I wanted to open my art history survey courses for Ball State University this Fall 2023 with an exploration of prehistoric art and architecture with an immediate consideration of the unique heritage close at hand to Muncie, Indiana. The Mound Builders- whose history and culture we will be looking at in more detail shortly- began as a problematic myth that nevertheless drove scholarship of indigenous American civilizations that rose and fell in the millennia between the earliest recorded presence of homo sapiens and the historic era following European contact. “Historic” is going to be the all-important determinant of how works of art and the civilizations that produced them are classified; the invention of a writing system and the creation of material texts that could outlive oral histories was the essential criterion that distinguished “prehistoric” from more specific designations given to record-keeping, historic civilizations, e.g. the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Minoans, the Sabaeans, the Phoenicians, or the Greeks, to name a few with their own distinctive innovations in writing.
When Europeans made contact with the diverse indigenous tribes inhabiting the North American continent- and included accounts of this contact in the written records of their own civilizations, namely the Early Modern empires of Spain, France, England, and other European powers of the day, many indigenous American groups entered into the historic record for the first time; oral traditions included references to the rise and fall of earlier civilizations before them, which neither left any written texts to history. Most everything that the Europeans encountered of the built landscape of North America prior to their arrival was prehistoric, but how prehistoric has been the question associated with the presence of monumental man-made transformations of the horizon into artificial flat-topped mounds or figurative works of landscape art like the well-known Serpent Mound and others of the Ohio River Valley from the sixteenth century through the present.
Recently, Graham Hancock’s controversial Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse devotes an episode to the consideration of the Serpent Mound and the mounds at Poverty Point as relics of an early post-diluvian civilization that built monuments in intentional astronomical alignments that marked the end of the Younger Dryas, a final ice age that lasted through 11,700 B.C.E., and which Hancock hypothesized was terminated by the impact of comet fragments to the Cordilleran Ice Sheet that covered a region known today as the Chaneled Scablands in southeast Washington State. As far as I am aware, this is the earliest theory about the makers and usage of the monumental mounds that dot the north American continent from the west of the Appalachian Mountains across the Mississippi River Valley. Although this claim has been popularized as a result of the Netflix documentary, the question about the age of the North American mounds and the people who built them has been one posed by the first European explorers and still evolving in archaeological and anthropological studies today. We’re going to explore some of the major theories- and controversies- that have defined what we know- and how we know it- about these works that stretch from the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys.
The premium placed on historical civilizations’ enduring legacies is owed to their texts that speak through the epochs of time. Usually considered reliable witnesses and the first authority consulted in serious study, primary sources are those written by eyewitnesses; in the case of the mystery of the North American mounds, for which no indigenous text exists to explain their creation or function, the earliest documents of their existence are the written accounts of European explorers. De Soto and his company witnessed living indigenous societies that integrated man-made flat-topped mounds into their traditional forms of domestic and village architecture in their expedition of the early sixteenth century through the southeast.
In the history compiled by Garcilaso de la Vega about De Soto’s expedition published in 1605, mounds are witnessed as integral parts of the landscape of the indigenous villages that dotted the otherwise flat Florida landscape:
“The Indians of Florida always try to dwell on high places, and at least the houses of the lords and caciques [chiefs] are so situated even if the whole village cannot be. But since all of the land is very flat… they build such sites with the strength of their arms, piling up very large quantities of earth and stamping on it with great force until they have formed a mound from twenty-eight to forty-two feet in height. Then on the top of these places they construct flat surfaces which are capable of holding the ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty dwellings of the lord and his family and the people of his service…”
Garcilaso continues with a description of how multiple “streets” would be cut up the sides of the mounds, “fifteen or twenty feet in width and… bordered with walls constructed of thick pieces of wood that are thrust side by side into the earth to a depth of more than the height of a man.” The text continues with an account that the horses of the Spanish conquistadors were able to traverse the wide “streets” built into the mounds with ease. The mounds that were integrated into the architectural landscape of the indigenous villages of Florida constitute platform mounds, a type that is distinct from effigy mounds like the Ohio Serpent or burial mounds.
