Download or read book Ancestral Mounds written by Jay Miller and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Two centuries of academic scholarship regarding mounds have examined who, what, where, when, and how, but no serious investigations have addressed the basic question, why? Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns. Native peoples continue to build and refurbish mounds each summer as part of their New Year’s celebrations to honor and give thanks for ripening maize and other crops and to offer public atonement. The mound is the heart of the Native community, which is sustained by song, dance, labor, and prayer. The basic purpose of mounds across North America is the same: to serve as a locus where community effort can be engaged in creating a monument of vitality and a safe haven in the volatile world.
Download or read book Mound Sites of the Ancient South written by Eric E. Bowne and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From approximately AD 900 to 1600, ancient Mississippian culture dominated today’s southeastern United States. These Native American societies, known more popularly as moundbuilders, had populations that numbered in the thousands, produced vast surpluses of food, engaged in longdistance trading, and were ruled by powerful leaders who raised large armies. Mississippian chiefdoms built fortified towns with massive earthen structures used as astrological monuments and burial grounds. The remnants of these cities—scattered throughout the Southeast from Florida north to Wisconsin and as far west as Texas—are still visible and awe-inspiring today. This heavily illustrated guide brings these settlements to life with maps, artists’ reconstructions, photos of artifacts, and historic and modern photos of sites, connecting our archaeological knowledge with what is visible when visiting the sites today. Anthropologist Eric E. Bowne discusses specific structures at each location and highlights noteworthy museums, artifacts, and cultural features. He also provides an introduction to Mississippian culture, offering background on subsistence and settlement practices, political and social organization, warfare, and belief systems that will help readers better understand these complex and remarkable places. Sites include Cahokia, Moundville, Etowah, and many more.
Download or read book The Mound Builders written by Stephen Denison Peet and published by Chicago : [s.n.]. This book was released on 1892 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mound written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Mound" by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Zealia Bishop. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Download or read book Star Mounds written by Ross Hamilton and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Star Mounds is a full-color illustrated study of the precolonial monuments of the greater Ohio Valley, woven together with over fifty "medicine stories" inspired by Native American mythology that demonstrate the depth of the knowledge held by indigenous peoples about the universe they lived in. The earthworks of the region have long mystified and intrigued scholars, archeologists, and anthropologists with their impressive size and design. The landscape practices of pioneer families destroyed much of them in the 1700s, but, during the first half of the 1800s, some serious mapmaking expeditions were able to record their locations. Utilizing many nineteenth-century maps as a base—including those of the gentlemen explorers Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis—author Ross Hamilton reveals the meaning and purpose of these antique monuments. Together with these maps, Hamilton applies new theories and geometrical formulas to the earthworks to demonstrate that the Ohio Valley was the setting of a manitou system, an interactive organization of specially shaped villages that was home to a sophisticated society of architects and astronomers. The author retells over fifty ancient stories based on Native American myth such as "The One-Eyed Man" and "The Story of How Mischief Became Hare" that clearly indicate how knowledgeable the valley's inhabitants were about the constellations and the movement of the stars. Finally, Hamilton relates the spiritual culture of the valley's early inhabitants to a kind of golden age of humanity when people lived in harmony with the Earth and Sky, and looks forward to a time when our own culture can foster a similar "spiritual technology" and life-giving relationship with nature.
Download or read book The Moundbuilders written by George R. Milner and published by London : Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2005 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by Bruce D. Smith, Curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution, as without question the best available book on the pre-Columbian Indian societies of eastern North America, this wide-ranging and copiously illustrated volume covers the entire sweep of Eastern Woodlands prehistory, with an emphasis on how these societies developed from hunter-gatherers to village farmers and town-dwellers.
Download or read book The Mound Builder Myth written by Jason Colavito and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history—and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people. Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history—but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this “ancient” myth has clear echoes in today’s arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, “alternative facts,” and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.
Download or read book Mound Builders of Ancient America written by Robert Silverberg and published by New York Graphic Society. This book was released on 1968 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an introduction to the ancient Indian mound builders of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
Download or read book Iron Age Echoes written by David R. Fontijn and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Groups of burial mounds may be among the most tangible and visible remains of Europe's prehistoric past. Yet, not much is known on how "barrow landscapes" came into being . This book deals with that topic, by presenting the results of archaeological research carried out on a group of just two barrows that crown a small hilltop near the Echoput ("echo-well") in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. In 2007, archaeologists of the Ancestral Mounds project of Leiden University carried out an excavation of parts of these mounds and their immediate environment. They discovered that these mounds are rare examples of monumental barrows from the later part of the Iron Age. They were probably built at the same time, and their similarities are so conspicuous that one might speak of "twin barrows". The research team was able to reconstruct the long-term history of this hilltop. We can follow how the hilltop that is now deep in the forests of the natural reserve of the Kroondomein Het Loo, once was an open place in the landscape. With pragmatism not unlike our own, we see how our prehistoric predecessors carefully managed and maintained the open area for a long time, before it was transformed into a funerary site. The excavation yielded many details on how people built the barrows by cutting and arranging heather sods, and how the mounds were used for burial rituals in the Iron Age.
