Mound Builders of the Mississippi About 6,500 years ago, people living near what is now Baton Rouge, Louisiana, felt the need to spend endless days filling basketfuls of dirt, carrying them in endless procession to a central location, and emptying them onto a slowly growing, human-made mountain, eventually building a flat-topped, pyramid-shaped mound. This mind-numbing labor marked the beginning of the Mound Builder civilization. Why did they do it? No one knows. But for the next 5,000 years or so, their culture would go through three well defined phases now called the Adena, the Hopewell, and the Mississippian. Although most contemporary scholars assume they were built by the indigenous people who lived there when they first made contact with Europeans, that wasn''t always the case. In 1787, Benjamin Smith Barton first put forth the theory that the mounds were built by Vikings. Since then, the Greeks, various African tribes, the Chinese, or mysterious groups of Europeans have all been suggested. Edgar Cayce predicted we would someday learn they were built by survivors of the Atlantis tragedy.
For a while, President Thomas Jefferson championed a variation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel theory. That is the opinion held today by many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith translated from golden plates he found on Hill Cumorah in Palmyra, New York, it is written that three groups of Israelites (called Nephites, Lamanites, and Mulekites) were descendants of some of the lost tribes who migrated to Mesoamerica in 590 B.C.E., following the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel. Smith never suggested that they were the Mound Builders, but it was a popular theory for a while. Some Mormon scholars still believe that the descriptions of the early mound builders fits with that of a Mesoamerican civilization that eventually moved north into the Mississippi Valley.
Hernando de Soto led the first European expedition through the southeast, from Florida up through Georgia and the Carolinas, eventually circling back to the Mississippi. During his journey, he stumbled upon mounds built near what is now Augusta, Georgia. The leader of the indigenous people there was a person he thought to be, in his words, a "queen." Her name was Cofitachequi. He asked her who built the mounds. She said she didn''t know, but her people were using them as burial places for nobles. Hundreds of the mounds are formed into animal effigy figures. The most well-known is undoubtedly the Serpent Mound in Ohio.
Many theories attempt to explain this mound as well as others such as the Hawk and Eagle Effigies in central Georgia. Although every theory has its champions none conclusively offers any reliable proof of authenticity. All we know for sure is that animal effigies are found from the eastern United States south as far as Peru. Carbon dating suggests that known Native American tribes of people built these mounds in their final form. But the tradition was 6,000 years old when it was first discovered by Europeans. It started in Louisiana, but no one knows who started it, why they started it, what they were trying to accomplish, or how the mounds were used. It must have taken an incredible amount of work. Suppose you want to build just a small earth mound.
Let''s assume you can carry a cubic foot of dirt in your basket and that it takes you fifteen minutes to fill the basket, walk over to the mound, and dump it out. If you do this for eight hours a day, at the end of the day you will have carried a little more than one cubic yard of dirt. Assuming you can find a way to enlist a hundred friends to help you, you can accomplish the back-breaking task of moving 100 cubic feet of dirt in a day. But there are 40,333 cubic yards in an acre, so it will take more than a year (actually, 403 days) to move enough dirt to cover one acre of ground, three feet high. Some of these mounds cover up to 20 acres and rise to the height of a ten-story building. As the saying goes, you do the math! The social coordination required for such a task boggles the mind. And there were thousands of these mounds scattered throughout the Mississippi River valley from Louisiana to Michigan and all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean. What moved people to drop what they were doing and go to so much trouble? And then, at the height of the Mississippian period, right when the civilization was at its peak, they suddenly stopped.
Everyone seems to have decided one day to quit what was then a 5,000-year-old tradition. Why? Did the population outstrip the food supply? Did the darker aspects of the religion turn people away? Did disease rear its ugly head? Did intertribal warfare doom them to destruction? No one knows. But where traditional archeology stops, speculation begins, even among archeologists. The common reasons given for the decline of the Mound Building civilization is that it may have been already in decline by the early 1500s when the first European explorers arrived on the scene, bringing death and devastation in the form of diseases for which the Indian population had absolutely no natural immunity. Estimates about death rates run as high as 90 percent of the population. What must it have felt like? What was the physical and emotional impact this would have had on the people? It was a story very similar to that which was experienced by the inhabitants of the Amazon Rain Forest. A group of strange, bearded white men show up in your village one day. They look different.
They act different. They speak in a foreign language and carry tools and weapons that you have never seen before. No one warned you about these people. Until the day they arrived you never knew such people existed. After a few days, they leave. But then people start getting sick and dying. As many as nine out of every ten people in every village begin to display the unmistakable signs of a sickness that is inevitably fatal. No one can work the fields anymore.
No one can care for themselves. Your mind and spirit are reeling from the shock. You question your religion, which failed to warn you about this. You are fatigued from trying to help so many sick people who can''t take care of themselves. You turn to neighboring villages and discover that every one of them, wherever the white strangers stopped in their journey, is suffering the same plight. It feels as though the world has ended. And that feeling is not far from the truth. The world may not have ended, but your world has.
By the time the sickness has run its course, there are not enough people left to continue your way of life. The fields lie barren. Food supplies run out. And eventually all you can do is pack up your meager belongings and walk into the sunset, hoping for a better life somewhere else. A few years go by. Then decades pass, one by one, leaving in their wake nothing but the silence of nature reclaiming its own. After a while, more Europeans come. They see the mounds that are now covered with forest and draw the mistaken conclusion that no one of any substance ever lived here.
They think they are the first, so they settle down and begin to reclaim what they think is virgin land, never knowing that beneath their feet lie the bones of a thriving civilization that once experienced the same passions that are common to us all. Once in a while, the newcomers discover an artifact of some kind. They might plow over the soil that was once carried, basketful by dedicated basketful, and dumped in this specific spot to form a structure that existed to fulfill a purpose that is totally beyond the comprehension of a hard-working farmer. A forgotten spirituality lies buried beneath their feet, and life goes on until someone begins to ask questions that few care about. After all, there are families to feed. The days are too short to take time out to ponder questions about the meaning of life or a possible connection to gods foreign to a Christian religion that is now considered to be the only path to the true God. It''s easier to call the old ones "primitive and superstitious," and leave it at that. And so it goes.
There are other possibilities, of course. In the field of what is often referred to as "alternative" or "fringe" history--meaning a history story different than the one we have been taught--there is no end to ideas. Some of the most interesting are those of Frank Joseph. When he was the editor in chief of Ancient American magazine he devoted a lot of space to the civilization of the early American Mound Builders. According to his theory, which he derived from sources that include both historians and psychic visionaries, 3,000 years ago a people known as the Keltoi, Kelts, or Celts, migrated into the British Isles. There they learned about the existence of the Americas, which had been known to various indigenous people of western Europe for at least 20,000 years. Groups of Kelts made the oceanic journey, arriving on the eastern shores of America at precisely the same time the mysterious Adena civilization arose. They introduced technology of various kinds, including astronomy, agriculture, iron-working, road building, and European spiritual practices that had led to the need to construct megalithic architecture.
Did the European Kelts, then, merge with the Adena, becoming the first Mound Builders? Joseph thinks so, but his theory doesn''t end there. He believes that somewhere around 300 B.C.E., Japanese seafarers known as the Yayoi, which was another a Mound Building culture that had conquered and assimilated the Jomon people of Japan, arrived on the west coast of America. They slowly worked their way inland, leaving telltale signs of their long passage, until they met the Adena people, who were the former Kelts from Europe. Merging into one civ.