The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost White Race”

I have been wading through this book.  It covers the curious history of popular understanding of thte Mound Builders during the nineteenth century.  Most important though is that Thomas Jefferson practically invented the science of stratigraphy in his excavation of a local mound and got it right.  Better we also get local indian tradition as well.

There were thousands of these things and they are all important as living funeralry monuments.  They were not necessarily built close to a community as one would expect.

Indian burial practise started first with laying the corpse out exposed to the elements for a long time.  I thingk trhat this became a practice because shallow burials could be readily dug up be hte Giant sloth in particular.  Thus this was an accomadation to nature.  Please observe our six foot depth serves the purpose of putting the body out of reach from such excavation in most cases.

Once enough bones had been accumulated at such an exposure site, family members could then gather the bones into a basket and then carry them to the final resting place in a burial mound.  The bones would be laid out and covered with additional baskets of soil drawn from the surrounding moat.

Ever community would have their own burial mound and it might even be  in an old hunting ground as well. They were also sustained over centuries providing some rather large structures as well.

We still had temple mounds and Chiefs nounds as well.  Few had anything to do with defence.

All this inspired a strange narritive in the nineteenth centuries attempting to make these mounds non native, mostly because the white settlers were completely aware of native legitamacy as land owners and ancestral stakeholders.

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The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost White Race”

(University of Oklahoma Press, 2020)

Why many Americans still don’t believe that ancient Native Americans built the mounds

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-mound-builder-myth.html

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 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 American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history—and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people.

Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history—but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it might seem now that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this “ancient” myth has clear echoes in today’s arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, “alternative facts,” and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.