American Antiquities: Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology [1 ed.] 9780803284319, 9780803268425

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Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved. Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

A m er ica n A n tiqu iti e s

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology Series Editors Regna Darnell

Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

Stephen O. Murray

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

American Antiquities Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology

Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

Terry A. Barnhart

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

© 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barnhart, Terry A., 1952– American antiquities: revisiting the origins of American archaeology / Terry A. Barnhart. pages cm. — (Critical studies in the history of anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-6842-5 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8032-8429-6 (epub) isbn 978-0-8032-8430-2 (mobi) isbn 978-0-8032-8431-9 (pdf ) 1. Archaeology—United States—History. 2. Archaeologists—United States—Historiography. 3. United States—Antiquities. I. Title. CC 101.U6B 37 2015 973.1—dc23 2015002772 Set in Minion by Westchester Book Group.

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

But as Time changes the face of things, I wish they [American antiquities] could be searched out and faithfully recorded, before the devastations of artificial refinements, ambition, and avarice, totally deface these simple and most ancient remains of the American aborigines. —William Bartram “The Creek and Cherokee Indians” (December 1789), Transactions of the American Ethnological Society 3 (1853) The antiquities of our country have always appeared to me more important and to deserve more attention than they have heretofore received. —De Witt Clinton “A Memoir on the Antiquities of the Western Parts of the State of New-York” (1818)

nothing in the progress of human knowledge is more remarkable than the recent discoveries in American archaeology, whether we regard them as monuments of art or as contributions to science. —Samuel George Morton “Some Observations on the Ethnology and Archaeology Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

of the American Aborigines,” American Journal of Science and Arts (July 1846) To us as Americans what History can be more interesting than that of our aborigines[?] The monuments and relics found in the United

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

States show that the earlier races had arrived at a considerable degree of civilization. —Montroville Wilson Dickeson “Indian Antiquities. A Course of Popular and Highly Interesting Lectures on American Archaeology.” Broadside, circa 1850 All written history is young, and even the voice of tradition sinks into a low and unintelligible whisper as we penetrate the mighty past and strive to learn the secrets of antiquity. —Ephraim George Squier

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“Tongues from Tombs,” Frank Leslie’s Weekly (March 20, 1869)

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Series Editors’ Introduction xi Acknowledgments xv Prologue: Historicizing the Origins of American Archaeology 1 1. American Antiquities: A Grand Theme for Speculation 39 2. Rediscovering the Mounds: Scientific Enquiry and the Westward Movement 94 3. Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions: More Testimony from the Mounds 152 4. A Dialectical Discourse: Constructing the Mound Builder Paradigm 205

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5. American Archaeology: An Infant Science Emerges 253 6. Origin, Era, and Region: An Expanding Field of Archaeological Enquiry 311 7. Archaeology as Anthropology: The Coming of the Curators and Professors 361

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Notes 423 Bibliography 477

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Index 561

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Illustrations

1. “Plan of an Old Fort and Intrenchment” 74 2. Parsons’s “Sketch of the Earthworks at the Muskingum River” 98 3. “Plan of the Remains of Some Ancient Works on the Muskingum” 103 4. “Plan d’un Ancien Camp” 104 5. “A Drawing of Some Utensils, or Ornaments”

112

6. “Ancient Works at Circleville: Ohio” 180 7. “Ancient Works, on the North Fork of Paint Creek near Chillicothe: Ohio” 181 8. “Ancient Works, on Paint Creek”

182

9. James McBride of Hamilton, Ohio

226

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10. “Map Exhibiting a Section of Six Miles of the Great Miami Valley” 228 11. Charles Whittlesey 234 12. “Marietta Works”

238

13. View of the Grave Creek Mound 245 14. Montroville Wilson Dickeson 15. “Indian Antiquities”

258

264

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

16. Ephraim George Squier 273 17. Edwin Hamilton Davis 274 18. “Map of a Section of Twelve Miles of the Scioto Valley” 276 19. “From an Ancient Mound in [the] Scioto Valley” 290 20. Views of Squier and Davis’s Scioto Valley Skull

292

21. Ancient Works at Aztalan 341 22. Mound Skull from Racine, Wisconsin 344 23. “Ancient Works at Maus’ Mill, Lemonwier River” 346 24. “Ancient Mounds” 364 25. “Kettles”

366

26. Human Effigies

368

27. The De Soto Mound, Jefferson County, Arkansas 411 420

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28. John Patterson MacLean

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Series Editors ’ Introduction

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Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray

Fascination with American Indian antiquities was intimately related to the emerging identity of a distinct American nation, whose citizens were to be harbingers of a New World in which institutions of freedom and democracy were poised to transcend the fetters of old Europe. It underwrote the development of a distinctively American archaeology beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s excavation of an Indian burial mound and continued through the early republic years alongside the professionalization of American science and the differentiation of the social sciences out of natural philosophy. Such concerns were particularly acute in the case of the Mound Builders. Terry A. Barnhart seizes on changing theories about the Mound Builders as a lens through which to examine the antiquarian origins of American archaeology. Ephraim George Squier and the Development of American Archaeology, 1821–1888, his previous book in the Critical Studies in History of Anthropology series, approached the monumental mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys biographically, through the work of their most significant early analysts. Ephraim Squier, with his colleague Edwin Davis, produced a seminal work based on their firsthand survey of these remains, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valle. Their report appeared in the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge in 1848. The recently established Smithsonian Institution was the scientific arm of the U.S. government and its commitment to scientific evidence as a basis for

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territorial expansion was profound. In this work, Barnhart enlarges his scope to frame the mound-builder debate in a larger intellectual context, one that would set the methodological tone for the archaeology of preColumbian North American sites that came later. American science debated these complex issues with full awareness of the heavy stakes for purported American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. Interpretation of the mounds and their makers captured public imagination and spurred much highly romanticized literature. It seemed unbelievable to most observers of the late nineteenth century that the great earthworks might have been produced by ancestors of the remnant tribes of the southeastern, northeastern, and northwestern United States, already devastated by disease, warfare, and genocidal removal policies. Barnhart retains a firmly historicist grip on his material, explaining what the early collectors and commentators were up to in their own terms, separating this from retrospective evaluation of their varying positions on race and human origins. The story is a fascinating one, with actors shifting sides, and similar issues surfacing across generations of excavation, private collecting, museum display, and often contentious public debate and publication. Barnhart meticulously follows subplots and characters and identifies his own interpretations of what cannot be documented directly, leaving readers sufficient information to judge for themselves. Many of the seminal figures were right, or mostly right, but often for the wrong reasons by twenty-first-century standards. In their own terms, however, their positions are consistent and rational. Polygenists thought that the different races had distinct origins and that some, at least, were inherently incapable of attaining a state of civilization, thus justifying conquest and removal. Monogenists were more optimistic, postulating a single origin for the human species and the possible ameliorability of the Indians through education. These polar positions were not, however, binary; they surface in different combinations for different individuals and the same individual at different times. xii

Series Editors ’ Introduction

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Barnhart does not have any particular axe to grind. He is a historian who is well informed about the tribe of nineteenth-century archaeologists and how they did their work, with all the interdisciplinary tangents that have entered into the story (including geology, natural history, linguistics, and even phrenology), and how the history of archaeology and anthropology articulates with a larger context of the role of Native peoples in the American imagination. Individuals, their fieldwork, and available theoretical frameworks appear to intersect but without a conclusion predictable in advance to ongoing debates over human origins. Mosaic chronology, the relationship of the Mound Builders to Central and South American civilizations or to historic Indian populations, priority of fieldwork over armchair philosophy, American exceptionalism in light of apparent relative European antiquity, amateur versus professional archaeological practice, and the emergence of institutional infrastructure recognizable as the archaeology of today are the author’s primary concerns. Barnhart is meticulous in examining when materials became generally available or known as opposed to when they were first excavated, collected, or described, and why that matters. Preprofessional science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was developing a nascent infrastructure for archaeologists to communicate with each other and consensus remained a fraught matter.

Series Editors ’ Introduction

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Acknowledgments

Exactly when and where a book project is born is sometimes difficult to pinpoint. Perhaps in my own case it began as a schoolboy with chance encounters with the prehistoric Indian mounds of the Miami Valley of southwestern Ohio—an enduring interest that began to take shape in graduate school and would be nurtured for several years more. It is far easier, by contrast, to acknowledge the conspicuous debts I have accumulated over the course of those many years in pursuing this line of research and writing. Expressions of appreciation and thanks to those who eased my way either by dint of their precepts and examples as mentors and colleagues or who helped me revisit the dimly lit corridors of American archaeology’s past as archivists and librarians certainly deserve more than a customary nod. Recognition of those obligations is as sincere as it is obligatory. I have learned far more about critical historical method, historiography, archival sourcing, and the problems inherent in the interpretation of cultures from my colleagues and students than I am certain they ever learned from me. Some of these fortuitous influences have been direct though personal and professional relationships and others indirect through the influence of their scholarship and the encouragement given to this project. The late Dr. Richard M. Jellison, professor emeritus of history at Miami University, and Ronald H. Spielbauer, associate professor of anthropology at Miami, were the first to introduce me to the history of anthropology—an absorbing field of research that ultimately brought

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me here. Others wielded similar influences. Dr. Bradley T. Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society, and Ms. Martha Potter Otto, curator emeritus of archaeology, placed me under similar obligations; most certainly more than I can now remember. The same must be said of Jonathan King, a former assistant keeper at the British Museum, for providing me with copies of archival materials relating the Edwin Hamilton Davis Collection of American Antiquities that forms part of the museum’s North American Indian collections. Other influences have been less direct but no less important. Stephen Williams, Harvard University Peabody Professor of North American Archaeology and Ethnography emeritus and a former director and curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard is among them. Steve lent a sympathetic ear and shared research over a long span of years. David L. Browman, one of Williams’s former students at Harvard, did me the honor along with Steve of inviting me to be a discussant at the Biennial Willey Symposium sponsored by the Society for American Archaeology’s History of Archaeology Committee in the spring of 1998. I have endeavored to keep faith with the letter and spirit of the symposium as well as their examples as scholars in the history of American archaeology. Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray, editors of the Critical Histories of Anthropology Series published by the University of Nebraska Press, believed in this project and gave the manuscript several critical readings at various stages of development. Nor is it too much to say that Darnell’s numerous contributions to the history of anthropology as an author and editor have long served as a model for historicizing anthropology’s past—not as an afterthought but as an integral specialty within the discipline of anthropology. Her oft-stated conviction that historians and anthropologists have something to learn from each other in writing the history of American anthropology has been a sustaining belief of my own. Thanks are likewise due to Matt Bokovoy, Native Studies and Borderlands History editor at the University of

xvi

Acknowledgments

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Nebraska Press, to Paul Vincent for his excellent copyediting on behalf of the University of Nebraska Press, and to Kimberly Giambattisto for shepherding me through the final phases of production. Several archivists, manuscript curators, librarians, and curators of museum collections are deserving of special mention. I am indebted to Sara A. Borden of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia for locating Benjamin Smith Barton’s notes on the 1785 Pennsylvania Boundary Survey. Elizabeth Singh, permanent secretary of the Royal Medical Society at Edinburgh, provided information regarding Benjamin Smith Barton’s years as a medical student there from 1786 to 1788 and for copies of Barton’s handwritten dissertations “Essay Towards a Natural History of the North American Indians” and “Of the American Albinos,” both of which Barton wrote in 1788. Ms. Singh also clarified details concerning the provenance and date of the manuscripts. Eric W. Schnittke, assistant archivist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, helped me access materials in the museum archives relating to Montroville Wilson Dickeson. Fred Burwell, archivist at Beloit College, rendered many kindnesses assisting me with the Stephen D. Peet papers. Several individuals assisted me in acquiring the images appearing here as illustrations. The good offices of Earle E. Spamer, coordinator for Reference and Library Programs at the American Philosophical Society; Lily Birkhimer, assistant curator of Digital Services at the Ohio Historical Society; and Beverly J. Cruse of Media Services at Eastern Illinois University’s Booth Library were of inestimable value. Some of the services rendered in the prosecution of this investigation go back several years. Ms. Janet Sue Ebel and Ms. Stacey Knight-Davis at Booth Library at Eastern Illinois University have assisted me in tracking down fugitive sources to good purpose and with good cheer. Other helpmates served me equally well. Christine Merllié-Young and my colleague Dr. Bailey K. Young corrected my labored translations of French texts and helped me verify French

Acknowledgments

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sources. Je suis bien obligé. David A. Simmons of the Ohio Historical Society and Dr. Larry L. Nelson of the History Department at Bowling Green State University, friends and colleagues of many years, helped me verify facts and dates relating to regimental histories and service records of the officers in the U.S. military; Dave with the arrival of the First U.S. Regiment on the Ohio frontier in 1785 and Larry regarding what is known about the service record of James Haines McCulloh Jr. from 1814 and 1816. Thanks also to Dr. Donald R. Hickey of the History Department at Wayne State College for helpfully fielding similar questions about deployments during the War of 1812. James Fairhead, professor of anthropology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, United Kingdom, shared his interests in history of American archaeology as well as his research regarding the activities of the American Ethnological Society. A hearty thanks to all.

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Terry A. Barnhart Charleston, Illinois

xviii

Acknowledgments

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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A m er ica n A n tiqu iti e s

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved. Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Prologue

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Historicizing the Origins of American Archaeology

The incipient phases of American archaeology developed within an eclectic set of interests and equally varied settings. The intellectual frameworks, institutional venues, and personalities that shaped its development from the late eighteenth century through the close of the nineteenth are distinctly discernible but not necessarily obvious from the vantage point of the present. American archaeology’s trajectory from an avocation, to a semi-profession, to a specialized, self-conscious profession was anything but a linear progression. There were too many contingencies, complexities, and variables. It was an organic and altogether untidy process. Archaeology was an earnest and scholarly pursuit before it became a bona fide discipline and profession. Preprofessional archaeology emerged from the intellectual tradition of antiquarianism and closely allied itself with the natural sciences throughout the nineteenth century—especially with geology. American archaeology, even in its most embryonic stages, reflects the first wave of specialization and professionalism that transformed all organized bodies of knowledge from the mid- to late nineteenth century. Archaeology’s trajectory as an emerging science was by no means unique. The gradual professionalization of American archaeology, and American anthropology as a whole, did not begin until the late nineteenth century and was not fully consummated until much later. Yet earlier developments are not without interest, although largely forgotten. The early discourse on the mounds frames perennial

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anthropological problems relating to human origins, antiquity, and cultural diversity in the New World that merit reexamination. The distant origins of American archaeology have not suffered from a want of attention. Samuel Foster Haven, the librarian at the American Antiquarian Society, wrote the first history of American archaeology in 1856. Justin Winsor, the historian and bibliophile at Harvard University, devoted considerable attention to the subject in the first volume of his Narrative and Critical History of the United States published in 1889. While Haven’s account is indispensable, Winsor’s work is an even more remarkable achievement.1 All who have followed in the footsteps of Haven and Winsor owe them much. The literature on the subject since then has burgeoned. A series of monographs, dissertations, and journal articles have led historians and anthropologists alike to become increasingly more interested in archaeology’s preprofessional past. The identification, preservation, and accessibility of archival materials relating to archaeological sites and museum collections originating in an earlier era of archaeological enquiry are often indispensable sources in the ongoing reanalysis of archaeological data. The writing of books, articles, and dissertations in the history of the discipline, moreover, reflect a basic need among archaeologists for self-analysis. It holds an equal attraction for historians who consider archaeological thought, activities, and collections as intellectual and cultural history writ large. Notwithstanding that attention, fundamental problems are deeply embedded in a good portion of the secondary literature relating to the nineteenth-century debate about “Mound Builders” and “American Indians.” Some of these are perceptual issues, others contextual, and still others basic errors of fact. Several of them have been uncritically accepted and reiterated from author to author. The condition is symptomatic of an overreliance on secondary accounts and a reluctance to go to the sources. The historiographical issues arising from that situation are daunting. Seldom are the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on the mounds framed upon their own terms and presented 2

Prologue

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within their own milieu. The conventional treatment of the subject is to arrange authorities into presumably irreconcilable “Mound Builder” and “American Indian” camps: those who were wrong (the Mound Builders were not Indians) and those who were right (the Mound Builders were Indians). Writing the history of American archaeology, especially concerning eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments about the origin and identity of the Mound Builders, is not always as straightforward or simple as it might seem. The debate was replete with conditional assumptions and stipulations respecting temporal, geographical, and cultural considerations that far too often fall by the wayside, if they are even acknowledged. Significantly adding to the problem are semantic and contextual considerations arising from the accommodating, indiscriminate, and problematic use of the term “race” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a synonym for tribe, nation, and race proper—a concept and construct that does not in all instances translate into our own understandings and usages. While aggregate groupings of authors into disconnected Mound Builder and American Indian categories hold true in many instances they are woefully inadequate, and even deceptive and distorting, for interpreting the thought of particular authors writing in relation to specific anthropological problems. At its worst that kind of pigeonholing is a crude form of reductionism. Accordingly, considerable attentiveness is given to interpreting texts (details matter) and to historicizing the use of language and meaning (context) during the period of this study. Precisely how authors verbalized time-bound usages and understandings of the concept of “race” in scientific and popular discourses about generic “Mound Builders” and correspondingly all-purpose “Indians” is an important point of enquiry. The commonplace distinctions that anthropologists make today between ethnicity, nationality, culture, and race were not self-evident to those who read the archaeological record through a different set of assumptions. Early archaeological writers commonly applied the ill-defined but ubiquitous concept of race as a stand-in or Prologue

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ancillary term for nation, tribe, and race proper. In other words, it was sometimes used in a restricted, biological, and genetic sense much as it is utilized today but sometimes not. Clarifying variability and inconsistency in the contextual meaning of language and its specific usages are hermeneutic considerations of some importance. It is certainly more than hairsplitting or pedantry. Why did the early investigators choose one word over another to convey their intended meanings? What were the interrelationships, associations, and connotations accompanying those terms that were explicitly understood and those that implicitly served as subtexts? What was the logic and illogic of the use and meaning of certain words, phrases, and corresponding ideas within the discourse about American antiquities? One need not make a full linguistic or cultural turn to poststructuralism to appreciate the importance of deconstructing texts and the coded language and thought they embody. And nowhere are those considerations more important than when discussing the archaeological thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Old ideas, like old artifacts, do not necessarily speak for themselves. Earlier paradigms, however privileged at one point in time, eventually become encumbrances. Alice B. Kehoe has well said on this very point that “the paradigmatic vision framing mainstream archaeology is as much an artifact as any we dig up.”2 Historians by-and-large have manifested decided proclivities in the way they have treated the preprofessional era of archaeology’s past. So much so that a good deal of the historiography on the subject is disproportionately skewed. Thomas Gilbert Tax has noted a tendency to underrate the achievements of the early years of archaeological enquiry and overstate the discipline’s romantic and unscientific origins. The result is what Tax quite accurately described as a “disjointed and unrepresentative” depiction of how the discipline actually developed. It has been the “bizarre” and the “absurd” notions of nineteenth-century archaeology that have received the lion’s share of attention at the expense of its scientific attributes. Whimsical writers offered the reading public 4

Prologue

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the very ideas against which the more empirical investigators earnestly inveighed in their efforts to establish archaeology as a science. Both the romantic and the empirical aspects of archaeology’s past must be entered into the ledger. But in equal measure with which the scientific aspects have been devalued or minimized, they receive compensatory though not uncritical attention here. Barry Alan Joyce has similarly commented that anthropological enquiry in the 1830s and 1840s is often seen as “an aberration” to be avoided, or is simply dismissed as “a quasiscientific excrement.” While there is certainly an element of truth in such deprecatory views of the period’s anthropology, it confuses more than clarifies when affirmed too dogmatically and selectively. Dismissive attitudes and assumptions concerning preprofessional figures leave a gaping hole in the history of American anthropology. It is an essentially ahistorical perspective symptomatic of historical amnesia. The problem invites attention.3 We look askance today at an era of anthropology that calculated the supposed intellectual and moral capabilities of races based on the internal capacity of their crania; included physical beauty as a subjective category of analysis in “external somatology” or physical anthropology; concerned itself with ethnic aptitudes, racial temperaments, and presumably fixed national characteristics; ranked entire races as being superior or inferior based on supposedly inherent differences; and made ethnocentric assumptions about their place within “the scale of civilization,” to use a period phrase. Some races were touted as being innately suited for intellectual pursuits and others depicted as inherently suited for physical labor and entirely given over to animal instincts. Such gross caricatures, no less than the certitude with which their advocates advanced them, go against the grain of latter-day sensibilities. Yet however offensive and objectionable we find such bald and inaccurate assertions they cannot be passed over in contemptuous silence or sanitized to make them more palatable. Such treatments of unpleasant memories explain nothing. It is only by cross-examining the assumptions that sustained such imposing Prologue

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attitudes and arguments that we can account for how they rationalized the maintenance of social hierarchy and regulated race relations. Archaeology in service of the state is hardly an exceptional or uniquely American story, but it most certainly is an American story. More is required of historians than heavy-handed moralizing and condemnation of the collective sins of the fathers and mothers. The burden of archaeology’s past regarding the treatment of human remains and grave goods looms large. The uses to which misguided anthropological theories and practices were called to witness to justify the institution of slavery, discriminate against free blacks, validate manifest destiny, and excuse an equally exploitative and coercive Indian policy receives due attention in the pages that follow. The moral and ethical dimension of archaeology’s past cannot be ignored or minimized if we are to present socially responsible interpretations. But we must also try to fathom why it was that archaeologists in the nineteenth century did not always see things the way we do, believe in the same things, or actuate their values and ideologies in a similar fashion. Recognition of that historical reality excuses nothing. But it does help us more fully comprehend how and why racial dogma was so readily accepted within certain circles of the anthropological community and also had currency in American and European societies at large. As the British novelist L. P. Hartley said in the opening line of The GoBetween (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” David Lowenthal took Hartley’s instructive metaphor as the appropriate title of The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985), where Lowenthal examines the inseparable relationship between the past and present and our inability to cope with those aspects of the past that disappoint or disturb us. Why, for example, is it difficult to speak of the past in other than self-aggrandizing terms? Why are some aspects of the past fêted and others purged?4 The question of continuity and disruption in the archaeological and historical records is a historiographical issue as well as one of anthropological epistemology. Calamitous depopulation among 6

Prologue

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indigenous societies radiated in both time and space. The symptoms or effects of that reality were imperfectly understood and articulated by most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers but dimly perceived by some nevertheless. The problem of population collapse and cultural disruption affected the Mound Builder-Indian debate and more broadly holds methodological implications for American archaeology and ethnology as a whole. In fact, it pinpoints a large stream of historical and anthropological problems from which many smaller ones also flow. Speaking of the discontinuities existing between the social and cultural systems of pre-Columbian populations and Native American societies from the sixteenth century onward, Robert C. Dunnell affirmed that “in some important respects, our eighteenth and nineteenth-century predecessors got it right; they even got it right for the right reasons, although the terminology is not exactly modern. The people responsible for the archaeological record were, just as they supposed, a far more numerous, culturally different group of people than were known in historic times. The entire relation between past and present, between history and archaeology must be rethought.” One can heartily concur with Dunnell’s opinion and with similar assessments made on the same point by Bruce G. Trigger and by coauthors David R. Wilcox and W. Bruce Masse without being uncritical of archaeology’s past, apologetic for its transgressions, or overly reproachful in reprimanding them.5 Overly simplified reconstructions of archaeology’s past that run roughshod over such important points of enquiry and complex issues in the eighteenth- and nineteen-century discourse on the mounds are poor historical servants. Dunnell reminds us that careful analysis requires more. “There is a timely lesson to be learned in the age of critical theory. It is easy to impugn the motives of our predecessors. A plausible just-so story about why Indians were rejected as the authors of the archaeological record has been spun by twentieth-century scholars: It is a story of deep penetration of a budding archaeology by the social and political attitudes of nineteenth-century American society. Prologue

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Closer inspection does not suggest such penetration was a strong force in nineteenth-century scholarship at all, but rather that it may well have played a critical role in the twentieth-century story about the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars.”6 One can concur with the first part of that statement and dissent from the second. The first part succinctly frames several of the issues and problems in the history of American archaeology that are revisited here. But the second part needs to be uncoupled from the first. Such “deep penetration” by social and political attitudes did, in fact, occur in nineteenth-century archaeology at every turn just as they do in every era of scientific enquiry. American archaeology cannot escape the social, political, ideological, and institutional settings in which it was and is practiced. The subject has, indeed, received considerable attention.7 So little was known about the mounds—also commonly referred to as tumuli, mounts, barrows, and not infrequently and significantly as “Indian graves” and “Indian mounds”—that the propensity for speculation was less a matter of complaint or apology than a sheer necessity. The early archaeological observers were intellectually challenged by an inadequate terminology or nomenclature and an undeveloped chronology—essentially no chronology at all. An understanding and appreciation of cultural differentiation and time-depth in the archaeological record awaited a future day. The Philadelphia physician, naturalist, and ethnologist Benjamin Smith Barton spoke to the issue directly. Writing to the celebrated theologian, scientist, and political theorist Joseph Priestly in May 1796 Barton observed that “I need not tell you, that you will sometimes find me leaving the sure road of historical enquiry, for the narrow, and too often uncertain, path of the antiquary. In most of the investigations and researches of the antiquary, some uncertainty is necessarily involved. The light which serves to conduct him is frequently extremely faint: the imagination and conjecture are, therefore, naturally called in to his aid. If this be ever allowable, it is especially so in an enquiry, such as the present, where the subjects of investigation have been taken from the 8

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darkness of the grave .” Bishop James Madison of Virginia sounded a similar note. When considering the origin and purpose of the mounds, said Madison, those knowledgeable in history, geography, and philosophy found themselves cast adrift. “It is true, that we want here a compass to guide us, and are left to find our way through this night of time, in the best manner we can.” That reality, that deficit in reliable knowledge, often led ardent and thoughtful scholars in different directions.8 The observations of Barton and Madison are reminiscent of those made by the American poet Joel Barlow’s in his great national work The Columbiad (1807). Antiquaries ransacked the annals of history in vain to answer even the most basic of questions regarding the unrecorded past and not infrequently lost their way and fell into error. And nowhere was that truer than when contemplating the veiled subject of American antiquities. The antiquary, said Barlow, walked alone.

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In these blank periods, where no man can trace The gleams of thought that first illumed his race, His errors, twined with science, took their birth, And forged the fetter of this child of earth, . . .  And when, as oft, he dared expand his view, And work with nature on the plan she drew, Some monster, gendered in his fears, . . .  Blocks nature’s path, and sends him wandering wide, Without a guardian, and without a guide.9 Extrapolation is as essential to deductive reasoning as observation is to inductive thought. Inference was neither unwarranted nor unwelcome to the early empiricists so long as it was proportionate. When constrained it was considered a legitimate exposition of thought; when uninhibited it was viewed as the antithesis of scientific enquiry. Henry Marie Brackenridge, for example, made a clear distinction between an informed hypothesis about the mounds and what he described to Thomas Jefferson in July 1813 as the “vague wanderings Prologue

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of fancy.” Brackenridge had devoted considerable attention to the mounds he frequently encountered along the Mississippi River in his travels between St. Louis and Baton Rouge. In self-deprecation, Brackenridge referred to his own “crude theories” on the subject of American antiquities yet hastened to note that however wanting, they were at least based on his own firsthand observations and reflections. Among the more discriminating archaeological observers firsthand knowledge of the subject was a litmus test. That consideration at least got Brackenridge’s views heard before the discerning members of the American Philosophical Society. Amos Stoddard likewise commented on the necessity of conjecture in the study of American antiquities, even though his own ruminations on the supposed existence of a Welsh nation in pre-Columbian America transgressed the boundaries of supposition in his own time as well as ours. Stoddard, somewhat ironically, commented that until the antiquities of the country were more thoroughly explored by accurate observers, those curious about the subject would have to content themselves with “partial accounts of them, perhaps in many instances erroneous, derived from various sources, and many of them of doubtful authority.” Antiquaries would of necessity have to satisfy themselves with a certain degree of conjecture, even though Stoddard himself hardly exemplified the best model of either inductive or deductive reasoning in advancing his overly indulgent Welsh theory, which was an apparent exception to his own rule.10 Historicizing the debate about the mounds is certainly not the same as accepting old assumptions and assertions at face value. Nor does it legitimize discarded theories or the more pernicious aspects of the nationalism, ethnocentrism, and racism that permeated the early archaeological literature and several other avenues of American and European thought besides. Contextualizing the various phases and facets of that discourse, however, requires some rethinking and jettisoning our own cultural baggage lest we indulge in the historical fallacy of presentism—interpreting the past as an affirmation of the 10

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present or, in effect, reading the past backward. Several historians have eruditely commented upon the baneful effects of presentism. Herbert Butterfield’s classic articulation of the problem in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and David Hackett Fischer’s discussion of presentism in Historians’ Fallacies (1970) are notable among them. Calling attention to the problem is admittedly easier than preventing it, but attempting to do so is an essential component of critical historical method. Fischer defines the fallacy of presentism as “a complex anachronism, in which the antecedent in a narrative series is falsified by being defined or interpreted in terms of the consequent. . . . It is the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world.” It is a most useful metaphor that exemplifies the challenge of interpretation in all fields of historical enquiry.11 While presentism and ethnocentrism are not one and the same attitude or mode of thought, they are often fellow travelers nonetheless. They share the common denominator of egocentrism, which limits our capacity to think beyond ourselves and to uncritically assume that we are the sum of all prior experience, knowledge, and enlightenment. Adam Ferguson, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, drew attention to the problem in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson’s critique of presentism is as timeless as the problem itself. It was a general characteristic of human nature when contemplating the history of “rude nations” derived from the study of antiquities “to impute every advantage of our nature to the arts that we ourselves possess; and to imagine, that a mere negation of all our virtue is a sufficient description of man in his original state. We see ourselves as the supposed standards of politeness and civilization; and where our own features do not appear, we apprehend that there is nothing which deserves to be known.” Human understanding is always challenged whenever we travel beyond our own experiences and frames of Prologue

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reference, especially when we attempt to vicariously experience the remote past. Vanity plays a part too. William Robertson—the principal of the University of Edinburgh, the royal historiographer for Scotland, and author of the two-volume History of America (1777)—made fundamentally the same cautionary and acute observation. In every stage of society, said Robertson, the sentiments and desires of humankind “are so accommodated to their own state, that they become standards of excellence to themselves, they affix the idea of perfection and happiness to those attainments which resemble their own, and wherever the objects and enjoyments to which they have been accustomed are wanting, confidently pronounce a people barbarous and miserable.  .  .  . Polished nations, conscious of the advantages which they derive from their knowledge and arts, are apt to view rude nations with peculiar scorn, and, in the pride of superiority, will hardly allow either their occupations, their feelings, or their pleasures, to be worthy of men.” The criticisms of Ferguson and Robertson convey what are essentially anthropological outlooks on the past. Although both observers lapsed into ethnocentrism themselves in their respective writings they were at least mindful of the problem. It is an inherent condition of the human psyche that we conceive the past in self-referential terms and quite often do so unconsciously. As historical spectators we inhabit what Peter Loewenberg has instructively called “the realm of healthy observing ego.”12 Questions of self-definition in archaeology’s past are just as important as they are in the present. Alfred Irving Hallowell’s prescription that the history of anthropology should focus on questions that define anthropological attitudes, stances, and concerns—what essentially defines anthropological enquiry in any era—is as valid today as it was when he presented it to his colleagues in 1965.13 Hallowell’s exploratory article on the subject is a canonical text within the history of anthropology, marking its beginning as a self-conscious discipline or specialized area of practice within the anthropological profession. Histories of the discipline à la Hallowell attempt to answer questions 12

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of continuing interest to both historians and anthropologists. Timeless concerns regarding human nature and society leading to the emergence of archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnology, and philology during the nineteenth century are the threads of historical analysis. Social or cultural anthropology per se was not a part of that earlier formulation or paradigm. It had yet to define and differentiate itself as a distinct province of anthropological practice from earlier and very broad conceptions of ethnology and ethnography. Even so, some of the basic concerns of cultural anthropology are to be found during earlier eras of anthropological enquiry. Thomas S. Kuhn ably demonstrated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970) that scientists often have difficulty thinking outside the prevailing paradigm in which they work and that defines, if not dictates, both theory and praxis in any given era of scientific enquiry. Contemporary understandings of earlier discourses can easily mislead. The contours, textures, and operative assumptions of the past can be more apparent than real when working within a different set of intellectual and cultural assumptions. The relevance of the history of anthropology to the field as a whole, Hallowell affirmed, is its corrective value. “The history of anthropology considered as an anthropological problem supplements an exclusive concern with the history of organized enquiry and any attempt to arbitrarily isolate their development from its roots in a wider cultural context. On the contrary, it directs attention to the cultural context and historical circumstances out of which formulations of anthropological questions must have developed. . . . The history, then, of what we now label anthropology in western culture is linked with the study of the sociology of knowledge, ‘ethnoscience’ and the study of man and his behavior from many different points of view, humanistic and scientific, in the modern period of western culture.” Taking both a humanistic and scientific perspectives on archaeology’s past necessitates that we ask many questions: What did those early figures read, how did they acquire and perceive their evidence, how did they Prologue

