Mound builders why

One of the most evocative tellings of this epic is in William Cullen Bryant's poem, "The Prairies": "All is gone; All - save the piles of earth that hold their bones, The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods, The barriers which they builded from the soil To keep the foe at bay - till o'er the walls The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one, The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped With corpses.

The brown vultures of the wood Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres, And sat unscared and silent at their feast. Under these circumstances, the Europeans need not have felt any compunction about sweeping aside the supposed savage hordes to re-claim the land on behalf of civilization. In my Columbus Dispatch column for June 5th I present the argument that this myth actually owes much of its substance to American Indian oral traditions recorded by early European pioneers. This does not, of course, lend credence to the story or make its use as a justification for the usurpation of American Indian lands any less heinous; but it makes the history of the myth more complicated and interesting.

These three cultures represent only a small fraction of the Native American communities which thrived in Prehistoric Eastern America. Their skills and ingenuity regarding the landscape and the sky are mirrored in other Eastern native cultures and, indeed, across the prehistoric Americas. This video, courtesy of CERHAS, discusses the history of mound-builder naming conventions and the problems which arise from labeling anonymous cultures.

Hancock discusses the apparent significance of soil to the mound-building cultures. Embankments encircle plazas or connect buildings in cosmic or magical arrangements. Sometimes there is only one mound; sometimes there are a score or more. Invested labor ranges from modest the equivalent of a mere handful of people working for a day or two to monumental the equivalent of hundreds of people toiling for years. So who built these mounds?

Ignoring more than a century of eyewitness accounts, some nineteenth-century antiquarians refused to admit that the mounds were the work of the American Indians, claiming instead that the architects were refugees from sunken continents, lost races, conquering foreign legions, or the mighty Aztec or Toltec. With the identity of the Mound Builders resolved, twentieth-century archaeologists turned to the history of mound building. Boosted by radiocarbon dating in midcentury, archaeologists have traced Mound Builder roots back at least seven millennia.

The larger of its two conical mounds covers a crematorium and dates to sometime around 7,—7, years ago calibrated. Early mound building flourished between 5, and 6, years ago, when Lower Mississippi Valley natives erected solitary mounds as well as mound complexes with between two and eleven structures. Since this would make the mounds much older than any others ever found, the professional community believed a mistake had been made in the testing and viewed the results with suspicion.

Then Saunders and Jones examined the Watson Brake mound complex on the west side of the Ouachita River approximately twenty miles south of West Monroe. There they found eleven mounds that were constructed in a circular pattern, with each mound being connected by a low, manmade earthen ridge.

Saunders and Jones carefully retrieved organic material taken from the mounds that dated to 3, B. This time there was no doubting the evidence. The Watson Brake mounds are nearly 2, years older than Poverty Point and are the oldest known Indian mounds in the United States and the oldest known human construction in the entire Western Hemisphere. Two have been found on the campus of Louisiana State University, and others have been found in Louisiana and other states. It is not known why the Indians built the Watson Brake mounds.