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    The Mound Builders
    The Mound Builders
    The Mound Builders
    Ebook295 pages4 hours

    The Mound Builders

    By Robert Silverberg

    4.5/5

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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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio University Press
    Release dateMay 1, 1986
    ISBN9780821443828
    The Mound Builders
    Author

    Robert Silverberg

    Robert Silverberg’s first published story appeared in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia University. Since then, he has won multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. He has been nominated for both awards more times than any other writer. In 1999 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2004 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him their Grand Master Award for career achievement. He remains one of the most imaginative and versatile writers in science fiction.

    Read more from Robert Silverberg

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      The Mound Builders, by Robert Silverberg, is a fascinating history.The first two thirds of the book is devoted not to the mound builders themselves, but to the odyssey of American archeology discovering their existence.Europeans had known about the mounds since the expeditions of De Soto in the early 1500s and mound building continued in some parts of North America until the early 1700s. However, beginning in the late 18th and continuing through most of the 19th century many Americans came to believe the myth of the mound builders.These magnificent earthen structures, laden with artifacts of a lost civilization, requiring large, highly organized societies, were the work of a vanished race. The mound builders were Phoenicians or Greeks or the lost tribes of Israel or survivors from Atlantis. It was impossible that they could have been related to the heathen savages that the Europeans were so efficiently exterminating. Many versions of the myths had Native Americans as the villains in the story, destroying the mound builders civilization. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that the myth was deflated and archaeologists allowed the mounds themselves to tell their story.The final third of The Mound Builders tells of the three great mound building cultures in North America; the Adena, Hopewell and Mississippians. The Adena were the first to build mounds, beginning around 1000BC. The Hopewell arrived some 600 years later and the two cultures coexisted for several hundred years. The Mississippian culture was coming into being as the Hopewell disappeared, around 700AD. The culture was in decline long before the arrival of the Europeans.The mounds of North America have many unsolved mysteries and Mr. Silverberg is careful to present multiple viewpoints regarding current speculations.Mr. Silverberg mentions my current obsession, Cahokia, only in passing. Although Cahokia was the largest prehistoric city in North American and Monk’s Mound dwarfs any other structure of the mound building cultures, much of the archaeological work in Cahokia had not occurred when The Mound Builders was published in 1970.If you have even a passing interest in North American archeology, The Mound Builders is a good read.
    • 4/5
      Silverberg's book is probably fairly dated now, but it is a great introduction to this fascinating book. Silverberg divides the Mound Builders into two categories, the more northerly Adena and Hopewell peoples, and the more southern Mississippians. He discusses their cultural differences as well as the archaeological findings. Silverberg begins to ask the questions about the disappearance of these cultures, but leaves most of the answers to other writers.

    Book preview

    The Mound Builders - Robert Silverberg

    1

    THE DISCOVERY OF THE MOUNDS

    Monuments of past civilizations lie scattered in many parts of the world. Egypt has her pyramids, England her Stonehenge, Greece her Acropolis. Out of the jungles of Cambodia rise the towers of Angkor. The isle of Crete offers the sprawling palace of King Minos at Knossos. The stone cities of the Mayas adorn Mexico’s Yucatán.

    But in the continental United States we have few spectacular relics of prehistory. The only ancient settlements of the American Indian that have survived are in New Mexico and Arizona: the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, the giant apartment houses of Chaco Canyon, the many other sites of the people we call the Pueblo Indians. Outside the Southwest, though, the builders of ancient America worked in wood and earth, and little of their work has endured. For signs of our past we must look, not to vast monuments of imperishable stone, but to subtler things: the arrowhead in the forest soil, the image carved on the face of a cliff, the bit of broken pottery.

    Our forefathers greatly regretted this lack when they came here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They did not like to feel that they were coming into an empty land peopled only by naked wandering savages. They searched hopefully for traces of some grand and romantic past. In Mexico and in South and Central America, European invaders had found great kingdoms and awesome cities, but the land to the north seemed a continent only of woods and plains, inhabited by simple huntsmen and equally simple farmers. It offered no imagination-stirring symbols of vanished greatness. In all this mighty continent, was there nothing to compare with the antiquities of the Old World?

    Men in search of a myth will usually find one, if they work at it. In the fledgling Thirteen Colonies the mythmakers had little raw material with which to work; but as the colonists gradually spread westward and southward, they found strange earthen mounds, beyond the Alleghenies and in the valley of the Mississippi, which could serve as the inspiration for romantic tales of lost civilizations.

    The mounds lacked beauty and elegance, perhaps. They were mere heaps of earth. Some were colossal, like the Cahokia Mound in Illinois, 100 feet high and covering 16 acres; others were mere blisters rising from the earth. Some stood in solitary grandeur above broad plains, while others sprouted in thick colonies. All were overgrown with trees and shrubbery, so that their outlines could barely be distinguished, although, once cleared, the mounds revealed their artificial nature by their regularity and symmetry of shape. Within many of them were human bones, weapons, tools, jewelry.

