Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth

viii, 396 pp. 60 black and white illustrations, maps, and charts included. "The mounds of the Mississippi Valley and southeastern United States are major monuments of the prehistory of North America. Nearly every important waterway in the Midwest is rimmed by clusters of mounds, ten thousand of them in the valley of Ohio alone. Some are of colossal size, like Cahokia Mound in Illinois, a hundred feet high and covering sixteen acres of land; others are mere blisters rising from the earth. Who built the mounds? To the first settlers who pushed beyond the Alleghenies, these earthworks were a major mystery. The semi-nomadic contemporary Indians appeared to have no knowledge of their origin... Inexorably the myth arose of a "vanished race" and a "lost civilization.""