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reason, what theoretical orientations do they disclose, what were the interpersonal and institutional networks in which they interacted, and what were the external social, political, and cultural factors that affected their frame of reference as a whole? Beyond these categories of analysis are the more intangible yet equally crucial questions of personality, motives, and idiosyncrasies that often translated into rivalries for patronage and recognition, factionalism within learned societies, and that sometimes exacerbated anthropological controversies. The history of American archaeology provides abundant examples of all. The supposed relationship, or lack thereof, between archaeology and ethnology during the early and mid-nineteenth century frames another historiographical problem. Those fields are sometimes perceived as being hopelessly estranged from each other in the study of the mounds and American aborigines—disjointed and sporadic yes; alienated and always at odds no. Even in their gestational phases archaeology and ethnology were no strangers to each other. Archaeological evidence was at the center of the monogenist-polygenist debate about human origins and antiquity and informed speculation on the causes and consequences of migrations of indigenous peoples from what were presumably their ancient seats. The use of ethnographic analogies in the interpretation of archaeological was common practice and remains so today. Archaeologists and ethnologists interacted through correspondence, as members of learned societies, and drew upon each other’s ideas and arguments in publications. And during an era when anthropology was a largely undifferentiated and inchoate set of interests, or a tradition if you will, archaeological and ethnological problems were often investigated by the same individuals. As the Philadelphia physician, geologist, and anthropologist Samuel George Morton remarked in the American Journal of Science and Arts for July 1846, “ethnography and archaeology should go hand in hand” in studying the past and present conditions of American aborigines.14

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American archaeology and ethnology, to be certain, did not become more systematically unified in the study of the mounds until the fieldwork of the Division of Mound Exploration within the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology in the 1880s and the excavations conducted by Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology during roughly the same period. Walter W. Taylor’s description of American archaeologists and ethnologists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century does service in further explicating their still nebulous but not insignificant relationships. Archaeologists and ethnologists, said Taylor, were anthropologists who only differed from each other by the nature of the materials with which they worked: whether they studied “the living or the dead Indians.” From the 1870s onward, American archaeologists and ethnologists both formally enlisted under the banner of anthropology. We would prefer to say living cultures as opposed to extinct ones today, but Taylor’s point, if somewhat tersely stated, still stands.15 Yet common ground also existed between American archaeology and ethnology at an earlier day, however inadequate the consummation. There was a perceived and articulated need among American archaeologists and ethnologists between the 1840s and 1870s, though largely unrealized, to move in a more holistic and integrated direction in the study of humankind. Any idea that archaeologists investigated mythical “Mound Builders” while ethnologists studied “Indians” before the founding of the Bureau of American Ethnology—and never did the twain meet—should be discarded. Early speculations on the origin of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and those on the mounds can only be dissevered in an artificial and random manner. That is not the history presented here. That is not to say that no theoretical or methodological barriers (intellectual dead ends) existed between American archaeology and ethnology before the founding of the bureau’s Mound Explorations Division, for those obstacles most certainly were present. But it is just as important to note that there were notable and significant

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exceptions to that statement. There was not an entire absence of using ethnography to explain the archaeological record before John Wesley Powell, Cyrus Thomas, and the stable of archaeologists and ethnologists at the Bureau of Ethnology in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as essentially and unquestionably important as their contributions were to the development of American archaeology as a formal discipline and an emerging profession. Scientific enquiry into the origin, antiquity, and identity of the Mound Builders could hardly be isolated from questions relating to the origins, migrations, customs, and affinities of the aboriginal inhabitants of the American continent, at least among those who took archaeology’s and ethnology’s scientific aspirations seriously. These were not stand-alone lines of investigation. Many nineteenth-century observers did, in fact, approach the problem of the mounds from the flawed and bifurcated standpoint of “Mound Builders” vs. “American Indians” as have many of their historians. But several early authorities on the mounds emphatically did not. The discourse concerning the origin and antiquity of American Indians dovetailed into the later discourse about the origin, antiquity, and identity of the Mound Builders. One line of enquiry quite naturally, not to say necessarily, sustained the other. Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis made precisely that argument as coauthors of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848). “It was concluded that if these monuments were capable of reflecting any certain light upon the grand archaeological questions connected with the primitive history of the American continent, the origin, migrations, and early state of the American race, that then they should be more critically and minutely, and above all more systematically investigated.”16 Even the most doctrinaire of nineteenth-century theorists, those who categorically denied that the North American Indians or their ancestors had built the mounds, always had to explain away the “Indian theory” first before they could advance their alternative theories of the Mound Builders. They also had to contend, assuming they cared, 16

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with the hostility of those in the mainstream scientific community who considered such ideas nonsense and missed few opportunities to say so. Archaeological investigators with backgrounds in the natural sciences for the most part found such ungrounded conjectures just as abhorrent as they are today. Archaeological controversies over the origin and meaning of the Dighton Rock, the Grave Creek Stone, the Newark Holy Stones, the Davenport Tablets, and many other dubious or fraudulent finds supporting diffusionist theories that assumed a nonindigenous origin for the Mound Builders represent, in a very real sense, archaeology’s nineteenth-century growing pains. Many of those old controversies, moreover, still echo in popular culture much to the chagrin of the archaeological establishment and the delight of cult archaeologists or pseudo-archaeologists who pursue their own alternative readings of the archaeological record. The song, historically speaking, has very much remained the same.17 Affirmations of the value of self-reflective histories of anthropology have been as frequent as they have been ardent. It is a recognized need dating at least to the close of the nineteenth century. The opinion rendered by Daniel Garrison Brinton in 1892 that the history of anthropology should be an essential component in the training of anthropologists is an example. There was a strong tendency among students of the sciences, Garrison intoned, “to read only for immediate purposes and on current topics. Few acquaint themselves with the history even of their own special branches; an ignorance which often results injuriously on the effectiveness of their work.” Students should not only read current works in the discipline but also the earlier literature in order to grasp the cumulative nature of anthropological knowledge. As a corrective to that lamentable fact, Brinton recommended that the history of anthropology, what he called “library work,” should form part of the curriculum at American universities. Students should familiarize themselves with the theories held by particular writers in the anthropological literature of the past and the problems they addressed. They should conduct research in archives and libraries Prologue

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where earlier discourses and concerns could be reconstructed and examined in relation to current literature. If the magnitude of the need for historical studies of anthropological thought was not on a par with the priorities assigned to training in the laboratory and to fieldwork, it was nonetheless a subject that would provide students with an enhanced understanding of the science of anthropology. And the absence of those historical perspectives Brinton considered a decided detriment to the development of anthropology as a whole.18 Since that time the importance of the history of anthropology to the field at large has been championed by many others besides. Dell H. Hymes, Irving A. Hallowell, Regna Darnell, and other anthropologists have rendered the opinion that the history of anthropology be undertaken as an essential disciplinary subfield or area of specialization.19 A prominent concern or question within that dialogue is how should anthropologists view the history of anthropology written by nonanthropologist? Hymes forthrightly answered that question forty years ago. The most important consideration “is not the particular origin of the scholar” but whether they know something about anthropological science as well as history. “Historians can learn anthropology; anthropologists can learn history.” It would be far more preferable in Hymes’s estimation if at least some anthropologists were trained “as specialists in the history of anthropology.” The interests, skills, and orientations of historians and anthropologists should “converge, but not merge entirely.”20 Hymes’s statement is predicated on the conviction, reiterated many times since, that the history of anthropology is relevant to current issues and problems. It should not be an afterthought, sideline, or matter of indifference to contemporary anthropologists. Nor should it merely be a pleasant stroll down memory lane. The history of the discipline is a critical process of self-reflection—an ongoing concern. Darnell, one of Hymes’s graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, has made that argument an article of faith. Historicizing the earliest periods of American archaeology also  means coming to terms with fundamental definitions and 18

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classifications of anthropology and how they changed in response to later developments. Brinton, who devoted much time and attention to formally defining anthropology, is again enlightening. He observed in his address before the Anthropological Society of Washington in April 1892 that developing and adopting precise definitions was essential to the field because they promoted a uniformity noticeably lacking. He also recognized that such delineations and classifications were transitory. Taking a page from William Whewell’s two-volume History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), Brinton remarked that a definition was merely “a condensed expression of our present understanding regarding it, and not a final statement.” As anthropology continued to develop, definitions would be modified.21 Yet it was Franz Boas who perhaps said it best. Boas affirmed in January 1899 that while formal definitions of what anthropology was, or at least ought to be, were certainly important, they were inadequate for understanding the subject as a field of scientific enquiry. They did not convey the inheritance of ideas and practices that defined anthropology or any other scientific discipline at any given point in time. “But sciences,” said Boas, “do not grow up according to definitions. They are the result of historical development.” Definitions reflect the consequences of disciplinary change, not its causes. Definitions are significant time markers that come at the beginning, middle, or end of periods of significant change. It is an interesting and useful perspective coming from a flamboyant forty-one-year-old German émigré on the cusp of launching a conceptual revolution in anthropological thought.22 Important differences in the conceptions, definitions, and classifications of nineteenth-century anthropology and those used today should not mask equally significant continuities. The terms ethnology and ethnography have more circumscribed meanings today than in the nineteenth century, when they were more generalized and included every branch of anthropology as it then existed. Luke Burke, a popular lecturer on the subject of ethnology and editor of the Ethnological Journal: A Magazine of Ethnology, Phrenology, and Archaeology Prologue

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published at London, gave a systematic definition of the science and its first principles in a three-part series appearing in that journal between June and October 1848. Burke emphasized the utility of ethnology as a practical science, elaborated its various fields of research, and discussed the relationship of the parts to the whole. “Ethnology is a science which investigates the mental and physical differences of Mankind, and the organic laws upon which they depend; and which seeks to deduce from these investigations, principles of human guidance, in all the important relations of social existence.” The terms ethnology and ethnography were often used synonymously but in their broadest sense were understood to mean “the Natural History of Man.” While the science of ethnology sought to know everything organically connected with the human species, its historical branch enquired into all facts of the past that illustrated the physical characteristics and presumed moral and intellectual traits of the various races. Historical ethnology (which included archaeology) concerned itself with determining the early seats, migrations, amalgamations, modifications, and social conditions of the races, and with establishing their “position in the social scale.” Burke’s views of the subject had great currency with Ephraim George Squier, Josiah Clark Nott, and George Robins Gliddon—all of whom were leading figures in what became known as the American School of Ethnology.23 Burke’s concern with formally defining ethnology in the 1840s and early 1850s reflects the same need for self-definition voiced by later authorities who may properly be called the first generation of semiprofessional and professional anthropologists. A widely recognized anthropological problem in the late nineteenth-century was the need for a well-defined and functional nomenclature. Adolph F. Bandelier drew attention to the problem of imprecise or veiled terminology in the early archaeological literature in a paper entitled “The Romantic School in American Archaeology” read before the New York Historical Society in February 1885. Bandelier’s well-judged thoughts on the subject are worth recalling. Historians must “dissect and compare” 20

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the discourses of the past in an effort to present things not so much as they actually were but as they were seen and understood by the discussants on the one hand (a subjective point of view) and by ourselves as their interpreters on the other (also a subjective point of view). Statements made in older writings, said Bandelier, far too often were merely copied or transcribed [by later scholars], however painstakingly and honestly, without being “critically sifted”—essentially reportage without analysis. Dissecting, comparing, and sifting the early archaeological literature is as good a description as any of the analysis undertaken here. The terminology used by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to describe archaeological remains and American Indian societies were “terms of comparison selected from types accessible to the limited knowledge of the times. The terminology was comparative in its origin, absolute only according to modern interpretation.”24 The “terms of comparison” used in the early literature were indeed limited to what the authors knew. The early investigators were constrained by an inadequate chronology and further hampered by terminology that was not up to the task of differentiating by time, space, and culture. We are sometimes prone to see “absolute” meanings in a word like “race” and a loaded phrase like “an extinct race” that in an earlier era of archaeological enquiry had relative meanings. What actual distinction is being made can easily be misread when force-fitted into what Bandelier aptly called the absolutes of more recent and contemporary interpretations. Historicizing vocabulary is, in fact, comparative in two senses: firstly, what it meant when compared to what we understand it to mean today (which may or may not be the same thing depending entirely upon context); and secondly, what it meant in relation to the use of other period terms and associated concepts that were available to particular authors writing in reference to specific points of enquiry. Contemporary understandings of both conventional and vernacular usages in the past too often fail us in our interpretations. The a priori assumptions of one era can all too easily crowd out or obscure those of another. Acknowledging that we have Prologue

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cultural baggage of our own that often gets in the way of understanding is just as important as recognizing that the cultural baggage of the past is equally problematic. That twofold frame of reference—the meanings assigned to words by the historical actors themselves and those we assign them as their interpreters—should be congruent but often is not. Brinton also spoke directly to the problem of nomenclature in an address before given before the Anthropological Society of Washington in April 1892. The problem of vague and inconsistent language, Brinton noted, inhibited the development of all branches of anthropology as an inductive science. There was such an unfortunate diversity in terminology used by different authors that adopting “a uniform phraseology” was a decided desideratum. Even the word “anthropology” itself at that time often had different usages and meanings in Europe and in the United States. Still worse was the confusion concerning what distinctions should be made between ethnology and ethnography. Brinton’s own “exhaustive” offering toward that end was part of his general scheme for instruction in anthropology. Powell, the discussant for Brinton’s paper on nomenclature and teaching, concurred entirely. The absence of a standardized terminology in anthropology represented a particularly pressing need. Powell had a full grasp of the language problem and its implications, as he noted in his commentary following Brinton’s address. “The usefulness, and even the possibility of language, depends upon convention. Those who use a language as a common medium of communication must by some means arrive at a common usage of words, so that the concepts which they have shall be represented by symbols common to all.” As concepts gradually developed, “the semantic content” of the corresponding word grew with it. It was thus necessary that new words be coined to express them and old ones redefined. Anthropology up to that time had been plagued by vagueness in the classification of core concepts and a concomitant ambiguity in the terms used to express them. Powell had his own tentative scheme of scientific classification and nomenclature for the anthropology

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that he presented to the members of the Anthropological Society of Washington alongside those of Brinton.25 Powell elaborated his views on the respective positions of ethnography, ethnology, and archaeology within the discipline of anthropology by way of analogy. He compared the relations of the various divisions of anthropology to the connections existing between geography and geology. “Ethnography bears the same relationship to Ethnology that geography does to geology.” Geography was a subset of geology and ethnography and ethnology subdivisions of anthropology. Archaeology’s relationship to anthropology, said Powell, was precisely the same. “Archaeology is not a distinct science, but refers only to some of the methods by which the facts of Ethnology are obtained.” Brinton agreed. His own general scheme of nomenclature and classification for anthropology described archaeology as “prehistoric and reconstructed anthropology.” Archaeology without anthropology was undeveloped and anthropology without archaeology correspondingly deficient. The considerable amount of attention devoted to nomenclature and classification by Brinton and Powell in a very real sense was a rite of passage—a necessary exercise in disciplinary self-definition.26 Like many of his predecessors Powell used the term ethnology in its broadest sense and as being more or less “synonymous” with anthropology. Burke used the term ethnology to define the interchangeability or approximate equivalency of ethnography and ethnology in much the same way in 1848. The distance between the old ethnology of the midnineteenth century and the new anthropology of Brinton and Powell was not all that great, although they would soon depart at wide angles. Concern with definitions and domestic relations among the subfields of anthropology continued apace. Powell’s views on the subject in 1892, so far as archaeology is concerned, are reminiscent of the obiter dictum tendered by Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips in 1958: “Archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” Willey and Phillips were no doubt speaking of archaeology as it then existed and not that

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of an earlier era. American archaeology unquestionably is, and has for some time been, one of the four fields of American anthropology. Yet archaeologists have often marched to the beat of their own drummer underneath the big tent of anthropology. Archaeology’s place within that extensive field has sometimes been confused and even contentious. Some anthropologists have even contended that commonplace assumptions of holism and integration in anthropology far too often are largely unexamined assumptions. The diverse elements of anthropology are not easily combined. The parts are sometimes more distinctive than the whole. What is perhaps a permissible corollary of the Willey-Phillips maxim for historians is that the history of archaeology and anthropology is intellectual and cultural history or it is nothing. At least that is the oblation to Clio made here. The field does, of course, have practical value for archaeologists outside of the historical guild strictly defined.27 Intellectual and cultural historians find archaeological discourse a rich harvest of ideas reflecting a broad cross-section of thought and experience. Whether we call such disciplinary history a sociology of anthropological knowledge, an anthropology of archaeology, metanarrative (stories of the storytellers), or straightforward intellectual and cultural history, the angles of vision are compatible and mutually enriching. A shared concern among historians and anthropologists is the need for critical historiography in writing the history of archaeology and anthropology generally.28 Maintaining a critical attitude toward historical method, sources, and interpretations is more than mere censure, fault-finding, or lining up errors in validation of present correctness. The history of American archaeology Willey and Jeremy Sabloff have argued is more than merely “recounting the follies and foibles of a premodern era.” They make that case as succinctly as anyone. “No individual, no institution, no intellectual tradition can ever fully escape from its generic forbears, and archaeology is no exception.”29

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Despite the significant cultural differences that distance us from remoter periods of archaeology’s past, we can still recognize that the antiquaries and early archaeologists were all too human and, therefore, more like us in many ways than not. Their values, attitudes, and behaviors, like our own, were neither all maleficent nor all meritorious. It should not be a matter of surprise if we see something of ourselves in archaeology’s past as well as those things that are alien. Historians are interlocutors and mediators of such matters. They arbitrate conflicting attitudes, assumptions, and values that are not easily merged and without presuming to reconcile or resolve them. The meeting of the past and present is not always a welcome encounter. That is not to say that historians do not have strong opinions about which claims and contentions made in the past and those made about the past that they find more or less tenable. Historians do make judgments and few make any pretense to being absolutely objective in their reconstructions of the past. Impartiality is certainly an ideal toward which most consciously strive, at least to the extent that human frailties and predispositions permit. Certainly that is no less true in the history of science, where appeals to demonstrable “truths” have often been avowed and just as often compromised. Historical relativism as an idea, organizing principle, or approach to the past is particularly pertinent as a conceptual tool for the history of anthropology. Historical relativism is the analog of cultural relativism. It mirrors the relationship between the observer and the observed among historians as it does among anthropologists. Interactions between historians and their subject matter, anthropologists and their cultural informants, and anthropologically trained archaeologists and their artifacts are consciously and unconsciously shaped by an individual’s personality, interests, motives, opportunities, and how each flows one into the other. Personality matters as a category of historical analysis because it affects the materials that scholars select and the interpretive themes they develop in both their conscious and

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unconscious efforts to impose order upon the chaos of the past. Peter Loewenberg, an historical relativist and practitioner of psychohistory (a somewhat maladroit but seemingly unavoidable name for an important field of research) observes in Decoding the Past that “distortion arises from the failure to account for the observers in each act of knowledge.” Much in the same vein cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, to carry the interdisciplinary analogy one step further, reminds us in his discussion of “thick description” that the observer is the one constant in the entire process of perceiving and interpreting a culture. The implications of these psychological considerations for both the history of anthropology for contemporary practice are compelling. Among the most important variables in the entire process of controlling the conditions of archaeological fieldwork and the formulation and testing of hypotheses are the peculiarities and habitual behaviors of the archaeologists themselves. Many such eccentricities and inconsistencies are encountered in the history of American archaeology.30 Historical relativists likewise affirm the primary importance of the subjective relationship between historians and their subject matter. There is no absolute canon as to what is relevant or irrelevant; important or insignificant. No transcendent standard of objectivity can lift us above our own place and time-bound cognitions. Even the positivist values of empiricism are period and culture-bound constructions, as the history of science so plainly demonstrates. Loewenberg has observed on this vital point, much as Leopold Von Ranke did before him, that “each historian and each age redefines categories of evidence in the light of its needs, sensibilities, and perceptions.” What serves as a useable past for one generation does not satisfy the requirements of another. Recognition of the way that history as a discipline and profession actually works does not give us license to throw out scholarly detachment as a conscious value and ideal toward which to strive. But it does give us a heightened awareness of the difficulties involved in reaching that destination. The quest to be faithful to the past and relate it just “as it really happened” is a legacy of the positivism of Leopold 26

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von Ranke and other European scholars. It has been an elusive goal although one to which the historical profession has often paid homage. Attaining anything that even approximates objectivity, says Peter Novick, is like “nailing jelly to the wall.” Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob also take up the truth and objectivity question in Telling the Truth about History. The authors scrutinize such topics as the heroic model of science, the once-favored claims of scientific history, and discovering the clay feet of science. As a work of critical historiography, Telling the Truth about History complements Novick’s That Noble Dream.31 Archaeologists collected, arranged, exhibited, exchanged, and sold artifacts during the period embraced by this study under a variety of circumstances. Sometimes they sold them to other collectors or acquired them through exchanges; on other occasions collectors sold them on the antiquities market; and in still other instances they donated or sold them to museums. Other collections originated through the fieldwork conducted by individuals working solo or under the aegis of learned societies and museums. The contexts in which those collections were formed are integral facets of the history of archaeology. That aspect of archaeology’s past has hardly been ignored. Yet withal objects have arguably received less attention than ideas. It should never be objects or ideas, of course, but rather objects and ideas. Even the most unassuming and seemingly unintelligible petroglyph is an expression of human thought and behavior. So too are the implements, ornaments, and ceremonial objects that were once part of the daily round of life and gave meaning and purpose to the prehistoric peoples who fashioned and used them. What Michal Chazan has called the “materiality” of archaeology’s past receives due attention here alongside the ideas that shaped the collecting, arrangement, and interpretation of archaeological materials both in private cabinets and museums. The contexts in which archaeologists recovered the material culture of the prehistoric past and the mind-sets and methods that informed their interpretations are kept to the foreground of the narrative without Prologue

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becoming its primary focus. The motivations and worldviews of archaeological collectors and collections receive like attention. The ideology of archaeological collecting is part and parcel of intellectual and cultural history. Museum collections were ordered into series to illustrate ethnological relationships, stages of culture, and presumed evolutionary developments or lack thereof. The illustrative value of those collections was often subsumed under the idea of “progress.” We prefer the less value-laden label of “change” today. The circumstances leading to the formation and sale of the Montroville Wilson Dickeson Collection of American Antiquities to the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia, the James McBride Collection purchased by William Sansom Vaux of Philadelphia and donated the collection to the academy, the Edwin Hamilton Davis Collection sold to William Blackmore as the nucleus of the Blackmore Museum, the sale of prehistoric European artifacts by the French anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet to Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1868, and the entire ideology and culture of nineteenth-century archaeological collecting defined the initial phases of museum anthropology. Nor should we forget that museum anthropology existed before academic anthropology. The first semi-professional and professional archaeologists worked in museums and not the academy, and there was a period of time when competition existed between museum anthropologists and those in universities for leadership in the field. Some individuals were more adept at negotiating that rivalry than others, yet another venue where personality entered into the equation. The research agenda of the academy became predominate in defining archaeology as a field of anthropological enquiry but museum anthropology remains an essential sector of the profession. One part of the profession cannot exist independently of the other, but it has not always been smooth sailing.32 The question of when archaeology became a scientific discipline is one where predilections and prejudices readily come to the fore. 28

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Definitional considerations once again loom large. Is archaeology only a discipline when it becomes ensconced within museums and the academy as a bona fide profession? Some historians and archaeologists have seen archaeology becoming a science in the 1840s, others during in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and still others see archaeological science as an empirical approach to the remote past being practiced at a much earlier period. There is no consensus in the matter. There is also the unwillingness of many anthropologists to take pre-Boasian anthropology seriously, which itself represents a conceptual and historiographical problem of some weight. The four-field definition of anthropology as archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and social or cultural anthropology that Boas formulated and institutionalized at Columbia—and that has been perpetuated by his students—became so firmly entrenched within the subculture of anthropology that some historians have argued that there is a bias within the anthropological community in dealing with pre-Boasian figures in the history of anthropology. That too is part of the Boasian legacy.33 Several scholars take the long view of archaeology’s development as a science while others are less comfortable with moving much beyond the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alice B. Kehoe, Bruce Trigger, Stuart Piggott, and Walter W. Taylor have convincingly argued in their respective writings that archaeology, as a conscious exercise in Baconian empiricism, has been practiced at least since the mid-seventeenth century, with Trigger and Taylor tracing its roots in England to the mid-fifteenth century. Trigger notes that the study of material remains in England and somewhat later in Scandinavia “began to supplement written records and oral traditions giving rise to a new tradition of antiquarianism, as distinguished from purely historical scholarship.”34 The study of the physical remains of the past was closely connected with the nationalistic sentiments and aspirations of emerging nation-states in England, Denmark, and Sweden. The relationship between archaeology and national origin myths has indeed been an Prologue

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intimate one. The nationalism that informed antiquarian scholarship in northern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had its complement in the partisan sentiments of American cultural nationalism that often tinged archaeological thought in the United States, from its origins as a formal discourse in the 1780s to the close of the nineteenth century.35 Antiquarianism was an Anglo-American tradition as well. It informed early enquiries into the origin, antiquity, and purposes of the mounds in significant ways, especially among American observers who developed structural and functional analogies between the barrows of England and Scotland and the mounds of America. Any assessment of those early figures must position them relative to the intellectual tradition of antiquarianism, both those who worked within that conventional approach to the past and those who departed from it to a greater or lesser degree. Historians and archaeologists today invariably use the term antiquarian in a pejorative sense. Antiquarian writings are considered narrow, nonanalytical, and lack a problem orientation, thus rendering them anathema to the scholarship valued by professional historians and archaeologists. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s caricature of the complacent antiquary vividly comes to mind. Antiquarian history, said Nietzsche, mummified the past by robbing it of its soul, vitality, and humanistic value. “The horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. He breathes a mouldy air; the antiquarian habit may degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for everything old: he often sinks so low as to be satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the scraps that fall from the bibliographical table.”36 Nietzsche’s amusing parody delineates the least-useful aspect of antiquarianism: idiosyncratic and self-indulgent collecting that indiscriminately values the hording of antiques, documents, inscriptions, or “relics” merely because they are old and rare. Whether Nietzsche every read Sir Walter Scott’s satire of Jonathan

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Oldbuck in Scott’s diverting novel The Antiquary (1815) is not known. But good Jonathan came to epitomize several of the same and similarly humorous attributes of antiquarianism. Yet neither Nietzsche’s burlesque nor Scott’s spoof advance our understanding of the more serious, empirical basis upon which many antiquaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries approached the study of archaeological remains. All was not a lark. Whether one insists upon calling those early figures in archaeology’s past antiquaries, archaeologists, ethnologists, pro-anthropologists, precursors, anticipators, intellectual ancestors, or dilettanti, they were still doing archaeology. The collective concerns and interests of those historical figures signify archaeology’s deep background. If archaeology was not always done well judged by later standards of practice, it was at least done in essence and not infrequently to good purpose. It is not necessary for those early authorities to have been correct in all things to have been on target in some, and sometimes actually more right than wrong, as is argued at several junctures of the narrative that follows. Nor is this a new perspective or revelation. Barry Alan Joyce convincingly argues in his study of the United States Exploring Expedition that many nineteenth-century explorers, Charles Pickering and Horatio Hale conspicuously among them, were sound ethnographic reporters. They exhibited the characteristics that define anthropology in any era, notwithstanding the fact that their interpretations of evidence are as period- and culture-bound as our own. It was not otherwise with the more empirical of the early archaeological writers. James B. Griffin has likewise observed on that score that the archaeology of Squier and Davis took an anthropologically oriented approach through their use of historic accounts of American Indians groups and other non-European cultures to interpret archaeological evidence. It was a methodology consonant with later developments in the interpretation of archaeological artifacts and sites. Squier, indeed, continued to make extensive use of cross-cultural analogies in his subsequent writings.

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Archaeologists take a more critical attitude toward the use of general analogies today than in the nineteenth century, but they still find an important place within archaeological interpretation.37 If anthropology is essentially “a generalizing and comparative discipline,” as Willey and Sabloff have defined it, then several of the preprofessional figures in archaeology’s past are worthy intellectual ancestors. Certainly the more informed and empirical of the early archaeologists are worthy of attention. Their descriptions, classifications, and comparisons of archaeological artifacts and sites were essentially anthropological, even when wrong. Those early investigators marshaled evidence, extrapolated theories of human development, identified problems, and articulated goals for research. Some of them, moreover, shared anthropological attitudes, interests, and approaches deeply rooted in Western thought—propensities that Margaret T. Hodgen has traced back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While it is most certainly true that anthropology as an academic discipline and profession did not emerge until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its foundational concepts date much further back in time, when contact with the previously unknown peoples of the New World prompted Europeans to devise ways of describing and understanding similarities and differences existing among humankind. James Sydney Slotkin fully concurred in Hodgen’s expanded timeframe for tracing the origins of rudimentary anthropological ideas and approaches. Slotkin argued that several of the fundamental premises and concerns of anthropology were recognized by the end of the eighteenth century, yet the sources of those ideas were established during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars did anthropology, Harry Liebershohn, reminds us, before anthropology became a bona fide discipline and profession. The origins of American archaeology in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries follow a similar trajectory.38 Evolutionary thinking about cultures passing through distinct developmental stages is a case in point. Those ideas predate the 32

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mid-nineteenth century but were relatively amorphous compared to later developments. Assumptions about why and how societies presumably change may not have constituted a systematic body of thought but they did have coherence and influence. The early developmentalist arguments lacked the structure, density, and cohesiveness found in the later evolutionary principles of Charles Darwin, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Edward B. Tyler, but even those theories of cultural evolution, notwithstanding their originality, were at least partially indebted to the past. Morgan, recognized by many as the founder of American anthropology, is a prime example. His “trisection” of “Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization” profoundly influenced anthropological and historical thinking for years to come, but that developmental trilogy had its counterpart in the earlier ideas of Montesquieu, Turgot, and Adam Ferguson. And returning to Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society we find what is perhaps the fullest articulation of the developmentalist ideas associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. He held that the study of “primitive peoples” was a window on the primordial condition of humankind—the “state of nature” from whence civil society eventually developed among some peoples but not among others.39 Why some nations and groups advanced to “civilization” when others presumably remained in an arrested state of development was a matter of debate. Some observers attributed the phenomenon to environmental factors and others to supposedly inherent differences between ethnic and racial groups, a question that became more urgent in early and mid-nineteenth-century America when egalitarian and anti-egalitarian arguments competed in the marketplace of ideas. The intellectual framework of the early archaeological and ethnological writers owed much to the thought of Scottish authorities. Prevailing notions of primitive society and the supposed characteristics and abilities of nations contained in William Robertson’s History of America (1777) and James Dunbar’s Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Uncultivated Ages (1780) likewise provided a conceptual model Prologue

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through which to interpret American aborigines and antiquities and one which they adamantly rejected. The views of Robertson and Dunbar were well known within academic circles. Whether we call their ideas and principles history, moral philosophy, or anthropology, they most definitely informed trans-Atlantic thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. American college presidents and professors were no strangers to their views and opinions. Most notably, the views and opinions of Robertson and Dunbar also informed the intellectual world of the Philadelphia physician and naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton. American archaeology and ethnology were by no means altogether provincial pursuits. European influences and interactions were present at an early day. The more informed and serious anthropologists participated in a trans-Atlantic conversation by the mid-nineteenth century onward.40 Historical epistemology enquires into how knowledge is acquired, validated, and organized. The social foundations of knowledge, the worldviews of its originators, and the meaning of evidence as interpreted during particular periods of the past all fall within its purview. Nowhere have those considerations received closer scrutiny than in the history science. Empirical science can be biased, flawed, and prejudice in any era, as the socially constructed scientific racism of the nineteenth century and the eugenics of the early twentieth century so vividly reminds us. One can argue that those constructions were pseudo-science and not science at all. But taking that position assumes the existence of an absolute, transcendent standard of what is science and what is not. That positivist model certainly exists as an ideal and did so in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. But scientific norms and values are not fixed. They are wrought by more than rationality, objectivity, and the rigors of the scientific method. Normative science changes in lock step with new scientific developments and with changes in societal and cultural attitudes and trends. It is a dialectical process between internal and external influences characterized by Thomas S. Kuhn as an essential tension between tradition and 34

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innovation in scientific research. Historically speaking, what has been recognized as science has been something of a sliding scale. The genuine science of one era becomes the ersatz science of another in precisely the same manner that the history of one generation often becomes the mythology of another. Few historiographical considerations in the history of science or any subject are more important.41 Ending this narrative at the close of the nineteenth century is not entirely an arbitrary convenience. The research agenda of American archaeology and ethnology had perceptively shifted from the Mississippi Valley to the aboriginal remains and peoples living west of the Hundredth Meridian, especially in the direction of the American Southwest. Even more significantly were the new trends in archaeology that began to significantly change the conceptualization of American prehistory and the settings in which archaeologists worked during the last two decades of the century. American archaeology by 1900 had not yet arrived but was well on its way to becoming a selfconscious profession that posited theories of cultural change and continuity among prehistoric societies. Avocational archaeologists were still alive and well but leadership in American archaeology by the close of the nineteenth century had passed to the semi-professional and professional curators and professors in museums and universities— harbingers of even more transformative changes yet to come. Yet the fundamental importance of the preprofessional era regarding the establishment of a national tradition of American archaeology, an ongoing process, should not be diminished. It was then also that archaeology gradually began to emerge as a true field of anthropological enquiry by building upon earlier developments and holding the seeds of later ones. New field methods and more stringent guidelines for the collection of anthropological data, archaeological remains among them, defined the process of professionalization firmly taking root during the 1880s and 1890s. The formation of the emerging anthropological community in those decades was the culmination of the long-term processes of professionalization, consolidation, and Prologue

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specialization at work within American culture at large that transformed the organization of knowledge in all disciplines during the nineteenth century, resulting in the establishment of new branches of learning and the reordering of old ones. How and why those changes occurred in relation to early scientific enquiries into the origin, era, and assumed purposes of American antiquities is the subject of this investigation.42 Revisionist histories all too often minimize, disparage, or ignore the contributions of their predecessors—what Clifford Geertz once legitimately complained of as a “peremptory” and “self-congratulatory” posture toward one’s precursors.43 At its most egregious that dismissive and imperious attitude represents among the least enviable aspects of revisionist critiques. Recognizing that all historians build upon the shoulders of their predecessors and contemporaries, I have endeavored to remain respectful of their contributions to the history of American archaeology, even as I have sometimes been distastefully compelled to disagree or correct them. I am also painfully cognizant that the opinions and views presented here are themselves subject to rethinking and amendment. In nodding to that humbling reality, I am forcibly reminded of the sage advice given by Davis to Squier in June 1847: “Don’t be too hard upon the poor Devils (The Antiquaries) that have gone before us as we may have followers too.”44 The geometric and nonlinear earthworks of the eastern United States denote a cultural landscape that has rapidly receded from view since the late eighteenth century. The comparative study of these remains was then in its infancy and only incrementally gained momentum from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Archaeology was a discipline in the making and altogether an avocation. Given the scientific and cultural distance that separates us from those early fieldworkers a compelling question is urgently begged: What value could those early surveys and maps possibly have in the era of electronic measurement, laser-range finders, three-dimensional imaging, digital levels, globalpositioning technology, field computers, and specialized mapping software? The answer is very little in terms of the more accurate 36

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surveying and mapping methods of the present when all things are equal, but quite a lot when the early surveys and descriptions are all we have of archaeological sites subsequently destroyed or greatly effaced in their configurations—when all things are not equal. Is this a subject of historical interest only? It is so partly but not entirely. The greater precision provided by contemporary surveying methods and instruments does not altogether negate the descriptive and documentary aspects of the fieldwork conducted by the early field investigators. However deficient the field techniques and theoretical orientations of the early archaeologist are by later archaeological standards, and examples are both numerous and significant, the more empirical observers nevertheless made a significant beginning in the study of North American prehistory. They articulated ideas and promoted the missions of institutions that reflected American society at large. John Peter Lesley, librarian and secretary of the American Philosophical Society and an accomplished geologist, noted the value of the early manuscript records of the society in April 1883. His observations are equally pertinent to the manuscript collections relating to history of American archaeology as to any other field of scientific enquiry. “Not the least important feature of the record [of the American Philosophical Society] is its representation of the first appearance of potent ideas, the first efforts for the improvement of the mechanic arts; the first steps taken in scientific paths; early explorations of the New World; with a pronounced eagerness to import the faculties of the Old World into it. It is not so much a record of the growth of an American society, as a record of the growth of society in America, and in this sense alone it possesses an extraordinary historical value.”45 It would be difficult to gainsay the cogency of that statement. Illustrations of its truthfulness in the history of American archaeology can be multiplied many times over. The personal papers and institutional records of those who surveyed and excavated mounds not only document archaeology’s past but also significantly intersect with a much broader plane of American social and cultural experience. Both the Prologue

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archival and published sources relating to those early surveys and explorations continue to be consulted in the comparative study and reanalysis of archaeological sites and the reconstruction of site features partially or entirely obliterated. Archaeology’s past in those and many other instances still speaks to us. It is here that historical research enters into the study of the mounds and the work of the early archaeologists. These considerations perhaps make historians less interlopers in the midst of archaeologists and more fellow travelers. Archaeological sites and associated museum collections have social and cultural histories that accumulated long after the societies and cultures that produced them had come and gone. Archaeology’s past is vitally and inescapably part of its present, although certainly not a captive to it.