Later French explorers and colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century would make sporadic content with the mound-building civilization that had survived through the early modern period only in the deep south. Their decline is noted by the Frenchman Bénard de la Harpe in the early eighteenth century in the “mounds of earth made with their own hands, from which it is inferred that these nations are very ancient and were formerly very numerous, although at the present time they hardly number two hundred and fifty persons.” The near-total extermination of the Natchez Tribe by the French in 1729 put an end to their traditional way of life around a temple mound, today the Emerald Mound.
Most Europeans and early Americans who encountered the monumental mounds of vanished and vanishing indigenous civilizations of north America did not have experience that De Soto’s company or early French settlers had of direct contact nor were they reading published Spanish and French accounts of this early contact that directly linked Native Americans with these by-then mysterious structures. Despite the weight of historical texts that witness indigenous people of the southeast constructing and using mounds, a popular fantasy took root in the American consciousness of the subsequent centuries of European colonization and conflict with indigenous peoples: the mounds had to have been built by a different civilization than the “savage” hunter-gatherers that stymied the unrelenting westward expansion of the era. Copper objects like the Etowah Birdman figure demonstrated metallurgical capabilities unknown to contemporary Natives, and the scale of organized labor required to erect the monumental mound architecture had not been seen. The colonial American mind teemed with fantastic pseudo-historical speculations that inserted the silent mounds of north America into Biblical and antediluvian narratives. Academic luminaries of the era, including Ezra Stiles then-president of Yale College, were keen to find material evidence on the north American continent of Old Testament migrations, specifically the driving of the Canaanites from Palestine by Joshua’s army of Israelites or the Ten Lost Tribes fallen into idolatry and punished with enslavement by the Assyrian King Sargon in 722 B.C.E. The early natural historian Benjamin Smith Barton suggested that the mounds were the work of Danish Vikings, who also were responsible for all of ancient Toltec civilization further south in Mexico. This speculation hinged on the description of the winged serpent-god Quetzalcoatl as a bearded man with fair-skin who brought civilizing innovations to the ancient people of the Yucatan. The “lost race” theory extended to Atlantean and ante-diluvian (pre-Flood) musings, with the claim made by John Ward’s Ancient Archives among the Cornstalks (1984) that Poverty Point was a refuge for those who had survived the Great Flood anticipating the arguments of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse Netflix series by nearly four decades. North American platform mounds have even been theorized to have been landing platforms for ancient alien spacecraft by Erich Von Daniken and in the popular Ancient Aliens theory.
The most tenacious of the “lost race” theories that attached itself to the mounds of North America was the Judeo-Christian-centric notion that lost tribes of Israel had somehow made it to the continent (the Bering Straight’s land bridge was also conscripted in service to this construct) and began to construct their temple-mounts to El-Shaddai, the Semitic God-On-High, in their new land. The early American archaeologist Caleb Atwater exhorted in 1820 to “…examine the loftiest mounds [in Ohio], and compare them with those described as being in Palestine. Through the wide world, such places seem to have been preferred by the men of ancient times who erected them.”
Although this Biblical reading of ancient indigenous works is no longer current in mainstream American archaeology, it continues as a point of faith and inquiry in studies funded by religious bodies like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon Church. Joseph Smith, the founder of this church and a religious figure for its followers, was captivated as a youth by the “Lost Race” mythos of the mound-builders and for whom later on the divinely-revealed discovery of golden tablets written by this lost civilization became a tenet of the Mormon faith. Also enshrined in the Mormon religion was the model of not one but two Old Testament-era migrations of Jews to North America: first, the Jaredites, who settled the continent after the construction of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages and whose destruction was recorded on a golden plate by the historian Ether, and second, a band of colonists led by Lehi who escaped Jerusalem shortly before the Babylonian conquest. Two groups emerged from this later migration, the Nephites- an agricultural civilization who built the mounds- and the Lamanites- a race of “ungodly savages” punished by God with the dark red skin color of indigenous American Indians. The religious history of Mormonism enshrined nineteenth-century racist attitudes that viewed the indigenous people of the continent as savages incapable of advanced civilization and condemned them as the presumed conquerors of an extinct advanced ancient race of mound builders. The last of the advanced race of Nephites is Mormon, whose inscribed history on golden plates discovered by Joseph Smith has anchored the novel American religious sect.
