Mound Builders

4: The Great Debate

THE GREAT DEBATE By 1840, the country between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi was no longer a sparsely populated wilderness. The pioneer villages were becoming towns, and even cities; territories were achieving statehood; the oncetroublesome Indian marauders had largely been pushed westward, beyond the rim of civilization. In Ohio and neighboring states, men now had time to take stock, to think and examine and study. In 1800, an Ohioan with a mound on his property was likely to level it so he could plant crops; forty years later it was more probable that he would undertake a careful excavation and fill his house with a collection of ancient artifacts. The feverish and romantic public interest in the Mound Builders led to a great deal of this amateur archaeologizing in the mound country and sparked a renewal of the debate on the origin of the mounds. There was no shortage of imaginative philosophers trying to prove that the Mound Builders had been Israelites, Phoenicians, Malays, Irishmen, or members of some other immigrant group. But now, also, there were many out in the open country, soiling their hands in the earth of the mounds, men who split the tumuli apart and sought to base their judgments on some sort of solid evidence. 74 5 The Great Mound at Grave Creek. Engraving from Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, by E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis, 1848. One of the important mound excavations of the day was carried out in 1838 at the Grave Creek Mound on the banks of the Ohio in what was then Virginia, but since 1863 has been West Virginia. This mound was one of the first major earthworks to be discovered by white men and got considerable attention in the late eighteenth century. A report quoted in Caleb Atwater's paper on the mounds declares that in 1819 the mound was "one of the most august monuments of remote Antiquity any where to be found. Its circumference at the base, is 300 yards; its diameter, of course, 100. Its altitude, from measurement, is 90 feet; and its diameter, at the summit, is 45 feet. The centre, at the summit, appears to have sunk several feet, so as to form a small kind of amphitheatre. The rim enclosing this amphi- 76 The Mound Builders theatre, is seven or eight feet in thickness.... This lofty and venerable tumulus has been so far opened, as to ascertain that it contains many thousands of human skeletons, but no farther. The proprietor of the ground, Mr. Joseph Tomlinson, will not suffer its demolition in the smallest degree. I, for one, do him honour for his sacred regard for these works of Antiquity...." On March 19, 1838, Abelard B. Tomlinson, a member of the family that owned the Grave Creek property, began to excavate the big mound. At a cost of $2,500, he sank a shaft from the "amphitheatre" at the summit of the mound to its base. At a depth of 77 feet he found a stone-covered, log-walled chamber enclosing a skeleton decorated with thousands of shell beads, copper rings, and mica plates. Going deeper, Tomlinson found another log-walled chamber 111 feet below the summit, in a pit that must have been dug before the mound was built. It contained two skeletons, one of them surrounded by 650 shell beads. A horizontal trench cut through the mound revealed masses of charcoal and burned bones, and ten more skeletons. To modern archaeologists, Abelard Tomlinson's report on the Grave Creek dig is important because it provides the first clear description of the log tombs of what now is called the Adena Culture. Tomlinson's contemporaries, though, simply described the vaults as the tombs of Mound Builder kings, and turned their attention to a much more exciting discovery: the Grave Creek Tablet. Tomlinson had found it in the mound in June, 1838. It was an oval white sandstone disc, % of an inch thick and 1Y2 inches in diameter, on which were inscribed three lines in an unknown alphabet. The Mormon controversy was The Great Debate 77 then raging; the whole nation knew of Joseph Smith and the golden plates he claimed to have found in the hill Cumorah. The uproar over the Grave Creek Tablet is easy to imagine. Among those who came to Grave Creek to examine the tablet was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), one of...