Earthworks, Indigenous Subjects, and the Creation of American Anthropology

Thousands of earthworks or “Indian mounds” line North America’s arterial river ways. The Great Serpent Mound, for example, protects the waters of Branch Creek, which flow into the nearby Ohio River; the mounds at Cahokia sit not far from where the Missouri and Illinois meet the Mississippi. The remains of Nanih Waiya, the Mother Mound of Choctaw people, sit near the Fox Branch of the Pearl River as, on the other side of the Great River, the Poverty Point earthworks overlook the floodplain. While indigenous peoples of North America have always had explanations for the earthworks that crisscross their continent, European and creole traders, naturalists, and museum workers have supplied their own narratives over the past 500 years, many of them digging into earthworks to do so. Indeed, in myriad ways, earthworks and the histories of the peoples who made them have provided the framework for anthropology and museology in the United States. One of the first academic accounts of earthworks in U.S. culture was Robert Silverberg’s Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (1968), which is still a central text of intellectual history. The four books under review here, however, provide a crucial expansion and reframing of Silverberg’s work—and of the history of U.S. archaeology, ethnology, and anthropology more generally—that is long overdue. Terry A. Barnhart’s impeccable survey of U.S. archaeology’s origins definitively replaces Silverberg’s as the work of reference. When paired with Sean P. Harvey’s thorough assessment of philological approaches to Native history, a more complete account of anthropology’s connection to the discourse of race and U.S. policies of indigenous dispossession emerges. Samuel J. Redman’s careful case studies of human remains collections in U.S. museums place nineteenth-century questions of race and human history in dialogue with twenty-first century concerns, while Jay Miller’s refreshingly original earthworks study places a crucial emphasis on the place of earthworks and mound-building practices in Native communities today. Taken together, these four studies provide fresh analyses of old questions and new insights, and their concurrent appearance testifies to an increasing scholarly interest in earthworks and indigenous philosophies within the study of U.S. history and culture.

When trappers, explorers, and settlers moved into the Ohio Valley in the eighteenth century, earthworks almost always provoked questions of age, origin, and purpose. The newcomers had little sense of the vast histories of the lands they had arrived to occupy, nor of the immensely interconnected, yet distinctive, peoples living there. Often, local inquiries were ignored or answered with “I don’t know,” which some took as a tacit acknowledgement that the earthworks had been made by an unrelated set of peoples commonly referred to as “Mound Builders.”

Terry Barnhart’s American Antiquities charts the history of earthworks reports from the earliest colonial sources to those from the end of the nineteenth century, evaluating the shifting ways in which settler-scholars interpreted the landscapes and peoples before them. Although the early mounds writings, Barnhart argues, have framed “perennial anthropological problems relating to human origins, antiquity, and cultural diversity,” they have tended to be uncritically reiterated in the secondary literature (pp. 1–2). One of Barnhart’s aims in American Antiquities, which provides the most comprehensive compilation and detail-oriented analysis of these writings to date, is to historicize and contextualize the “problematic Mound Builder–Indian dichotomy” and the way in which contemporary observers frequently failed to...