I was surprised recently in my own research when this particularly American religious lens was applied to forms which I usually study in the context of ancient Yemeni art. Earlier in this lecture, we included Sabaean among the forms of early written languages, and this civilization that flourished in the fertile southwest of the Arabian Peninsula belonged to the wider Semitic family of language, religion, and culture that includes ancient Hebrew. A Yemeni colleague of mine had excitedly circulated a sensational YouTube video that purported that the ancient Sabaean language’s characters had been identified in petroglyphs in Colorado.
An American archaeologist in our workgroup was the first to point out that the video in question was produced by a religious institution, rather than an academic one, and that its Mormon affiliation (Brigham Young University in this case) gave well-documented reason to question its motives; the archaeologist also pointed out that the long centuries of attributing distant origins to aspects of indigenous American civilizations contributed to their ongoing erasure from their rightful place in history, patiently explaining how “Lost race” or “Old World” theories have been deeply injurious and insulting to indigenous peoples of the Americas. By insisting that their inventions and adaptations are not their own, external theories negate the creativity and deep history of indigenous peoples, a considerable factor in the bigger picture of genocide, colonization, oppression, displacement, and impoverishment histories that still bring much to bear on the present. It was an illuminating moment to have the historiography of the North American mounds’ studies and competing models of migration/ethnic origin and the Biblical lens become current in my own studies of South Arabian art and archaeology. It expands most Americans’ traditional knowledge of the Bible and Semitic identity; only a very select few read the Hazarmaveth of the Old Testament fluently as the Hadhramawt region within the Yemen, as a region of deep antiquity with its own Jewish population archaeologically well-documented as well as the embattled republic’s borders. The idea of South Arabian traders reaching North America and carving on the cliffs of the Coloradan jowl the same characters that turn topographies to text captivates the imagination of the scholar of ancient Arabia. The intrepid wanderings of Semitic tribes- not restricted to the Ten Tribes of Israel scattered by Sargon, but seen in the broader scope of Semitic language and identity of the fertile southernmost extent of the Arabian Peninsula is legendary and extends the mythos of Yemeni settlements as far as the Himalayas and Tibet, which is sometimes phonetically interpreted as tubaat- the plural of the title of king in pre-Islamic Himyarite Yemen. However, situated within the broader scope of European-American colonial archaeo-religious philosophy, the linking of indigenous Native American petroglyphs to parallel inscriptions of pre-Islamic South Arabia and the Dhofar region of Oman specifically in a study funded by the Mormon-affiliated Brigham Young University continues the fraught legacy of Biblical, Atlantean, or otherwise non-indigenous identities in the developing Mound Builder mythos.
