Who were the mound builders?
The name “mound builders” refers to numerous ancestral Native American tribes that represent much of the cultural advancement of Native Americans in numerous locations in North America. It should be understood that the Mound Builders were not a single tribe. Instead, there were many groups living from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River Valley and the Mississippi River that built different types of sophisticated mounds and had many more cultural advancements than are often credited to ancestral Americans. The mounds, semi-rounded structures that rose from the earth, could serve several purposes. Effigy mounds were semi-animal shaped mounds. These might have been sites for worship or for burials. One of the most famous of these still in existence is the 1370 foot (417.58 m) long Serpent Mound located in Ohio. Other mounds looked like flat-topped pyramids and may have been used for religious ceremonies. Different types of Mounds may date back to 2500 BCE and there’s strong evidence that
They were unquestionably American aborigines, and not immigrants from another continent.” And then adds: “Now they judge this from the fact that their constructions, their mode of burial, and other peculiarities, mark them as having been a separate and distinct people from any other that at any time inhabited America. And we, knowing that they came from the Tower of Babel, can understand why they were neither Hebrews nor like any other people in any land.” — Lectures on the Book of Mormon, p. 85…. But all Latter-day Saints do not, evidently, agree that the Jaredites, exclusively, were the Mound Builders, and some seem disposed to give credit for some of the mounds built to the Nephites. The Committee on American Archaeology, of which Apostle Kelley is himself a member, say: “On entering the United States, the Nephites settled largely in the same sections inhabited by the Jaredites, the oldest mound builders, and their march to their final conflict was along the same lines.” — Repor
Were they an ancient vanished race as many scholars believed or were they the ancestors of the American Indians. By the completion of the project in 1890, over 2000 mounds and earthworks had been studied in the eastern United States. About 100 of these were in the Kanawha Valley. In 1894 Cyrus Thomas published his book Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology and proved that the Mound Builders were not a vanished race but the ancestors of the American Indian. This was the birth of modern American Archeology. Once the question of the identity of the Mound Builders was settled, archeologists began tracing the development of North American Indian culture. Today the term Mound Builder is missused. The types of mounds built, although many and varied, can be divided into two basic culture types. These two basic types are usualy called Effigy and Temple and both groups as well as many Amerindian groups that did not belong to these two groups, practiced making various forms