Download or read book Ancestral Heaths written by Marieke Doorenbosch and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barrows, i.e. burial mounds, are amongst the most important of Europe’s prehistoric monuments. Across the continent, barrows still figure as prominent elements in the landscape. Many of these mounds have been excavated, revealing much about what was buried inside these intriguing monuments. Surprisingly, little is known about the landscape in which the barrows were situated and what role they played in their environment. Palynological data, carrying important clues on the barrow environment, are available for hundreds of excavated mounds in the Netherlands. However, while local vegetation reconstructions from these barrows exist, a reconstruction of the broader landscape around the barrows has yet to be made. This makes it difficult to understand their role in the prehistoric cultural landscape. In this book a detailed vegetation history of the landscape around burial mounds is presented. Newly obtained and extant data derived from palynological analyses taken from barrow sites are (re-)analysed. Methods in barrow palynology are discussed and further developed when necessary. Newly developed techniques are applied in order to get a better impression of the role barrows played in their environment. It is argued in this book that barrows were built on existing heaths, which had been and continued to be maintained for many generations by so-called heath communities. These heaths, therefore, can be considered as ‘ancestral heaths’. The barrow landscape was part of the economic zone of farming communities, while the heath areas were used as grazing grounds. The ancestral heaths were very stable elements in the landscape and were kept in existence for thousands of years. In fact, it is argued that these ancestral heaths were the most important factor in structuring the barrow landscape.
Download or read book Earthworks Rising written by Chadwick Allen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A necessary reexamination of Indigenous mounds, demonstrating their sustained vitality and vibrant futurity by centering Native voices Typically represented as unsolved mysteries or ruins of a tragic past, Indigenous mounds have long been marginalized and misunderstood. In Earthworks Rising, Chadwick Allen issues a compelling corrective, revealing a countertradition based in Indigenous worldviews. Alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native writers, artists, and intellectuals, Allen rebuts colonial discourses and examines the multiple ways these remarkable structures continue to hold ancient knowledge and make new meaning—in the present and for the future. Earthworks Rising is organized to align with key functional categories for mounds (effigies, platforms, and burials) and with key concepts within mound-building cultures. From the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio to the mound metropolis Cahokia in Illinois to the generative Mother Mound in Mississippi, Allen takes readers deep into some of the most renowned earthworks. He draws on the insights of poets Allison Hedge Coke and Margaret Noodin, novelists LeAnne Howe and Phillip Carroll Morgan, and artists Monique Mojica and Alyssa Hinton, weaving in a personal history of earthwork encounters and productive conversation with fellow researchers. Spanning literature, art, performance, and built environments, Earthworks Rising engages Indigenous mounds as forms of “land-writing” and as conduits for connections across worlds and generations. Clear and compelling, it provokes greater understanding of the remarkable accomplishments of North America’s diverse mound-building cultures over thousands of years and brings attention to new earthworks rising in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book A Serpent s Tale written by Lorett Treese and published by Westholme Publishing. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When American settlers first crossed the Appalachian Mountains they were amazed to discover that the wilderness beyond contained ancient ruins--large man-made mounds and enclosures, and impressive earthen sculptures, such as a gigantic serpent. Reports trickled back to the eager ears of President Thomas Jefferson and others. However, most did not believe these earthworks had anything to do with Native Americans; rather, given the intense interest in the history of Western Civilization at the time, it became popular to speculate that the ruins had been built by refugees from Greece, Rome, Egypt--or even the lost continent of Atlantis. As Lorett Treese explains in her fascinating history A Serpent's Tale: Discovering America's Ancient Mound Builders, the enigmatic nature of these antiquities fueled both fanciful claims and scientific inquiry. Early on, the earthworks began to fall to agricultural and urban development. Realizing that only careful on-site investigation could reveal the mysteries of the mounds, scholars hastened to document and classify them, giving rise to American archaeology as a discipline.