Ultimately, the North American mounds shaped the science of archaeology and established methods and precedents that would define best practices in the field. In contrast to the romantic and sometimes bombastic nineteenth century voices that created fantastic origins for the mounds, cooler heads prevailed that suspended a conclusion that was not supported by the objects and artifacts excavated in increasing frequency from the mounds themselves. They did not preclude that the ancestors to contemporary Native Americans were the authors of these works, and as evidence increased to this conclusion, the history and identity of older prehistoric North American civilizations emerged. Thomas Jefferson wrote a meticulous account of his own excavation of a mound in Virginia (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785) hailed as the first scientific publication of the New World. His work was prescient in its rigor and method as well as his understanding of the mound itself as an Indian construction, rather than the relic of a lost fantastical race. Three essays published between 1813 and 1829 by Dr. J. H. McCulloh, Jr. demonstrated a single-race theory for the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas as exclusive settlers of the New World and the author of all their works. Meticulous studies documented numerous mounds that have since vanished under American cities; the text of Caleb Atwater’s “Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and other Western States” (1820) preserves the existence of many as it advances a super-diffusionist idea that the Mound Builders, who he identified as Hindu Indian shepherds, crossed from Asia via the Bering Strait land-bridge- which is still the accepted model of migration. His model erred by inferring an unbroken presence of mounds from Russia across Alaska and the western edge of the continent, still unexplored in his day and where no trace of artificial mounds has been found. Another American president- albeit for the shortest tenure-, William Henry Harrison, presented his studies of earthworks near to his Ohio home before the Historical Society of Ohio, and Thomas Jefferson’s former Secretary of the Treasury, Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, also contributed a pioneering study of indigenous languages and served as the first president of the American Ethnological Society. Both men of state argued a similar yet opposite theory of migration and influence between native prehistoric populations; Harrison saw in the disappearance of the Mound Builders the seed of Mexican civilization, while Gallatin posited that Mexican influence spread north to the populations of the Mississippi Valley. The magisterial Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848)that published the excavations of Squier and Davis became a foundational text for the Smithsonian Institute and the field of scientific American archaeology to come. The latter volume furnishes sometimes the only historical trace of mounds that no longer exist or in dramatically-diminished forms, such as the Wisconsin effigy mounds.
As scholarship and documentation were brought apace with what had been haphazard levelling of native mounds in the Western territories, more became known about the art and culture of the mound builder’s civilization. Although the discovery of metal objects had fueled early speculation about highly advanced, possibly Atlantean races in possession of sophisticated metallurgical knowledge, the further discovery of copper, mica, and meteoric iron used for indigenous artifacts clarified that the makers of the mounds only worked metals directly without any knowledge of smelting ore or advanced metallurgical techniques. Tablets, like the one purportedly discovered by Joseph Smith that became the foundational text of the Mormon religion, were sometimes unearthed and sensationally reported, but among the hoaxes subsequently discovered (like the village blacksmith who imitated the Chinese characters on his tea chest upon six brass plates that were planted in a mound near Kinderhook, Illinois in 1843), one acknowledged authentic piece is the Cincinnati Tablet, found in 1841, that is thought to have been possibly used as a stamp in the production of ornamental textiles.
True scientific archaeological excavations and publications contributed to the emerging schematic of native American prehistory history that is accepted in its broad sketches today. Once the mythology of a single Mound Builder race had been put to bed, those who studied the mounds had long remarked that there were a great variety to them that indicated different forms used by different civilizations. The monumental, flat-topped pyramidal mound complexes that radiate majestically from the Mississippi and its conjoined river basins of the central continent and their smaller counterparts in documented southeastern tribes’ village architecture seem an entirely different object than the conical mounds that proliferate across Ohio or the effigy mounds that figure the Wisconsin landscape into men, herds, birds, and one contested animal: for those who link the mounds to deep geological antiquity, it is a mammoth mound- an animal that went extinct after the last Ice Age, but to those that integrate the mounds into more recent timelines of unwritten north American history, it is a bear with a nose disfigured by a flood plain. As the mounds were increasingly established as native works, it became a question of establishing which natives and when- questions resolved in the later days of twentieth-century archaeology when carbon-14 dating replaced the tree-ring counting that had been the mainstay since the seventeenth century. Gradually, human settlement in North America has fallen into four major broad categories: Paleo, which comprises the earliest traces of human presence, Archaic, Woodland- which is distinguished for its use of burial mounds and refined pottery and Mississippian, defined by temple mound structures and stockaded settlements.