    There were so many of these earthen heaps—ten thousand in the valley of the Ohio River alone—that they seemed surely to be the work of an energetic and ambitious race. As the settlers fanned outward during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they found scarcely an area that did not show traces of mound-building activity. The Atlantic coast, from North Carolina up through New England, had no mounds, but beyond the Alleghenies they were everywhere.

    In the North, the mound zone began in western New York, and extended along the southern shore of Lake Erie into what now are Michigan and Wisconsin, and on to Iowa and Nebraska. In the South, mounds lined the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to eastern Texas, and were found up through the Carolinas and across to Oklahoma. The greatest concentration of mounds lay in the heart of the continent: Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri. There were lesser mound areas in Kentucky and western Tennessee. Nearly every major waterway of the Midwest was bordered by clusters of mounds.

    To some of the settlers, the mounds were nuisances to be plowed flat as quickly as possible. To others, they were places of handy refuge in time of flood. But to the antiquarian, the mounds were the work of a vanished race which with incredible persistence had erected them in the course of hundreds of thousands of years and then had disappeared from the face of North America.

    Why a vanished race?

    Because the Indians of the mound area, as the settlers found them, were semi-nomadic savages, few in number and limited in ambition. They seemed obviously incapable of the sustained effort needed to quarry tons of earth and shape it into a symmetrical mound. Nor did these Indians have any traditions of their own about the construction of the mounds; when questioned, they shrugged, or spoke vaguely about ancient tribes.

    By the early nineteenth century, hundreds if not thousands of mounds had been examined, measured, and partly excavated by the settlers whose imaginations were stirred by them. These pioneering mound studies revealed the extreme variety in the forms of the earthworks. Along the Great Lakes, the mounds tended to be low, no more than three or four feet high, and took the forms of gigantic birds, reptiles, beasts, and men. These huge image-mounds seemed quite clearly to be of sacred nature—idols, perhaps. Such effigies were common in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa, more rarely seen in Ohio and Missouri, and scarcely found anywhere else.

    To the south, in the valley of the Ohio River, the customary shape of the mounds was conical and their height might be anything from a few yards to 80 or 90 feet. Such mounds seemed at first glance to have been lookout posts or signal stations, but excavation showed that they always contained burials. Aside from the conical burial mounds, isolated mounds in the form of immense, flat-topped pyramids were sometimes found in the Midwest. Some were terraced, or had graded roadways leading to their summits. To their discoverers it appeared probable that the flat-topped mounds had once been platforms for temples long ago destroyed by the elements.

    In the lower Mississippi area, conical mounds were scarce, and flat-topped pyramids were the rule. These imposing structures reminded their discoverers of the teocallis, the stone pyramids of Mexico; and their presence in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico clearly indicated some link between the Aztec culture and that of the builders of the mounds.

    In addition to the effigy mounds, the burial mounds, and the temple mounds, two types of embankment were observed, mainly in the central Ohio-Indiana-Illinois-Missouri zone. On hilltops overlooking valleys, huge forts had been erected, with formidable walls of earth sometimes reinforced by stone. These obviously defensive works covered many acres. In lowland sites were striking geometric enclosures—octagons, squares, circles, ellipses—of a clearly nonmilitary nature. The lines of embankment were 5 to 30 feet high, and the enclosures had areas of as much as 200 acres. Running out from the enclosures were often parallel walls many miles long, forming great avenues.

    The size of these structures astonished the early settlers. One great mound near Miamisburg, Ohio, 68 feet high and 852 feet in circumference at the base, was found to contain 311, 353 cubic feet of soil; another, in Ross County, Ohio, was shown to consist of 20,000 wagonloads of earth. Ross County alone proved to have 500 mounds and 100 enclosures.

    Theories about the mounds and their builders multiplied swiftly. One idea was based on the presence of effigy mounds in the North, conical mounds and geometrical enclosures in the Midwest, and Mexican-style flat-topped pyramids in the South. Did this mean the builders had migrated southward, building ever greater mounds as they went, and at last had left Florida and Georgia and Louisiana to become the founders of the rich Mexican civilization? To this notion was offered its opposite: that out of Mexico had come colonists who moved northward across the continent, at first building earthen mounds in the style of the teocallis, then gradually transforming or forgetting their ancestral culture and producing the conical mounds of Ohio, and finally petering out as builders of effigy mounds near the Canadian border. But no one could be sure of any of this.

    The discovery of the mounds was profoundly satisfying. These artificial hills soon were cloaked in mystery and myth. They provided a link between the New World and the Old, for scholars hurried to their books to find evidence of mound building in ancient times, and they were not disappointed.