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Terry A. Barnhart Charleston, Illinois

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1

American Antiquities A Grand Theme for Speculation

Encounters with archaeological remains in North America reflect the different historical circumstances and geopolitical contexts in which the Spanish, French, English, and Americans explored and colonized different regions of the continent from the sixteenth through the late nineteenth centuries. Plotting those differences in time and space is important. It shows that the custom of mound building among indigenous societies in the Southeast and Northeast continued into early historic times (archaeologists and historians today know them as terminal prehistoric or contact cultures), whereas the custom of mound building in many areas of the upper Mississippi Valley had already been abandoned by the time the first European observers arrived on the scene. Although prehistoric sites in the American Southwest like Mesa Verde in Colorado and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico are better known to public audiences today than the mounds of the eastern United States, that was not the case throughout most the nineteenth century. Conjectures concerning the origin, antiquity, and assumed purposes of the mounds were questions of scientific and popular interest both in the United States and in Europe. Those questions fired the imaginations of scholars, travelers, and the reading public alike. Archaeological discoveries were made and reported in a piecemeal manner. Sequencing the geographical and historical circumstances in which that process actually occurred enables a more holistic interpretation, both synchronically and diachronically, of the beginning

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of archaeological enquiry as an unintended or chance consequence of western expansion during the late colonial and early national periods of American history—a process that continued with the exploration of trans-Mississippi West from the mid- to late nineteenth century. The existence of largely nondescript stone tools, fragments of ceramics, and enigmatic rock carvings was known decades before the first published accounts of American antiquities as such appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and the transactions of learned societies. And the Spanish knew of the aboriginal remains in the American Southwest long before they became a subject of scientific investigation. The question of time—the interval between when archaeological remains first became known to Europeans and when they appeared in print—is an important consideration in the history of American archaeology since the first published reports regarding American antiquities often appeared long after the first encounters. Who knew what and when is just as important a question as what they thought they knew. It is an important point of enquiry that receives particular attention hereafter. The first America antiquities to receive passing notice were rockpaintings (pictographs) and rock-writings (petroglyphs) commonly found throughout North America. Stone tools and fragments of earthenware also periodically turned up in the plow zone during the cultivation of fields and the construction of buildings. Those curiosities seldom received formal notice but occasionally prompted travelers to describe them and writers with an antiquarian inclination to speculate as to what should be made of them. When Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet explored the upper Mississippi River between June and July 1673, for example, they encountered “two painted monsters” on the face of a high rock somewhere between the Missouri and Illinois Rivers. The imposing nature of the painting at first frightened them. The Indian interpreters traveling with them, said Marquette, would only look at the figures but for a short time. His description of the mural leaves little to the imagination. “They are as large as a calf; they 40

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have horns on their heads like those of deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a head like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body covered with scales, and so long a tail that it winds all around the body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a fish’s tail. Green, red, and black are the three colors composing the picture.” The paintings were high up on the face of the perpendicular rock so as to make it difficult to reach them.1 Marquette made a drawing of the figures that was subsequently lost. His vivid description of them, however, readily identifies them as two underwater panthers or horned-serpent beings, a manito so prominent in the cosmology and iconography of Eastern Woodland peoples. Underwater panthers and horned serpents are also present as a motif in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex of Mississippian cultures—an important continuity between prehistoric and historic art—and also appear to be present in the symbolism of late prehistoric cultures other than Mississippian in different regions of the Eastern Woodlands cultural area.2 Whether Marquette’s water panthers were the handiwork of tribes then living near the site or their prehistoric ancestors is unknown and no longer knowable since the paintings did not survive the nineteenth century. According to Amos Stoddard in his Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana (1812) the painting was still in a good state of preservation and known to locals as the Piesa. Francis Parkman, who visited the site in 1867, located the painted rock immediately above Alton, Illinois. While the tradition of the painted rock still existed in and around Alton the figures themselves had been entirely effaced by time and part of the rock quarried and carried away. As Parkman observed, “Some years ago, certain persons [at Alton], with more zeal than knowledge, proposed to restore the figures, after conceptions of their own; but the idea was abandoned.”3 Much better known were the figures of men and animals inscribed upon a rock located on the east bank of the Taunton River across from the town of Dighton in the colony of Massachusetts. Reverend John American Antiquities

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Danforth made the first known drawing of the rock in 1680, and the curiosity received notice in a Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Boston by Cotton Mather on December 19, 1689. The strange characters on the rock evoked a sense of wonder in Mather. No one knew how or when the lines were made, a circumstance that suggested “odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument; whereof you shall see, the first Line Transcribed here.” Mather considered it a noteworthy but unintelligible record of the kind that “the Indian people” engraved upon rocks.4 He communicated a second notice of the “unaccountable Characters” to the Royal Society of London in 1712, two of which he copied for the benefit of the society. His brief description appears in the twenty-ninth volume of the Philosophical Transactions for 1714–16.5 Mather would be the first in a long line of observers to comment on the celebrated Dighton Rock, which became a curiosity both at home and abroad. The Dighton Rock in time would come to hold a conspicuous place in unfounded speculations concerning the ante-Columbian discovery of America. Some of the French and English ventures in the fur trade in the upper Mississippi Valley were concurrent but most were not. Lake Erie was the last of the five Great Lakes to be discovered, explored, and mapped by French cartographers. Samuel de Champlain vaguely knew of the existence of a water route connecting Lake Huron and Lake Ontario but knew nothing of its actual features or whether it was a lake or a river. The Iroquois, who occupied the lands along the Niagara River in western New York, were hostile to the French and denied them access to the most direct route to headwaters of the Ohio River. The lands lying south of Lake Erie and along the Ohio River remained terra incognita to the French for many more years. Nicholas Sanson de Abbeville, the royal engineer and geographer from 1647 to 1667, depicted Lake Erie on his map “Amerique Septentrionale” in 1650, the first map to depict all five of the Great Lakes. Lake Erie appears on Sanson’s map without a name. But to the southeast of the lake he located a people called “N. du Chat” (the Cat Nation), as 42

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the Erie Indians were then known to the French and from which the name Lake Erie is derived. Louis Jolliet is credited with having traversed the northern shore of Lake Erie in 1669 with his brother Adrian on a trading expedition to Sault St. Marie where they resided until 1671. They were presumably the first Europeans to do so. It has been speculated, however, that Étienne Brûlé, a guide and interpreter for Champlain, may have crossed the lake as early as 1615. There is much uncertainty regarding that claim, as there is concerning several aspects of French exploration and rights of discovery, as to whether it was Brûlé or Jolliet who first crossed some or all of Lake Erie. But Jolliet’s claim seems the more likely. Be that as it may, the waterways lying directly south of Lake Erie leading into the interior were not explored by the French until a relatively late date compared to their activities elsewhere in the upper and lower Mississippi Valley. When it was that the first European, French or English, trod upon the southern shore of Lake Erie is unknown. Either the event went unrecorded or evidence of it has not survived. And the question of who was the first French explorer to discover and reconnoiter the Ohio River is equally problematic, as will be seen in the discussion that follows of the dubious claim that René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, or René-Robert de La Salle, was the discoverer of the Ohio. As was the case with Lake Erie, the French knew of the Ohio River years before they actually explored it. Spanish observers made the first recorded descriptions of the mounds and mound-building Indians in the lower Mississippi Valley during the Spanish entrada into “La Florida” in the mid-sixteenth century. Anglo-Americans likewise knew the southeastern United States as “Florida” from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, an archaic geographical designation that encompassed a far larger area than the present state of that name. “La Florida” of the Spaniards included present-day Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas. The Native inhabitants of the region were sometimes referred to collectively and alternatively as the “Florida tribes” or the “Gulf American Antiquities

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tribes.” The Natchez, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokee, and other historic groups or contact cultures in the southeast were lumped together under that designation. Other early southeastern groups did not maintain distinct tribal identities beyond the eighteenth century. Earliest knowledge of those peoples and confederations of tribes is based on the published accounts of the extraordinary military expedition to Spanish Florida led by Hernando De Soto between 1539 and 1542. De Soto organized the trek at his own expense. He and a company of some one thousand adventurers arrived on the west coast of Florida in 1539, where they made preparations to explore the interior in search of the gold and silver rumored to exist somewhere to the north. De Soto and his soldiers continued to explore the interior regions of La Florida for the next three years during which time they traveled, as can now best be determined, through present-day Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The expedition returned to the Mississippi River in the spring of 1542 where De Soto died after contracting a fever. After some truly harrowing experiences, the surviving members of the De Soto expedition at length reached the Spanish settlements on the Gulf of Mexico. The Portuguese chronicler of the De Soto expedition, the Gentleman of Elvas, was himself one of the survivors of the ordeal. He published an account of his experiences in 1557. Richard Hakluyt brought forward the first English translation of Elvas’s chronicle in 1609 and other English editions appeared in 1611 and 1686. A more extensive account of the expedition appears in Garcilaso de la Vega’s The Florida of the Inca published at Lisbon in 1605. Garcilaso’s sources were the recollections of an anonymous survivor of the expedition who conveyed his experiences to Garcilaso orally and the manuscript accounts of Juan Coles and Alonso de Carmona, both of whom had been with De Soto in Florida. The accounts of the Gentleman of Elvas and Garcilaso both contain descriptions of Indian villages and mounds.6 Robert Silverberg has reasonably conjectured that had 44

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the descriptions of mounds and mound-building Indians contained in the early Spanish and French accounts been better known and more fully appreciated for their significance, the protracted debate about who had built the mounds, in a general sense at least, might have been greatly attenuated.7 But it should be noted that even some writers who were quite familiar with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century accounts of southern mounds continued to make generic distinctions between “Mound Builders” and “Indians” and to raise questions not fully answered by the early records. French records in the seventeenth and early eighteen centuries are strangely silent about the existence of the mounds and earthworks in the upper Mississippi Valley, although those in the lower and central Mississippi Valley were known to the French at a comparatively early day. When Jolliet traveled down the Mississippi River with Marquette between June and July 1673 they visited what later became known as the American Bottom, the area where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers converge. It is a stretch of rich and easily cultivated alluvial soils or “bottom lands” extending from present-day Alton, Illinois, to the Kaskaskia River in southern Illinois. The extensive complexes of mound groups in the American Bottom attest that the region was once a major center of prehistoric settlement. So far as is known Jolliet and Marquette were the first Europeans to visit the American Bottom. Yet Marquette’s journal makes no reference to the nearby mound groups that once ranged from St. Louis to the Great Cahokia Mound at present-day Cahokia, Illinois—sometimes referred to as “Monk’s Mound” owing to the fact that is was once the home of a group of Trappist monks of the Cistercian order of the Catholic Church who built a short-lived monastery there. The omission of any reference to it is curious but not inexplicable. The high limestone and dolomite bluffs on the eastern shore of the Mississippi, the canes and large reeds growing along its banks, and the dense stands of cottonwood and elm trees noted by Marquette possibly prevented his party from seeing the mounds on the adjacent prairies. American Antiquities

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As Marquette and Jolliet descended further down the Mississippi, at or just above thirty-three degrees north latitude, they encountered a small band of unidentified Indians. “I hailed them in Huron,” wrote Marquette, “but they answered me by a word, which seemed to us a declaration of war. They were, however, as much frightened as ourselves, and what we took for a signal of war, was an invitation to come near, that they might give us food; we accordingly landed and entered their cabins.” That nameless group possessed firearms; what were presumably glass beads, iron axes, hoes, and knives; and double-glass bottles in which they kept their gunpowder. “They wear their hair long and mark their bodies in the Iroquois fashion.” The headdress and clothing of the women Marquette thought resembled that worn by Huron women. They informed the priest that they obtained their trade goods from Europeans to the east of the river who had “rosaries and pictures” and played musical instruments, some of whom, Marquette recorded, “were like me [i.e., French].” Father Marquette saw no evidence that any of his hosts had ever been instructed in the Christian faith. His description of that unknown group, however, falls well short of a positive ethnic identification. Hailing them in Huron and misunderstanding their response further suggests that any HuronIroquois identification is problematic.8 Much conjecture and confusion has centered on the identity of that anonymous group encountered by Marquette on the upper Mississippi. Based solely upon the entry in his travel journal there is no way of determining whether they were a band of Algonquian-, Siouan-, or Iroquoian-speaking peoples. Marquette says only that the men resembled the Iroquois and the women the Huron. It is mere surmise. So too is the conjecture made by John Gilmary Shea, editor of Marquette’s journal, who concluded from their dress and language, as described by Marquette, that were a displaced group of the Huron-Iroquois family or band on a hunting and trapping expedition deep into the interior. He further noted that “they may have been a Tuscarora party” since they “referred to the Spaniards of Florida with whom they traded 46

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in trinkets and skins. That they were not dwellers on the Mississippi (i.e. indigenous or native to the locality where Marquette found them) seems probable, from the fact that they were spoken of, not by the next tribe [encountered by him], but by those lower down [the Mississippi], whom they had doubtless reached on some other foray.” Why Shea thought that the Europeans with rosary beads and pictures with whom the group traded were Spanish and not French is uncertain. The conjecture appears to be based solely on the supposition that they were Tuscarora, the main body of whom was then living in North Carolina. Yet some writers have accepted his idea that this was a refugee group of Tuscarora as an established fact without further comment.9 A similar silence regarding the mounds attends the account of the explorations of the Franciscan Recollect priest and missionary Louis Hennepin. Hennepin was with La Salle at Fort Crèvecœur on the Illinois River in February 1680 and continued down the Illinois to the Mississippi. He returned to Quebec via the Mississippi, traveling as far north on that river as the Falls of St. Anthony at the site of presentday Minneapolis. Hennepin noted in A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, published at London in 1698, that several of those groups venerated the bones of the deceased. But he says nothing about the practice of entombing them within mounds or of even having seen a mound during his travels. Hennepin’s muteness regarding the presence of mounds once again is curious and would seem to suggest one of three possible explanations: the tribes known to him had abandoned the practice of constructing mounds by that time; the presence of mounds was so commonplace (regardless of whether he thought them to be natural or artificial eminences) that he did not think them exceptional enough to warrant comment; or he simply did not know of their existence. Given the attention he devoted to customs relating to the religious beliefs and practices of the tribes he visited the last conjecture seems unsatisfactory. Benjamin Smith Barton, who set great stock in Hennepin’s observations on burial customs among the Indians, was also puzzled at his silence about the existence of mounds in the areas American Antiquities

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he traversed. Others likewise valued Hennepin’s observations on Indian customs and languages as well as his maps and geographical descriptions of the areas in which he traveled. Extracts from A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America appeared in the first volume of the Archaeologia Americana: Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society as “a preliminary article” to the recent discoveries made by Caleb Atwater in the same region.10 Yet other aspects of Hennepin’s writings are much less dependable. He claimed for the first time in Nouvelle Découverte d’un très grand pays, situé dans l’Amérique (1697) that he had not only explored the upper Mississippi but also the lower, tracing its course all the way to the Gulf. That unsubstantiated and doubtful claim did not bode well for his future reputation and raised questions about his integrity as a narrator of his experiences in the upper Mississippi as well. It prompted the American historian Francis Parkman to question the veracity of Hennepin’s later writings. Some writers have gone so far as to denounce him as an “arrant falsifier.” His defenders, however, claim that the erroneous statements attributed to him owe more to how Hennepin has been interpreted and edited than to the reliability of Hennepin himself. The biographical entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) places a greater premium on caution and skepticism than on acceptance. “The weight of the evidence is however adverse to such a theory.”11 Notwithstanding Hennepin’s suspect claim that he explored both the upper and lower Mississippi all the way to the Gulf, it does not necessarily follow that his observations on Native languages, religious beliefs, and customs are ipso facto untrustworthy. Samuel Foster Haven likewise found the absence of discourse about archaeological remains on the part of the early travelers to the interior of North America “to be somewhat singular, in view of the fact that so much has since been brought to light in the very path on which they trod.” Henry Marie Brackenridge interpreted that deficiency in his Views of Louisiana (1814) thus: “The French writers, who most probably observed them [the mounds], do not speak of them; a proof 48

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that they had no doubt as to their origin, nor thought of attributing them to any [one] other than the natives of the country.”12 It is as good an explanation as any. A painstaking search by Cyrus Thomas at the Bureau of Ethnology found but a single mention or suggestion of the existence of mounds in the upper Mississippi Valley in the Jesuit Relations and none in the accounts of the Recollects, although mention of them is made in areas of French colonization in the lower Mississippi Valley. The Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Gravier (1651–1708), founder of the Jesuit mission among the Ileniwa (Illinois tribes) in 1698 and one of the compilers and transcribers of an extensive Kaskaskia-French dictionary is a further case in point.13 Gravier descended the Mississippi River in November 1700 as far south as the French settlement at Mobile in La Louisiane on the Gulf coast. He recorded that an anonymous Jesuit missionary intended to spend most of the winter of 1700 in the villages of the Tamaroa and Cahokia tribes in what is today southwestern Illinois. “One of our missionaries,” said Gravier, “is to visit them [the Tamaroa] every second day all winter long, and do as much for the Kaoukia [Cahokia], who have taken their winter quarters four leagues above the [Tamoroa] village.”14 That location placed the unnamed missionary within the midst of the extensive Cahokia mound complex. But no mention of those remains is made by Gravier who himself knew the locality as well as anyone. Gravier does, by contrast, specifically mention the existence of mounds and earthen embankments further to the south. Speaking of the Arkansea he noted that one of their abandoned villages was “discernible now only by the old outworks, there being no cabins left.” The “outworks” most certainly referred to the earthen embankments or trenches that had once contained palisades. He further noted of the “Tounikas” that “they have only one small temple, raised on a mound of earth.”15 Yet Gravier is curiously silent about the existence of mounds and earthwork north of that location, some of which he must have observed firsthand in the Illinois Country. American Antiquities

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La Salle is often credited with having discovered both the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in 1669–70. Several historians have admiringly traced his alleged descent of the Ohio with a bold hand and several generations of schoolchildren have learned that Monsieur La Salle was the discoverer of both the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers. It is a claim contested by scholars who have most fully investigated this persistent issue in Canadian and American history. The unsubstantiated claim that La Salle discovered these waterways is, moreover, one that he never made himself. There is simply no documentary evidence from the period of La Salle’s known explorations that put him on the Ohio or Mississippi River in 1669 and 1670, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding.16 He most certainly knew of the Ohio, having learned of its existence from the Seneca. He even went so far as to organize an expedition intended to take him and his party to the headwaters of the Ohio. La Salle and company left Montreal in a flotilla of canoes in July 1669 but traveled no further than two Seneca villages in western New York before aborting the mission. La Salle never made the proposed journey to the Ohio apparently due to his ill-health at the time and his lack of experience as a novice explorer. The assertion that he explored the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in 1669 and 1670 is altogether attributable to claims made after the alleged fact. It is based entirely upon declarations made amid intrigues between the Recollect and the Jesuit orders of the Catholic Church. The hearsay evidence bearing upon this point is based entirely upon conversations that purportedly transpired at Paris in 1678 between La Salle and the Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot—a former Jesuit whose later religious views ran toward Jansenism, an influential member of the court of Louis XIV, a member of the French Academy and Academy of Inscriptions, an inveterate foe of the Jesuit order, and a protector of La Salle—and their respective friends at court. The nineteenth-century Parisian archivist and historian Pierre Margry accepted that hearsay evidence and did more than anyone to promote the claim that La Salle discovered the

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Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. La Salle’s adventures and accomplishments in the Mississippi Valley are truly remarkable, but his alleged role in discovering the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers does not appear to be among his many noteworthy accomplishments. La Salle was certainly the first to explore the lower Mississippi and discover its mouth, but not its upper courses, nor those of the Ohio. So far as the historical record is concerned the first known French exploration of the Ohio River is that made by Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry in 1729.17 The course of the Ohio River shown on Jacques Nicolas Bellin’s “Map of Louisiana, the Course of the Mississippi, and the Adjacent Country” is based on the de Léry expedition. The Bellin map is dated 1744 and appears in Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France (1744). Bellin’s map shows the headwaters of the Ohio and the general, though not actual, course of the river running to the southwest. Bellin describes de Léry’s journey down the Ohio in his Remarques sur la Carte de l’Amerique Septentrionale, published at Paris in 1755, who appears to have descended as far as the falls of the Ohio at present-day Louisville, Kentucky. “I am indebted for the topographical details of the course of this River [the Ohio] to M. de Lery, Engineer, who surveyed it with the compass at the time that he descended it with a detachment of French troops in 1729, and also, to R. P. Bonnecamp, a Jesuit Mathematician, with whom I have spoken, and who has traversed the River in its entire length, and surveyed with a great deal of care its course from Kaknouangon down to the Riviere a la Roche [Great Miami], in taking observations of the latitude in a great many places, and estimating the wind currents and the distances, with a much precision as possible.”18 It appears, therefore, that de Léry and not La Salle was the first explorer known to have traveled and surveyed the upper courses of the Ohio, and that Marquette and Jolliet are to be credited with discovering the upper Mississippi and the mouth of the Ohio River in 1673.

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What is known of French ingress south of Lake Erie began with de Léry’s voyage of 1729 and continued with the military expedition out of Montreal led by Captain Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville (also known as Céloron de Bienville) during the summer of 1749. Céloron’s party consisted of 213 French Canadians and a smaller number of Native American auxiliaries. Céloron’s party buried at least six engraved lead plates at the mouths of rivers, one at the mouth of the Allegheny River and five more further downstream at the mouths the principle tributaries of the Ohio River. Céloron buried one of those plates at the mouth of the Muskingum River on August 16, 1749, and another at the mouth of the Kanawha River on August 18, 1749. An intact lead plate recovered from the mouth of the Kanawha River is in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society and a partial remnant of the plate recovered at the mouth of the Muskingum is in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. Intrepid Virginia and Pennsylvania fur traders were already on the ground in the Ohio Valley at Logstown in western Pennsylvania and at Lower Shawnee Town on the Scioto River in what is today southern Ohio, challenging France’s monopoly of the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley fur trade and the allegiance of the tribes in the Ohio Country to the French trading interest. Céloron’s mission was to reassert the French claim to the Ohio Country in the name of Louis XV of France, make a show of force intended to prevent further encroachments by English traders, and to intimidate the tribes who were inclined to trade with the English. When Céloron buried one of his lead plates along the southern bank of the Allegheny on August 3, 1749, he made the earliest recorded notice of an archaeological remain in the Ohio Country. He buried the plate “near an immense stone upon which certain figures are rudely enough carved.” Céloron’s carved rock in all probability was the petroglyph that later became known as “The Indian God,” located some 115 miles above Pittsburgh and eight miles downriver from Franklin, Pennsylvania. Four days later Céloron’s party visited what he identified as an Iroquois village known as “Rocher ecrite” or Written Rock. 52

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Andrew Arnold Lambing, who edited the journal of the Céloron expedition, thought it likely the village known to Céloron as Rocher ecrite was most likely Shannopin Town, which stood on the east bank of the Allegheny River near present-day Pittsburg. “But why it should have been called ‘Written Rock,’ I have no means of determining.” The village in all probability took its name from the presence of another carved rock or petroglyph. Either Céloron did not observe the presumed petroglyph himself or thought it unimportant to make further comment about the name. There were many such written rocks on the upper Ohio and it is reasonable to infer that Céloron and his sojourners encountered several of them.19 Further down the Ohio other petroglyphs received early notice. “Antique Sculptures” opposite “Weeling I.” (Wheeling Island) just above “Weeling Ck” (Wheeling Creek) appear on “A General Map of the British Middle Colonies in America” published at Philadelphia in 1755 by the Philadelphia surveyor, draughtsman, and “ingenious mechanic” Lewis Evans (1700–1756). The explanatory pamphlet accompanying the map—Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays, the First, Containing An Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America—is generally known and cited as Evans’s Analysis. The Analysis makes no mention of the petroglyphs appearing on the map, which were clearly a local landmark and curiosity among Pennsylvania fur traders who were the sources for both Evans’s map and pamphlet.20 Evans’s map is a milestone in the history of American cartography, as well as the social and cultural history of the Ohio and Illinois countries. Appearing in eighteen editions between 1755 and 1814, it influenced virtually every map made of North America during that period. As the London publisher and historian Henry Newton Stevens noted in reprinting Evans’s map in 1924, it served as “the principle prototype for the cartography of British North America.”21 Evans compiled his Analysis with a keen eye to the region’s future promise as an English colony. Imperial interest and strategies vis-à-vis American Antiquities

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the French loom large and are a major concern. His descriptions of topography, natural resources, the characteristics and orientations of rivers, the locations of portages and the distances between them, and the names and locations of trading centers and Indian villages meant far more in that world than the familiar boundaries of states, counties, and townships of later date. Those regions were an important locus of Native American settlements and seasonal trading activities, the geopolitical dimensions of which often had far-ranging and significant consequences. The region was anything but a “trackless wilderness” as it has often been described in early accounts of the American frontier as Evans’s map amply attests. The Ohio Country was accessible from virtually all points of the compass. The north-south orientation of the river valleys enabled travel from Lake Erie to the Ohio River and the Ohio gave direct access to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Evans could well say regarding the strategic importance of the Ohio Country that “were there nothing at Stake between the Crowns of Britain and France, but the Lands on that Part of Ohio included in this Map, we may reckon it as great a Prize, as has ever yet been contended for, between two Nations.”22 The 1776 London edition of Evans’s “Map of the Middle British Colonies in America,” published by Thomas Pownall, also shows “Antique Sculptures” opposite “Weeling Creek” and above “Weeling Island.” Pownall’s edition is accompanied his Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America As Are Contained in the (Annexed) Map of the Middle British Colonies.23 His Topographical Description includes most of the information contained in Evan’s Analysis but has additional information based on the journal of Captain Harry Gordon. Gordon traveled down the Ohio in 1766 when he made the first English map of that river based upon actual surveys.24 Pownall printed his 1776 map from the same copper plate used to print the original map, which was engraved by James Turner in Philadelphia in 1755, although Pownall’s contains significant additions and corrections.25

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A vague reference to earthworks also appears in Evans’s Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays. There he categorically but questionably states that the “Erigas” or Erie Indians “were seated on [the] Ohio and its Branches, from Beaver-Creek to the Mouth of the Quiaaghtena River. The far greater part have been extirpated, some incorporated into the Senecas, and the rest have retired beyond the woodless Plains over the Mississippi, and left the Confederates [Iroquois] entire Master of all the Country. From the Ruins of the Eriga Towns and Fortresses we may suppose they were the most numerous of any [tribes] in these Parts of America.”26 The first part of that statement is true but the second part extremely doubtful. A description of an Erie fortification appears in the Jesuit Relation of 1659–60. An Iroquois war party of seven hundred men is there reported to have attacked an Erie force numbering two thousand men. The Iroquois defeated the Erie in their own “entrenchments” consisting of wooden palisades.27 The palisaded towns of the Erie were doubtless similar, if not identical, to the fortified villages of the Huron and Iroquois that existed during the same period. Evans’s claim that the Erie were on the Ohio and its tributaries, however, is highly doubtful and must be received with skepticism, if, indeed, it can be received at all. The Iroquois dispersed the Erie from their homelands in western New York in the mid-seventeenth century. When Evans placed the Erie on the Ohio, or rather misplaced them, the Erie had not existed as a distinct tribal group, alliance, or confederacy since 1656 or 1657. It is an extrapolation on Evans’s part that receives no support from archaeological and historical evidence. It is a conjectural attempt to locate them after their dispersal. What is known of the shadowy people known as the Erie indicates that they never extended their settlements any further westward than the Niagara Frontier, which ranges from western New York to the New YorkPennsylvania boundary. The earthworks in northern Ohio once commonly attributed to the Erie—the Whittlesey tradition or focus

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named after the nineteenth-century archaeologist Charles Whittlesey who was the first to survey and describe them—do not appear to have been occupied during the early historic era in the region and were probably not Erie. Given what is known about the settlement patterns and interactions of other Iroquoian and Huronian groups it is highly unlikely that the Erie, even if they were a numerous people as alleged by Evans, would have occupied so extensive a range of territory as has sometimes been attributed to them. It would be an anomaly among the Iroquoian peoples and groups like the Erie with whom they were linguistically and culturally kindred or for that matter among most North American groups. That the Erie lived along the eastern shore of the lake that bears their name in fortified villages is not in dispute. But whether those settlements extended as far west as present-day Ohio is by no means evident and the notion that the Erie erected earthworks in northern Ohio is even more problematic. Several archaeological and historical studies have thoroughly discredited the idea that the Erie Indians once occupied the entire southern shore of Lake Erie, notwithstanding the persistent appeal of the notion that the Erie are a convenient bridge between the late prehistoric and contact cultures in what is today northern Ohio. David S. Brose has noted that the terminal phases of the Whittlesey tradition, Late Woodland sites located on the Erie shore west of the New YorkPennsylvania boundary, probably were not occupied any later than circa 1650 and were probably not Erie sites. Brose observed that despite years of diligent research “there is no certain identification linking any archaeological complex with any specific ethnic group in those early reports” on the entire lake plain running from Sandusky, Ohio, eastward to Cleveland. Since archaeological materials at Whittlesey sites do not indicate even indirect contact with Europeans the association of that the cultural tradition with the historic Erie is unwarranted. Evans would be the first of many writers to make huge leaps of faith regarding the western extent of Erie settlements in the midseventeenth century.28 56

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Among the most celebrated and erudite travelers to British North America and to New France during the mid-eighteenth century was Peter (Pehr) Kalm (1716–79), the Swedish-Finnish naturalist, agricultural economist, and former student of Carl Linnaeus. Kalm is often reported as having mentioned “mounds” in his published travel account but what he describes there are not mounds at all. Kalm traveled through the eastern seaboard colonies of British North America and Canada between 1748 and 1751. He came to North America on a botanical expedition sponsored the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences but his curiosity ranged much further afield. Kalm was an astute observer of both humankind and nature. After returning to Stockholm in 1751, he published his travel journal in three volumes as En Resa til Norra America (1753–61). The widely cited work appeared in German, Dutch, French, and English translations. Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–98) translated the work into English in three volumes as Travels into North America, which were published at Warrington, England, in 1770 and 1771, and brought forward a second edition of two volumes published at London in 1772.29 Kalm sought out all the information he could gather during his travels relating to the origin of American Indians. He spent most of the winter of 1748–49 at the Swedish-American community of Raccoon in southern New Jersey, where he spent a portion of his time collecting “ancient Indian tools” that predated the arrival of Europeans. Given the fact that those traditional implements consisted solely of sharpened stones, shells, and bones he inferred that the tribes that formerly lived there “must have led a very wretched life.” Some of the old Swedes still living in the community had traded with the Indians (always referred to generically by Kalm) when they were yet very numerous. The old traders distinctly remembered when the Indians (probably bands of the Lenape or Delaware and closely affiliated groups) still cooked their meat in clay pots and kettles and fished in the Delaware River with bone hooks. The stone implements and ceramic pieces accidentally turned up by plowing and digging in and around Raccoon intrigued American Antiquities

