Academic Interpretations

The mounds of the Ohio River Valley elicited a fascination from the academic community almost from the moment of their discovery by European settlers. In the later eighteenth century, amateur enthusiasts such as Thomas Jefferson, as well as religious figures who spent their lives among the Native Americans, began an academic narrative which has not yet abated.

In the nineteenth century there was a strong belief that the mounds were built by a lost race. Many tribes who were living in the Ohio River Valley during the eighteenth (and nineteenth) century were immigrants from other parts of the eastern United States and had therefore little to no cultural memory of the mounds. This encouraged the incorrect view among Europeans that because of the Native American 'ignorance' of the mound's purpose and construction, Native Americans could not have created the mounds. Academics and popular historians proposed origin theories which ranged from the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Phoenicians, Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Chinese, and Welsh, among many others, as the builders of the mounds. Many writers resolved the issue of what happened to the mound builders by suggesting that they either moved to Mexico and built the famous Mayan and Aztec mounds, or were destroyed by the 'barbarous' Native Americans.

Although such a mythology fed into the severe racism of the era, the drive to prove the myth helped establish the grounds for the use of archaeological methods to uncover American history. Men such as Manasseh Cutler used dendrochronology to attempt to establish a timeline for mounds (Marietta, 1788). Caleb Atwater, who excavated the Ohio settlement of Circleville in the early 1800s, may have been convinced that the mounds were built by people from India, but his careful study and sensitive treatment of the area established good archaeological practice.

Two other angles to the 'Lost Races' theory were that 'giants' roamed ancient America and the mound-building cultures lived coterminously with mastodons. The former concept had enjoyed a long, if spotted, history by the mid-nineteenth century: as early as c. 1705, Cotton Mather misinterpreted mastodon bones as those of a giant. Both of these concepts were interlinked, as mastodon bones were beginning to be uncovered in the Ohio River Valley and elsewhere, occasionally in the general vicinity of sites occupied by mound-building cultures, and were often mistaken for 'giants' or 'cyclops'. Effigy pipes supposedly shaped like elephants, such as those found by Peter Mare in 1872, and 'elephant-shaped' effigy mounds added fuel to the theory. Academics fiercely argued over the truth of these two propositions, even through the 1930s, but ultimately the concept that they were not coterminous won out, and the concept of giants became less popular as more effective identification and dating processes were adopted in the 1950s.

By the late nineteenth century, the myth of a separate race of Mound Builders had been replaced by the opinion that the ancestors of modern Native Americans built the mounds. Popular history reluctantly changed to meet this opinion, substituting their colorful stories for light, informative articles across the twentieth century. Items of interest like the Grave Creek Tablet remained popular, however, and continue to be discussed to this day.

Cadwallader Colden's History of the Five Indian Nations, published in 1727, is one of the earliest published references to mounds in the northern half of the United States. He wrote that a "round hill" was often placed over a grave. Colden also argued that Europeans should treat their native neighbors with more respect. Colden subscribed to what is now known as the 'noble savage' mindset, and argued, albeit condescendingly, that the Native Americans were virtuous but untutored, and that instead of Europeans improving their nature they only taught the Native Americans new vices.

James Adair's History of the American Indians, published in 1775, joins Cadwallader Colden's work in being one of the earliest published mentions of mounds in the northern half of the United States. Adair wrote: “great mounds of earth, either of a circular or oblong form, having a strong breakwork at a distance around them, are frequently met with.”

The History of Northern American Indians is possibly the earliest published account of mounds in Ohio. On May 3^rd, 1772, a group of Christian Native Americans under the guidance of missionary David Zeisberger made a journey from Western Pennsylvania to Ohio. During their journey, they encountered many burial mounds, and Zeisberger published his account several months later. In his account, Zeisberger writes: "Here and there...embankments, still to be seen, were thrown up around a whole town. Here and there, near the sites of such towns there are mounds, not natural, but made by the hand of man." He speculated that the mounds were used as hiding places during inter-tribal warfare.

Although History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations was technically a popular work, the Reverend John Heckewelder was respected by both academics and laypeople alike. He lived among the Delaware tribe during the 1770s and collected stories about the mounds before they entered so forcefully into the public conscious, and his stories were therefore given particular credence. His insistence that the Delawares told him that the creators of the mounds, who were called "Tallegewi" and were particularly tall, sparked off a race to uncover the giants who built the Ohio River Valley mounds. Heckewelder's work remained well-known among academics throughout the nineteenth century. To this day, speculation persists among popular and conspiracy historians as to a giant race of mound builders in the United States.

