Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
New York Graphic Society
Description
Our forebears, finding large, incomprehensible earthworks scattered down the Mississippi Valley, refused to believe they were built by the aborigines who still cluttered up the place and impeded settlement. Mr. Silverberg describes, with gleeful and copious quotation, the nineteenth-century literature of speculation which attributed these monuments to the Phoenicians, stray Vikings, the lost tribes of Israel, refugees from Atlantis, an extinct race of giants, and Welshmen. The book, which is charmingly written, ends with a history of the archeological work which gave the mounds back to the Indians. -- The Atlantic Monthly
User reviews
LibraryThing member barriesegall
Book traces the discovery of the mounds, how the myth and triumph of their builders being a race other than the Indians, the great debate that took place, and then the deflation of that myth. It examines in depth the Adena and Hopewell Mounds and the Temple Mound People.
Original publication date
1968
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The mound-builders;: A reconstruction of the life of a prehistoric American race, through exploration and interpretation of their earth mounds, their burials, and their cultural remains, by H. C Shetrone