Download or read book Expanding the View of Hohokam Platform Mounds written by Mark D. Elson and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a hundred years, archaeologists have investigated the function of earthen platform mounds in the American Southwest. Built by the Hohokam groups between A.D. 1150 and 1350, these mounds are among the few monumental structures in the Southwest, yet their use and the nature of the groups who built them remain unresolved. Mark Elson now takes a fresh look at these monuments and sheds new light on their significance. He goes beyond previous studies by examining platform mound function and social group organization through a cross-cultural study of historic mound-using groups in the Pacific Ocean region, South America, and the southeastern United States. Using this information, he develops a number of important new generalizations about how people used mounds. Elson then applies these data to the study of a prehistoric settlement system in the eastern Tonto Basin of Arizona that contained five platform mounds. He argues that the mounds were used variously as residences and ceremonial facilities by competing descent groups and were an indication of hereditary leadership. They were important in group integration and resource management; after abandonment they served as ancestral shrines. Elson's study provides a fresh approach to an old puzzle and offers new suggestions regarding variability among Hohokam populations. Its innovative use of comparative data and analyses enriches our understanding of both Hohokam culture and other ancient societies.
Download or read book Wisconsin Indian Literature written by Kathleen Tigerman and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the oral traditions, legends, speeches, myths, histories, literature, and historically significant documents of the twelve independent bands and Indian Nations of Wisconsin. This anthology introduces us to a group of voices, enhanced by many maps, photographs, and chronologies.
Download or read book Living Near the Dead written by David R. Fontijn and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hills overlooking the north flank of the Rhine valley in the Netherlands are dotted with hundreds of prehistoric burial mounds. Only a few of them were ever investigated by archaeologists and even nowadays the many barrows preserved in the extensive forests of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug are the oldest visible witnesses of a remote but largely unknown prehistoric past. In 2006, a team of archaeologists of the Ancestral Mounds project of Leiden University set out to investigate these age-old monuments. Parts of two mounds at Elst in the municipality of Rhenen were excavated and numerous finds collected by amateur archaeologists were retrieved and studied. As a result, the research team was able to reconstruct the formation and histories of this barrow landscape from 2000 BC onwards. Contrary to what was initially thought, the Elst barrows appeared not to have been situated within a separate ceremonial landscape but were rather closely linked with the world of daily living. Throughout the Bronze Age and Iron Age, people had been "living near the dead". The finds discussed in this book include a rare example of an Early Bronze Age burial mound, examples of pottery deposition, remains of a Middle Bronze Age "Hilversum-Period" settlement and many indications for mundane and ritual uses of the barrows in the later Iron Age. Dr David Fontijn is associate professor in European prehistory at Leiden University and senior research fellow at the TOPOI excellence cluster in Berlin. His research focuses on the Bronze and Iron Age and was awarded several prizes including the Praemium Erasmianum study Prize for his book Sacrificial landscapes .
Download or read book Native Nations written by Kathleen DuVal and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today “A feat of both scholarship and storytelling.”—Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated. For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch—and influenced global markets—and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to command much of the continent’s land and resources. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory. In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future.
Download or read book Mound City written by Patricia Cleary and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2024-06-07 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly one thousand years ago, Native peoples built a satellite suburb of America's great metropolis on the site that later became St. Louis. At its height, as many as 30,000 people lived in and around present-day Cahokia, Illinois. While the mounds around Cahokia survive today (as part of a state historic site and UNESCO world heritage site), the monumental earthworks that stood on the western shore of the Mississippi were razed in the 1800s. But before and after they fell, the mounds held an important place in St. Louis history, earning it the nickname “Mound City.” For decades, the city had an Indigenous reputation. Tourists came to marvel at the mounds and to see tribal delegations in town for trade and diplomacy. As the city grew, St. Louisans repurposed the mounds—for a reservoir, a restaurant, and railroad landfill—in the process destroying cultural artifacts and sacred burial sites. Despite evidence to the contrary, some white Americans declared the mounds natural features, not built ones, and cheered their leveling. Others espoused far-fetched theories about a lost race of Mound Builders killed by the ancestors of contemporary tribes. Ignoring Indigenous people's connections to the mounds, white Americans positioned themselves as the legitimate inheritors of the land and asserted that modern Native peoples were destined to vanish. Such views underpinned coerced treaties and forced removals, and—when Indigenous peoples resisted—military action. The idea of the “Vanishing Indian” also fueled the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ histories, a practice that continued in the 1900s in civic celebrations that featured white St. Louisans “playing Indian” and heritage groups claiming the mounds as part of their own history. Yet Native peoples endured and in recent years, have successfully begun to reclaim the sole monumental mound remaining within city limits. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Patricia Cleary explores the layers of St. Louis’s Indigenous history. Along with the first in-depth overview of the life, death, and afterlife of the mounds, Mound City offers a gripping account of how Indigenous histories have shaped the city’s growth, landscape, and civic culture.
