A mound in eastern Tennessee
Cyrus Thomas (July 27th, 1825-June 26th, 1910)
Enter Cyrus Thomas a biologist from Illinois who was the first to head the Division of Mound Exploration. He created a team of scientists who would be some of the first recognized American archaeologists to investigate the mounds and try to discover once and for all the identity of their creators. There was no way an exhaustive study could be made of the 1000+ mounds spread all across eastern North America so they created a study of a representative sample of the four distinct types of mounds. The mound types were animal effigy (mounds in the shapes of animals), cone-shaped, flat top and geometric design.
A report completed in 1894 for the Bureau of Ethnology documented the results including drawings, maps, and an extensive amount of recovered artifact data. The biggest conclusion was that these works were most definitely created by the ancestors of present day Native Americans. The impact of this was to prove that Native Americans were not as "savage" or unintelligent as many scientists had previously implied. It would take ingenuity on par with many other civilized societies to create such works. They also concluded that these mounds had multiple uses. The most important uses found in the study were to be burial sites for important members of the tribe, to elevate temples and buildings of importance and to designate and note sacred locations on the landscape.
An artistic representation of Monk's Mound
An archaeological site map of Cahokia
Gerard Fowke would help to establish ideas of the amount of time needed to build the mound in Cahokia. His efforts would prove to be some of the first in Applied (or Experimental) Archaeology. This would be the act of trying to recreate artifacts or structures using only the tools known to have been available at the time they were originally made. "As the contents of Cahokia's mound are equal to 420 times those of Mr. Fowke's assumed tumulus, it would require the hundred persons, laboring in the same way, to work every day for forty-eight years to construct the great tumulus" (Thomas 1907). This vast amount of time made early archaeologists assume that it was not a structure created all at once but instead a structure that was built in stages. Artifact evidence found within the context in different strata help to support this theory.
The mound builder society is still extensively researched today and it is widely unknown to say which Native American tribes are derived from that society. "Part of the Mound Builders may have gone south (Cherokee?) and part of them may have gone west (Mandan?) while part may have remained in New England (Iroquois?)" (Allison 1927).
References
Allison, Vernon C. 1927. The Mound Builders: Whence and When. American Anthropologist. 29: 670-689.
Marks, David. 1831. Mormons, Mastodons and Mound-Builders. The Spalding Research Project. http://solomonspalding.com/SRP/saga2/sagawt0b.htm. Accessed May 13th, 2013.
Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History. 2011. The Moundbuilders of North America. Podcast from 19th Century Anthropology Collections. Dur. 5:12. Accessed May 13th, 2013.
Thomas, Cyrus 19907. Cahokia or Monk's Mound. American Anthropologist. 7: 362-365.
Places to Visit:
Cahokia: http://www.cahokiamounds.org/visit/
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