    From Herodotus, writing about 450 B.C., came details of the burial of a Scythian king on the Russian plains: the mourners place the dead monarch and his treasures in a tomb, and then they set to work and raise a vast mound above the grave, all of them vying with each other, and seeking to make it as tall as possible.

    The Old Testament told how Canaanite tribes worshiped their deity in high places—and what were these high places if not temple mounds? Homer’s Iliad related how Achilles heaped a great mound over the remains of his friend Patroclus, and how Hector, Patroclus’ slayer, eventually was buried in such a mound as well. Alexander the Great, it was said, had spent a fortune to build a burial mound for his friend Hephaestion. The Roman Emperor Julian, who died in Asia in the year A.D. 363 while warring against the Persians, was buried beneath a huge tumulus, or mound. Danish annals told of the mound burial of Denmark’s first king in the middle of the tenth century. In Britain, antiquaries had long amused themselves by opening ancient mounds, which they called barrows.

    The discovery of the North American mounds connected the New World to Herodotus and Homer, to Rome and the Vikings, to England’s barrows, to all the mounds of Europe and Asia that had been known for so long. It let loose a flood of speculation about the origin and fate of their builders. Learned men came forth to suggest that our land had been visited long ago by Hebrews, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Vikings, Hindus, Phoenicians—anyone, in short, who had ever built a mound in the Old World. If the Israelites had built mounds in Canaan, why not in Ohio? And what had become of the builders of the mounds? Why, obviously, they had been exterminated by the treacherous, ignorant, murderous red-skinned savages who even now were causing so much trouble for the Christian settlers of the New World.

    In this way a myth was born that dominated the American imagination throughout the nineteenth century. The builders of the mounds were transformed into the Mound Builders, a diligent and gifted lost race. No one knew where the Mound Builders had come from or where they had gone, but the scope for theorizing was boundless. The myth took root, flourished and grew, even spawned a new religion; then the scientists took over from the mythmakers and hacked away the luxuriant growth of fantasies. The most vigorous demythologizer was the one-armed Major J. W. Powell, conqueror of the Colorado River and later founder of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. When the Bureau put the myth of the Mound Builders to rest in the 1880’s, it was with a certain regret. Powell himself sounded rather wistful in the 1890–91 Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology:

    It is difficult to exaggerate . . . the force with which the hypothetic ‘lost races’ had taken possession of the imaginations of men. For more than a century the ghosts of a vanished nation have ambuscaded in the vast solitudes of the continent, and the forest-covered mounds have been usually regarded as the mysterious sepulchres of its kings and nobles. It was an alluring conjecture that a powerful people, superior to the Indians, once occupied the valley of the Ohio and the Appalachian ranges, their empire stretching from Hudson bay to the Gulf, with its flanks on the western prairies and the eastern ocean; a people with a confederated government, a chief ruler, a great central capital, a highly developed religion . . . all swept away before an invasion of copper-hued Huns from some unknown region of the earth, prior to the landing of Columbus. . . .

    2

    If more attention had been paid to the experiences of the first Europeans to visit the American mounds, the whole Mound Builder myth of a lost race might never have gained headway. In 1539, Hernando de Soto and an expedition of gold-seeking Spaniards landed in Florida and made their way through much of the Southeast, exploring a thickly populated territory where the mound-building tradition was still very much alive. Each town had one or more mounds, on which temples and the dwellings of chiefs and nobles were situated. It seemed quite logical to the Spaniards that these Indians would choose raised sites for their important buildings, and the chroniclers of de Soto’s expedition saw nothing remarkable about the mounds, mentioning them only casually. Yet within 250 years some highly learned Americans, unable to believe that the mounds of the Southeast had been built by Indians, were suggesting quite seriously that they were the work of de Soto’s own men!

    De Soto had served with distinction in the Spanish conquest of Peru. He was one of the few Spaniards to behave honorably during that bloody invasion; he came home from Peru a wealthy man in 1537, and asked Charles V, the Spanish king, for a grant of land in the New World. The king awarded him the governorship of a vaguely defined territory called Florida, which had been discovered by Ponce de León in 1513 and sketchily explored by several Spanish expeditions in the following two decades.

    De Soto collected 622 men, including a Greek engineer, an English longbowman, two Italians, and four dark men from Africa, and in April of 1539 they left Cuba for Florida. A month later they reached Tampa Bay, and on May 30 de Soto’s soldiers began to go ashore. They were looking for a new kingdom as rich as Peru.

