Mound Builders

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 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 now might seem 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.

Since 1997, a series of astounding developments have shattered American archaeology's most cherished beliefs. Excavations have uncovered solid evidence that acient America was settled at least 50,000 years ago. Genetic evidence shows that several waves of migrations came into America from not only Siberia, but also from Polynesia, China, and Japan. A mysterious genetic type has been identified in ancient American skeletal remains as well as in some modern Native Americans. This enigmatic type is linked to the Middle East and may well have originated in a location between America and Europe.Edgar Cayce, America's famous "Sleeping Prophet," gave 68 readings between 1925 to 1944 that provided information on America's Mound Builders and ancient American history. These readings have never been thoroughly analyzed and have been largely forgotten.For the first time, Cayce's statements about ancient America are compared to current archaeological evidence. Incredibly, nearly everything Cayce related about the Mound Builders is true. Well-documented and highly illustrated. This is a reissue of the book first released in 2001.

The Mound Builders, is a classical and a rare book, that has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and redesigned. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work, and hence their text is clear and readable. This remarkable book falls within the genres of North America local history, Canada

THE STORY: At an archeological dig in the Midwest, a party of university scientists are unearthing vestiges of a lost Indian civilization. Heading the group is Dr. Howe, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and by a younger associate and his wife.

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.

Includes material on the Spiro Mound.

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 connected egalitarian societies in the process. Examining “every available ceramic sherd from every northern earthwork,” Howey combines regional archaeological investigations with ethnohistory, analysis of spatial relationships, and collaboration with tribal communities to explore changes in the area’s social setting from 1200 to 1600. During this time, cultural shifts, such as the adoption of maize horticulture, led to the creation of the earthen constructions. Burial mounds were erected, marking claims to resources and defining areas for local ritual gatherings, while massive circular enclosures were constructed as intersocietal ceremonial centers. Together, Howey shows, these structures made up part of an interconnected, purposefully designed cultural landscape. When societies incorporated the earthworks into their egalitarian social and ritual behaviors, the structures became something more: ceremonial monuments. The first systematic examination of earthen constructions in what is today Michigan, Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200–1600 reveals complicated indigenous histories that played out in the area before European contact. Howey’s richly illustrated investigation increases our understanding of the diverse cultures and dynamic histories of the pre-Columbian ancestors of today’s Great Lake tribes.

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.