Not only archaeology but also art history played a major role in defining the different civilizations that rose to prominence and constructing mounds across north America centuries prior to European contact. Paleo-archaic cultures did not nearly as refined an artistic nor technical legacy as the Adena and then the Hopewell did in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The civilization that we call Adena today (which is not an indigenous designation but rather named after the Ohio estate of its governor in the early nineteenth century) appears to have been the evolution of the regional populations of the area that developed a refined pottery and burial tradition in the Late Archaic through the Woodland Period. Although native skulls had been employed to argue for the Indian origin of the mounds in the nineteenth century, later on, closer examination revealed the presence of a later type that was distinct from this local stock. The later longer and more narrow skulls that were found in burial mounds belonged to a civilization named the Hopewell Culture, similarly after the property owner of a site in the nineteenth century, and these were the two primary builders of the cone-shaped mounds that created the Mound Builder mythos. Adena and Hopewell mounds revealed startling differences however in the course of their excavations. Earlier Adena conical mounds appear to have been used as burial repositories over generations, with layers like Russian nesting dolls and surprising decorative sensibilities, like antler headdresses fashioned from hammered sheets of metal, the Cresap Mound turtle effigy, the tube-shaped tobacco pipe carved in the effigy of a man presently loaned to the Cleveland Museum of Art and carved tablets, not with engraved inscriptions as the Mound Builder mythologists predicted, but intriguing graphic patterns.
The arrival of the Hopewellian Civilization however signalled a new dominant culture, new practices of burial, and an expansive trade network that prized materials from distant corners of the New World: obsidian blades from what’s now Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, a copper sheep’s horn that is modeled on a species native to Wyoming (though the copper came from Michigan), bear claws from the Rockies, conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, mica from the Appalachians, and more characterize a vast trading network and sphere of influence. Whereas the Adena mounds were accumulations of burials spanning generations and centuries, the Hopewell mounds were constructed at one point of time, though they could contain multiple burials. It has been proposed that the Hopewell burial mounds were reserved for the burial of great chiefs, and on the occasion of an important death, perhaps wives and other members of the household followed in death shortly afterwards. The Hopewellian culture had a taste for opulence in death; what are thought to be their royal burials contain treasures of pearls, pipes, and ornaments of copper, mica, tortoiseshell, and silver. One skull displayed an artificial copper nose and rods once worn in hair that had long ago disintegrated. Overall, Robert Silverberg summarized, “Hopewell displays a love of excess that shows itself not only in the intricate geometrical enclosures and in the massive mounds, but in the gaudy displays in the tombs. To wrap a corpse from head to foot in pearls, to weigh it down in many pounds of copper, to surround it with masterpieces of sculpture and pottery, and then to bury everything under tons of earth- this is the kind of wastefulness that only an amazingly energetic culture would indulge in.”
If the Adena had initiated what has been called the cult of the honored dead, the Hopewell elaborated upon it. Whereas the Adena are acknowledged to be the builders of the Serpent Mound in Ohio and of smaller sacred circle-earthworks, larger Hopewellian circles and geometric enclosures like the Newark Earthworks in Ohio (ca. 1 C.E. – 400 C.E.) expanded to a monumental and ceremonial scale these earlier impulses. The Newark Earthworks have recently been the subject of an interactive 3D simulation by the IDIA Lab at Ball State University (https://idialab.org/projects/newark/). Mounds State Park, another Adena-Hopewell site, has been similarly digitized as an interactive 3-D model by IDIA lab in a free app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/virtual-companion-mounds-park/id1028587191)
Hopewell’s contact with the Crystal River Complex, a prehistoric culture with sites along Florida’s gulf coast that built in the tradition of flat-topped mounds more commonly encountered in Mexico, creates a well-documented network of influence by which can be understood the rise of the later Mississippian Culture, which built great monumental complexes of the flat-topped mound type De Soto encountered in surviving indigenous life in seventeenth-century Florida. Hopewell civilization declined- the precise circumstances are not known with certainly-, and centuries later a new typology of mound arose on the North American continent. These were not burial mounds but a new type: Platform Mounds. They are distinguished in archaeologists’ chronologies of the era as the Temple Mound Periods I and II. These served as the bases of houses and temples for the chiefs, priests, and other important buildings. Cahokia, Angel Mound in Indiana, and the Etowah Mounds and their spectacular artworks are representative of the climax of art and architecture reached on the North American continent in the Mississippian era.