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Kalm, who reasonably inferred that they were the kind used by the local tribes before the arrival of the Swedes and other Europeans. Projectile points and scrapers made of flint and quartz, stone pestles used since time immemorial for pounding maize, and unglazed clay pots or kettles tempered with sand or quartz were among his valued possessions. Kalm stated surprise that given the plentitude of iron as a natural resource almost everywhere in North America that American aborigines knew nothing of its use for tools before the arrival of Europeans.30 Kalm stood on solid ground when describing artifacts. Other aspects of his interest in the origin of American aborigines, however, were more conjectural. “It is not certain whether any other nation possessed America, before the present Indian inhabitants came into it, or whether any other nations visited this part of the globe before Columbus discovered it.” Kalm came to America with those points of enquiry clearly in mind and was decidedly disappointed that he did not find more remains of antiquity that would help address them. “In vain,” he lamented, “does one seek for well-built towns and houses, artificial fortifications, high towers and pillars, and such like, among them, which the old world can show from the most ancient times.” Contemplative and historically conscious travelers in America could not take pleasure in beholding the ruins of antiquity such as those interspersed across the landscape of Europe, scenes that made travel a delightful experience. “We can enjoy none of these pleasures in America. The history of the country can be traced no further, than from the arrival of the Europeans; for everything that happened before that, is more like a fiction or a dream than anything that really happened.” Had Kalm’s travels taken him to the Ohio Valley his longing eyes would have beheld a much different landscape and one well calculated to satisfy his antiquarian interests. But there were no Indian mounds and earthworks in the areas of North America in which he lived and traveled. More than two decades would pass after Kalm ended his celebrated travels in North America before the existence of the mounds 58

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become generally known to anyone other than Native Americans and British fur traders, the latter of whom left no records of their encounters. He did suggestively note, however, that in more recent times there had been found “a few marks of antiquity, from which it may be conjectured, that North-America was formerly inhabited by a nation more versed in science and more civilized, than that which the Europeans found on their arrival here; or that a great military expedition was undertaken to this continent, from these known parts of the world.”31 Here is an early and historically significant statement of a largely unexamined assumption that would be repeated many times over in the subsequent debate on the origin and identity of the Mound Builders. There would be many elaborations and permutations to that assumption in archaeological thought. Some years before Kalm came into Canada the then governorgeneral of New France, Charles de la Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois, ordered the military commander Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, to lead an expedition across North America in search of the South Sea. La Vérendrye was to determine how far Montreal and the South Sea were from each other and what advantages might accrue to Canada and Louisiana by establishing a communication with that ocean. The party set out on horseback from Montreal in 1731 (although Kalm gives no dates) and traveled directly due west to the extent that the intervening topography allowed. After many days journeying they came to the tall grasses of the largely treeless Northern Plains. There they found what they believed was evidence of plowed fields. “Many of these fields were everywhere covered with furrows, as if they had been ploughed and sown formerly.” No one on the expedition attributed those furrowed fields to the Native groups residing in the vicinity, nor did they regard them as “Indian old fields”— abandoned cornfields.32 Continuing further West the explorers came to a place where, to the best of their knowledge, no Frenchmen or any Europeans had ever been. There they found in a wooded area of the plains “great pillars American Antiquities

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of stone” one leaning upon the other. Each pillar consisted of a single stone and all appeared to have been erected by human hands. Some of the pillars were laid upon one another forming a wall. There was no writing upon these stones save for one. Inside one of the large pillars the explorers found a smaller stone covered on both sides with unknown characters. They took the stone with them on their return to Montreal and sent it to Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas, in Paris. The stone was still believed to be in the possession of Count Maurepas when Kalm recorded the story of its alleged discovery but was subsequently lost. Several Jesuits reportedly saw the stone while it was still in Canada. They were unanimous in the opinion that “the letters” on the stone were the same as those figured in published accounts of Tartaria and known as “Tartarian characters.” Comparing the markings on the stone with the illustrations of their Tartarian authorities they found both to be “perfectly alike.” When the exploring party enquired of Native groups living near the pillars who had constructed them and who had written the characters on the stone, they did not know. La Vérendrye calculated that the place where he found the pillars was nine hundred French miles west of Montreal. Kalm could learn of no other antiquities in North America, real or purported, notwithstanding his frequent enquiries about them. Kalm received his information about the expedition at Quebec in August 1749 directly from La Vérendrye himself. He had also heard the same story repeated by others said to have been eye-witnesses to everything that happened on the expedition. But that is not the kind of corroboration that can be readily admitted into evidence. Kalm raised no question regarding the veracity of La Vérendrye’s narrative and Samuel Foster Haven thought that the general similarity of the “furrows” to the “garden beds” in Michigan and Wisconsin “imparted and air of authenticity” to the account. Nothing further was heard of the monolithic pillars or the enigmatic stone. La Vérendrye’s narrative aroused curiosity among those familiar with Kalm’s published journal

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but contributed nothing to advance the study of American antiquities. It was de facto hearsay evidence and nothing more. Even so, the mere suggestion that “Tartarian characters” were found on a stone in the interior of North America attracted the interest of those who believed that at least some American aborigines were the descendants of the Tartars or who were at least open to the possibility. Kalm’s account of an “ancient cultivation” and a stone inscribed with Tartarian characters found a place in James Dunbar’s Essays on the History of mankind in rude and Cultivated Ages (1782) and some members of the Society of Antiquaries of London took up the subject in February and November 1786. Benjamin Smith Barton quoted the entire passage from Kalm describing these curiosities in his Observations on Some Parts of Natural History (1787), prudently adding that the accurateness and discernment of the Jesuits who made that identification he could not determine. Should it be that the stone was still preserved at Paris, said Barton, “it would, perhaps, be worthy the attention of some industrious antiquary, to examine into the truth of the Jesuits[’] assertion.” Memory of La Vérendrye’s Tartarian stone occasionally resurfaces in the writings of the alternative-archaeology school as presumed evidence of another “rune stone” in North America.33 It should be further noted that Kalm himself did not indulge the Tartar theory. He merely reported what La Vérendrye related to him and apparently believed to be true. The same cannot be said for John Reinhold Forster, the translator and editor of the English edition of Kalm’s Travels. Forster not only found La Vérendrye’s account “to be highly probable” but went one step further by identifying the mysterious people who had probably erected the stone pillars and wrote the Tartarian inscription. Forster took Kalm’s vague suggestion that a military expedition to the American continent from some known part of the world might have contributed to the peopling of the New World and provided the missing pieces. It is not known if the hypothetical military expedition referred to by Kalm was his own idea or was

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suggested to him by La Vérendrye. Regardless, it was all that Forster needed to exercise his imagination and elaborate a pet theory. He cited the story related by Marco Polo of the great fleet that Kublai Khan sent to conquer Japan. A great storm overtook the armada and it was never heard from again. Forster believed that a portion of that lost fleet at length reached the shores of America. Traveling far inland the Tartar crews arrived “opposite the great American lakes, between forty and fifty degrees north latitude,” where they probably erected the monuments in question. They were the ancestors of the same nations called the “Mozomlecks” and attained a certain degree of civilization. Meanwhile, a different part of Kublai Khan’s lost flotilla supposedly reached the Mexican coast and founded the Mexican empire. Thus it appeared to Forster that the Tartars had “probably furnished NorthAmerica with civilized inhabitants.” Those he deemed to be “The savage Indians of North-America” sprang from a different source. They likely descended from the Yukaghiri and the Tchucktchai who inhabited the most northeasterly parts of Asia, where the Russians affirmed that there was but a short passage to the American continent. The Eskimo, by contrast, were of the same origin as the inhabitants of Greenland, the Samoyeds, and the Laplanders. Finally, and most incredibly, Forster held that South America, and especially Peru, “is probably peopled from the great unknown fourth continent, which is very near America, civilized, and full of inhabitants of various colors” who could easily migrate to America by water—an “unknown” continent that was indefinite even to the point of being nonexistent. Haven mistakenly attributed those fanciful speculations to Kalm instead of assigning them to Forster alone, a whimsical theory that appears in one of Forster’s explanatory footnotes and not in the original narrative written by Kalm.34 The hypothesis of Kublai Khan’s lost fleet continued to have legs among those who enquired into the origin of the American tribes. Jeremy Belknap, the founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, made a guarded reference to Forster’s account of Kublai Khan’s lost voyagers in his discourse before the society in October 1792 62

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commemorating the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. In making enquiries into subjects where little or no knowledge could be derived from history or tradition, observed Belknap, “the mind is apt to rest, perhaps too much on circumstantial proofs which seem to favour any hypothesis. Let this be my apology, if any be necessary, for introducing the following quotation from the learned Dr. Forster.” Belknap neither affirmed nor denied the veracity of Forster’s conjecture. But he at least, albeit contritely, thought it worthy of consideration. The English edition of Kalm’s Travels into North America features an engraved map. The information upon which the map is based is much more verifiable than Forster’s lost Mongol fleet. “A New and Accurate Map of Part of North-America . . . for the Illustration of Mr. Peter Kalm[’]s Travels” (1771) delineated by John Gibson also shows the site of “Antique Sculptures” opposite “Weeling Island.” Forster copied that information from Evans’s map that was published in 1755, four years after Kalm’s tour of North America. Kalm’s travels between 1748 and 1751 took him throughout the eastern seaboard colonies and into Canada but he never visited the Ohio Valley. There is no reason, therefore, to believe he had firsthand knowledge of the petroglyphs in western Virginia. Similar petroglyphs are found throughout the eastern United States and Canada and are not uncommon in the upper Ohio Valley. Interpreting the cultural context and probable meaning of these glyphs as evidences of human thought and activity is problematic and has been the subject of critical study.35 The first encounters with prehistoric Indian mounds in the Ohio Valley occurred at approximately the same time. Dr. Thomas Walker of Virginia, a founding member and agent of the Loyal Land Company of Virginia, led an expedition in the spring of 1750 to explore and survey 800,000 acres of a royal land grant in southeastern Kentucky in preparation for settlement. Walker kept a daily journal of the trip and on April 27, 1750 recorded the earliest known encounter with a prehistoric Indian mound by an Anglo-American traveler. “We crossed Indian Creek and went down Meadow Creek [today Maple Creek] to American Antiquities

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the [Cumberland] River.” There, near the mouths of two streams emptying into the Cumberland, Walker’s party came across the remains of several Indian cabins. Among them stood “a round Hill made by Art about 20 feet high and 60 over the Top.”36 It is likely that other chance encounters occurred at an equally early date and under similar circumstances that simply went unrecorded. Given the proximity of prehistoric Indian mounds and earthen enclosures to known trade routes and trading sites, it would be truly remarkable if anonymous traders did not encounter at least some of these remains in advance of the literary-minded missionaries and travelers who recorded their existence in diaries and journals. It would not be surprising if the colonial records of Pennsylvania and Virginia relating to the fur trade and land companies should be found to contain incidental references to mounds and earthworks in the Ohio Valley that have as yet gone undetected. James Adair, an Irish American deerskin trader and forty-year resident of the American Southeast, gave further notice of the mounds located within that region in his History of the American Indians published at London in 1775. Adair’s general observations on the customs of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw are of interest even though his narrative is heavily colored by his determination to prove that the American aborigines were descended from the ancient Hebrews. Several other aspects of the work are quite remarkable, however, and are not invalidated by his unsubstantiated Hebrew theory of Indian origins. Adair notes, for instance, that even though the Cherokee no longer collected the bones of the dead at certain times for reburial, they still raised heaps of stones “as monuments for their dead.” Many of the stone heaps were still to be seen in various places in North America. When stones could not be obtained “they raised large hillocks or mounds of earth, wherein they carefully deposited the bones of their dead, which were placed either in earthen vessels, or in a simple kind of arks [sic], or chests.” The Cherokee, à la Adair, were still building mounds, however altered the custom. 64

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Adair further notes the existence of circular and oblong mounds of earth enclosed by what he believed to be breastworks: “these were their forts of security against an enemy.” The mounds and enclosures with which he was familiar were located on low lands and overgrown with large trees of unknown ages that dated “beyond the reach of Indian tradition.” Two oblong mounds located in the northern section of Choctaw territory he again identified as “fortresses,” which were raised against an invading enemy. The scale of those remains left a decided impression. “This was a stupendous piece of work, for so small a number of savages, as could support themselves in it; and their working instruments being only of stone and wood. They [presumably the Choctaws] called those old fortresses Nanne Yah, ‘the hills, or mounts of God.’ ”37 The ethnographic value of such observations is not altogether offset by Adair’s addiction to the Lost Tribes of Israel theory. Samuel Gardiner Drake fairly observed in 1841 that Adair “tormented every custom and usage into a like one of the Jews, and almost every word in the language became a Hebrew one of the same meaning.” Yet such manipulation of customs and words does invalidate the value of the whole. One can second the opinion of John Wesley Powell, who observed in September 1882 that even the most absurd theories can be brought to heal by those “who can discern the germ of truth even in a blundering statement, and whose knowledge is a touchstone for the detection of spurious productions.”38 So it is with consulting Adair. Another early notice of archaeological remains found much further to the northwest is Jonathan Carver’s description of a circular earthwork on the upper Mississippi River, some miles below Lake Pepin in what is today southeastern Minnesota. Carver traveled through the region from 1766 to 1768 in the forlorn hope of finding a northwest passage to the Pacific—a quest that motived more than one eighteenthcentury explorer of North America. He described the earthwork as “a partial elevation that had the appearance of an intrenchment. On a nearer inspection I had greater reason to suppose that it had really been intended for this [purpose] many centuries ago.” Carver was American Antiquities

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satisfied that the enclosure had once been a breastwork for defense. “Though much defaced by time, every angle was distinguishable, and appeared as regular, fashioned with as much military skill, as if planned by Vauban himself.” Carver was at a loss to explain how such a work could exist in a country that had been “the seat of war to untutored Indians alone, whose whole stock of military knowledge has only, until within two centuries, amounted to drawing the bow, and whose only breast-work even at present is the thicket, I know not.” Carver left it to future explorers to determine whether the earthwork was “a production of nature or art.” He hoped that his “hints” as to its hypothetical purpose might lead to a more perfect investigation of the work, “and give us very different ideas of the ancient state of realms that we at present believe to have been from the earliest period only [the] habitations of savages.”39 Several writers have questioned the reliability of certain parts of Carver’s narrative, Benjamin Smith Barton notably among them. Barton frankly observed that Carver’s Travels, from which Barton himself quoted extensively, manifested “an involuntary propensity to credulity, and to the marvelous.” Nor did he stop there. “For my own part, I must confess, I have long considered Mr. Carver as a person whose authority may justly be disputed. . . . It seems to me very improbable that this gentleman did ever penetrate into the interior parts of north america , which he has described; he appears to have done little more than to have modernized the uncouth relations of Hennipin [Hennepin] and of La Hontan; at least, it is impossible to read the travels of these writers, and those of Mr. Carver, without being struck with the remarkable similarity of observation, of incident, and sometimes of language, in almost every page.” The importance of Carver’s Travels in the history of American exploration has often been noted, yet Barton was not the last writer to question the reliability of certain parts of his narrative. Carver’s trustworthiness has been a point of dispute among historians since Barton’s day as well. Moses Coit Tyler described Carver’s 66

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Travels as a work of “true and precise” information on the customs, religions, and languages of the tribes with which he was familiar. It was a work of “unsurpassed value.” Edward Gaylord Bourne, much like Barton, arrived at a different conclusion. He too found Carver’s Travels to be a derivative compilation much of which he cribbed from other authorities. “Scholars are in general agreement that much of the work in this volume is an abridgement or adaptation of historical writings by Charlevoix, Adair, and La Hontan. Entire chapters read as near verbatim text from one or more of these other authors.” Despite that criticism, essentially the same charge leveled by Barton, there is no reason to suppose that Carver’s somewhat prosaic description of what he called the remarkable remains of “an ancient fortification” near Lake Pepin is not an original observation of his own.40 Far more significant were the accounts of the mounds that occurred in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Although still incidental, detached, and impressionistic, they nevertheless embodied the leading questions regarding the origin the mounds that defined discourse on the subject until the end of the nineteenth century. The Moravian missionary David Zeisberger described a prehistoric earthwork when he and a group of Delaware Indians established the Schoenbrunn Mission on the Tuscarawas River in March 1772. Zeisberger noticed the existence of earthen embankments or enclosures near the site and made the following entry in his journal: “Long ago, perhaps more than a century ago, Indians must have lived here, who fortified themselves against the attack of their enemies. The ramparts are still plainly seen. We found three forts in a distance of a couple of miles. The whole town must have been fortified, but its site is now covered with a thick wood. No one knows to what nation these Indians belonged; it is plain, however, that they were a warlike race.” Zeisberger also noted the presence of a circular earthwork enclosing five acres quite near the Lichtenau Mission and of a mound three-quarters of a mile further downriver, which added further testimony that earlier groups of American aborigines had once resided there.41 American Antiquities

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Zeisberger returned to the subject in 1779 and 1780 when he wrote his manuscript history of the North American Indians. “Here and there traces may be found, particularly along the Muskingum, in which region one may yet see many places, where embankments, still to be seen, were thrown up around a whole town. Here and there, furthermore, near the sites of such town there are mounds, not natural, but made by the hand of man, for in those days the natives carried on great wars with one another.” He conjectured that the mounds were used as safe havens during times of siege. “At the top of these mounds there was a hollow place, to which the Indians brought their wives and children when the enemies approached and attacked them, the men ranging themselves round the mound for defensive action.” Those who were killed in such attacks were commonly buried in one pit and a mound of earth raised over them, “such as may even now be seen bearing in these days great and mighty trees.”42 Zeisberger’s passing mention of those remains is significant in two regards. His description of the earthworks as “fortifications” represents an early, widespread, but sometimes erroneous assumption among early observers. The embankments of prehistoric earthworks (enclosures) at first glance resemble the breastworks of military fortifications, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to the popular notion that they were forts. Some of the irregular enclosures do, in fact, mark the sites where stockaded villages once stood. But the more elaborate and geometric works appear to have served a religious and ceremonial purpose, while still others an astronomical or calendric function. Zeisberger also matter-of-factly attributes the mounds to earlier groups of Indians as opposed to those who resided in the Ohio Valley in the eighteenth century. Many other observers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also attributed such remains to earlier groups of unknown Indians. The temporal distinction is an important one. Not all of those who denied that the “Indians” had built the mounds necessarily meant all Indians, at all places, and at all times.

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Virtually no one knew Zeisberger’s opinion, however, since his account was not published until 1910. It had no contemporary impact. The historical significance of Zeisberger’s observations are not altogether diminished, however, since they clearly show him attributing the mounds and other earthworks to earlier but unknown groups of “Indians,” and that curious and literate observers on the ground knew of the existence of those remains before they came to the attention of the scientific community and public at large. Several diaries and journals kept in the 1770s by missionaries to the Ohio tribes likewise make reference to the mounds and speculate as to who built them, but those records were not published until the late nineteenth century. We are privy to the thoughts of those diarists today whereas most of their contemporaries, except those personally acquainted with them or who corresponded with them, were not. The mounds and earthwork in the lower Mississippi Valley began to receive the notice of English travelers at about the same time. John Bartram visited the large mound known as Mount Royal located on the shore of an island in Lake George on January 25, 1766, and described the excursion in his diary: “About noon we landed at Mount Royal, and went to an Indian tumulus, which was about one hundred yards in diameter, nearly round, and near 20 foot high.” Bartram found some nondescript bones, presumably human, scattered over the surface of the mounds. Judging from the live oaks growing upon it, some of which were three feet in diameter, he thought the mound to be very ancient: “what a prodigious multitude of Indians must have laboured to raise it?” Running directly north of the mound was “a fine straight avenue about 60 yards broad, all the surface of which has been taken off, and thrown on each side, which makes a bank of about a rood [quarter of an acre] wide and a foot high more or less, as the unevenness of the ground required, for the avenue is as level as a floor from bank to bank, and continues so for about three quarters of a mile to a pond.” The avenue appeared to be laid out as an oblong square,

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the four-foot perpendicular banks of which gradually sloped toward the pond. Bartram thought that the mound and avenue marked the former location of “a large Indian town” and the mound the burial ground of its inhabitants. “Whether the Florida Indians buried the bones after the flesh was rotted off them, as the present southern Indians do, I can’t say.”43 Bartram’s son William Bartram (1739–1823) was an equally meticulous observer. William traveled with his father in 1765 and 1766 and revisited the southeast a decade later. The younger Bartram traveled through the Carolinas, Georgia, and East and West Florida between April 1773 and October 1776.44 He described the same “magnificent Indian mount” he had earlier visited in the company of his father. There were no settlements on the island during that that first visit, only extensive “old fields” (“Indian old fields” as they were often called), a large orange grove, and palm and live oak trees. Bartram discovered on his return visit that much had changed. All of the original vegetation had been cleared away and at various times brought under cultivation as fields of indigo, corn, and cotton, and at some point subsequently abandoned. Near the mound, he noted, ran the same avenue earlier described by his father could still be discerned. He described the road as “a noble Indian highway, which led from the great mount, on a strait line, three quarters of a mile. . . . This grand highway was about fifty yards wide, sunk a little below the common level, and the earth thrown up on each side, making a bank of about two feet high.” He was pleased to note that the late proprietor of the land had the good taste to preserve the mound and adjacent grove, which presented a pleasing and sublime prospect.45 Such avenues are not uncommon among the aboriginal remains of North America. They are of considerable interest to archaeologists as to their orientation and purpose relative to both the sites at which they are found and to other archaeological sites nearby and relatively distant.46 Those same travels in the southeast informed the narrative of Bartram’s “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians”—a manuscript 70

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not made known to the public until the mid-nineteenth century. The Bartram manuscript holds a conspicuous place in the history of American archaeology and the circumstances surrounding its origins a subject of a considerable amount of scholarly attention. The Philadelphia physician and ethnologist Samuel George Morton came into possession of the manuscript at some point after Bartram’s death. But through what channels and by whose hands are unknown. Morton placed the manuscript in the possession of Ephraim George Squier in 1847 or early 1848 during Squier’s investigations of Ohio mounds jointly conducted with Edwin Hamilton Davis. Squier and Davis incorporated excerpts and illustrations from the manuscript into Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848) just prior to its printing and publication by the Smithsonian Institution. Those extracts and engravings form an important conclusion to their discussion of the aboriginal remains of the South. Selections from the Bartram manuscript, with additional illustrations, also appeared in the appendix to Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York (1851) and in The Serpent Symbol (1851). Squier published the Bartram manuscript in full in the third volume of the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (1853), adding his own prefatory and supplemental notes.47 The whereabouts of the original Bartram manuscript, if still extant, is not known. But there are two surviving copies: one made by Davis and another used by Squier in publishing the Bartram account in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.48 The Bartram manuscript, written in December 1789, is an account of the history, religion, and customs of the tribes composing the Creek confederacy. The manuscript consists of observations made in response to a series of questions on the Muscogulges or Creek Indians submitted to him by an unidentified party. In all likelihood, the anonymous enquirer was Benjamin Smith Barton of Philadelphia. It was Squier’s opinion that Bartram wrote the manuscript for Barton and there is no reason to question that attribution. Bartram and Barton were correspondents and the line of questioning to which Bartram responds American Antiquities

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is consistent with the manner in which Barton solicited information from correspondents. Bartram’s descriptions and sketches of truncated mounds and rectangular enclosures establish that the Creeks were occupying those remains in the mid-eighteenth century. Those observations, together with those made in Bartram’s Travels, provide important information on the character of those structures. The Creeks used the structures in their war and religious ceremonies as the site of their village council houses. Yet Bartram attributed their origin not to the Creeks but to an earlier aboriginal people to whom he referred only as “the ancients” in contradistinction to the historic Creek tribe. He was making a temporal distinction only. The possibility that the Creeks or kindred groups were the direct descendants of the people or peoples who constructed the mounds is not mentioned, but he thought them to be aboriginal monuments in every sense. In his discussion of this fact, however, Bartram several times noted that he did not attribute the actual construction of those works to the either the historic Creek or the Cherokee. Once again, the gap in time between when the observations were made and published is significant. The first contemporarily published drawing and description of a prehistoric earthwork appeared in the Royal American Magazine of Boston in January 1775. The anonymous plan and account are of two contiguous enclosures designed in the form of a circle and a square located at the present site of Circleville, Ohio. The drawing is dated October 17, 1772. The plan is not based on a survey of the site but rather on approximate calculations made on horseback. The author of the account is anonymous but there can be little question as to his actual identity. The Reverend David Jones—a Baptist missionary from Freehold, New Jersey—visited the Shawnee villages in the Scioto Valley during the summer of 1772 and 1773. He was at the right place at the right time to have obtained the plan and made the observations communicated to the Royal American Magazine. The journal kept by Jones

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during those trips, moreover, contains several descriptions of “fortifications” found in the vicinity of the Shawnee villages of the Scioto Valley, such as his description of the geometrical earthworks located at Frankfort. Jones himself did not make the plan of the earthwork figured in the Royal American Magazine, which was located about two days’ journey south of the Shawnee villages he visited. “The gentleman[,] who gave me the account and plan of it, went some distance out of his way in his travels through wilderness, on purpose to see it. From personal acquaintance I could rely on it.”49 Jones did not identify the “gentleman” who made the plan and description. But it was probably John Irwine, a Pennsylvania trader living with the Ohio Shawnee, for Jones also noted that that “Mr. Irwine told that another [earthwork] exactly in this form is to be seen on the river Sciota, the banks of which remain are so high as to intercept the sight of men on horseback.”50 It is possible that Irwine, or another trader, knew of the Circleville works and offered to provide Jones with a plan and description of their character. Jones noted there were numerous other “forts” of this character scattered throughout the Ohio Country, even though he personally saw none as large as the one figured and described by his informant. He further observed that not all of the earthworks were of the same design. “Those forts, or whatever they were designed for, are not all built alike, for some are circular, some in the form of a half moon, and others square, and contain within the walls from an half to eight or ten acres.” Although the plan has no claim to precision its historical significance is in no way diminished. It gave a general idea of the design the site and brought this class of remains to the attention of others besides the Native peoples and Indian traders who lived within their vicinity. Jones made no effort to identify the builders of the works. Yet like Zeisberger he did not attribute them to any of the Indian groups living in the Ohio Valley at that time.

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Who the constructors of it were, the Indians who live in the neighborhood to it, have no tradition upon which we may depend. . . . The present Indian inhabitants were not the builders, and they can give no satisfactory account [of those] who were. By the largeness of the trees growing in the fort, they must be of ancient standing and consequently erected long before the Shawanese and Delawares removed into the country west of the Ohio; for their removal into that country happened since the English took possession of the sea. It seems probable that the former inhabitants were constantly at war, nation against nation, and erected these forts as their dernier resorts in time of danger. They were doubtless better skilled in the arts of fortification and architecture than the present inhabitants.51

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The implications of Jones’s statement merit consideration. It frames a problem in the history of American archaeology of considerable dimension. The fact that none of the tribes residing in the Ohio Valley during the eighteenth century were still constructing mounds, or had what Jones considered to be reliable traditions about who had built them, did not ipso facto mean that the ancestors of at least some of those groups had not built them at one time. There is no good reason to deny that the prehistoric Shawnee, Miami, and other central Algonquians had once been mound-building peoples, or for that matter the Iroquois or Cherokee. Yet Jones perceptively noted that the question of who had built the mounds was further complicated by the fact that the groups living there at the time of his travels had migrated from other parts of the eastern United States. There is no continuity in the archaeological and historical records between the prehistoric mound-building Fig. 1. (opposite) “A Plan of an Old Fort and Intrenchment in the Shawanese Country, Taken on Horseback, by Computation Only.” The first published drawing and account of a prehistoric earthwork west of the Alleghenies appeared in the Royal American Magazine at Boston in January 1775. The sketch is dated October 17, 1772, and the anonymous account is no doubt attributable to the Reverend David Jones, a Baptist missionary who visited the Shawnee villages in the Scioto Valley during the summer of 1772–73.

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cultures—an older, localized population that manifested several chronologically distinct cultural traditions over a span of several centuries—and the historic tribes who resettled the region from virtually every point of the compass in the 1740s and 1750s. But that is not the same as saying the Mound Builders were not “Indians” in a racial or biological sense of the word. It would be many more years before archaeologists developed a less problematic, less bifurcated nomenclature that allowed chronologically and culturally distinct traditions and sequences to be established outside the misleading Mound Builder-Indian dichotomy— a cultural and temporal interpretation and not a racial one. Twelve miles below Wheeling, Virginia—West Virginia since 1863— stood the mounds and earthworks at Grave Creek. The mound group was a mandatory stop for curious travelers on the Ohio River. The English land speculator and sometime Indian trader Nicholas Cresswell visited “the great Grave” there early on the morning of May 5, 1775. He reported the mound to be three hundred feet in based circumference, one hundred feet high, and sixty feet in diameter at the summit “where it forms a sort of an irregular Bason.” There also appeared to be a trench around the base. Cresswell further noted the presence of two smaller mounds or “hills” located about fifty yards from the great mound together with other “antique vestiges,” which he thought to be “very irregular” works of defense. He was otherwise at an entire loss to explain their existence and became one of a long line of travelers who asked the grand trilogy of questions concerning their origins. “All these Hills appear to have been made by human art, but by whom, in what age, or for what use I leave it for more able antiquarians to determine. The Indians’ tradition is that there was a great Battle fought here and many great Warriors killed. These mounds were raised to perpetuate their memory. The truth of this I will not pretend to assert.”52 Precisely which Indians related the tradition to Cresswell, and whether he obtained it first or secondhand, is not known. He may have obtained it from an individual or group of the Lenape or Shawnee among whom he traveled. Cresswell was himself uncertain of its veracity. It might 76

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well have been hearsay, a tall tale, or a pat answer prepared for curious travelers and visitors. That such an extraordinary pile of earth would be constructed to commemorate a single battle is, in fact, highly improbable. More than likely the mound group was a place of sepulture and the handiwork of several generations of Native peoples. Nor was the site necessarily only a burial place. The orientation of the large mound in relation to the angles it formed with other mounds at Grave Creek suggests that it served as more than a mere burial mound although it unquestionably served that purpose as well. Further testimony that fur traders and missionaries were curious about the prehistoric remains of the Ohio Valley during the early 1770s is found in the diary of the Reverend David McClure (1748–1820). McClure was a native of Newport, Rhode Island. He prepared himself at the age of fifteen to become a missionary to the Indians at Eleazar Wheelock’s school for Native Americans at Lebanon, Connecticut. He graduated Yale College in 1769, became an ordained minister at Dartmouth College in May 1772, and then embarked on a mission to the Lenape living along on the Muskingum River in the Ohio Country—an experience he committed to his diary. The earthworks and tumuli he saw along the headwaters of the Ohio during those travels were a great curiosity, as McClure observed in a diary entry dated October 7, 1772. A circular or oblong earthwork on the south bank of the Connemoh River (a tributary of the Allegany River) and another of similar dimension near the Lenape settlement at Kekalemahpehong occasioned the following observation: “They are very ancient[,] artificial works, for the present inhabitants can give no account of the builders, or the design of them. Some suppose them to have been intended for places of Public Worship; but the more probable conjecture is, that they were built for defence. There is nothing in them that discovers much knowledge of architecture or civilization.” Later in his diary, when discussing the first peopling of the American continent from Kamchatka and Tartary via the Behring Straits, he contradicted that statement by affirming that “there are no monuments American Antiquities

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of great antiquity to be found, except the supposed earth forts, and the probability is, that they are not very ancient”—“ancient” being a relative, ill-defined term often used to describe aboriginal remains. McClure thought that the original population of the continent came to North America “since the commencement of the Christian Era” in keeping with prevailing assumptions of biblical chronology regarding human origins. Thus the aboriginal remains of the continent had to be placed with that restricted timeline. Those hastily formed opinions aside, it is nevertheless clear from McClure’s diary that speculation concerning American antiquities was already rampant among those who either lived in or traveled to the Ohio Country. The Indian trader John Irwine of Pittsburgh, for example, gave McClure a plan of another very large earthwork on the Scioto River. That was probably the same plan that Irwine described to the Reverend David Jones that same year. McClure additionally reported that an unnamed trader told him that he wanted to build a trading house atop “a small hillock or Tumulus” located at the village Kekalemahpehong. Unidentified “Indians” (probably Lenape, Shawnee, or a mixed band of both) “forbade him” from doing so, however, since it was known to them to be a grave in which many were buried. Whether those graves contained the remains of friends or enemies they would not say. McClure saw another mound, a pyramidal structure about twelve feet high at Logstown in western Pennsylvania (located near Pittsburgh and today part of downtown Pittsburg). “Mouldered human bones are found by digging into them.”53 McClure was of the opinion that the enclosures he visited were places of defense for villages once located nearby, but wondered whether burial mounds containing several interments might be attributed to earlier outbreaks of smallpox. “This disorder in time past made dreadful destruction.” Little more could then be said regarding the origin and purposes of the enigmatic mounds and earthworks found in the Ohio Country. But conjecture on the subject was not wanting, as McClure tellingly noted. “Much has been said and written, on the subject 78

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of appearances like fortifications, which are found all over the country of the Ohio.” He did not say who had said and wrote what, or where and when they had done so. But his statement further indicates that the existence of these works was known by word of mouth in advance of the first published notices of them. Such local knowledge, however, did little to promote scholarly and public interest in the subject of American antiquities. It is important to note on this salient point that the travel accounts of Walker, Jones, McClure, Cresswell, Ziesberger, and Bartram were not published in their own life times. Their observations where rediscovered by scholars long afterward. Much has been written about Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of an Indian burial mound on the Rivanna River in central Virginia. Since Jefferson did not give the date or dates of the excavation in his account of the dig in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), there has been much uncertainty about when it actually took place. After an exhaustive analysis of the internal and external evidence relating to the manuscript draft used to typeset Notes in the Massachusetts Historical Society, Jefferson scholar Douglas L. Wilson concluded that the summer, possibly in June, or the early fall of 1783 is probably the more likely timeframe in which Jefferson made the excavation. Despite that uncertainty, however, few students of the early American republic would quibble with the judgment made by William Peden, editor of Jefferson’s Notes, who observed that it is “probably the most important scientific and political book written by an American before 1785; upon it much of Jefferson’s reputation as a philosopher was based.” So far as the origin of American archaeology is concerned, the attention bestowed upon the work by scholars adds further weight to Peden’s appraisal. The observations and conclusions embodied in Jefferson’s Notes significantly influenced early archaeological thought, although the extent to which they did so has resulted in divergent interpretations among historians.54 The genesis of Notes dates to 1780 when François Barbé-Marbois, secretary of the French legation in to United States, submitted a list American Antiquities

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of enquiries to certain members of the Second Continental Congress concerning the thirteen American republics. Jefferson took up the task of answering Marbois’s questions for his native Virginia, submitting his responses in December 1781. Jefferson’s friend and correspondent Charles Thomson, secretary of the Confederation Congress, understood the opportunity that Marbois’s enquiries presented to say something substantive relating to the natural history and Native peoples of Virginia, and by extension the latent potentialities of America as a whole. Writing to Jefferson in March 1782, when Jefferson was beginning to revise and correct the responses he submitted to Marbois in December 1781, Thomson encouraged him to take an enlarged view of his subject. His advice reflects the intellectual and cultural aspirations of the fledging republic that was only beginning its journey of self-discovery.