    On the first of June they entered an Indian town, called Ucita in the narrative of a member of the expedition known to us only as the Gentleman of Elvas. This Portuguese knight wrote, The town was of seven or eight houses, built of timber, and covered with palm-leaves. The chief’s house stood near the beach, upon a very high mound made by hand for defense; at the other end of the town was a temple, on the top of which perched a wooden fowl with gilded eyes. . . . This is the first known description of a mound of the American Indians.

    This town had been visited by a band of rough Spaniards eleven years earlier, and the inhabitants did not remember their guests with pleasure. They were no happier with de Soto. He and two of his lieutenants moved into the chief’s house; the other dwellings were demolished, as was the temple. De Soto sent scouts inland to survey the territory, and soon smoke signals were rising as the Indians passed the word from village to village that intruders once again had come.

    The scouts returned to say that the countryside was a maze of swamps and ponds and marshes; the only routes through the mud were Indian trails so narrow that the Spaniards had been able to travel only two abreast. Worse, the patrol had been ambushed by the Indians; two of the irreplaceable horses had been slain, and several of the men had been wounded.

    De Soto would have done well to quit there and return to Spain to enjoy his Peruvian wealth. He would have avoided the torments of a terrible march through 350,000 square miles of unexplored territory, and would have spared himself the early grave he found by the banks of the Mississippi. But a stroke of bad luck in the guise of seeming fortune drew de Soto onward to doom. A marooned Spaniard, a member of an expedition of 1528, appeared; he had lived among the Indians so long, adopting their customs and their language, that he had almost forgotten his former way of life. This man, Juan Ortiz, seemed just what de Soto needed: an interpreter, a guide to the unknown country ahead.

    The Spaniards proceeded north, looking for gold. Ortiz spoke to the Indians when he could and arranged peaceful passage through their territory. Where Ortiz could not speak the local language, the Spaniards used cruelty to win their way. The Indians were terrified of the Spanish horses, for they had never seen such animals before. The Spaniards also had packs of ferocious wolfhounds, and were armed with arquebuses. These were clumsy guns that could be fired only once every few minutes—time enough for the Indians to loose dozens of deadly arrows—but the flash and bang and smoke of the guns served to send the native warriors into flight. De Soto enslaved hundreds of Indians, placing them in irons to carry the baggage. Others he massacred as an example to the tribes ahead, and as the march continued, the killing increased. In Peru, de Soto had been generous to the conquered Incas; but here, vexed by the humid climate and the total lack of treasure, he grew harsh and stern.

    Garcilaso de la Vega, another of the chroniclers of the expedition, offers much information about the customs of these Indians. Though not himself an eyewitness, this historian used the accounts of three of de Soto’s men for his book, published in 1605. Garcilaso gives this description of mound building:

    The Indians of Florida always try to dwell on high places, and at least the houses of the lords and caciques [chiefs] are so situated even if the whole village cannot be. But since all of the land is very flat . . . they build such sites with the strength of their arms, piling up very large quantities of earth and stamping on it with great force until they have formed a mound from twenty-eight to forty-two feet in height. Then on the top of these places they construct flat surfaces which are capable of holding the ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty dwellings of the lord and his family and the people of his service. . . .

    Leading to the houses atop the mounds, says Garcilaso, the Indians build two, three or more streets, according to the number that are necessary, straight up the side of the hill. These streets are fifteen or twenty feet in width and are bordered with walls constructed of thick pieces of wood that are thrust side by side into the earth to a depth of more than the height of a man. Additional pieces of wood just as thick are laid across and joined one to the other to form steps. . . . The steps are four, six or eight feet apart and their height depends more or less on the disposition and steepness of the hill. Because of the width of these steps, the horses went up and down them with ease. All of the rest of the hill is cut like a wall, so that it cannot be ascended except by the stairs, for in this way they are better able to defend the houses of the lord.

    None of the villages had any gold. Each chief told the same story to get rid of the Spaniards: there was a golden land, yes, a village of incredible treasure, quite far away, in another part of the country entirely. De Soto knew they were lying, but there was little he could do save lead his men onward, north along the Florida coast.

    1   Map of the de Soto explorations.

    On March 3, 1540, they crossed into Georgia. The land, which had been fertile, became a place of dense pine forests where the horses could not enter and hostile Indians lurked. The food supply dwindled; some of the horses died. As they reached northern Georgia, they learned from the natives that they were approaching Cofachiqui, the realm of a fat queen said to be rich in gold. She ruled the area on the South Carolina and Georgia sides of the Savannah River, with her capital near present-day Augusta.

    The queen greeted de Soto warmly and presented him with a string of large pearls. He responded by giving her a gold ring set with a ruby. Once the Spaniards were comfortably settled in the town and had dined on turkey and other Indian foods, de Soto brought up the subject of gold and silver. The queen explained that those metals were not mined in her land, but that her people obtained them by trade. She ordered gold and silver brought to de Soto, but what the

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