Although not strictly regarding a mound in the Ohio River Valley, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia include an account of his excavation of a mound on his Monticello estate. The careful notes and, for the time, sensible and sensitive archaeological practices, have encouraged modern historians and archaeologists to call Jefferson the 'first American archaeologist'. Although it constitutes a long extract, his notes include a useful account of the various theories active at the time to determine the use of the mounds:

"That they were repositories of the dead, has been obvious to all: but on what particular occasion constructed, was matter of doubt. Some have thought they covered the bones of those who have fallen in battles fought on the spot of interment. Some ascribed them to the custom, said to prevail among the Indians, of collecting, at certain periods, the bones of all their dead, wheresoever deposited at the time of death. Others again supposed them the general sepulchres for towns, conjectured to have been on or near the grounds; and this opinion was supported by the quality of the lands in which they are found, (those constructed of earth being generally in the softest and most fertile meadow-grounds on river sides) and by a tradition, said to be handed down from the Aboriginal Indians, that, when they settled in a town, the first person who died was placed erect, and earth put around him, so as to cover and support him; that, when another dies, a narrow passage was dug to the first, the second reclined against him, and the cover of earth replaced, and so on."

Reverend James Madison wrote and published A Letter on the Supposed Fortifications of the Western Country defending the opinion that the mounds of the Ohio River Valley were built by the ancestors of the Native Americans. He argued against the mounds being built for fortifications, which was a prevailing opinion of the era, and instead suggests they were burial places.

Reverend Harris, who, in his Journal of a Tour suggested that a different race built the Ohio mounds, placed himself in opposition to the Reverend James Madison, who argued that the ancestors of the Native Americans built the mounds. Although Harris's ideas were not unique for the time, and neither were Madison's, their works were published during a time of increasing public interest in the mounds. Consequently, their works became the figureheads of the split opinion in the native vs non-native argument which lasted for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

In the 1830s Samuel G. Morton examined 968 mound builder-era skulls and compared them with six contemporary Native Americans. He determined that they were genetically similar, but unfortunately in his published work, Crania Americana, Morton wrote that while they were a single race they were divided between the civilized Toltecs, who emigrated to Mexico, and the uncivilized Barbarians, who were the ancestors of the Native Americans.

In The Mound Builders: Their Works and Relics, Reverend Peet argued that mastodons and mound builders coexisted. This theory was popular during the later half of the nineteenth century, and was aided by the discovery of mastadon bones at sites used by mound builders, which were speculated to be coterminous. Reverend Peet used these discovered mastadon bones, an effigy mound in Wisconsin (which he argued was shaped like either a mastodon or an elephant) and an effigy pipe, shown in the above image, discovered by Peter Mare in 1872 and believed by many, including Peet, to be shaped like an elephant.

Charles W. Putnam's essay titled "A vindication of the authenticity of the elephant pipes" was meant to defend effigy pipes such as those found by Mare against the Bureau of Ethnology. Putnam, a member of the Davenport Academy, probably felt threatened that a rival institution was making damaging claims about the authenticity of Davenport's collections.

Edwin Squier and Ephraim H. Davis's Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley was the first major publication of the Smithsonian Institute, founded in 1846. The work was the first large-scale publication on American archaeology, and sought to depict, discuss, and interpret mounds and their origins: unfortunately, their ultimate conclusion was that the Native Americans could not have built the mounds. Despite these failings, the book remains a valuable piece of America history as Squier and Davis recorded many mounds which no longer survive in the twenty-first century.

William M. Carpenter's "Remarks on some fossil bones recently brought to New Orleans from Tennessee and from Texas" was published as a rebuttal against the 'giant' theory (particularly against articles such as the 'Evansville Chronicle' in the 'Popular Interpretations' section). He denies any truth in the theory and explains how the bones were a mix of different animals.

John Wesley Powell, a former army major and geological surveyor of the western United States, had, for his era, a great respect and appreciation for Native Americans. In 1879, in an effort to help preserve Native American culture, Powell urged Congress to establish the Bureau of Ethnology, eventually run by the Smithsonian Institution. For twenty-three years, Powell oversaw a great deal of anthropological work including examinations of mounds across the Ohio River Valley. He led a research team whose aim was to conclusively prove that the mounds were built by the ancestors of the Native Americans, and reports of their findings were published in annual reports compiled by the Smithsonian.

The Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, published in the 1890s, is the text which, to many academic minds, firmly and conclusively settled the argument over the origins of the mounds. The argument begins by reinforcing the power of the Lost Races theory: "It is difficult to exaggerate...the force with which the hypothetic 'lost races' had taken possession of the imagination of men."

At the end of a detailed list of ten conclusions reached after a long study of the mounds, the tenth conclusion firmly quashed any doubts as to the Native Americans having built the mounds:

"The links of evidence connecting the Indians and mound-builders are so numerous and well-established as to justify archaeologists in assuming they were one and the same people."