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This Country opens to the philosophic view an extensive, rich and unexplored field. It abounds in roots, plants, trees, and minerals to the virtues and uses of which we are yet strangers. . . . The human mind seems just awakening from a long stupor of many ages to the discovery of useful Arts and inventions. The history, manners and customs of the Aborigines are but little known. These and a thousand other subjects which will readily suggest themselves open an inexhaustible mine to men of a contemplative and philosophical turn. Thomson was certain that should Jefferson send the society a copy of his responses to Marbois that they would make “an acceptable present,” since its object was to advance useful knowledge, especially that relating to the New World.55 It was in that context, and with that prompting, that Jefferson expanded and rearranged the twenty-two enquiries posed by Marbois into twenty-three questions. Jefferson revised and enlarged the manuscript over the next three years. He anonymously published two hundred copies of an English edition of the work at Paris in May 1785 and a second English edition printed by John Stockdale at London 80

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appeared in 1787. Query XI of Notes asked for a description of resident Indian tribes. It was in response to that request that Jefferson related his account of the excavation of an Indian burial mound on the Rivanna River. He described the mound as being located “on the low grounds of the Rivanna, about two miles above its principal fork, and opposite to some hills, on which had been an Indian town.” Later investigators have identified the town as the seventeenth-century Monacan Indian village of Monasukapanough on the South Fork of the Rivanna River.56 Archaeologists have dated the burial mounds in the area to the late prehistoric period, circa ad 900–1700. The exact location of the mound excavated by Jefferson is somewhat conjectural since it is no longer extant. A group of archaeologists from the University of Virginia in 2003 reexcavated what they believed may have been the site of the mound explored by Jefferson in 2003. Yet when David I. Bushnell Jr. examined the location on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology in June 1911 he reported that the mound opened by Jefferson, locally known as “the Indian Grave,” had “entirely disappeared.” Bushnell surmised that the mound washed away during the flooding of the Rivanna River, possibly the freshet of 1877, when the entire lower terrace was submerged and the banks gave way to the current. Alluvial deposits twenty inches deep covered the village site at the time of Bushnell’s examination. Since Jefferson’s burial mound had once been associated with that village, Bushnell’s conclusion that the mound had been inundated and washed away would seem to be confirmed. It is also conceivable that there was not much left of the mound after Jefferson’s exploration, or that the internal structure had been so weakened by the dig as to make it more susceptible to erosion and flooding. The clearing of trees and continued plowing may have also made it less resistant to erosion caused by spring floods. Be that as it may, Jefferson’s description of the mounds and its internal structure is all that remains of its former existence.57 Jefferson opened the mound to satisfy himself which, if any, of the prevailing opinions regarding the contents of the mounds were correct. American Antiquities

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The dig was not idle or misplaced curiosity on his part and certainly not a search for antiquarian treasure. It was directed at solving an archaeological problem. What could be learned from careful observation of the internal structure and contents of the mounds? “That they were repositories of the dead, has been obvious to all; but on what particular occasion constructed, was a matter of doubt.” There was no consensus in the matter.

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Some have thought they covered the bones of those who have fallen in battles fought on the spot of internment. Some ascribed them to the custom, said to prevail among the Indians, of collecting, at certain periods, the bones of all their dead, wheresoever deposited at the time of death. Others again supposed them the general sepulchers for towns, conjectured to have been on or near the grounds; this opinion was supported by the quality of the lands in which they are found, (those constructed of earth being generally in the softest and most fertile meadow grounds on river sides) and by a tradition, said to be handed down from the Aboriginal Indians, that, when they settled in a town, the first person who dies was placed erect, and earth put around him, so as to cover and support him; that, when another dies, a narrow passage was dug to the first, the second reclined against him, and the cover of earth replaced, and so on.58 Jefferson did not say where, when, or from whom he learned of that tradition regarding the burial customs said to have been bequeathed by “Aboriginal Indians”—ancestors who presumably handed down the tradition to their descendants. The alleged tradition is vague and cannot be corroborated. But neither is there a compelling reason to dismiss it out of hand. It makes a reasonable connection between prehistoric and historic Indian cultures. Jefferson’s Indian mound was “sphroidical in form,” about forty feet in base diameter and stood about twelve feet high. He estimated that the height of the mound had already been reduced by some fourand-a-half feet by plowing. The details of his exploration are worth 82

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noting since he is often credited with having conducted the first stratigraphic excavation of a mound in the United States. Jefferson does not say who assisted him in the exploration but it is not to be supposed that he did the digging and trenching himself. In all probability his slaves at Monticello provided the labor under his supervision. “I first dug superficially in several parts of it, and came to collections of human bones, at different depths, from six inches to three feet below the surface. These were lying in the utmost confusion, some vertical, some oblique, some horizontal, and directed to every point of the compass, entangled, and held together in clusters by the earth.” The chaotic positions of the bones were such as “to give the idea of bones emptied promiscuously from a bag or basket, and covered over with earth, without any attention to their order.” Jefferson and his crew next made “a perpendicular cut through the body of the barrow, that I might examine its internal structure. This passed about three feet from its center, was opened to the former surface of the earth, and was wide enough for a man to walk through and examine its sides.” He noted that there were bones in the different strata of the mound, with those nearest the surface being in the best state of preservation. He thought it likely that the mound contained “a thousand skeletons.” He also noted that the bones were those of men, women, and children, a circumstance that did not support the popular notion that the mounds marked the spot of those who had fallen in battles. Jefferson’s estimate that the Rivanna River mound contained a thousand skeletons appears to be an accurate interpretation. Excavation of a similar mound on the Rapidan River conducted in 1988 found it to contain the remains of 1,000 to 1,500 people. Both the Rivanna and Rapidan mounds (just fourteen miles distant from each other) were small and both served as “community burial places.” The accumulation of so many human remains occurred over several generations much, indeed, as Jefferson surmised.59 Jefferson further observed that “I know of no such thing existing as an Indian monument: for I would not honour with that name arrow American Antiquities

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points, stone hatchets, stone pipes, and half-shapen images. Of labor on the large scale, I think there is no remain as respectable as would be a common ditch for the draining of lands: unless indeed it would be the Barrows [mounds], of which many are to be found all over this country.” When Jefferson made that statement he was apparently unfamiliar with the plan and description of the earthworks at presentday Circleville, Ohio, that appeared in the Royal American Magazine in 1775; or if he knew of that account he did not think the earthwork rose to the level of monumental architecture or consider it a “respectable” work of large scale labor.60 Jefferson later qualified that opinion somewhat but not entirely. He observed to Ezra Stiles in September 1786 that “the Indians on the waters of the Ohio . . . might indeed make . . . entrenchments of earth,” even though they were a people who lived in “a hunter state.” The builders of the mounds and earthworks were actually sedentary and agricultural peoples, yet Jefferson and many other Euro-Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries insisted upon seeing them as nomadic hunters instead of as agriculturalists. They projected the hunter state they incorrectly attributed to existing groups of North American Indians (some of whom were more sedentary and intensely agricultural than others but none were nomads or strictly hunters as often portrayed) upon the social conditions that presumably existed among their prehistoric ancestors—an unwarranted and misleading assumption. Neither premise, in fact, was correct. But those assumptions do explain why so many, like Jefferson himself, believed that the erection of monumental architecture required a “greater degree of industry” than was capable of a people living in a hunter state.61 Jefferson’s curiosity about burial mounds led to a discussion of a related and older problem concerning the origin of American aborigines: “Great question has arisen from whence came those aboriginal inhabitants of America?” He recognized that the passage from Europe to America was feasible even given the limited navigational capabilities

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of an earlier day, whereas the route from northeast Asia was not only tenable but even closer and more direct. As for the theoretical passage from Europe, traveling from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Greenland, and from Greenland to Labrador made the first part of the journey the longest. It was a trans-Atlantic crossing that presumably had been made since the earliest times for which there are records (an apparent reference to the Norse Sagas). It might be supposed, therefore, that earlier and later voyages may have occurred along the same route as well as from northeast Asia to northwest America. The coast of northeast Asia and the American continent was not an impassable barrier, as demonstrated on the last voyage of Captain Cook, who coasted from Kamchatka to California: “if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all,” said Jefferson, “it is only by a narrow strait. So that from this side also, inhabitants may have passed into America; and the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former: excepting indeed the Eskimaux, who, from the same circumstances of resemblance, and from identity of language, must be derived from the Groenlanders (Greenlanders), and these probably from some of the northern parts of the old continent.62 Questions relating to the origin and affinities American aborigines, Jefferson affirmed, most likely would be resolved through the study of their languages and dialects. “In fact, it is the best proof of the affinity of nations which can ever be referred to. . . . It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having previously collected and deposited in the records of literature, the general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke.” Only then could the requisite comparisons of vocabularies be made “and hence to construct the best evidence of the derivations of this part of the human race.” Jefferson clearly perceived that the developmental drift of languages

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was also a means of gauging the antiquity of humankind in the New World. Comparing what he believed were the radically different Indian languages of America and those spoken in Asia, Jefferson found that there were “probably twenty in America for one in Asia.” The time necessary for American languages to have diverged so far from a common stock, even in some instances to the point of losing all outward resemblance to each other, was considerable. “A separation into dialects may be the work of a few ages only, but for two dialects to recede from one another till they have lost all vestiges of their common origin, must require an immense course of time; perhaps not less than many people give to the age of the earth. A greater number of those radical changes of language having taken place among the red men of America, proves them of greater antiquity than those of Asia.”63 A decade later Barton respectfully disagreed with that opinion in New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797, 2nd ed. 1798). Unlike Jefferson, Barton did not think there were a greater number of aboriginal languages spoken in America than were spoken in Asia, a circumstance that had suggested to Jefferson a greater antiquity for American Indians than for Asians, and that further hinted that the direction of emigration might well have been from the American continent to northeast Asia. Barton’s comparative study of vocabularies convinced him that American aborigines and Asians did indeed share a common origin. He believed the American tribes came to North America from Asia in remote and long forgotten times. Yet he agreed with Jefferson that the time necessary for the differentiation of dialects spoken by American aborigines to have occurred bespoke a remote antiquity. “It would take many hundred[s], perhaps three or four thousand” years to produce the difference of dialects which we observe between many American and Asiatic nations.” Frances W. Pennell, a former curator of at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and a keen student of Barton’s scholarly endeavors, noted that he reversed Jefferson’s linguistic evidence but accepted the

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soundness of his reasoning regarding the unknown antiquity of those languages.64 Standing in bold contrast to Jefferson’s sober observations on the antiquities of the Western Country were those of his contemporary John Cleves Symmes. Charles Thomson favored Jefferson in April 1787 with an extract of a letter he received from Symmes in February of that year concerning the antiquities of the Western Country. Symmes enlarged in that letter on the Native Mexican tradition related in the second volume of William Robertson’s The History of America (1777) that their ancestors had migrated to Mexico from a presumably distant territory to the north or northwest in about the tenth century. Symmes attempted to show from surviving pieces of pottery and from the characteristics of the mounds and earthwork themselves that the ancient inhabitants of the country bordering the Ohio were the very people who subsequently migrated to Mexico. Symmes’s letter is notable for several incorrect statements about the assumed capabilities of the Indian groups who presumably drove the Mound Builders southward into Mexico and took possession of their former lands, statements that nonetheless had currency among some residents of the Western Country at the time and for many years to come.65 Symmes’s letter to Thomson is an early statement of a supposed connection between the Mound Builders and ancient Mexicans, the former being the presumed progenitors of the latter. His penchant for theorizing in advance of his facts gave Jefferson occasion to comment. He hoped that persons residing in the Western Country, unlike Symmes, would concern themselves with making accurate descriptions of them without forming hypotheses. “The moment a person forms a theory his imagination sees in every object only the tracts which favor that theory. But it is too early to form theories on those antiquities. We must wait with patience till more facts are collected.” Exact descriptions of American antiquities should be inserted “naked” into the Transactions of American Philosophical Society. “Patience and observation may enable

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us in time to solve the problem whether those who formed the scattering monuments in our Western Country were colonies sent off from Mexico, or the founders of Mexico itself?” Such forbearance did come easily to theorists like Symmes. Time and further investigation alone could adequately answer the question. The impatience and quick judgment of theorists like Symmes would not do.66 Appraisals of Jefferson’s place within the history of American archaeology on the whole have been admiringly lavish. Witness, for example, the fulsome praise given by Karl Lehmann-Hartleben, a German American classical archaeologist and professor of fine arts at New York University from 1935 to 1960. Lehmann-Hartleben noted that the manner in which Jefferson directed his investigation of the mound at an articulated archaeological problem “anticipates the fundamental approach and the methods of modern archaeology by about a full century.” And in like manner Mortimer Wheeler—an accomplished British archaeologist, promoter of archaeology as a scientific discipline, and an authority in his day on the stratification-grid technique of excavation—described Jefferson’s dig as “the first scientific investigation in the history of archaeology,” a remarkable achievement that would not be surpassed in its thoroughness for many years afterward. That view is counterbalanced by the opinion of Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff in A History of American Archaeology. Willey and Sabloff recognized Jefferson as one of the more significant “forerunners” of archaeology but questioned the accuracy of “the father of American archaeology” designation. Much as Walter W. Taylor had before them, Willey and Sabloff noted that Jefferson “had no immediate intellectual offspring. Unfortunately, his influence as an archaeologist was not important for his contemporaries or even the next generation.” Jefferson’s excavation, as Taylor noted, was an “isolated” event. It had no sequel or continuity with later developments. Willey and Sabloff took a much longer view of the origin of American archaeology: “we do not believe that one can point to a single individual as the progenitor of American 88

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archaeology but must view the rise of the discipline in terms of the culmination of both specific antiquarian and general intellectual trends in the New and the Old Worlds.” Given the number of early archaeological writers who cited Jefferson as authority during his own lifetime, and for several years afterward, the judgments of Taylor and that of Willey and Sabloff are perhaps too begrudging. While it is difficult to reconcile these conflicting assessments of Jefferson’s achievement one can certainly second the opinion of Jeffrey L. Hantman and Gary Dunham that Jefferson’s excavation and published observations and conclusions were “extraordinary for his time.”67 Another early archaeological observer and contemporary of Jefferson was John Filson of Kentucky. Filson was cut from the same cloth as Symmes but not Jefferson. Filson was not an original, systematic investigator but a reporter of the discoveries made by others. But the description of “curious sepulchers” containing human remains at Lexington made in his Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke—published at Wilmington, Delaware, in 1784—appealed to those with an antiquarian bent and made the rounds. “This method of burying [at Lexington] appears to be totally different from that now practiced by the Indians.” He also noted that pieces of earthenware vessels had been turned up near Lexington, “a manufacture with which the Indians were never acquainted.” The first statement is correct: burial practices had changed among Native peoples; the second an erroneous assertion based entirely upon misperception and misinformation. The Indian groups that Filson knew in the Ohio Valley, or knew of, as is more likely the case, probably were not, in fact, making pottery in the 1780s. But that does not mean that their ancestors never had. Nor was his statement true of all North American Indian groups even then. Ceramic traditions continued among some of the southeastern tribes until at least the mid-eighteenth century, as attested by James Adair, who began trading deerskins with the Catawba in 1735, afterward with Cherokee, and in 1744 with Chickasaw. He continued to trade with the Chickasaw until 1768. Those groups, said Adair, made “a prodigious American Antiquities

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number” of earthen pots of various sizes, and “of such antiquated forms, as would be tedious to describe, and impossible to name.”68 So long as accounts of American antiquities only appeared in desultory travel accounts and yet unpublished journals and diaries the systematic organization of archaeological evidence were virtually nonexistent. It was only when more detailed reports of the mounds appeared in transactions and proceedings of scientific societies that archaeology became a subject of scholarly interest. As George Daniels noted in Science in American Society, scientific enquiry during the period centered in learned societies and not in colleges. Learned societies made numerous and significant contributions to the intellectual and cultural life of the new nation that went well beyond the field of science. Their members cultivated eclectic interests. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences at Boston is a case in point. The Provincial Congress of the State of Massachusetts established the American Academy in May 1780 and its series of Memoirs began in 1783. Among its principal aims was “to promote & encourage the Knowledge of the Antiquities of America.” James Bowdoin, the founding president of the academy, noted that the study of American antiquities, a rather novel idea at the time, was among the philosophical and scientific endeavors that tended “to advance the interests, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” The antiquities of America—the res antiquae laudis of Virgil, as Bowdoin referred to them—were a most worthy subject of investigation. Here truly was a grand theme for speculation and one that directly appealed to the nation’s incipient sense of national identity and strident patriotism of the Revolutionary Era.69 Bowdoin elaborated the mission of the American Academy in his inaugural address a president. Learned societies arose from the “social affections of man,” which were the primary source of personal happiness. The active and comprehensive nature of “the social principle” led to the founding of societies that promoted scientific knowledge

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for the benefit of humanity and the cultivation of their members own intellectual interests. Whether the example was the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, the Royal Society at London, or the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia—the immediate models for the American Academy’s rules and principles of conduct—learned societies arose from the same wants and needs that actuated the creation of other social institutions and that animated society at large. They were, indeed, a reflection of the societies that created them. And that was certainly true of Bowdoin’s disjointed view of American antiquities and American aborigines. Knowledge of antiquities, he affirmed, necessarily implied an understanding of ancient history, a subject that for the most part was a sealed book in America. Yet the investigation of antiquities led “directly to the source and original [i.e., origin] of things” about which no historically conscious people could be indifferent. “It is very pleasing and instructive—to recur back to the early ages of mankind, and trace the progressive state of nations and empires, from infancy to maturity, to old age, and dissolution.” It was a conception of past and present that assumed that even at the very apogee of greatness a state held the seeds of its own future decay. And just as certainly new kingdoms and empires would arise from the ruins of past greatness and begin the cycle anew. Ancient history showed the “mortality” all things human, not excepting the rise and fall of great civilizations.70 Bowdoin viewed the aboriginal inhabitants of America, as essentially static beings whose societies had passed through the ages essentially unchanged. “Whatever relates to the aboriginal natives of America, not already noticed in history, may be comprised in a very narrow compass. Their want of civilization, and improvement, . . . will justify the opinion, that the present race of them, in manners and conduct, differ very little from their ancestors, who lived centuries ago.” It was an erroneous, counterproductive assumption representing a formidable conceptual problem in a good portion of the archaeological thought

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of the period. It was problematic because of the specious conclusions and inferences that logically followed. Bowdoin lauded the benefits derived from the study of antiquities on the one hand and yet saw no value in the antiquities of American aborigines on the other. “It may naturally be conjectured therefore, that the ancient and modern history of these people, with the exception of what might regard their wars, would appear but little more than a transcript of each other; and that would be in vain to search among them for antiquities.”71 American Indians under that view were, in effect, frozen in time— prisoners of Euro-American preconceptions and prejudices and Western definitions and assumption about civilizations. Such commonplace notions and encumbrances really would have to be discarded before anything even approximating a cultural history of prehistoric North America could be envisioned. Archaeological investigations in the United States, however cursory and haphazard, began in tandem with the western expansion of the United States in the decade immediately following the American Revolution. It was only with the organization, settlement, and elimination of Indian land claims northwest of the Ohio River between 1785 and 1795 that a bona fide discourse about the mounds can truly be said to have commenced. The encounter with the elaborate earthworks at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers attracted an unprecedented amount of attention in the transactions of American learned societies, the press, and enquiries from abroad. The ancient works at the Muskingum would be surveyed, mapped, and described many times. Questions concerning who built those remains and for what purposes occasioned divergent answers. Some early writers ascribed them to pre-Mexican Toltecs, others to Tartars or Scythians, others to the expedition of Hernando de Soto, and still others to earlier Native tribes no longer living in the same localities where the mounds were found, and perhaps no longer extant (in a social and cultural sense and not in a biological or genetic one). The debate further turned on the question of whether the works were military or religious in 92

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purpose, or perhaps both, given obvious differences in their design. No less exigent was the question of antiquity: Were the works at the Muskingum and those discovered elsewhere in the Ohio Country pre-Columbian in origin, and if so how old were they? It was the beginning of a long disquisition on the mounds and the unknown peoples who built them.

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2

Rediscovering the Mounds Scientific Enquiry and the Westward Movement

The expansion of the American republic into the trans-Appalachian West during the 1780s had an unintended consequence—the EuroAmerican rediscovery of the mounds and the beginning of scholarly discourse about their origins, antiquity, and purposes that went well beyond the detached and infrequent notices of their existence made during the previous decade. What can legitimately be called scientific enquiry began with the arrival of the First American Regiment in the Western Territory of the United States in October 1785. It was then that the First American Regiment, a small force formed from the rump of the disbanded Continental Army, arrived at the mouth of the Muskingum River under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Josiah Harmar. The construction of Fort Harmar at Muskingum began in October of that year and the garrison completed the structure sometime in early 1786. The Congress of the United States sent the regiment to the Muskingum in order to remove squatters from public lands northwest of the Ohio, protect government surveyors in laying out the first Seven Ranges of rectangular townships under the Land Ordinance of 1785, and to negotiate a series of Indian land-cession treaties intended to open the region to permanent American settlements. It was during that process of western expansion and dispossession that confirmed reports of the existence of ancient works along the Ohio River and its tributaries appeared both in the correspondence of army officers and in the eastern press. 94

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One of the first officers to arrive in the Western Country was Major General Richard Butler of Pennsylvania. Butler came in October 1785 as a commissioner plenipotentiary of the United States. He traveled from Fort Pitt in Pennsylvania to negotiate a land-cession treaty with the Shawnee at Fort Finney, located at the mouth of the Miami River (near present-day Cincinnati). The Shawnee had refused to accept the land assigned them under the Treaty of Fort McIntosh signed January 21, 1785, which had been negotiated by the U.S. Indian commissioners (Butler being one of them) and representatives of the Delaware, the Ottawa, and the Chippewa. Representatives of the U.S. government were attempting to bring the recalcitrant Shawnee to heal by the threat of immediate attack by the U.S. Army if they did not agree to the earlier terms of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh by signing a new one. The process of national expansion and dislocation of tribal groups northwest of the Ohio River in the short span of a few years lead to a series of armed conflicts collectively known as the Ohio Indian Wars of 1790 to 1794. When Butler reached the Ohio River en route to those negotiations he visited the Grave Creek mound on October 4, 1785. “We went to see ‘the Grave,’ which is an extraordinary pile of human bones covered with earth.” Butler noted that the mound was about sixty feet in perpendicular height and 108 feet in base diameter. Large trees grew upon its sides and summit, one of which was three feet in diameter. “Supposing the annual growth one-tenth of an inch, it is one hundred and eighty years old.” Yet the mound upon which it stood was no doubt much older. How long it had been barren of trees after its construction could not be known with any degree of certainty. But Butler inferred that it would take a longer period of time for the trees to establish themselves on the mound than in the surrounding forest. It would take at least another fifty years for the trees to establish themselves assuming, of course, that they were the first growth. There may have been earlier trees that grew and died before those standing on the mound in 1785 had reached maturity. Butler also examined “two small forts Rediscovering the Mounds

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which, with the grave, form a triangle. . . . About one-fourth of a mile from these, forming an angle of about twenty five degrees, is a large fort, which the owner of the land has begun to plow up, where they find pieces of earthen bottles [pottery], arrow points, stone tomahawks, and marks of savage antiquity.” Butler later became second in command on the ill-fated military expedition led by General Arthur St. Clair. Butler lost his life on November 4, 1791, at the defeat of St. Clair’s army on the Wabash River in what is today northwestern Ohio. His observations on the Grave Creek site, however, would have only been known to his fellow officers, family, and other personal acquaintances with whom he may have corresponded since his pocket diary or journal was not published until 1847.1 Much better known was the discovery of the extensive earthworks at the mouth of Muskingum opposite Fort Harmar. News of their existence spread quickly via word of mouth among travelers and through correspondence, newspaper reports, and papers read before learned societies. Major General Samuel Holden Parsons of Connecticut, a fellow treaty commissioner to the Shawnee with Butler, sent Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, his firsthand observations on the natural curiosities and antiquities of the Ohio Country made during his tour of the region in the winter of 1785–86. Writing to Stiles from Middletown, Connecticut, on April 27, 1786, he gave a brief account of his visit to Big Bone Creek, where his party collected some 300–400 pounds of bones of extinct animals as well as unknown quantity of tusks (mostly bones and tusks of wooly mammoths—the extinct genus Mammuthus, proboscideans ancestral to the modern genus of elephants. The earthworks he pronounced to be “fortifications.” Fragments of earthen vessels and “bricks” dug up from considerable depths in the ground and numerous conical burial mounds containing the bones of the dead, said Parsons, “are proofs of the Country’s having been peopled heretofore by those who had some knowledge of the Arts; and the trees grown up in those fortresses are of a size which leaves little room to doubt that the works were abandoned long before the 96

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country was discovered by Europeans. The present Inhabitants having no knowledge of the Arts or tradition respecting the fortifications leaves a doubt whether the present [occupants] are the Immediate descendants of the former Inhabitants.” He speculated no further as to origin of the mounds, leaving it to Stiles and other scholars to form their own opinions.2 Parsons also sent Stiles a draft of the earthworks at the mouth of the Muskingum. It is dated May 3, 1786 (possibly the date that Stiles copied the drawing as opposed to the date on which he originally drew it). Stiles enclosed a copy of the diagram, together with Parsons’s April 27 letter to him, in a communication to Thomas Jefferson dated May 8, 1786. Jefferson was then residing in Paris as the U.S. minister plenipotentiary to France. Stiles described Parsons’s map as “a Drawing of Works of Earth in Lines of Circumvallation found at the Muskingham on Ohio, lately taken by Genl. Parsons on the spot.” He added some conjectures of his own in communicating Parsons’s account that are not to be attributed to Parsons. Stiles affirmed that the Muskingum works, together with “bricks” and fragments of earthenware dug up in Kentucky, furnished evidence “that there have been European or Asiatic Inhabitants there in antient ages, altho’ long extirpated. Capt. Smith, your antient Virginn. Adventurer, says they found some of the Indians who descended from those who read in a Book.”3 Such unfounded speculations grew abundantly in a period when virtually nothing was known about the mounds and the people who built them. Unsubstantiated stories about encounters with Indians who were descended from a people who at one time reportedly could read, or at least had somehow come into possession of books, periodically continued to resurface. Supposedly Welsh-speaking Indians who had theoretically lost the capacity to read and write appealed to few scholars but resonated as folklore and myth. Parsons gave a further account of his discoveries in the Western Country in a letter written October 2, 1786, to Joseph Willard, president of Harvard College. The letter appeared in the second volume of the Rediscovering the Mounds

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Fig. 2. Samuel Holden Parsons’s “Sketch of the Earthworks at the Muskingum River.” Parsons sent Stiles a drawing of the earthworks located at the mouth of the Muskingum. It is dated May 3, 1786 (possibly the date that Stiles copied the sketch as opposed to the date on which Parsons originally drew it). Stiles enclosed a copy of the diagram in a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated May 8, 1786. Stiles described Parsons’s map in that letter as “a Drawing of Works of Earth in Lines of Circumvallation found at the Muskingham [sic] on Ohio, lately taken by Genl. Parsons on the spot.” Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington dc .

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Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1793.4 Parsons wrote Willard, he said, in order to correct misrepresentations and groundless accounts attributed to him in newspapers by directly communicating to the academy the observations he made during his travels. It was important, he said, that discoveries in the Western Country be faithfully reported and carefully compared so that “reasoning on the subject may might be [made] with greater certainty; and old principles confirmed, or new hypotheses established with more accuracy.” His communication to the academy is not without interest. He visited the large conical mound at Grave Creek on November 4, 1785, only one month later than Butler, while en route to join him in treaty negotiations with the Shawnee at Fort Finney at the mouth of the Great Miami River. Parsons said of the Grave Creek mound: “Here is a mound of earth, plainly the work of men’s hands, called an Indian grave.” It stood about eighty feet high, and ascended in an angle of about 45 degrees. The diameter at the summit was about sixty feet and enclosing a concave center that had sunk about four feet. He, like Butler, recorded that an oak tree about three feet in diameter stood atop the mound near its center. He did not open the mound but proceeded some sixty miles further down the Ohio River to the mouth of the Muskingum.5 Parsons’s account of the earthworks at the Muskingum submitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is essentially the same report he earlier sent Stiles (and that Stiles enclosed in his letter to Jefferson together with Parsons’s drawing). Parsons’s added no new facts on the subject to what he had earlier communicated except to say that a white oak tree growing on the earthworks appeared to have grown from the decayed remains of tree that once stood upon the same spot. “This however, is conjectural, there not being so great evidence, as to render the fact certain.” He further observed that soldiers dug up pieces of earthenware during the construction of Fort Harmar at the mouth of the Muskingum. While digging the trenches for its pickets they found a number of pieces and “one entire brick” buried two to Rediscovering the Mounds

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three feet below the surface. He further noted that at the great Kanawha River, and at other places along the Ohio, he found other “Indian graves” similar to the one at Grave Creek but not as large.6 The origin of the remains at the Muskingum was as much a mystery to Parsons as to anyone else. Yet he perceived that the Shawnee and other Indian groups with whom he was acquainted treated the mounds with some degree of deference. “Not thinking it proper to open the mounds of earth supposed to contain the bones of the dead, whilst the Indians were in treaty with us; I desired the commanding officer, to open them at the Miami, after the Indians had gone; and also left the same request at [the] Muskingum, with an officer of learning, and great curiosity in his observations in the natural world: and to inform me of their discoveries; extracts of whose letters I herewith send you. The Indians have no tradition [concerning] what nation ever buried their dead in the manner we discovered them. The trees on the Indian graves and ancient fortifications (of which there are great numbers in that country) appear to be coeval with the adjoining forests.” Parsons was of the opinion that the country had been densely populated by a people who knew the “necessary arts” to a much greater extent than “the present native Indians.” That opinion aside, he left the formulation of theories to others.7 His observations are noteworthy for their circumspection and the fact that he saw no reason to consider the works at Grave Creek, the great Kanawha, and at other sites along the Ohio as anything other than “Indian graves”—a generic appellation but hardly one that posited a non-Indian origin. Parsons unfortunately had little opportunity to continue his useful enquiries. He drowned the morning of November 17, 1789, in a canoe accident on a branch of the Big Beaver River not far from the Ohio.8 The plan and description of the earthworks at the Muskingum River that Parsons sent Stiles in April and May 1786 prompted Stiles to write to Benjamin Franklin soliciting his opinion about who might have built them. The drawing of the Muskingum works that Parsons sent Stiles was undoubtedly that made by Captain Jonathan Heart, 100

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one of the officers at Fort Harmar. Parsons had only been at Fort Harmar for two days, but before he left he asked one of the officers to send him information about the works at the Muskingum. There seems little question that the officer obliquely mentioned by Parsons was Heart, who was in command at Fort Harmar during part of 1786. Heart was by far the most promising and thorough of the early military observers. He was born at Kensington, Connecticut, in 1748 and graduated with honors from Yale in 1768. Parsons held Heart in high regard, describing him as “an officer of learning and great curiosity in his observations of the natural world.”9 And there also seems little doubt that Heart was the unnamed captain mentioned in Harmar’s letter to Thomas Mifflin, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Assembly. Writing to Mifflin at Fort Pitt in March 1787 Harmar enclosed a plan of the works at the Muskingum, saying they were “taken by a Captain of mine, with his explanations. Various are the conjectures concerning these fortifications. From their regularity I conceive them to be the works of some civilized people. Who they were, I know not. Certain it is, the present race of savages are strangers to any thing of the kind.”10 Heart’s plan and description of the Muskingum earthworks appeared in the first volume of the Columbian Magazine in May 1787.11 It is the first account of a prehistoric mound group based upon an actual survey and also served as the basis of the embellished engraving of the Muskingum earthworks by Pierre Antoine Tardieu published at Paris in 1801. Heart’s plan’s appearance did more to promote interest in the subject of American antiquities than any previous report. Heart’s survey and description divided the site into three parts: enclosure No. 1 he called the “town,” No. 2 the “fortification,” No. 3 was the large mound at the site that he dubbed “the pyramid.” White oak trees growing at the sites were nearly four feet in diameter and in some instances rose from what appeared to be the decayed remnants of still older trees. Human bones were found in some of the small mounds at the site, along with burnt stones, pieces of charcoal, “Indian arrows,” and fragments of shelltempered earthenware. As to when and by whom the earthworks were Rediscovering the Mounds

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erected he could not say, nor could he explain the obvious design of its earthen embankments and mounds. The accounts of the Indians, he noted, were “irregular and inconsistent, and carry more fable than [the] appearance of tradition.” Given the “uniform regularity,” impressive extent, and apparent antiquity of the works, he concluded that only a numerous people could have erected them, and one “well acquainted with the art of fortification and defense.” There was “a beautiful uniformity” to the whole.12 Writing to Benjamin Smith Barton from Fort Harmar on January 5, 1791, Heart made further observations on the ancient works and Native inhabitants of the Western Country. He submitted the letter in response to enquiries received from Barton in January of the preceding year. Barton published Heart’s letter in the third volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, published in 1793.13 Heart reported that it was difficult to make further investigations at the Muskingum since the Marietta settlement had by January 1791 spread over the entire extent of the ancient works.14 Travelers, whose testimony he trusted, informed him that on a branch of the Scioto River called Paint Creek other extensive works were to be found, which continued along the Scioto for nearly sixty miles to its union with the Ohio (present-day Portsmouth, Ohio). There were also works on the opposite shore or Virginia side of the Ohio (present-day northern Kentucky) that had been traced by Colonel George Morgan. Heart additionally learned from a “Mr. Wells,” whom Heart described as “a gentleman of nice observation and philosophical enquiry,” of the existence of ancient works on the Great Miami and the Little Miami. Reports of other earthworks located in the lower Mississippi Valley came to Heart’s attention as well. He learned of earthworks located on the eastside of a small branch of the Big Black River in present-day Mississippi, at Bayou Pierre in Louisiana, and on the headwaters of the Yazoo and Mobile Rivers. It is yet again clear from that statement that knowledge of these sites among traders, soldiers, and Native Americans often moved by word of mouth prior to the appearance of 102

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Fig. 3. “Plan of the Remains of Some Ancient Works on the Muskingum.” Captain Jonathan Heart of the First American Regiment at Fort Harmer prepared an account and map of the elaborate complex of earthworks at the mouth of Muskingum River that appeared in the Columbian Magazine in May 1787. The copperplate engraving is the first published plan of an Ohio earthwork based upon an actual survey. Heart’s brief narrative generated an extraordinary amount of interest and conjecture concerning the origin and era of works of such manifest design.

the first written accounts of them. While it is not to be supposed that Heart visited all of those sites, it is likely he that visited at least some of them as indicated by an entry in the diary of Ezra Stiles. During a visit with Stiles at Harvard on July 13, 1791, Heart presented his former professor with a map of the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Stiles noted in his diary that Heart had traveled from that location overland to the Chickasaw Indian towns in the state of Georgia Rediscovering the Mounds

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Fig. 4. “Plan d’un Ancien Camp Retranché découvert sur les bords du Muskinghum.” An embellished version of Heart’s maps of the Marietta earthworks by the Parisian cartographer P. Tardieu (Pierre Antoine Tardieu). The engraving appeared in the first volume of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’etat de New-York (Travels in Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York) published at Paris in 1801. Notice the placement of a nonexistent island at the mouth of the Muskingum. This is probably a misplacement of Devil’s Island (now known as Kerr’s Island), which is located just above, and not at, the mouth of the Muskingum.