The platform or temple mound characteristic of the Mississippian era was accompanied in urban architecture of the era by the construction of massive palisades, a phenomenon witnessed by De Soto’s men in the late sixteenth century. The technique of driving timber in order to create a palisade under raised mounds witnessed by De has been confirmed by later archaeological studies of mounds that were built in a much earlier period, like the ceremonial complex called the Etowah Mounds in Bartow County, Georgia. Modern excavations of the mounds revealed the use of timber in the manner described by Garcilaso; the last phase of building at the Etowah Mounds terminated in 1550 C.E. Artifacts excavated from these sites attest to a highly developed artistic and technical society that produced copper tools and ornamental plates, brightly-colored and patterned cloths, and a ceramic sculptural tradition that features distinctive bird-man imagery and gendered pairs with stylized features and dress.
The art histories of the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian cultures- particularly at Etowah and the works which demonstrate Mexican influence yet which are distinctly their own style- deserve a longer discussion than today’s lecture affords. This first look at more local prehistory- for my Ball State university students, this lecture hoped to spark interest in the prehistoric architecture of their nearby Angel Mound, Mounds State Park, and others within driving distance of Muncie, Indiana. For myself coming from Louisiana, the mounds at Poverty Point and the oldest man-made structure of our hemisphere, the humble LSU Campus Mounds in Baton Rouge, have fascinated me long before I began teaching a global art history survey. In this introduction to prehistoric art, we can observe that “prehistoric” doesn’t mean crude or unrefined; although the Adena-Hopewell or Mississippian cultures did not possess a system of writing, their history by necessity has been written by the material culture of their burials and temples. Art and artefacts have in their cases been the basis by which the characteristics of a vanished people have become known and the lens through which we can now appreciate the richness of Native American art and architecture in the centuries and millennia that preceded European contact and conquest.
Selected Further Reading:
Ancient Mounds Heritage Area and Trails Advisory Commission, “Indian Mounds of Northeast Louisiana: A Driving Trail Guide,” 2008.
Atwater, Caleb. Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. American Antiquary Society, 1820.
Carr, Christopher. “Mississippian, Effigy Mound Complex, and Georgia Woodland Bird-Persons and Bird Effigies: A Comparison to Adena and Hopewellian Cases,” Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspectives (2022): 661-698.
Cochran, Donald R. and McCord, Beth K. The Archaeology of Anderson Mounds (Mounds State Park: Anderson, IN, 2001). https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5013205.pdf
“Early Indiana to 1779” https://indianahistorygriffin.weebly.com/early-indiana-to-1779.html
Ellwood Brooks et al. “The LSU campus mounds, with construction beginning at ~11,000 BP, are the oldest known extant man-made structures in the Americas,” American Journal of Science 322.6 (2022): 795- 827.
“Intriguing Interactions,” National Geographic https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/intriguing-interactions/
“Mississippian Copper Plates,” Peach State Archaeological Society. http://peachstatearchaeologicalsociety.org/index.php/20-copper-artifacts/296-mississippian-copper-plates
Saunders, Joe. “A Mound Complex in Louisiana at 5400-5000 Years Before the Present,” Science 277.5333 (1997): 1796-1799.
Silverberg, Robert. The Mound Builders (University of Ohio Press, 1970).
Wedel, Mildred Mott. “La Harpe’s 1719 Post on Red River and Nearby Caddo Settlements,” The Texas Memorial Museum Bulletin 30. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/29951/tmm-bulletin-30.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Filson Art History 2019 