Indian Mounds of Wisconsin

2. Speculation, Excavation, Explanation: In Search of the Mound Builders

2 Speculation, Excavation, Explanation In Search of the Mound Builders Who built the mounds? This is the question still most frequently asked about Indian mounds. Today, the question most often concerns the identity of the speciWc Native American people among the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago ), Menominee, Potawatomi, Chippewa, and other modern tribes that live or lived in the Wisconsin mound district. As ludicrous as it may now seem, when Euro-American settlers asked the question in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most did not believe that Native Americans were responsible. WHO BUILT THE MOUNDS? Immigrants to the New World found mounds and other mysterious earthworks just about everywhere they went in the eastern part of North America . In the South, they encountered abandoned communities in which were large Xat-topped pyramids of earth reminiscent of the massive stone structures described as having been built by the Aztecs of Mexico. In the Ohio River valley, they were astounded to come across colossal earthen embankments , ramparts, and ditches in complex geometric forms as well as groups of conical mounds. Throughout the upper Mississippi River drainage in the Midwest, the new people discovered other earthen mounds, including those sculpted into the shapes of giant birds and other animals. But most Americans had never actually witnessed the natives build 13 mounds and, as a reXection of the prejudice of the day, seriously doubted that such “savages,” in the midst of being displaced, starved, and killed, could organize the labor to achieve the purpose. Consequently, the colonial residents of the eastern seaboard and later settlers of midwestern lands hotly debated the origin of the mounds and elaborate earthen structures. They Wlled newspapers, books, magazines, and scholarly journals of the day with their theories, fueling the imagination of an American public hungry for information about their new home. On one side of the debate was a small cadreofscholarsandscientiWcallyinclinedindividuals—includingpoliticianphilosopher Albert Gallatin, founder of the American Ethnological Society of New York, and Wisconsin’s own Increase A. Lapham—who made the seemingly logical connection between the native inhabitants of North America and the ancient earthen structures. On the other, much larger, side were those people, many of them also well educated, who argued that the mounds were the products of a mysterious and distinctly non-Indian (that is, civilized) “race” that had disappeared before both Native Americans and Euro-Americans came to occupy the North American continent. During the nineteenth century, interest in the question of the identity of the mysterious mound builders became so great that it precipitated investigations and publications by a new government agency, the Smithsonian Institution, and stimulated the growth of North American archaeology into a discrete and scientiWcally based Weld of inquiry. THE MYTH OF THE “LOST RACE” Why was a “Lost Race” evoked to account for the mounds, and why was such wild speculation so universally accepted? The answers to these questions lie not only in the obvious lack of speciWc information concerning Native American cultural history, but in the worldview of Europeans and their American descendants that limited all observations and interpretations to rigidly held religious and Eurocentric beliefs. Historian Robert Silverberg, in Mound Builders of Ancient America, and archaeologists Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. SabloV, in A History of American Archaeology, cite a number of speciWc factors that contributed to the development of the myth of a Lost Race as the builders of the mounds. 1 The Myth before the Nineteenth Century Before the mid-nineteenth century, there was an absence of not only reliable information about the cultural history of the New World, but also a scientiWc framework in which to collect and evaluate such information. Much of Speculation, Excavation, Explanation 14 what was known was derived from the accounts of explorers who had been less interested in the history and culture of the natives they had encountered than in gold, God, and glory and from the musings of “armchair explorers” who wrote books based on second-hand information and literary fantasy. ScientiWc reasoning, with its emphasis on the accumulation and analysis of objective and empirical data, had not yet fully emerged. Even basic concepts, such as that of an ancient and ever-changing natural world, would have to await the acceptance of the geology of Sir Charles Lyell and the biology of Charles Darwin. Knowledge about the world and its history was not as much formed and tested by accumulated data as it was molded...