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and returned to the Ohio Country by way of the Tennessee River. He spent an indeterminate period of time among the Chickasaw before striking out for the Tennessee River.15 Heart’s conclusions concerning the authors of those ancient remains were equally circumspect as those made by Parsons. He rejected the suggestion advanced by Benjamin Franklin that the earthworks might have been constructed during Hernando De Soto’s expedition. There were numerous earthworks located in regions not visited by De Soto and his expeditionary force would not have had the time to erect so many of them over so vast an extent of territory. The condition of the works and the trees growing on them indicated a pre-Columbian origin and suggested that they had not been constructed by any European, Asian, or African nation. Nor did he think they were built by “the present Indians or their predecessors: or some traditions would have remained as to their uses, and they would have retained some knowledge in constructing similar works.” The architects of the mounds, whoever they were, must have been a sedentary and agricultural people, for the great number of the works indicated the presence of a large population that could not have sustained itself by hunting alone. He speculated that the Mound Builders lived in a partially civilized state and did not believe they could exist in such large numbers or have erected such impressive remains without the coercive power of law and some form of government. Heart had earlier observed in the Columbian Magazine that the accounts of the Indians regarding the mounds were “irregular and inconsistent.” They struck him as being more like fables than credible traditions. It is important to note in light of that opinion, however, that in his letter to Barton he nevertheless recorded a Choctaw tradition regarding a mound located on the east bank of a small tributary of the Black River in present-day Mississippi. He described it as an elevation of earth about a half-mile square and some fifteen to twenty feet high. A wall of equal height and a deep ditch extended from the northeast corner of the work for nearly a half mile to the adjacent highlands. Rediscovering the Mounds

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“This information I had from the Chacktaw-Indians, who inhabit the country, and it is confirmed by many white people [traders], who resided with the Chacktaws, and had often been on the spot.” It is unclear from that statement whether Heart obtained that account firsthand during a trip down the Mississippi at some point before January 5, 1791, when he wrote his account for Barton, or from a Choctaw trader visiting Fort Harmar. “The tradition of the Chacktaws with respect to this elevation is as follows, viz. that in the midst [of the mounds] is a great cave, which is the house of the Great-Spirit; that in that cave he made the Chacktaws; that the country being then under water, the great spirit raised this wall above water, to set the Chacktaws on to dry, after they were made.”16 The Choctaw tradition related by Heart is but a fragment of a much larger set of origin beliefs later recorded by Daniel Garrison Brinton—a tradition once shared by the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek. Euro-Americans first recorded the tradition among the Creek at Savannah, Georgia, in 1735. According to an account appearing in the second volume of the American Gazetteer, published at London in 1762, the Creek themselves originally recorded the legend on a bison skin in red and black symbols. According to that report an assembly of fifty members of the Creek tribe and residents of Savannah, who were conversant in the Creek language, translated the symbols into English. Colonial authorities sent the skin to London where it was framed and hung in the Georgia Office at Westminster. The version of the narrative recorded by Heart is unquestionably authentic. Slivers of the story also appear in the narratives of Bernard Romans, James Adair, and Josiah Gregg. Scholars have devoted considerable interest to the tradition. Brinton substantiated and explained what had survived of the tradition in 1870. The Swiss-born Albert S. Gatschet, a linguist at the Bureau of American Ethnology, took up a comprehensive investigation of the Creek tradition at Brinton’s request, which appeared as a title in Brinton’s Library of Aboriginal Literature in 1884. The Choctaw told Romans the story 106

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of a hole or cave located between themselves and the Chickasaw out of which the entire Choctaw nation arose at once. Adair speaks of “the Muskohgeh cave” at Nanne Hamgeh from which the subterranean ancestors of the Chickasaw emerged. Gregg attests that after the removal of the Choctaw to the Indian Territory “the old full blood Choctaws” still related the story that the first of their tribe originated in a cave at Nunnewaya or Bending Mountain, but said the tradition had little currency among the younger Choctaw and mixed bloods. Brinton learned that some of the Creeks residing in the vicinity of the Tallahassee Mission in the Indian Territory in 1869 still recognized the legends as versions of other stories they had heard told by the elders of the tribe.17 The works at the Muskingum received additional attention from Winthrop Sargent, secretary of the Northwest Territory. Sargent sent a plan and description of the remains on March 27, 1787, to James Bowdoin, governor of Massachusetts and president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bowdoin presented Sargent’s letter and plan to the academy during a meeting held May 29 of that year. But for whatever reason it was not published at the time. Henry I. Bowditch, the librarian of the academy, found the letter and drawing sixty-three years later among some old manuscripts and brought it to the attention of the academy during a meeting held on February 13, 1850. Bowditch published Sargent’s letter, references, explanations, and engraved map—together with the story of their rediscovery—in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1853.”18 The provenance of Sargent’s plan is sketchy at best. He is identified as the delineator, “fait par W. Sargent,” but he does not say if it is an original sketch made by himself or merely a copy of one made by someone else. Nor does he indicate whether it is based upon an actual survey. Sargent does says that he did not have a compass with him when he made his measurement of the large conical mound (the Conus mound), which might suggest that his plan is not, in fact, based on a survey. But that is a risky assumption. Sargent might well have used Rediscovering the Mounds

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a surveyor’s compass in determining the dimensions of the site as a whole or in part except for the Conus mound. Moreover, he may well have surveyed the site over the course of several visits. It should be further noted on this unsettled point of enquiry that Sargent was one of the government surveyors on the Seven Ranges Survey. He would have been quite capable of making his own survey of the site and was certainly in a position to do so. He only states that his plan depicts works discovered the previous year (1786) by the American garrison at Fort Harmar. It is also possible in the face of such uncertainty that Sargent merely copied the plan from the survey and sketch of the site made by Captain Heart at Fort Harmar sometime in 1786 or early 1787. The Heart plan appeared in the Columbia Magazine in May 1787, only two months after Sargent submitted his plan to Bowdoin. Sargent’s plan differs from Heart’s in reference to a few particulars. Whether those differences are to be attributed to Sargent or to the engravers Tappan and Bradford cannot be determined without examining Sargent’s manuscript drawing in the archives of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and comparing it to Heart’s published map. Heart’s original drawing, upon which the engraving in the Columbia Magazine is based, does not appear to be extant.19 The earthworks at the Muskingum, said Sargent, were incontestably old. Trees of four and five feet in diameter were then growing on the mounds and walls of the enclosures, which evidently were not the first growth, gave testimony that the works were not of recent origin. It appeared that the former inhabitants of the Western Country were populous and possessed some knowledge of “science” (i.e., military science and geometry). He believed that no other works that had yet been investigated that gave more evidence that those who designed and constructed them possessed military knowledge than those at the Muskingum. “I cannot but observe that here the Art of Defense seems to have been well understood.”20 That was the same opinion entertained by Heart, which again suggests that Heart may have been the source of Sargent’s information. Yet caution is in order here too 108

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since Sargent was a surveyor and in a position to make his own firsthand observations. Further down the Ohio at the mouth of the Great Miami River (present-day Cincinnati) stood another complex of mounds and earthworks. The upper terrace of the site was once covered with prehistoric works that very quickly became the casualties of Cincinnati’s rapid development. Those remains also received the attention of Sargent after the seat of territorial government in the Northwest Territory moved from Marietta to Cincinnati in 1790. The historically conscious and scientifically inclined Sargent, a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1787, noted in a communication to William Maxwell, who printed The Centinel of the North-Western Territory at Cincinnati, that every effort should be made to study these remains. It was a duty the present generation of Westerners owed their descendants no less than to the memory of the ancient peoples who occupied the region before them. In the future page of the faithful historian posterity will with pleasure trace the rise and progress of settlement—the arts and sciences &c. &c. in this western world; the observation[s] of their fathers will furnish the proper documents—more however is expected from them; . . . All the atlantic states of America, and the old world have with wonder, heard stories of extensive works of art in this territory—of ancient fortifications and stupendous mounds of earth, the vestiges of [an] immense population and [an] infinitely greater share of science than is possessed by the present ‘red people.’ Who then were the authors, is the question that is proposed—and when, and where did they migrate.21 Given those unanswered questions it was important that all materials left behind by the ancient inhabitants of the Western Country should be carefully collected and deposited in museums. It was preferable that they be placed in public institutions rather than private museums whose existence were apt to be more ephemeral and their Rediscovering the Mounds

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holdings more likely to be dispersed. Only then, said Sargent, could those articles be compared to those of the ancient Mexicans (a tacit assumption that they might be related) and to the ancient remains of other peoples. Analogies drawn from those comparisons might elucidate the obscure subject of American antiquities. Sargent offered his own services in collecting such articles and in making drawings and descriptions of them before sending the originals, together with the names of those who contributed them, to either the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Historical Society of Massachusetts, Harvard College, or to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, according to the preferences of the donors. He bolstered that appeal by subjoining a letter from Jeremy Belknap, a Congregational clergyman and the principal founder and corresponding secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The interests of the society were national in scope as indicated in the letter that Belknap wrote to Sargent on November 1, 1791. It outlines the aims of the new society, which were to collect, preserve, and communicate materials from which “a complete history” of the expanding nation could be written and not just the history of Massachusetts and New England. Among the thirteen subjects of interest enumerated by Belknap was “Monuments, and relicks of the ancient Indians,” together with the “numbers and present state of any remaining Indians.”22 Sargent, in fact, had already acted in the matter. Several articles recovered from “the old Indian grave” opened at Cincinnati on August 30, 1794, which he described as “matters curious & novel,” were placed in his possession. He gave an account the articles recovered from the mound—located at what later became the corner of Third and Main streets in Cincinnati— that appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine for July 1795. And he sent a second account of the excavation and artifacts to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, which included the same drawings of ornaments and implements that appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine. That account appeared in the fourth volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society in 1799.23 Sargent deposited 110

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the objects recovered from the mound at Cincinnati in the cabinet of the American Philosophical Society. George Turner of Philadelphia, one of the more active members of the American Philosophical Society, examined them and submitted his analysis to his fellow members on November 25, 1799. Turner, a member of the society since 1790, did so in order to correct several misconceptions concerning the identification and composition of the items represented in Sargent’s published account. He thought it worthy of remark that the polished circular object made from cannel coal (bituminous coal) from the Cincinnati mound resembled a circular object also made from cannel coal figured in the first volume of Archaeologia Scotica: Or Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1792). He drew attention to those correspondences not to suggest a connection between the Mound Builders and the ancient Scots but rather to explain why such similarities in the ornaments and implements among ancient peoples should not be a matter of surprise. Parallel conditions resulted in analogous results among peoples widely separated by time and place when in similar stages of social development. “Perhaps, both were designed for similar purposes by their ancient rude owners, though separated by an ocean a thousand leagues wide! Kindred acts will spring from kindred manners.” Heart assumed similar grounds. He observed that those who argued that Indians were the descendants of the Ten Tribes of Israel based solely upon similarities in some of their customs failed to considered that the children of Israel were themselves but little removed from a state of nature. Such resemblances could be explained upon different grounds: “that nature is uniform, and that all things being equal ever operates the same.” Such correspondences arose not from a common origin or descent “but were such as nature herself pointed out.”24 Turner and Heart’s rationales for similarities between distinct and unconnected peoples stood in stark contrast to the opinion of Adair who interpreted perceived parallels in the customs of the ancient Hebrews and American aborigines as evidence of a connection or Rediscovering the Mounds

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common origin. He advanced twenty-three separate arguments in support of that premise in his History of the American Indians (1775). What he called “the Indian system” derived from the moral, ceremonial, and judicial laws of the Hebrews, “though now but a faint copy of the divine original.” He conjectured that their descendants arrived here from northeastern Asia “over Kamschatska.” His fixation with that pet theory has led some scholars to question the value of Adair’s observations as a whole. Yet his hopelessly flawed supposition regarding the origin of the American Indians does not vitiate the value of his descriptions of social organization, language, and customs, nor those relating to religious beliefs and ceremonialism. Those aspects of the work are of enduring value to historians and anthropologists, some of whom have fairly judged it as the most significant account of the southeastern tribes published in the eighteenth century. The moral judgments and ethnocentric assumptions that bias many of the early accounts of American Indians, Wilcomb E. Washburn has noted, do not necessarily nullify the ethnographic value of everything they reported. Adair’s History of the American Indians is a notable case in point.25 There is much sound philosophy in the observations of Turner and Heart regarding analogous artifacts and customs among groups widely separated by time and place, although they were by no means original. Their respective views are characteristic of the comparative method employed by historical writers and authors of travel accounts dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was part of the Fig. 5. (opposite) “A Drawing of Some Utensils, or Ornaments, Taken from an Old Indian Grave, at Cincinnati, County of Hamilton, and Territory of the United-States, North-West of the River Ohio, August 30, 1794.” Winthrop Sargent’s original drawings of articles recovered from a mound at Cincinnati on August 30, 1794, are in the Winthrop Sargent Papers at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus (the Ohio History Connection since May of 2014), mss 11, box 3, folder 11, Archives-Library Division. Engravings made from the drawings appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine (July 1795) and in the fourth volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1799). Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection.

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intellectual framework that shaped their enquiries into American antiquities. Neither Turner nor Heart would have disagreed, for example, with the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s thoughts on the uniformity and predictability of human nature as it applied to all aspects of human endeavor. Hume affirmed in Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748) that “it is universally acknowledged that there is a great Uniformity among the actions of Men, in all Nations and Ages, and that human Nature remains still the same in its Principles and Operations. The same Motives produce always the same Actions: the same Events follow from the same Causes.” Hume was probably also the authority for Benjamin Rush (writing anonymously as “A Pennsylvanian”) when he asserted in an anti-slavery pamphlet published at Philadelphia in 1773 that “Human Nature is the same in all Ages and Countries; and all differences we perceive in its characters in respect to Virtue and Vice, Knowledge and Ignorance, may be accounted [for] from Climate, Country, Degrees of Civilization, from Government, or other accidental causes.”26 Turner and Heart subscribed to that universal maxim, as did many of their contemporaries who shared their interest in human nature, behavior, and the comparative study of antiquities. Turner, indeed, is no less an interesting study than Heart and Sargent. His travels as a judge in the Northwest Territory, especially in the Illinois Country, gave him opportunity to make firsthand observations on natural history, American antiquities, and American Indians. He collected archaeological, ethnological, and natural history specimens during those travels, which he donated to the American Philosophical Society in February 1797. The materials included “A variety of very curious & interesting articles from different parts of the Western Country”—the Missouri, Upper Mississippi, and Tennessee Rivers mostly—“tending to throw some illustration on the Indian Antiquities of N. A.”27 Turner resigned his territorial judgeship during the winter of 1797–98 and returned to Philadelphia when he became one of the

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most active members of the American Philosophical Society. He was one of seven members on the society’s natural history committee, which included Thomas Jefferson, president of the American Philosophical Society; James Wilkinson, commander of the U.S. Army; Caspar Wistar, vice president; Adam Seybert, secretary; Charles Willson Peale of the Peale Museum; and committee chairman Jonathan Williams. The committee sought to promote the study of “the antiquity, changes, and present state” of the country as primary objects of research deserving particular attention. One of the chief aims of the committee was to procure one or more complete skeletons of the mammoth and the remains of other unknown animals that had been discovered in America or that might be in the future. The committee sought to acquire accurate plans, drawings, and descriptions of “ancient Fortifications, Tumuli, and other Indian works of art: ascertaining the materials composing them, their contents, the purposes for which they were probably designed, etc.” They encouraged enquiries into the customs, manners, languages, and migrations of the Indians nations, “ancient and modern,” and solicited communications to the society on these subjects from “every Lover of Science.” Acquiring the remains of animals from the Great Bone Lick on the Ohio was a stated desideratum, as was encouraging further study of the mounds: “the committee are desirous that cuts in various directions may be made into many of the Tumuli, to ascertain their contents.” The diameter and species of the largest trees growing upon the mounds should be identified and their annual growth rings counted in an effort to determine their antiquity. Toward that end, Turner submitted communications on the fossil remains of the mammoth and the contents of the mounds that appeared in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society in 1799 and 1802 respectively. He donated a bone-tipped arrow head to the cabinet of the society in the belief that such collections increased, as Turner said, “the knowledge of our country.” Turner took the charge of the committee seriously. He

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continued his research on American aborigines for many more years and eventually edited the two-volumes of his Traits of Indian Character, which were published in 1836.28 Like many Revolutionary War veterans Turner was an ardent cultural nationalist. He saw in the ancient remains on the Muskingum the novel aspect of an original American civilization whose age-old secrets had yet to be revealed. The idea of a lost American civilization held strong romantic and nationalistic appeal to those like Turner who were ready to incorporate the mounds into their own visions of American exceptionality and uniqueness. Archaeological remains under that view were works of monumental grandeur bespeaking an unknown past that could be invested with heroic attributes. Here once existed a people whose antiquity and achievements might well have rivaled those of Greece and Rome. The allure of such notions was positively irresistible in a new republic painfully self-conscious of its lack of historical associations comparable to those of the Old World. The mounds and other earthworks of the Western Country were subsumed or appropriated as part of an emerging national landscape and identity.29 Turner thought it unnecessary to derive the civilization represented by American antiquities from the Old World. It was original, ancient, and not imported from anywhere. Knowing that Sargent shared his interest in American antiquities, Turner expressed his sentiments on the subject in a letter to Sargent in June 1787. I am not one of those who implicitly believe that America was indebted to the Old World for its people. In the Course of innumerable ages, might not America have seen—and perhaps in Succession—the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Empire? Might she not have fostered the Arts and Sciences, while the now enlightened Parts of the Earth were covered with Barbarians? And may not the last period of her perfect Civilization be too remote in Antiquity

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for the most durable of her Monuments to have withstood the leveling Hand of Time? Perhaps the works at the Muskingum represented “the last efforts of [an] expiring Civilization.”30 The novel subject of American antiquities also received notice in Benjamin Smith Barton’s Observations on Some Parts of Natural History published at London in the fall of 1787.31 The youthful Barton intended the work to be the first of a four-part study but it was the only portion of the work ever published. He was then a second-year medical student at the University of Edinburgh who nurtured a serious interest in American aborigines and American antiquities alongside an equally ardent ambition to establish a scientific reputation—a motivation that in one of his later and more candid moments he freely confessed. The desire to make a name for himself drove him ever onward: “in everything which I have hitherto published, I have had reputation in view. If I have not acquired it, I have borne the disappointment with tranquil indifference.”32 Barton earned election to the Royal Medical Society at Edinburgh in December 1785, was the third junior president of the society in 1787–88, and became a member of the Edinburgh Natural History Society. He wrote two essays during his years at Edinburgh that are among the bound volumes of handwritten dissertations of the Royal Medical Society. The first of these treatises is a signed essay on “The Natural History of North American Indians” and the second is entitled “Of the American Albinos.”33 The front matter or “Advertisement” to Barton’s Observations on Some Parts of Natural History states that the work is “the production of a very young man” written as a recreational escape from “the laborious studies of medicine, during a bad state of health.” It is also a classic example of theorizing in advance of facts—a tendency in scholarship that Barton himself is on record as deploring—and the backpedaling and defensive posturing that often occurs as a consequence. Barton

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tentatively speculated in that work that groups of pre-Columbian Danes might have built the mounds and earthworks of the Western Country. “I am induced to think that the Danes have contributed to the peopling of america ; and that the toltecas , or whatever nation it may have been, that constructed the eminences and fortifications in that continent, were their descendants.” Barton did not attempt to determine the era in which the Danes migrated to the New World. “History, so far as I know, is silent on the subject.”34 An anonymous commentator in the Critical Review of London for October 1787 panned Barton for that conjecture. His critic, probably the Critical Review’s editor Tobias George Smollett, granted that the author’s subject was an important one but his treatment of it left much to be desired. “We have often alluded to some remains on the continent of America, of a more polished and cultivated people, when compared with the tribes which possessed it on its first discovery by Europeans. Mr. Barton has collected the scattered hints of Kalm, Carver, Filson, and some others, and has added a plan of a regular work, which has been discovered on the banks of the Muskingum, near its junction with the Ohio.” He found the descriptive aspects of the work more satisfactory than its theoretical bearings. “The author’s system is shortly this, that America was peopled from the north of Europe, probably by the Danes, who landed on the coast of Labrador, and gradually advanced to a more genial climate, leaving their temporary fortresses, and marks of their progress, till they reached Mexico, where we find similar structures.” Given the fact that similar artificial mounds existed in Ireland, however, it was by no means clear that the Danes or any other European nation for that matter had peopled America based on structural similarities or cognate customs. “Perhaps the author’s facts may be applied to different purposes.” If one had to fix the origin of the population in the western parts of America from somewhere in Europe, said the reviewer, the evidence seemed to favor southern Europe and not northeastern Europe. What that supposed evidence was Barton’s reviewer did not say.35 118

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Barton later claimed that his critique in the Critical Review “misrepresented” his views on the peopling of America. And it should be noted in fairness to Barton that he did state the opinion that while many theorists peopled the American continent from only one or a few sources, he believed otherwise: “it is more than probable [that] it has been peopled from a thousand sources.” And he had even “hinted” at another place that the Iroquois had migrated to America from northeastern Asia.36 The “facts” presented by Barton’s reviewer, moreover, were no less uncertain, misdirected, or conjectural than some of his own. Yet Barton remained sensitive over the issue and later found it necessary to explain his Toltecan-Danish hypothesis with “more perspicuity.” He believed that “the fortifications, and other artificial eminences in America, were constructed by the Toltecas, or some other American nation, and that the Danes were the ancestors of that nation. I had also imagined that the Danes had contributed to the peopling of America.” But he did not believe, nor did he ever say, that the American continent had been peopled solely from northern Europe, and only by the Danes. Yet Barton’s defensive explanation of his position hardly negates the criticism even if it somewhat deflected it.37 Barton’s Observations on Some Parts of Natural History also contains a notice of the ancient remains but recently discovered at the mouth of the Muskingum River. The origin of the engraved map of the Muskingum earthworks accompanying that account has been something of a mystery. It is either based on the survey of the site made Heart discussed above or that made by Sargent, assuming, of course, that Sargent’s map was not also based on Heart’s plan as it may well have been. Barton said only that he obtained the plan and description of the Muskingum works from William Tilton of Philadelphia.38 A further clue that it is based on the survey made by Heart is that Barton refers to the largest enclosure at the site as “the town,” which is the same phrase used to describe it in Heart’s account. Heart was the commandant at the fort in 1786 and it is likely that he either personally surveyed the site, or directed the survey, sometime that year. Sargent’s account of the Rediscovering the Mounds

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remains gives the year of their discovery as 1786, although the garrison at Fort Harmar may have detected their presence soon after their arrival in October 1785, without fully realizing the extent and design of the works until surveyed and platted by Heart. Such problems of attribution and dating are not uncommon to the period or unique to early archaeological accounts and site plans. The map and descriptive account by Heart that appeared in the Columbian Magazine for May 1787, for example, are both undated. The site plan in the possession of Parsons and copied by Stiles, however, bears the date “February 1786.” Sargent did not communicate his plan to the American Academy of Arts and Science at Boston until May 29, 1787, but whether Sargent made that plan himself, had it made for him by another officer at Fort Harmar, or based it entirely on the Heart survey cannot now be determined. Copies of maps and letters were customarily made and circulated among interested parties. The Heart survey map was probably not an exception. Chronology is crucial in identifying authorship and dating materials. But regrettably, as in this instance, it is not always possible given the fragmentary nature of surviving records. It thus appears that Barton obtained a copy of Heart’s plan through the good offices of Tilton in advance of its publication in the Columbian Magazine for May 1787. Thomas Seddon, William Spotswood, Charles Cist, and James Trenchard printed the Columbian Magazine at Philadelphia and were within Barton’s circle of acquaintances. Indeed, Barton contributed an engraving of the “Ohiopyle Falls” near the Youghiogheny River in southwestern Pennsylvania based on a sketch made by David Rittenhouse during the survey of the Ohio-Pennsylvania boundary in 1785, which appeared as the frontispiece for the Columbian Magazine in February 1787.39 If he did not himself know the editors and publishers of the Columbian Magazine personally in 1787, Barton undoubtedly knew someone like Tilton who did. An experienced engraver in Philadelphia and London could have turned the work

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around relatively quickly. How Tilton came by the map and when are unanswered questions. Barton’s silence in regard to those particulars is puzzling given the importance of the engraving to his account. There is no evidence that Barton surveyed the Muskingum works himself. Nor is it a claim he ever made himself. Yet notwithstanding Barton’s acknowledgment that it was Tilton who provided him with the site plan and description, Roger Kennedy has credited Barton with having made the survey of the Muskingum works during the OhioPennsylvania border survey of 1785, even though he offers no supporting evidence. The nineteen-year-old Barton did, in fact, assist his uncle David Rittenhouse on that survey. But the journal that Barton kept on the expedition does not indicate that the surveying party went to the mouth of the Muskingum River. The journal shows that he and his companions visited the Grave Creek mound on the Virginia shore of the Ohio in June 1785. Barton recorded the dimensions of the mound in the journal, which are based on measurements made at the time by his fellow traveler and surveyor Andrew Porter. That visit is also suggested in the account of the Grave Creek mound given by Barton in his Observations on Some Parts of Natural History. He did not, however, have his commonplace book with him in London where he wrote and published the account and could not then recollect Porter’s dimensions. Barton’s biographers Joseph Ewan and Nesta Dunn Ewan plausibly assert that Barton’s visit to the Grave Creek mound so fired his imagination that it was then and there that the idea of preparing an account on the subject of American antiquities first took form. But Grave Creek appears to have been as far south as Barton and the surveying party traveled. Afterward, he and his companions turned northward. If the aspiring and ever-striving Barton had surveyed the mounds and earthworks at the Muskingum in 1785 as Kennedy suggests, the world most certainly would have known it.40 Barton left Edinburgh during the winter of 1788 and returned to the United States in September 1789. He returned without a medical

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degree to show for his time and effort, although he received an honorary degree in medicine in August 1796 from the Christian Albrechts University at Kiel.41 Barton was sensitive about not completing his medical studies at Edinburgh and more than a little cryptic in the matter, but it did not prove a detriment to his career. He began a medical practice at Philadelphia in October 1789 and received appointment in 1790 as professor of botany at the College of Philadelphia where he began a long and distinguished career as a naturalist. He was still avidly interested in the subject of American antiquities and was desirous of bringing forward a work on the subject—an aspiration only partially fulfilled by his undigested and rather jejune Observations on Some Parts of Natural History. Barton stated his intention in December 1789 of publishing by subscription a historical and philosophical enquiry into the origin, character, and design of American antiquities, together with observations on the migrations, the population, the “genius,” the religions, and art of the ancient inhabitants of the American continents. The work was to be put to press as soon as the booksellers at Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and New Haven received subscriptions for three hundred copies. Barton intended to have the work distributed by December of 1790. He and his booksellers apparently never obtained the requisite number of subscriptions for the project was stillborn.42 Ten years later Barton still expressed the hope of completing the projected work, which would examine together “the physical and moral history of the aboriginal Americans.” Knowing his interest in the subject Barton’s friends often asked him when the composition would be finished. He never hesitated in explaining the reasons for its delay, as he did in a paper he read before the American Philosophical Society in May 1796 and published in the fourth volume of its Transactions in 1799. Tied down, by the necessities of life, to the practice of an anxious and an arduous profession; depending upon this profession for my daily bread and subsistence, it is obvious that I am not in 122

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possession of that leisure and of that freedom of mind, which are necessary even for the exact arrangement of those materials which my early enthusiasm, and my early labor put me in possession of. But I have not relinquished the idea of publishing this work. On the contrary, I am still assiduous in collecting new materials, and hope to publish the whole in two or three years. Having greatly extended my original plan, I cannot flatter myself with the prospect of submitting my labours to the public much sooner than the period just mentioned.43 Barton affectionately described his proposed physical and moral history of the American aborigines as “the favourite object of my earlier and my present days.” He hoped to demonstrate in that work the physical antiquity of the American continent, the remoteness or isolation of its earliest inhabitants, the parts of the globe from which it had been peopled, and the fewness of radically distinct Native languages as opposed to the bewildering number of dialects within those languages. Ever the cultural nationalist, he further aimed at vindicating “the intellectual character of the Americans” from the aspersions of Georges-Louis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon), Cornelius Franciscus de Pauw, Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, and William Robertson— authors who in his estimation neither understood the natural history and indigenous peoples of the New World about whom they wrote nor freed themselves from the theoretical systems that blinded them to their subject matters. While Barton addressed that prickly issue in his New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797, 2nd rev. ed. 1798) he was clearly contemplating taking up the complaint against those authorities in separate work, one in the same vein as his Observations on Some Parts of Natural History though more comprehensive in scope. “And although I shall not be able to shew that highly civilized nations had ever possessed the countries of America, previously to the discovery of Columbus, yet it will be easy to demonstrate, that these countries were formerly possessed by nations much farther Rediscovering the Mounds

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advanced in civilization, than the greater number of nations north of the empire of Mexico: by nations who must have been extremely numerous.”44 Nor did Barton suppose that the “more polished nations of America” had entirely passed away. While it was probable that some of those groups were no longer extant it was just as likely that the descendants of others still were. He supposed that it was “chiefly the strength and the glory” of those once-polished nations that had departed (i.e., their cultures) and not the peoples themselves. “Their descendants are still scattered over extensive portions of this continent, subsisting chiefly by fishing and by the chase; and contenting themselves with a slender and imperfect agriculture, such as is suited to the manners and the numbers of rude and uncultivated tribes.” He was convinced that an unbiased enquiry into the history of the American aborigines “cannot fail to discover unequivocal proofs of the ancient strength and respectability of the ancestors of many of the savage Indians tribes who now inhabit the countries of America.” He did not doubt that many of the North American tribes were “the descendants of nations much more populous, and much more polished, than themselves.” The present condition of the North American Indians he attributed to the cumulative effects of wars and pestilent diseases—disruptions causing those societies to split into numerous tribes and disperse from former locations.45 Given that interest it is surprising that Barton made but a single reference to American antiquities in his New Views, admittedly a work primarily concerned with historical linguistics as a means determining the likely origins, migrations, and affinities of the American tribes. His only mention of the subject came at the end of his discussion of what he perceived to have been the greater concentration of aboriginal population in the western part of the continent, evidenced in part by the large number of mounds found west of the Allegheny Mountains. It was a circumstance that seemed to imply to Barton the Asiatic origin of the American tribes. Early European travelers in the New World 124

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found the interior or western parts of the American continent more thickly settled than the eastern areas. Barton believed such testimony gave considerable weight to the theory that the Americans were of Asiatic origin, the more eastern tribes having arrived at their earliest known locations after slowly migrating from the West over an indeterminate period of time. It was an opinion, Barton noted, that the English antiquary Edward Brerewood—a member of the Old Society of Antiquaries and a former professor of astronomy at Grisham College in London—advanced as early as 1614 in his posthumously published Enquiries Touching the Diversities of Languages and Religions Through the Chief Parts of the World.46 The English traveler and writer Thomas Gage, perhaps influenced by Brerewood’s opinion, made the same observation in A New Survey of the West-Indies published in 1648 and reprinted in 1699. Archaeological evidence seemed to support that conjecture as well. The geographic distribution of the mounds and earthen enclosures, even as imperfectly as they were then known, led Barton to conclude that the mounds were “so many proofs of the higher degree of population of the western over the eastern part of North-America.” They were less numerous in the countries lying between the Atlantic seaboard and the Appalachian Mountains than they were in the region ranging west of the mountains to the Mississippi. The logic of that premise, however, led him to incorrectly hypothesize that those monuments would likely be found to be even more numerous west of the Mississippi.47 Mounds and earthworks were indeed constructed westward of the Mississippi, but are far more numerous eastward of that river. Yet that does not necessarily invalidate his conjecture that the interior parts of the continent, vaguely and relatively denominated as its western regions, were more populous at an earlier point in time. According to Barton the North American tribes were not only fewer in number than they had once been, but were also much less refined and cultured than they were two hundred years earlier when Europeans first became acquainted with them. “Declining in industry, they have Rediscovering the Mounds

