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In Illinois, the one-hundred-foot Cahokia Mound spreads impressively across sixteen acres, and as many as ten thousand more mounds dot the Ohio River Valley alone. The Mound Builders traces the speculation surrounding these monuments and the scientific excavations which uncovered the history and culture of the ancient Americans who built them. The mounds were constructed for religious and secular purposes some time between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., and they have prompted curiosity and speculation from very early times. European settlers found them evidence of some ancient and glorious people. Even as eminent an American as Thomas Jefferson joined the controversy, though his conclusions—that the mounds were actually cemeteries of ancient Indians—remained unpopular for nearly a century. Only in the late 19th century, as Smithsonian Institution investigators developed careful methodologies and reliable records, did the period of scientific investigation of the mounds and their builders begin. Silverberg follows these excavations and then recounts the story they revealed of the origins, development, and demise of the mound builder culture.
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Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of Ame...
A classic resource on early knowledge of prehistoric mounds and the peoples who constructed them in the eastern United States
Mound-builders are unique in being the only birds that do not incubate their eggs using body heat; rather, a variety of naturally occurring sources of heat is exploited such as solar energy and the heat generated by decomposing organic matter. This book shows how this remarkable adaptation influences every part of these birds’ lives, including the development of the embryo, the parentless life of the hatchlings, their social organisation and their survival. Twenty-two species of mound-builders exist within the Megapode family. Mound-builders examines the three occurring in Australia: the Scrubfowl in the humid tropics; the Brush turkey in dense forested areas from Cape York to Sydney; and most remarkable of all, the Malleefowl in the arid interior. Scientific interest in these birds has increased considerably in recent decades, and Mound-builders summarises many significant discoveries. With a strong emphasis on conservation and changing interactions between mound-builders and people, this is an excellent introduction to one of the most unusual bird families.
Hailed by Bruce D. Smith, Curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution, as without question the best available book on the pre-Columbian Indian societies of eastern North America, this wide-ranging and copiously illustrated volume covers the entire sweep of Eastern Woodlands prehistory, with an emphasis on how these societies developed from hunter-gatherers to village farmers and town-dwellers.
This work establishes the Amerindian burial experience as essential to understanding all neolithic religious customs. It also includes a selection of technical illustrations, a bibliography, and an appendix.
Who Were the Mound Builders? is aligned to the Common Core State Standards for English/Language Arts, addressing Literacy.RI.3.9 and Literacy.L.3.1c. Readers learn about the Native Americans who constructed mounds throughout the U.S., depicted in full-page color photographs accompanied by narrative nonfiction text. This book should be paired with The Native American Mound Builders" (9781477726587) from the InfoMax Common Core Readers Program to provide the alternative point of view on the same topic.
Rising above the northern Michigan landscape, prehistoric burial mounds and impressive circular earthen enclosures bear witness to the deep history of the region’s ancient indigenous peoples. These mounds and earthworks have long been treated as isolated finds and have never been connected to the social dynamics of the time in which they were constructed, a period called Late Prehistory. In Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200–1600, Meghan C. L. Howey uses archaeology to make this connection. She shows how indigenous communities of the northern Great Lakes used earthen structures as gathering places for ritual and social interaction, which maintained conne...
Provides an introduction to the ancient Indian mound builders of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.