsular Florida. Among these were the impressive earthworks encountered by colonists in the upper Ohio Valley. The embankment-surrounded hill crests (such as Serpent Mound) and the massive geometric enclosures of the Ohio Valley belong to this time. These works feature the precise laying out of earthen embankments that enclosed sacred, ritual space.
Mounds and other constructions were placed in various positions within a particular location. The largest hilltop enclosure is called Fort Ancient. Encompassing about one hundred acres, it is surrounded by an embankment ranging in height from four to twenty-three feet. It is breached by seventy openings and appears, in common with other earthworks, to have been created piecemeal over a century or more. Although the location of such hilltop enclosures has inspired visions of embattled defense, their construction offers no evidence of a military objective, and all of the archaeological evidence points to mortuary and ritual use only.
The geometric earthworks laid out on broad river bottoms offer further interest because of the precision of their geometric layouts. Circles, squares, and octagons were constructed singly or in attached groups, in conjunction with round burial mounds and paths bordered by low embankments. The Newark earthworks represent an unusually large assortment of such elements, with a well-preserved octagon and an impressive great circle twelve hundred feet in diameter. The geometric works are connected by bordered pathways extending over four square miles. Each example of mounds with embankments, whether large or small, indicates the remains of mortuary and sacred architecture connected with multigroup aggregations.
With the rise of communities based on corn agriculture around a.d. 1000, the flat-topped pyramidal mound came to predominate throughout the Southeast. This construction was designed to serve as a platform for chiefly residences and shrines controlled by the chief and his priesthood. Mortuary mounds continued as members of a set of mounds at most sites that were dedicated to distinct functions. These sets of mounds were arranged in cardinal directions, and the space they delimited often defined public plazas. Fortifications with bastions accompany many of these mound-bearing towns. The largest mound in eastern North America, called Monks Mound, is one of about one hundred mounds of at least three types present at the great Cahokia site (Illinois), which is spread over two square miles. Monks Mound is one hundred feet high and has a basal area of about thirteen acres.
After a.d. 1300 mound construction declined in frequency and amount throughout the Southeast. By the sixteenth century mounds that were still in use were occupied, with little attempt to add to or alter them. Archaeology thus has demonstrated that there have been dramatic changes in the way Native Americans have made use of earth to create architectural features. The seeming disregard for earthen architecture by certain tribes during the colonial period happens to be part of an ongoing process. As a consequence, the Mound Builder label has to be regarded as a description of ancient Native American civilization rather than as something describing a fundamentally different group of people.
See also
Cahokia;
Mississippians;
Moundville;
Serpent Mound.
Brian M. Fagan, Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991); Roger C. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1994); Robert Silverberg, Mound Builders of Ancient America (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1968).
James A. Brown
Northwestern University