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neglected, if not forgotten, some of the arts by which they were distinguished. . . . In short, we behold them rapidly passing to a melancholy decay, without being able, in many instances, to determine to what causes their declension is owing. Does not this known declension from a more respectable state of improvement, favour the opinion that, previously to our acquaintance with them, the Americans were both more numerous and cultivated than they have been at any subsequent period? For it is certain that we have not been the sole instruments concerned in their decline, and fall.” Barton saw evidence of that deterioration in the ethnographic accounts of several early writers. Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775) contained a great number of facts attesting to “the corruption and alteration” of religious ideas and practices among the Cherokee, Muskogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Catawba from those possessed by their ancestors, which, by extension, had doubtless occurred among other tribes as well. Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix reported in 1721 that the considerable decrease in numbers among the aboriginal inhabitants of the lower Mississippi Valley (“Louisiana”) had been even more sudden than among the Native peoples of Canada. Charlevoix found it impossible to assign the true reason for the phenomena but noted that “whole nations have entirely disappeared with the space of forty years at most; and those who still remain, are no more than the shadow of what they were, when M. De Sale discovered this country.” Just as wars and the spread of diseases accounted for the declining populations and dispersals of many North American tribes, analogous disorders had doubtless occurred before those Native groups had first become known to Europeans.48 Barton’s evidence was slim but his reasoning sound. Nor is it incompatible with the findings of later scholars who have made the case for the decline in Native population due to environmental and cultural changes that in some instances predated the arrival of Europeans and were greatly accelerated after first contact with Europeans. The combined effects of pandemic diseases contracted from Europeans, years of intertribal wars, and conflicts with Europeans 126

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(as both enemies and allies in European geopolitical contests for empire) altered traditional societies and created a different cultural landscape.49 Nor did Barton solely rely on ethnographic accounts to make his case that groups of American aborigines had once lived in a more refined state. Archaeological evidence led him to the same conclusion. He did not doubt that the articles recovered from the mound at Cincinnati and described by Sargent were made by an aboriginal people “more polished” than those of later date. We would today say that the mounds and their contents were made by prehistoric Native Americans who possessed different cultures than that of their historic descendants. We eschew Barton’s implicit supposition that the prehistoric ancestors of the North American tribes had been more advanced than those first known to Europeans in the sixteenth century since it denigrates the latter and implies that historic groups were not capable of constructing mounds—an unwarranted assumption given the fact that mound building continued among some groups into the early historic era. Yet Barton’s imperfectly delineated distinction regarding cultural differences between earlier and later groups of American Indians has meaning nonetheless, even though the comparison was more or less invidious. Native societies and cultures had been greatly altered after contact with Europeans and there is archaeological and historical evidence indicating that population decline and abandonment of settlements occurred to a certain degree even in advance of their arrivals. Barton perceived that, however imperfectly. His contributions to archaeology and ethnology are uneven in quality but not, as in this instance, without interest. The degree to which his contemporaries deferred to his opinions, or at least yielded to the self-assurance with which he wielded them, was unrivaled. Barton’s influence, indeed, continued well after his death in 1815. His time-bound anthropology is seldom if ever cited today but his interests and activities are still of interest to historians and will remain so. Other of Barton’s contemporaries also contributed to the early discourse on the mounds—sometimes to good purpose and other times Rediscovering the Mounds

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not. As noted above, the Congregational clergyman, scholar, and Yale College president Ezra Stiles wrote to Benjamin Franklin at some point during the winter of 1786 to solicit his views about the “fortifications” recently discovered in Kentucky and at the Muskingum as described by Parsons and other travelers. Franklin offered no definitive explanations as to when those remains might have been erected and by whom, but did hazard the opinion that they might have been built as defensive works during the expedition of De Soto of 1539–43. The attorney, Federalist editor, and future American lexicographer Noah Webster nevertheless ardently pursued that hypothesis in a series of letters to Stiles written between October 22, 1787, and July 4, 1788. The Webster-Stiles correspondence appeared in Webster’s American Magazine between December 1787 and July 1788, in which Webster labored to show that De Soto might have erected the works at the Muskingum and elsewhere in the Western Country as Franklin had tentatively suggested, whereas the more cautious Stiles thought the probability unlikely. Webster and Stiles were no strangers. Webster was in the first class of pupils whom Stiles taught at the beginning of his presidency at Yale in 1778 and they remained on cordial terms thereafter. The letters exchanged by Webster and Stiles generated considerable discussion at the time. The correspondence has often been noted yet remains largely unexamined. It deserves more attention than it has received not because of the correctness of the views expressed there—quite the contrary in regard to the conjectures of Webster—but because of the divergence of opinion it frames among two of the most learned commentators of their generation. Some of the unresolved issues mentioned in their exchanges moved forward in time while others were unceremoniously and appropriately left behind.50 Webster’s precipitousness in the matter was truly astonishing given how little was known about the subject. Acting upon Franklin’s hint Webster launched an enquiry into whether the construction of the ancient remains at the Muskingum could be attributed to De Soto. 128

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Webster began his enquiry into the De Soto expedition by consulting William Robert’s An Account of the First Discovery, and Natural History of Florida (1763). Yet he found it difficult to determine from Robert’s narrative how far De Soto’s army penetrated into the interior and at what particular places it encamped over the four winters of the expedition. The courses traveled and the distances between places were not always given, and the dates of certain events “wholly irreconcilable.” Yet the problematic nature of the account did not deter Webster from offering up his conjectures as to the probability of the De Soto theory. It is in Webster’s second and third letters to Stiles that he states his conclusions. “The result of my enquiries is, a strong persuasion in my own mind, that that the fortifications remaining in the Western Country, were erected by the Commander.” He realized that there were many objections that had to be overcome regarding that theory, yet at least for the moment he was favorably disposed to entertain the idea as a distinct probability. Webster elaborated the opinion in his third letter to Stiles that De Soto’s army raised many of the “breastworks” or forts that could still be traced in the Carolinas, in Georgia, and along the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries. “Nor do I have any doubt that the old forts discovered by M. Carver [on the upper Mississippi in present-day Minnesota] may be ascribed to the same expedition.” It was evident to Webster that De Soto had advanced north of the Missouri where he remained forty days, probably on the Mississippi or the St. Pierre River. Webster again conceded the hypothetical and problematic nature of the discussion and understood the objections that could be raised against it. Whether all the remains discovered in the western regions could be rationally attributed to De Soto was a doubtful proposition. The extent of the works at the Muskingum described and figured by Heart posed one such “forcible objection.” Even so Webster still thought it likely that at least some of the earthen enclosures in the Mississippi Valley had been constructed by De Soto. His position is as interesting as it is untenable. “That the natives of Rediscovering the Mounds

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this country did sometimes throw up breast works of earth is a fact.” De Soto himself, Webster noted, observed several of them in the course of his marches and encampments. But the unidentified Portuguese chronicler of the expedition described the Native defenses only as lines of palisades and never once mentioned embankments of earth or stone, or an entrenchment.51 Webster reasoned thus: the existence of palisaded villages among the tribes encountered by De Soto did not necessarily explain the origin of burial mounds and cemeteries or account for their contents. Burial mounds sometimes indicated the custom of burning the dead or their bones—a practice that could not be credited to the Spaniards. The origin of the mounds and burying places could only be attributed to the Indians. “That these mounts and graves are the works of the native Indians is very evident; for such small mounts are scattered over the every part of North America.” Webster attributed the origin of those burials to the practice of collecting, at certain times, all the bones of the deceased and reburying them in a common grave. “We fairly conclude that the mounts at the Muskingum are the work of the native Indians.” Notwithstanding that sober observation Webster then made a novel not to say contradictory distinction. While the mounds in every part of North America were “the cemeteries of the native Indians” (not excluding those at the Muskingum) yet the “original construction, or the improvement of the walls of earth, must be ascribed to Ferdinand and his body of Spaniards.” That conclusion, he admitted, was not as well founded and required more proof than was then available. Yet he still thought the theory worthy of consideration. Webster was wedded to the idea that the design of the earthen embankments evidenced knowledge of formal military engineering or science on a European model.52 Webster thought the De Soto proposition to be a plausible conjecture. It appeared to be far less so to his correspondent Stiles. Notwithstanding what Stiles respectfully praised as Webster’s ingenious and learned disquisition on the subject, he was not satisfied with either 130

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his evidence or reasoning. The subject needed to be investigated more thoroughly than existing evidence permitted. He doubted that De Soto had reached either the sources of the Mississippi or Lake Pepin in the forty-fourth degree of latitude. And there was also the question of whether an army the size of De Soto’s, even one that encamped during the winter months and possibly had the voluntary or forced assistance of Indians, could have erected works as extensive as those on the Altamaha River in Georgia, at Lexington, Kentucky, and those at the Muskingum, the Scioto, and at Lake Pepin. Stiles saw no reasons for not assigning the numerous cemeteries in the Western Country to the same people who erected the supposed fortifications in question. Time and further exploration of the interior of the continent alone could adequately answer the question. “When we have found all the works and their drawings [made], a better judgment may be made.”53 Meanwhile, Stiles suggested an alternative hypothesis for explaining the origin and purpose of the mounds. It might be more profitable to enquire as to whether the imposing remains in the Western Country were the vestiges of temples or places of sacrificial worship rather places of defense erected during the four years of De Soto’s wanderings. “Perhaps the supposed fortifications may be the reliques of the ancient Indian temples—decayed into ruins after sundry ages of national diminution and depopulation. . . . We can trace back nothing in this country, no monuments either of inhabitants or arts beyond 5 or 600 years ago: Unless in the simularity of its mythology with that of Asia in general, . . . all these I say the Indians universally throughout all America abound with. This carries them back to very distant antiquity.” A full investigation of all American languages might establish an affinity with those spoken in northeastern Asia, a correspondence that might validate the idea of their having migrated here from Asia. The antiquity of American aborigines and their origin was an open-ended question yet one that Stiles directly linked to the problem of determining the origin, antiquity, and purposes of the mounds. Affinities in ancient religious beliefs, mythologies, and languages might provide better Rediscovering the Mounds

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clues for answering the leading questions relating to American antiquities than an unsupported theory that attributed the remains at the Muskingum to the military expedition of De Soto.54 The coup de grâce to the De Soto supposition came from the pen of Jeremy Belknap in the Columbian Magazine for September 1788.55 Belknap’s assessment is based upon the account of the De Soto expedition given in the fourth volume of Samuel Purchas’s compilation of documents relating to the history of exploration and travel Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, published at London in 1625. Purchas’s Pilgrimes contains an abridged translation of the original Spanish journal written by “a Portugal of the company” and a survivor of the expedition. Belknap compared that account with the history of the De Soto’s travels written by Fernando de Herrera, but found the account of the journal translated and published by Purchas to be more detailed and useful. Belknap concluded that the circumstances and details of De Soto’s marches did not agree with the notion of his army building such extensive earthworks as those at the Muskingum and elsewhere in the interior of the country. He further pronounced that De Soto traveled no further north than the thirty-fifth degree of latitude, which put him southeast of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. The earthworks found in the interior were too extensive and dispersed to have been built by De Soto’s army (that was Heart’s opinion as well), even though the adventurous commander traveled considerable distances and encamped his army over the course four winters—no mean achievement. Yet the works in question would have required a greater length of time to construct than De Soto ever spent at one place during the four years of his expedition. Belknap was certain that the architects of the mounds would have to be sought elsewhere. “Whether they were constructed by that race of Indians who were in possession of the country, at the time of the first arrival of the Europeans in America, is another question.” He did not take up that enquiry himself but admitted it into discussion as a distinct possibility, and certainly one more easily accounted for than identifying De Soto’s 132

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Spaniards or any other Europeans as the authors of the mounds. “In the account of Soto’s expedition we find mention made of many ‘large walled towns’ inhabited by the Indians, and there is a description of one which may serve as a model for the rest. It was at Ullibabali, or as it is now called Alibama, a branch of the Mobille.”56 Webster finally disavowed the De Soto theory in view of the dissenting opinions of Stiles and Belknap, particularly the latter. “It is now very clear that my opinion was not well founded.” He had supposed that the word Chicaca to be a reference to the Muskingum River. But the word should have been written with the cedilla ç—formerly used in Spanish and pronounced as an “s.” “Chicaça,” which is how it appeared in the original Spanish account of the expedition, is pronounced “Chicasaw.” “This determines the place of Soto’s winter quarters, the second year after landing, to be in the territories of the Chickesaws.” Not surprisingly, Webster did not think his letters to Stiles were worth republishing as a whole in his Collection of Essays and Fugitiv[e] Writings (1790). He only reprinted an extract from his third letter to Stiles comparing the burial customs of the American aborigines with those of the ancient Britons. These were nothing more than conjectures on the peopling of the American continent based on analogies in archaeological remains in the United States and Britain. Webster, however, thought them worthy of preservation in his Essays.57 The Webster-Stiles correspondence is equally revealing regarding the well-traveled theory of a Welsh presence in the New World. Webster knew that Stiles was receptive to the idea that the legend of the Welsh prince Madoc might well be true and that it was possible that the earthworks at the Muskingum had been erected by Madoc’s fabled colony. While there was no direct evidence of a Welsh colony in America there might be “collateral evidence” by way of analogy indicating that the story of Madoc was not entirely imaginary. “There is such a surprising affinity between the Indian mounts and the barrows or cemeteries which are remaining in England, but particularly in Wales and Anglesey, the last retreats of the original Britons, that we can hardly resolve it Rediscovering the Mounds

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into a common principle of analogy that subsists between nations in the same stage of society.” Nor did Webster stop there. He attempted, based upon biblical assumptions of a common origin for all of humanity, to derive the original inhabitants of America and those of Britain from a common stock “long since the age of the first parent.” He did not think that America had been peopled as late as the twelfth century (the supposed time of Madoc’s migration to America) but supposed instead that America received its first people “two or three thousand years” earlier. Even so, that did not preclude the possibility that thousands of years later other colonizers may have crossed the Atlantic bringing with them knowledge of the Roman art of fortification.58 Webster developed what he saw as “striking” analogies between the Indian mounds and barrows of England and Wales—resemblances he considered to be “positive proofs” of a former connection. He drew his examples from Henry Rowlands’s Mona Antiqua Restaurata. An Archaeological Discourse on the Antiquities, Natural and Historical, of the Isle of Anglesey, the Ancient Seat of the British Druids (1723, 2nd rev. ed. 1766) and the two volumes of William Camden’s Britannia: Or, A Chorographical Description of Britain and Ireland Together with the Adjacent Islands (1595). Translated from the original Latin into English in 1610, Camden’s Britannia appeared in subsequent English editions throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Archaeological remains on the island of Anglesey off Wales, at Stonehenge in the county of Wiltshire, and at Pembrokeshire in Wales, said Webster, invited comparison to the American mounds described in the respective accounts of Jefferson and Heart. The manner of constructing the barrows of England and those of America, together with the purposes they served, presented similarities “rarely to be traced in works of such consequence, among nations whose intercourse ceased at Babel—an analogy that we could hardly supposed would exist among nations descended from different stocks.” Analogy alone, Webster granted, did not establish “the direct descent of the Indians from the ancient Britons.” But given the assumptions of his ethnology it was 134

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not beyond the realm of possibility that they could have passed from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Greenland, and from there to Labrador, whereby “the North-American savages may claim a common origin with the primitive Britons and Celts.”59 Amidst persistent tales of Welsh-speaking Indians some inventive theorists also affixed or transferred the tale of Madoc as a possible explanation for the origin of the mounds, not believing North American Indians capable of erecting them. The genealogy of the idea in Anglo-American thought is significant, indeed essential, for understanding its remarkable longevity. The English merchant and adventurer George Peckham advanced England’s commercial and maritime interests in A True Reporte, of the Late Discoveries and Possession taken . . . of the Newfound-Landes (1583). Peckham resurrected the tradition of Madoc in service of English mercantilism and establishing the Crown’s right of title in the New World. The Anglican clergyman, geographer, and Welsh historian David Powel (ca. 1549–98) further promoted the legend of Madoc in his Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales (1584). According to Welsh tradition Madog ab Owain Gwynedd (1150–80?) and his wayfaring shipmates encountered the American continent in or about 1170. Powel did not question the legend’s authenticity; nor that of the Welsh mathematician, astronomer, and antiquary John Dee who embraced the tradition as a means of affirming Welsh identity. That same year Richard Hakluyt used the story of Madoc to justify English expansion into New Spain in his Discourse on Western Planting (1584). Sir Thomas Herbert’s travelogue A Description of the Persian Monarchy Now Beinge: The Orientall Indyes Iles and Other Parts of Greater Asia and Africk (1634) also included speculations about the Welsh prince Madoc’s presumed discovery and colonization of America. All of those assertions, imperial cant writ large, served overtly political and commercial ends concerning the planting of English plantations or settlements in North America and England’s desire for dominion at the expense of Spain and France. The Madoc myth became a trope within the rhetoric of British colonialism. Rediscovering the Mounds

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The idea of a Welsh colony in America was also part and parcel of the cultural baggage of Cotton Mather (1663–1728), the learned ecclesiastical historian of New England. Mather vaguely appealed to the Welsh tradition, even though he did not mention Madoc by name, in a sermon delivered in 1689. A remarkable passage of The Way to Prosperity—a sermon delivered to the governor, council, and representatives of the Colony of Massachusetts on May 23, 1689—attempts to further establish an ancient Briton or English claim to the New World: “and as we know that England afforded the first Discoverers of America in these latter Ages, whatever the Spaniards may pretend unto the Contrary, it may be proved that both Britains [i.e., Britons] and Saxons, did inhabit here, at least Three or Four hundred years before Columbus was born into the world, of which the Annals themselves of those times do plainly enough Declare.” Mather again appealed to the ancient authority of the “Annals” in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), where he reiterated England’s specious claim to the right of discovery and original title in North America. “Whatever Truth may be in that Assertion of one who writes, If we may credit any Records besides the Scriptures, I know it might be said and proved well, that this New World was known, and partly Inhabited by Britains, or by Saxons from England, Three or Four Hundred Years before the Spaniards coming hither; which Assertion is Demonstrated by the Discourses between the Mexicans and the Spaniards at their first Arrival; and the Popish Reliques, as well as British Terms and Words, which the Spaniards then found among the Mexicans, as well as from undoubted Passages, not only in other Authors, but even in the British Annals also.”60 The Madoc legend is instructive of how traditions are often engrafted into the construction of cultural identities and the promotion of political agendas in the absence of creditable evidence of their authenticity. The lore about Madoc was part of Mather’s “British Annals” regardless of its lack of credibility. The Celtic-speaking Welsh were Britons and natives of England and that was all that Mather needed to advance

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England’s fictitious right of discovery or original title in the New World and the interests of New England. Indeed, the more remote and obscure the fable the better. Such is the nature and efficacy of origin myths: the more ancient the claim the more difficult to disprove. It required a claim of equal or greater antiquity to counter it. Appeals to antiquity served purpose for those seeking the sanction of the past for concerns of the present. Invocations of an ancient, mythic past in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries performed a social or utilitarian function as Mather’s avowals readily attest. Myths exist alongside of facts in the sometimes hazy realm of collective memory.61 The Welsh hypothesis continued to have legs based upon supposed similarities between certain works in the Celtic and American Indian languages—the apparently analogous “British Terms and Words” alluded to by Mather in Magnalia Christi Americana. Captain Isaac Stuart of South Carolina, for example, further promoted the idea of Welsh-speaking Indians in the bizarre and hardly credible account of his captivity by the Indians from circa 1764 to 1766. Stuart’s narrative appeared in the Columbian Magazine for March 1787, where he recounts his alleged encounter with “a nation of Indians remarkably white,” whose hair was mostly reddish in color. His Welsh traveling companion, himself also a recent captive, determined to remain with the unidentified tribe since he purportedly understood their language, which Stuart said differed but little from Welsh.62 Nor did the tale stop there. John Williams continued to perpetuate the legend of Madoc in two pamphlets published at London in 1791 and 1792 and the fable resurfaced in the third volume of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society for 1794 in an account of the western “fortifications” extracted from the journal of a soldier in the army of Arthur St. Clair. Unnamed persons had informed the author that the Welsh had built the mounds. The notion of Welsh Indians continued to be seriously entertained among some ethnological observers at least until the midnineteenth century. George Catlin, for example, identified the Mandan

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as a Welsh-speaking people and tried to prove his theory in an appendix to the second volume of his Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians (1844).63 When the Webster-Stiles debate came to the attention of George Rogers Clark he drafted a response intended for Mathew Carey’s American Museum, published at Philadelphia between 1787 and 1792. Either Clark never sent the letter as intended or for some reason Carey decided against publishing it, although the latter possibility seems extremely unlikely. Given Clark’s national stature as a military hero of the American Revolution, his firsthand knowledge of western geography, Indian customs, and American antiquities, his opinion would have carried some weight with Carey or any other periodical editor of the day. The assumption made here is that Clark never got around to sending Carey the letter. After Clark’s death in 1818 the manuscript came into the possession of Lyman Copeland Draper of Wisconsin, an inveterate collector of original documents relating to the Indian Wars and early settlement of the West. Draper shared the Clark manuscript with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft who published it in the fourth volume of his Indian Tribes of the United States (1856). Clark’s observations on the origin of the mounds and the credibility of Indian traditions concerning them are worth recalling. Clark was quite familiar with the earthworks he examined at the mouth of the Ohio River (Cairo, Illinois) in the spring of 1780, and even more familiar with those along the fertile margin of the Mississippi at the mouth of the Kaskaskia River. He saw no need to attribute those remains to anyone other than the ancestors of the Indian peoples who lived, or at one time had lived, within the same localities. The idea that De Soto had marched from Florida to Lexington, Kentucky, thence to the mouth of the Muskingum, and at length crossed the Missouri erecting fortifications every step of the way struck Clark as an absurdity. “So great a stranger to the western country as Mr. Webster appears to be, ought to have informed himself better before he ventured to palm his conjectures on the world.” Certain 138

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Indian traditions known to Clark gave what he believed were credible accounts of those remains. “They [probably the Kaskaskia] say they were the works of their forefathers; that they were [once] as numerous as the trees in the wood; that they affronted the Great Spirit, and he made them kill one another.” The Kaskaskia chief Jean Baptiste Ducoigne informed Clark that his ancestors erected the large works found along on the Mississippi near the Kaskaskia River at a time “when they covered the whole [country] and had large towns; that all those works we saw there were fortifications around the town, which must have been very considerable.” The smaller earthworks found within the larger ones marked the locations of “palaces” (i.e., temples or houses of lesser chiefs) and atop the large, truncated mound or “small mountain” (the Great Cahokia Mound) sat the house of the great chief who was protected by all. Clark was no stranger to those sites. One day he led a small party to reconnoiter the mounds to see if they could find evidence of the large population said to have once lived there. They easily traced the outline of a town for upward of five miles on the plain below the town of Cahokia. “There could be no deception here, because the remains of ancient works were thick—the whole were mounds, &c. Nature never formed a more beautiful [scene] than this.” Most of the community appeared to have occupied that part of the site nearest the river but a little back from it. At the center of a strip of low land standing between the river and town stood a large mound shaped like a sugarloaf. It seemed obvious to Clark that “an idol or a temple” once stood upon the leveled or cut terrace of the mound. “I think the world is to blame to express such great anxiety to know who it was that built those numerous and formidable works, and what hath become of that people. They will find them in the Kaskaskia, Peorias, Kahokias, Piankashaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and such old nations, who say they grew out of the ground where they now live. . . . This is their tradition, and I see no good reason why it should not be received as good history—at least as good as a great part of ours.” The Indian nations living in the Rediscovering the Mounds

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vicinity of the mounds were greatly altered peoples. At what time “this great revolution” occurred among the tribes he could not say, but he did not doubt that such a transformation had taken place. “But I am convinced that it was anterior to five hundred years, and I don’t think it difficult to make a tolerably satisfactory conjecture of the time, at least, within a few ages. It may appear strange how it should be possible to discover this, but so it is.”64 Nor were Ducoigne and Clark wrong in maintaining that the aboriginal population of the region had once been much larger and towns more densely settled. Dramatic demographic changes—Clark’s “great revolution”—are not illusory constructs. Informed observers like Ducoigne, Clark, and Barton perceived that the main bodies of contemporary tribes had once been more populous and that their ways of life had been greatly altered. The noticeable contrast between the number of Indians present in eastern North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the number and geographic range of the mounds and earthworks, begged the question as to how that disparity might be explained. That the ancestors of North American Indians differed from their descendants, were more “polished” to use Barton’s term of preference, was a reasonable inference drawn from the assumption of population decline and disruptions caused by the impact of epidemic diseases and warfare, with pestilence in Barton’s estimation being the most important cause. Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence then available, Barton and Clark could hardly be expected to have surmised more. The astuteness of their hypotheses, at least in regard to demographic upheavals and cultural disruptions in prehistory, has been more or less borne out by the archaeological and historical records. Their discernment in the matter was something more than intuition; something less than certitude. Perhaps their remarks should be characterized as faith in strongly held convictions on both their parts rather than hard science. But if so their positions were essentially correct albeit nebulous, as Clark himself acknowledged.

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The numbers game of historical demographics is a fascinating though often controversial field of enquiry. Projections and models for calculating baseline population referents and the “depopulation ratio” are still based on sets of speculative assumptions regarding the size of prehistoric populations within various regions of the New World. It is an imperfect science from the perspective of its critics; an invaluable one from that of its proponents. Yet few would deny that it has greatly advanced our understanding of the social dynamics at work among indigenous peoples, both prehistoric and historic. The controversy is not whether such epidemics occurred but rather what order of magnitude is assigned to the size of aboriginal populations before 1492 (baseline references), how devastating were the losses (depopulation ratio), and whether the impact of disease spread uniformly or varied by region and within regions.65 Nor has the discourse been all about change and no continuity between prehistoric and historic groups of North American Indians. But the gravity of accumulated change, some gradual and some rapid, is nonetheless a keynote in the long reach of aboriginal history throughout the Western Hemisphere. Native Americans have never been frozen in time even though they have often been perceived in precisely that manner—a conceptual problem not only of some importance in the archaeological thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but one that remains firmly entrenched in contemporary popular culture. But even during the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries there were notable exceptions as instanced in the views of Barton and Clark. It is not necessary that all of their opinions be correct in order for some to ring true. It was not then, and is not now, an all-or-nothing proposition. Robert C. Dunnell critically commented in 1991, at the height of the new surge of scholarship on demographic collapse, that much of the discussion was ahistorical. The tendency among some archaeologists to treat the idea of catastrophic demographic collapse and the abandonment of traditional homelands among Native peoples

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“as if it were news” betrayed a chronic lack of historical perspective. It was more the “rediscovery” and amplification of an old idea based upon the systematic garnering and reanalysis of a significant amount of new and compelling archaeological and ethnographic evidence. It is another example of acute historical amnesia. The basic idea had a much longer incubation as Ducoigne, Clark, and Barton remind us.66 New impetus to the discussion of American antiquities followed the establishment of a permanent American settlement by the Ohio Company of Associates at the mouth of the Muskingum on April 7, 1788. Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tupper, Samuel Holden Parsons, and the Reverend Manasseh Cutler—a group of New England veterans of the Revolutionary War—established the Ohio Company of Associates as joint-stock company at Boston’s Bunch-of-Grapes Tavern in March 1786. Cutler and Winthrop Sargent, the secretary of the Ohio Company, successfully negotiated a contract with Congress for the purchase of 1.5 million acres of public lands northwest of the Ohio River in October 1787. The Ohio Company originally called the settlement Adelphi (“Brethren”) but on July 2, 1788, officially adopted the name Marietta (a contraction of Marie Antoinette) in recognition and appreciation of French aid to the Continental Army during the American Revolution under the Franco-American Alliance of 1778. The directors of the Ohio Company also named Marietta’s Marie Antoinette Square in her honor.67 Several members of the Ohio Company belonged to the Society of Cincinnati—a mutual aid and fraternal organization formed by officers of the Continental Army at Newberg, New York, in May 1783, just as the army was about to disband. The directors of the Ohio Company named the streets after prominent members of the society, which in their eyes symbolically added republican virtue and élan to the settlement by making the proper associations and classical allusions. Like the legendary Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus of the ancient Roman republic they would beat their swords into plowshares at the Muskingum. Cincinnati, Ohio, also traces its name to the Society of Cincinnati. John Cleves Symmes and his fellow investors in the Miami 142

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Company established Losantiville on the north shore of the Ohio River opposite the mouth of the Licking River in December 1788, but territorial governor Arthur St. Clair, himself a member of the Society of Cincinnati, renamed the settlement Cincinnati in 1790. Cutler—one of the founders and directors of the Ohio Company of Associates, an accomplished botanist, and a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1785—conducted his own investigation of the Marietta earthworks in September 1788. As a man of science, Cutler was intensely interested in the ancient remains at the Muskingum. He was with the party of investigators that measured the earthworks on September 6, 1788. Putnam, the superintendent of the Ohio Company, either made or directed the survey.68 The party cut down the largest and oldest trees growing upon the embankments in order to count their annual growth rings. Cutler used a magnifying glass in counting the concentric circles and calculated that a poplar or tulip tree felled on the embankment north of the Sacra Via was between 441 and 445 years of age. “Attributing the age of the present growth [of trees] to be about 450 years, and that it had been preceded by one of equal size and age, which as probably or otherwise was not the first, the works have been deserted more than 900 years. If they were occupied one hundred years, they were erected more than a thousand years ago.”69 The age of the trees growing upon the Marietta earthworks established beyond the shadow of doubt “that those works were of a much earlier date than the discovery of America by Columbus, which may be put an end to the dispute about Fernando de Soto.” Cutler initially disagreed with “the new hypothesis” that the ancient works were designed for religious and not for military purposes—a theory he thought had originated with Barton, although Stiles is on record as entertaining that opinion in his correspondence with Webster. Even though the army officers at the Muskingum had reportedly also adopted the new theory, Cutler was not yet convinced. A decade later he modified his opinion. He still considered the embankments at Marietta to be defensive structures and the large mounds located Rediscovering the Mounds

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within them religious structures. Further reflection in the matter made it difficult for him to imagine how the large, truncated-pyramidal mounds within the great square at Marietta could have been designed for anything other than religious purposes. There the ancient people had built their temples, worshiped their idols, and made their sacrifices.70 Cutler also noted that an opening made at the summit of the Conus mound revealed the bones of an adult, who had been buried in a horizontal position and covered with a flat stone. Beneath the skeleton small thin stones were arranged at different distances. “That this venerable monument might not be defaced, the opening was closed without further search.” Cutler speculated that the clusters of small vertical stones within the burial might contain the skulls of human sacrifices like the charnel houses of Mexico, or the mound might have been “a general repository for the dead, collected in the manner described by Lafitau and other early travelers among the Indians.”71 The human remains found in the charnel houses at the base of the mounds were associated with funerary rites but were not places of human sacrifice as Cutler, and many observers after him, speculated. His observation that the mounds might be places where the bones of ancestors were periodically gathered and reburied in the so-called Festival of the Dead, as described by the Jesuit missionary Joseph Francois Lafitau among the Iroquois, was an informed and astute observation. Mounds were built for different reasons but at least some of those constructed by the Iroquois and their ancestors are attributable to that custom. And by extension the practice no doubt accounts for some of the mounds built by other Native groups as well. Comparing the form and situation of the Marietta earthworks with the places of aboriginal worship in Mexico, Cutler found a great similarity. The Mexican tribes erected their temples on natural or artificial elevations with gradual ascents similar to those on the Muskingum. Cutler further reasoned that

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if the Mexican tribes, agreeably to their historic paintings and traditions, came from the northward, and some of them in their migrations went far to the eastward, it is not improbable that either some of those tribes, or others similar to them in their customs and manners, and who practiced the same religious rites, were the constructors of those works [at the Muskingum]. The present natives bear a general resemblance, in their complexion, form, and size to the ancient Mexicans. Though their rites and ceremonies differ, they profess the general principles of the Mexican religion; believing in the Great Spirit, good and evil genii, and a state of existence after death. . . . When it is considered how long it must have been since these works were erected, how generally the practice of offering human sacrifices anciently prevailed among all the tribes from Louisiana to the western ocean; . . . will it not strengthen the probability that human sacrifices were among the religious rites of the ancient possessors of this ground?72 Cutler’s connection between the Mound Builders of Ohio and the ancient Mexicans was a long-lived construct. It would later have many adherents. The ancient works at the Muskingum laid full claim to Cutler’s historical and scientific curiosity. He did not doubt that the origins of the mounds were connected with the origin of the American aborigines, although he was uncertain as to the source of their migration to the New World. He consulted the pages of history in search of clues that might explain the origin and purpose of the mounds. He asked Jeremy Belknap if he knew of any accounts describing the ancient method of burying the dead in the eastern regions of Asia, and whether mounds were known to exist in that part of the world. He specifically wanted information about the manners and customs of the people bordering on the straits between Asia and America. He also made similar enquiries about the mounds of Denmark and Norway and

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gathered information about those in Ireland and Scotland. Belknap suggested that Cutler commence his investigations at home before venturing further afield. He drew Cutler’s attention to Jefferson’s account of his opening of a mound in his Notes on the State of Virginia and to the Reverend Samuel Kirkland’s 1788 account of a Seneca tradition regarding similar earthworks in western New York. Cutler himself, said Belknap, would be the best judge as to how those remains compared to those investigated by himself at the mouth of the Muskingum River. Belknap’s referral of Cutler to the account of the missionary Kirkland was sound advice. Kirkland spent much of the summer of 1788 on a tour among the western tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, which took him as far as Buffalo Creek. The journal he kept during those travels describes a mound and two earthen embankments at the former site of a fortified village located about thirty-six miles west of the Genesee River. The Seneca knew the site as Tegatainasghque, which Kirkland translated as “a double-fortified town, or a town with a fort at each end.” Near the earthwork at the north end of the town stood “a funeral pile” or mound. “The earth is raised about six feet above the common surface, and betwixt twenty and thirty feet in diameter.” The best information Kirkland could obtain from his unnamed Seneca informants was that their ancestors constructed the mound previous to the Seneca joining the confederacy and at a time when they were at war with the Mississaugas (an Anishinaabe-speaking people closely related to the Ojibwa) and other tribes living around the Great Lakes. “This must have been near three hundred years ago,” Kirkland surmised, “if not more, by many concurring accounts, which I have obtained from different Indians of several different tribes.” Which Indians provided Kirkland with that corroborative information other than the Seneca he did not say, but so far as such estimates go it was an informed one. The Seneca tradition relating to the mounds and earthworks visited by Kirkland in western New York is the only one (among the Seneca at least) that has come down to us. There might well have been others that either substantiated the tradition or contradicted it either in whole 146

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or part. Nor do we know how much interpolation or literalism there is in Kirkland’s account of the tradition. But regardless of how accurate the tradition is or is not (both as it was related to Kirkland by his Seneca informants and as he understood and recorded it in his journal) there is no good reason to dismiss it. “Indian tradition says, also, that these works were raised, and a famous battle fought here, in the pure Indian style and with Indian weapons, long before their knowledge and use of firearms, or any knowledge of the Europeans. . . . In the great battle fought at this place between the Senecas and western Indians, some affirm their ancestors have told them there were eight hundred of their enemies slain; others include the killed on both sides to make that number. All their historians agree in this, that the battle was fought here, where the heap of the slain, before the arrival of the Europeans; some say three, some four, other five ages ago; they reckon an age one hundred winters, or colds.”73 The accuracy of that tradition much be judged by the same critical standard applied to the oral traditions of all peoples, but it does offer a corrective to the oft-stated trope that “the Indians” had no traditions regarding the mounds. Some did and others did not; or if they did they went unrecorded. Notwithstanding the Seneca tradition preserved by Kirkland, it is unlikely that all of the mounds and earthworks were built, at least in the first instance, to bury those slain in battles. That scenario was by no means unique to the Seneca but problematic nonetheless. Intertribal battles may well have occurred at or near the mounds resulting in the internment of the dead. Yet several of the mounds contain the remains of women and children besides adult males and were constructed over several generations, a circumstance that strongly counters the idea that they owed their origin to a great battle, just as Jefferson observed in Notes on the State of Virginia. Yet the commonplace association of mounds and earthworks with warfare at the sites of palisaded villages in many cases is likely correct. And the degree to which early historical accounts confirm archaeological evidence that wooden palisades protected Iroquois and Huron villages from their enemies cannot be Rediscovering the Mounds

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altogether written off. Some of the smaller burial mounds may owe their origin to the need to bury those slain in battle but this neither adequately explains the origin of most, nor of the extensive geometric earthworks of the Mississippi Valley. Belknap made a further recommendation to Cutler regarding supposed similarities in the manners and customs of the peoples of eastern Asia and those living in the straits between Asia and America. He suggested John Bell’s two-volume Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia (1763). Bell—a physician, diplomat, and traveler from Antermony, Scotland—journeyed through Siberia in 1720 with the Russian embassy en route to China. His description of burial mounds made of earth and stone in the vicinity of Tomsk, Siberia, were of particular interest to those like Belknap and Cutler who entertained a possible connection between the Tartars and the original inhabitants of America. According to Bell, this mode of interment “prevails to this day among the kalmucks [Kalmyks, a Mongolian people in Russia] and other [Siberian] tartars, and seems to be of great antiquity.” Each summer many persons visited the mounds of Tomsk in search of the treasure found within those mounds, a practice abhorred by the Kalmyks who sometimes interrupted the gravediggers in their plunder “and robbed all their booty.”74 Belknap further recommended Gerhard Friedrich Müller’s Voyages from Asia to America for Completing the Discoveries of the North West Coast of America (1761) regarding Russian discoveries on the northwest coast of America. He thought the results of James Cook’s exploration of the Bering Strait in 1778 might also be of interest, accounts of which could be found in John Ledyard’s A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1783) and Cook’s posthumously published A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784).75 Cutler advanced the widespread opinion that only a numerous people could have expended the labor needed to erect the works at the Muskingum. “It was probably the Imperial City, and the Emporium of the country.” He placed no credence in the trustworthiness of Indian traditions regarding the origin of the mounds, although he acknowledged 148

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that such traditions existed. “I am inclined to think their ideas of the original design of those works have rather been handed to them by the Europeans and Americans with whom they have been conversant, than from their own ancestors.” Cutler made several enquiries about the ancient works of an unnamed Seneca sachem, an elder whom he judged to be eighty to ninety years of age. The chief confessed he did not know who had made them nor for what purpose. All he could say was that “it was done a great while ago, and all the Indians had forgotten what they were for.” Whereas Cutler’s Seneca informant claimed no knowledge about the origins of the mounds, Kirtland’s Seneca informants did. Whether those Native traditions were influenced by conversations with Euro-Americans, as Cutler suggested, or originated with them is impossible to say. Like all traditions they cannot be uncritically accepted at face value. They must be weighed and sifted according to the rules of evidence and the merits of the case. But neither is there a compelling reason to assume an imposing attitude that rejects them whole cloth as mere fable and fancy.76 The directors of the Ohio Company admired the Marietta earthworks and made specific provisions between 1788 and 1796 that the remains were to be surveyed, preserved, and ornamented with trees and shrubs.77 They designate the elevated squares or platform mounds as public squares and dignified them with the Latin names of Quadranaou and Capitolium. The parallel walls leading from the Muskingum River to Quadranaou they called the “Sacra Via” (Sacred Way) and the largest mound at the site “Conus.” They placed the earthworks under the care of the city of Marietta and as late as 1842 Samuel P. Hildreth could proudly report that members of the community continued to preserve them for posterity. “The public mind is strongly opposed to any violation, of disfiguring of the original form of this beautiful structure [the Conus mound], as well as of the old works generally.”78 Yet not even the prudent measures of the Ohio Company and the sensitivity of later generations of Mariettans would save most of the earthworks from destruction. The walls of the graded road Rediscovering the Mounds

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known as the Sacra Via, together with other portions of the earthworks, were destroyed in 1882 for the manufacture of bricks.79 The clay content of the mounds made them valuable resources for brick makers and accounts for the destruction of many mounds throughout the Mississippi Valley. The state of knowledge regarding the mounds and their builders at the close of the eighteenth century was fragmentary—barely even existent. The American geographer Jedidiah Morse, for instance, gave a brief notice of the “Antiquities and Curiosities” found in the Kentucky Country in his American Geography published in 1789 that encapsulates received opinion on the mounds at the time of its publication.

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The numbers of old forts found in the Kentucky country are the admiration of the curious and a matter of much speculation. . . . When, by whom, and for what purpose, these were thrown up is uncertain. They are certainly very ancient, as there is not the least visible difference in the age or size of the timber growing on or within these forts and that which grows without; and the oldest natives have lost all tradition respecting them. They must have been the efforts of a people much more devoted to labour than our present race of Indians; and it is difficult to conceive how they could be constructed without the use of iron tools.80 Morse based that statement upon the best information available to him, some of which was accurate and some incorrect. The mounds were definitely ancient but some considerably more so than others. Nor had all of the oldest Natives lost their traditions concerning the mounds although many clearly had. North American Indians built the mounds in antiquity only to abandon the practice during later periods of their respective histories. Cultural practices are not immutable. A further indication of the limited state of knowledge regarding the mounds at the close of the eighteenth century is the circular letter issued by the American Philosophical Society in 1798 and published in its Transactions the following year. The circular indicates the lines 150

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of research into the origin, era, and purposes of the mounds that were already established and should be continued. The committee issuing the circular consisted of Thomas Jefferson, James Wilkinson, George Turner, Caspar Wistar, Adam Seybert, Charles W. Peale, and Jonathan Williams. The members of the committee sought “to obtain accurate plans, drawings, and descriptions of ancient fortifications and tumuli, and other Indian works of art: ascertaining the materials composing them, their contents, [and] the purposes for which they were probably designed, etc.” It was particularly desirous that “cuts in various directions may be made into many of the Tumuli, to ascertain their contents; while the diameter of the largest tree growing thereon, the number of its annulars and the species of the tree, may be tend to give some idea of their antiquity.” Careful measurements should be made of the length, breadth, height, and composition of earthen walls or embankments often found in association with mounds.81 Significantly, that work began a decade earlier through the observations of Butler, Parsons, Heart, Cutler, Putnam, Sargent, and Turner relating to the ancient works at Grave Creek, Marietta, and Cincinnati, which represent the uncertain beginnings of scientific enquiry into the origin, antiquity, and purposes of the mounds.

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3

Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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More Testimony from the Mounds

The ancient works located along the Ohio River and its tributaries continued to receive the attention of curious travelers and residents of the western states during the early nineteenth century. Several of those accounts were more substantive and reliable than others; some advanced and some hindered scientific enquiry. It is the works that promoted the study of the still ill-defined subject of American antiquities rather than those that impeded it that primarily concern us here. Notable among the empirical enquiries is Bishop James Madison’s account in the Transactions of the American Philosophical (1804), Thaddeus Mason Harris’s Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Allegheny Mountains (1805), and Daniel Drake’s Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country (1815). Most important of all in terms of resonance is Caleb Atwater’s “Description of the Antiquities of Ohio” published in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society (1820). The antiquaries, ideas, and institutions involved in those early investigations and writings represent a significant province of American intellectual and cultural history. Those early accounts provided more testimony from the mounds as well as an overlay of fictions that too often became mingled with documented facts. It was not all one attribute and none of the other; not all correctness and not all falsehood but 152

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a blending of both based on a gradually expanding but still inadequate knowledge base. A decidedly astute observer was Bishop James Madison of Virginia— the first Episcopal bishop of the United States, a former president of William and Mary College, a friend and correspondent of Thomas Jefferson, and a first cousin of James A. Madison. Madison’s approach to the subject of American antiquities has deservedly secured his reputation as an early archaeological investigator. He gave an account of the mounds located near what is today Charleston, West Virginia, in a letter to Benjamin Smith Barton. The published letter is undated but Barton read the communication before the American Philosophical Society on December 16, 1803, and published it in the first part of the sixth volume of the society’s Transactions in 1809.1 Some writers, those with fervid imaginations but no firsthand knowledge of their subject, Madison noted, attributed the earthworks of the Western Country to the indefatigable Hernando De Soto. Others ascribed them to the fabled Welsh prince Madoc who supposedly sojourned to the New World in the twelfth century. All such conjectures, said the good-humored bishop, were “as lifeless as either Soto, or the Prince.”2 The actual character of the earthworks, their great number, and the locations in which they were found led Madison to reject the popular notion they were “fortifications.” The works he examined had interior instead of exterior ditches, were overlooked by adjacent mounds, stood at the base of hills instead of on top of them, and lacked a source of water. He concluded that the earthworks on the Kanawha were not fortifications and had no relation to military defense whatsoever. Madison recognized that the works in question often differed in area and form, but those with which he was familiar on the Kanawha, Elk, and Guyandot Rivers had common features indicating a common origin and purpose. He was a careful and cautious observer but nonetheless fell into the common error of assuming that the mounds were “universally cemeteries.” Many mounds do include burials but others Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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contain no human remains at all. Those that do include burials, however, may be reasonably attributed to customs not unlike those described by the perspicacious Madison.

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Wherever they have been opened, we find human bones, and Indian relicks. They have grown up gradually, as death robbed a family of its relatives, or a tribe of its warriors. Alternate strata of bones and earth, mingled with stone and Indian relicks, establish this position. And hence it is, that we find near the summit of those mounds articles of European manufacture, such as the tomahawk and knife; but never are they seen at any depth in the mound. Besides, it is well known, that among many of the Indian tribes, the bones of the deceased are annually collected and deposited in one place; that funeral rites are them solemnized with the warmest expressions of love and friendship; and that this untutored race urged by the feelings of nature, consign to the bosom of the earth, along with the remains of their deceased relatives and friend, food, weapons of war, and often those articles which they possessed and most highly valued, when alive. This custom has reared beyond doubt, those numerous mounds.3 The enclosures located near the mounds were not fortifications but “the fixed habitation of a family, and a long line of descendants.” That conclusion was a logical inference from facts but may be only partially correct. The possibility that the earthen embankments described by Madison enclosed fixed habitation sites and were also once fortified with palisades does not appear to have occurred to him. Not all sites were protected with palisades on the embankments, but some were depending upon the era of their construction and primary purpose.4 Madison also incorrectly assumed that the numerous burials found by Jefferson during his excavation of a mound on the Rivanna River in Virginia would likewise be found in all mounds: “we may conclude, that what is true of one of them, is, ceteris paribus, applicable to all. The only difference consists of their dimension.”5 Such assumptions 154

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precluded the possibility that the mounds were built by different people, in different eras, and for different purposes. Madison and his contemporaries had little comparative data available to them and worked in an era that lacked a common nomenclature and system of classification. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that archaeologists had enough comparative information to begin the process of temporal and cultural differentiation, which has, and will continue to be, periodically revised in light of new data and methodologies. Notwithstanding the dearth of reliable information in Madison’s own time, he had no difficulty in accepting the mounds of the Kanawha Valley, like the inscribed rocks of the region, as “curious specimens of Indian labour.”6 The same year that Madison made his observations about the earthworks of the Kanawha Valley—presumably 1803 although he may well have examined those works over the course of more than a single year— the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris of Dorchester, Massachusetts, visited the celebrated works at Marietta. Harris’s narrative is a compilation based on the earlier accounts of the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, Major General Richard Butler, Jonathan Heart, the survey of Rufus Putnam, and observations he himself made on the spot during the spring of 1803. His conclusions on the identity of the Mound Builders were quite different from those of Madison, a juxtaposition of contemporary views on the subject first noted by Samuel Foster Haven. Harris’s views on those remains appeared in his Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Allegheny Mountains published at Boston in 1805. Harris—a Harvard graduate, Harvard librarian, Unitarian minister, coeditor with Samuel Biglow of Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews’s Massachusetts Magazine from April 1795 to June 1796, and a member of the Massachusetts Historical—later became a founding member and corresponding secretary of the American Antiquarian Society. He was a learned and literate traveler. Harris’s narrative contains a discussion of the leading questions connected with the origin, antiquity, and purposes of the Marietta mounds—an enquiry, he said, that “All serves to surprise and to embarrass the mind.”7 Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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Harris rejected the notion that the earthworks were sacred enclosures and that the “elevated squares were the area of temples or places of sacrifice, notwithstanding their admitted resemblance to the structures in Mexico described by the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–87) in Historia Antigua de México (1780). He assigned the mounds a defensive origin. Here truly was a grand theme for speculation, said Harris, but one fraught with many difficulties. “On a subject where all is conjecture, it is impossible to form a decided opinion. That opinion must have the preference which has the most probability in its favor.” He believed it more than plausible that the authors of the mounds had migrated from northern Asia, where corresponding structures were found, while “the intimations of History” in the region where he believed they had eventually settled provided further clues as to their likely identity. Those migrants, Harris insisted, came to the American continent not as colonizers but as a people in flight before relentless pursuers. “The Mexican annals testify this.” The last statement is another allusion to the authority of Clavijero who described Anáhuac (the vaguely defined ancestral home of the Aztecs), gave an account of Aztecan migrations and customs, and constructed a chronology for the indigenous peoples of Mexico (including one for the earlier and semi-mythical Toltecs based on Aztecan chronicles he believed to be authentic and true). Clavijero was a major influence on Harris’s archaeological thought and that of many other early observers. Harris advanced his Toltecan theory upon his stated grounds of probability. He attributed the works he observed at the Muskingum, and by extension elsewhere, to the Toltecs based entirely upon the authority of Clavijero’s account of the Toltec migration into Mexico from the North. The smaller mounds found in Ohio were burial places for those slain in battle, whereas the larger mounds composed of “strata” located near “fenced cities” contained adults and infants found in different stages of decomposition. Those remains were interred at times and perhaps during intervals of several years. The Toltecs, according to Clavijero, began a migration in the middle of the sixth century out 156

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of their native country southward—a trek that continued for 104 years until they arrived in the Valley of Anáhuac in Mexico. Harris postulated that the supposedly Toltecan Mound Builders were descended from the ancient Scythians of Asia, whereas the North American Indians, who had presumably warred on the Toltecs and eventually drove them southward into Mexico and Peru, had probably migrated to the American continent from northwestern Europe. The earthworks of the western country were places of defense erected by Scythian immigrants from northern Asia: the same people later known to history as Toltecs. Thus Harris, like Cutler before him, made a tenuous Toltecan-Mound Builder connection.8 Harris found other reasons for assigning the Mound Builders an Asian origin as well. The situation, construction, form, and content of Asiatic and American mounds were so alike “that there can be no hesitation in ascribing them to the same people.” Analogies in customs led him to believe that American aborigines were the descendants of the ancient Scythians who migrated to the American continent from some region in eastern Asia: “many of the customs of Scythians are still in use among the Indian tribes; in particular that of scalping their prisoners, and of putting them to death by a variety of ingenious and protracted tortures.” The Tartars of eastern Asia were also likely candidates for being the ancestors of the American aborigines. “They [the American tribes] have many things, also, in common with the Tartar tribes of Asia; as the fabric and structure of birch canoes; the method of marching in what we call ‘Indian file;’ and the construction of implements of war, and instruments of the chase. Whereas the northern nations , by whom they seem to have been encroached upon and gradually expelled from the first settlements they made, till they were finally driven into Mexico and Peru, most probably migrated from the northwest parts of Europe.” That conjecture conformed to Harris’s tenet of probability and his reading, or misreading as it were, of inconclusive anatomical evidence. “This seems probable from the different character and physiognomy discoverable in the people who Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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emigrated from the northeast extremity of the American continent.”9 Such confident conclusions based on supposed structural analogies in archaeological remains, similarities in customs, and resemblances in skeletal remains came all too easily to many nineteenth-century observers, Harris being a most representative example. The contrasting opinions held by Madison and Harris on the origin and identity of the Mound Builders are a précis of the entire nineteenthcentury Mound Builder-Indian debate. As Samuel Foster Haven observed in 1856, those two investigators

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represent the two classes of observers whose opposite views still divide the sentiment of the country; one class seeing no evidences of art beyond what might be expected of existing tribes, with the simple difference of a more numerous population, and consequently better defined and more permanent habitations; the other finding proofs of skill and refinement, to be explained, as they believe, only on the supposition that a superior native race, or more probably a people of foreign and higher civilization, once occupied the soil.10 The divergent views of Madison and Harris frame the problematic Mound Builder-Indian dichotomy as clearly as any, a discourse that remained at cross purposes for decades yet to come. Haven’s comparison of their contrasting views serves purpose. The spread of settlement in the Mississippi Valley during the early nineteenth century resulted in the discovery of new archaeological sites even as it threatened them with looming destruction. The welltraveled Timothy Flint of Cincinnati observed in 1826 that the more his countrymen explored, settled, and brought the great valley under cultivation, the more mounds, enclosures, and “relics” were brought into public view. The mounds that Flint observed between the Miami and Little Miami Rivers in southwestern Ohio, those near Cahokia on the American Bottom in western Illinois, and others as far down the Mississippi as St. Francisville were works of great labor. Their builders erected many of them in the form of regular cones and 158

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parallelograms evincing a conscious, artificial design even to the most superficial observer. “These mounds must date back to remote depths in the olden time. From the ages of the trees on them, from other data, we can trace them back six hundred years, leaving it entirely to the imagination to descend deeper into the depths of time beyond.” Significantly, Flint also identified the principal reason why so many of the works of the Mound Builders had been destroyed and why the loss of these sites would most certainly continue in the future. “The most dense ancient population existed in precisely the places where the most crowded future population will exist in ages to come. The appearance of a series of mounds generally indicated the contiguity of rich and level lands, easy communications by land and water, and the best locations for fishing and hunting. Samuel R. Brown made much the same observation in his Western Gazetteer in 1817. “Wherever we find the traces of former population, as demonstrated by the existence of mounds, fortifications, and ruins of buildings, we are sure to find land of an excellent quality.”11 Correlations between prehistoric and historic settlement patterns are numerous and largely explain why so many mounds and earthworks did not survive the nineteenth century, as well as why many Americans regarded them as an expendable part of the landscape. The sites chosen for the towns and cities of the Euro-American successors of the mound-building cultures were often the same locations with the greatest concentration of mounds and earthworks. Marietta, Newark, Portsmouth, Circleville, and Chillicothe in Ohio; Frankfort in Kentucky; and St. Louis in Missouri are all cases in point. Other examples could be multiplied throughout the length and breadth of the Mississippi Valley. The grading of city streets, the manufacture of bricks for the construction of new buildings, the running of turnpike roads, and the digging of canals took a heavy toll. The farmer’s plow inexorably degraded and destroyed an even greater number. Among the more historically conscious, that widespread obliteration hastened the surveying and mapping of the mounds while it was still possible Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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to do so. Daniel Drake at Cincinnati, Caleb Atwater at Circleville, Samuel P. Hildreth at Marietta, and John D. Clifford and Constantine Rafinesque at Lexington implicitly understood that sense of urgency and made valuable archaeological records in the face of general indifference. The rapid development of western states gave pause for reflection on the passing of the Mound Builders and the rising prospects of their successors. Those considerations were often little more than odes to progress and justifications for the dispossession of Indian peoples, but some were of a more wistful and humanistic bent. One such contemplative moment occurred during Major Stephen Harriman Long’s exploring expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains, which commenced its long journey in May 1819. The exploring party included Thomas Say and Edwin James. James was the botanist and geologist and wrote the narrative of the expedition published in 1823. At the very outset of the expedition, along the fertile bottoms of the Allegheny River in western Pennsylvania, Long’s party found traces of ancient works that became more common further down the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. It was a humbling realization, James said, that those vestiges of human thought and labor were the sole surviving evidences that the people who designed and built them had ever existed. Here unknown generations lived, procreated, and died only to be forgotten. The leveling hand of time destroyed every other record of their existence save these. “These colossal monuments, whatever may have been the design of their erection, have long since out-lived the memory of those who raised them, and will remain for ages, affecting witnesses of the instability of national, as well as individual greatness; and of the futility of those efforts, by which man endeavors to attach his name and his memorial to the most permanent and indestructible forms of inorganic matter.”12 Personal encounters with the mounds not infrequently prompted explorers and travelers to wonder whether their own achievements would be similarly forgotten in the abyss of time. Such ruminations

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connected the past and present in meaningful ways. The large mounds found on the prairies of Illinois opposite St. Louis and on the Meramec River stirred similar thoughts and emotions. James and company counted seventy-five mounds in the course of a five-mile walk, which at length brought them to the enormous mound that only a few years before had been occupied by the monks of La Trappe (consequently, the great mound at Cahokia was for many years referred to as “Monks Mound”). Examining those vestiges of antiquity—”these monuments without inscriptions,” as James described them—was a moving experience that “never fails, though often repeated, to produce an impression of sadness. As we stand upon these mouldering piles, many of them now nearly obliterated, we cannot but compare their aspect of decay with the freshness of the wide field of nature, which we see reviving around us. . . . We feel the insignificance and the want of permanence in everything human.”13 The numerous evidences of a former population along the Muskingum River and its tributaries also prompted William H. Keating to wax philosophically about those remains in his narrative of Long’s expedition to the source of St. Peter’s River undertaken in 1823. Keating’s observations were, like those of James, an attempt to connect his own experiences and thoughts with the imagined experiences of the ancient Mound Builders. Everywhere do we observe, in this valley [the Muskingum Valley], remains of works which attest, at the same time, the number, the genius, and the perseverance of those departed nations. Their works have survived the lapse of ages; but the spirit which prompted them has disappeared. We wander over the face of the country; wherever we go, we mark the monuments which they have erected; we would interrogate them as to the authors of these mighty works, but no voice replies to ours, save that of an echo. The mind seeks in vain for some clew to assist it in unraveling the mystery. Was their

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industry stimulated by the desire of protecting themselves against the inroads of invaders, or were they themselves the trespassers? Did they migrate to this spot, and if so, whence came they?14 Enquiries of that nature continued apace as more prehistoric sites along the tributaries of the Ohio came to the attention of local residents and scholars. The first published account and plan of the extensive hilltop enclosure located on the east bank of the Little Miami River, since known as Fort Ancient, appeared anonymously in the Port Folio in November 1809.15 An account of another earthwork located on the Scioto River by “J. C.” (probably the Reverend John Poage Campbell) appeared in the same number of the Port Folio, where the author pensively commented on “the melancholy pleasure” derived from contemplating the remains of former times, and the need to preserve them from both human despoliation and the destructive force of the elements: “science loudly demands that they should be preserved in some work not of an ephemeral cast.”16 An account of an enclosure at the confluence of the Ohio and Great Miami Rivers by Charles Wilkes Short of Transylvania University also appeared in the Port Folio in September 1817. The site was located on the farm of William Henry Harrison in Hamilton County, Ohio, and Short’s account is based on a written description given to him by Harrison. Short may have made the accompanying plan of the site, but it is unclear whether the measurements upon which it is based are his own or were provided by Harrison.17 An account that is far more speculative than descriptive is John D. Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities,” a series of eight letters that appeared in the Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine published at Lexington, Kentucky, between September 1819 and April 1820.18 The first and most valuable part of those letters generally discusses the earthworks at Cincinnati, Circleville, and a site on the Cumberland River, but the letters as a whole are more concerned with theorizing about

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the possible origins of the Mound Builders and the peopling of the New World. Clifford attributed the mounds and earthworks to Hindus who presumably migrated to the New World at a remote but indefinite period of time. That opinion significantly influenced Caleb Atwater, who accepted that conclusion after reading Clifford’s views and being presented with a drawing of a triune vase that Clifford and Atwater considered to be the representation of a Hindu deity. Clifford’s misplaced and fruitless Hindu theory does not offset the descriptive and documentary value of his work as a whole, nor the encouragement he gave to the archaeological interests of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. In neither the case of Atwater nor Clifford do the parts discredit the whole, which is not to say that Clifford’s contribution to knowledge were on par with those of either Atwater or Rafinesque. An archaeological writer of a different sort was Daniel Drake—a Cincinnati physician, naturalist, cultural leader, and booster par excellence.19 Drake drew attention to the importance of making careful records of Ohio’s ancient works in Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country (1815). He delineated the form and position of the mounds and earthen embankments located on the upper plain within the original town plat of Cincinnati. Drake lamented the cursory and imitative nature of many published accounts of the mounds, suggesting that those who lived in localities where they were found should make a carful investigation of them. “No objects in the state of Ohio seem to have more forcibly arrested the attention of travelers, nor employed a greater number of pens, than its antiquities. It is to be regretted, however, that so hastily and superficially have they been examined by strangers, and so generally neglected by ourselves, that the materials for a full description have not yet been collected. The former have too often contented themselves by copying from each other; and the latter have commonly substituted wonder for examination.” Yet it was the apathy and disregard of his fellow westerners, those who lived in the very midst of the mounds

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and had the best opportunity to make a thorough study of them, toward whom Drake directed his severest criticism. The mounds and their contents were rapidly disappearing yet few seemed to care: “the bigotry of Spain in the 16th century seems not to have been more destructive to the historical paintings of Mexico, than the indifference, negligence or idle curiosity of many of our citizens are to these interesting relics.” Nor was that criticism an anomaly. Samuel R. Brown lamented in 1817 that the oval-shaped mound that once stood at the intersection of Third and Main Streets had already been destroyed: “Its venerable antiquity has not been respected; only a small part of it remains.”20 Three years later Drake and a group of likeminded citizens acted in the matter. He joined Elijah Slack, president of Cincinnati College; James Findlay, an attorney and editor of the newspaper Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette; and two other community leaders, William Steele and Jesse Embree, in establishing the Western Museum Society of Cincinnati in September 1818. Steele was the first to propose the creation of the society and apparently remained the society’s largest contributor. He invited Drake in the summer of 1818 to join him in establishing the museum. But there is no question that Drake was the visionary and animating spirit from that point forward.21 The society sought to collect, preserve, and exhibit the “natural and artificial curiosities, particularly those of the western country.” Metals, minerals, and petrifactions, together with preserved specimens of indigenous animals and the bones of extinct species, were gathered and scientifically arranged for public inspection. And among the artificial curiosities collected were “the relics of the unknown people who constructed the ancient works of the western country.” Various ornaments and implements manufactured by “the present savage tribes,” in distinction to those of the mysterious Mound Builders, also greeted curious visitors. The managers of the society were determined to exert every effort to form an exemplary archaeological collection since nothing associated with the Western Country generated more excitement or curiosity 164

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than “the relics and vestiges of the extinct and comparatively civilized population with which it abounds.” It was extremely unfortunate, said Drake, that the contents of many mounds had already been removed from their localities and sent to museums in the East. “To study them [the artifacts] successfully, it is necessary that they should be compared, and for this purpose they must be brought together.” The society founders hoped that local antiquities would thereafter be sent to the Western Museum instead of being sent out of state. The managers differentiated between “antiquities” and “the weapons, utensils, trinkets, and other manufactures of our neighbouring Indians” as distinct classes of objects—a common though problematic dichotomy in early museum collections and private cabinets. Drake himself, it should be noted, never made such hard distinctions between the types of societies possessed by the ancient Mound Builders and the historic Indian tribes associated with the Ohio Valley. He believed that the Indians were the descendants of the earlier mound-building peoples. The societies that built the mounds were extinct but not the people themselves.22 Drake, a former student of Benjamin Smith Barton in the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania, accepted the opinion stated by Barton in May 1796 that the nation or nations who constructed the mounds were not extinct or lost in the true sense of the word, but were greatly changed by the influence of war and disease. As Drake observed while still a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1806, “Dr. Barton supposes that the remains of antiquity discovered throughout the continent of North America[,] and more particularly in the Western Parts, are the work of a Nation or Nations of people which are not now completely extinct but which have degenerated into the present aboriginal Indian tribes from the influence of war, pestilence, etc.”23 Drake concurred in Barton’s opinion. He elaborated that view in Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country. He thought Barton’s theory had “a high degree of plausibility,” noting that Dr. Hugh Williamson and Henry Marie Brackenridge also shared that view. Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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In the course of some enquiries into the ancient works of the Miami country, I have found nothing adverse to the supposition of the Professor [Professor Barton]; but several facts have appeared in its support. Of these, the only one which I shall mention is the existence, in the larger mounds, of fragments of earthen ware, which have in their composition a perfect identity with that fabricated since the discovery of America, even up to the present time, by many of the tribes low on the Mississippi. A single fact cannot establish a theory; but upon viewing this discovery in conjunction with what has been written by the ingenious authors just cited, it must, I think, be acknowledged, that this hypothesis is rendered more plausible than any other.24 The American ornithologist Alexander Wilson expressed the same opinion after examining Drake’s archaeological collection during a visit to Cincinnati in March 1810. Drake, who had recently opened what he described as a large Indian mound in the vicinity, showed Wilson the materials he found in that mound and articles found in other mounds as well. A large fragment of earthenware recovered from the center of the large mound was similar to earthenware that Wilson found at Grave Creek, “which is a pretty positive proof that these works have been erected by a people, if not the same, differing little from the present race of Indians, whose fragments of earthenware dug up about their late towns correspond exactly with these.”25 Drake drafted the constitution for the Western Museum Society in June 1818. He did so “in such a manner as to the make the institution a complete school for natural history,” where he hoped to see deposited “the choicest natural and artificial curiosities of the Western country.”26 The museum gradually but systematically took shape between then and its opening in 1820.27 Drake’s cabinet of minerals and fossil bones formed the nucleus of the museum’s collection. The managers of the society hired curators and artists, who spent the next two years acquiring collections and arranging and preparing them for 166

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public display. The principal curator was the English-born Robert Best— Elijah Slack’s assistant in chemistry at Cincinnati College and later a professor at Transylvania University. Joseph Dorfeuille succeeded Best as curator in 1823. The amiable and charming Dorfeuille was a naturalist (primarily an etymologist) from Louisiana of uncertain origins.28 The naturalist John James Audubon worked at the museum as an artist, taxidermist, and curator for a brief period in 1819–20, during which time he prepared the collections of birds and fish for exhibition. An agreement signed on March 25, 1819, by Drake as the secretary of the Western Museum Society and the trustees of the Cincinnati College stipulated that the trustees would provide a rent-free room or rooms for the museum in the building of the Cincinnati College. The managers of the museum would remain in charge of the collection. In exchange for that consideration, the faculty could use the collections to illustrate lectures and students could be admitted under the supervision of the president of the college.29 Drake wanted to make the connection between the Western Museum and Cincinnati College a permanent one. “In some degree they are necessary to the success of one another, and the interests of both would therefore suffer by a separation.” That relationship between the museum and college lasted a scant five years. The Western Museum opened on June 10, 1820, in the Cincinnati College building amid great expectations for its future usefulness to Western science and culture. Drake delivered an inaugural address in the chapel of Cincinnati College on the condition and prospects of the society.30 It was proper on that occasion, he said, to review the design and work of the Western Museum Society and to ask what likely benefits the cultivation of the arts and sciences would have on “the happiness and dignity” of the community. The plan of the museum included “nearly the whole of those parts of the great circle of knowledge, which requires material objects, either natural or artificial, for their illustration.” Collections in zoology, mineralogy, antiquities, and the fine and useful arts were carefully assembled and intended to Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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“offer something to interest the naturalist, the antiquary, and the mechanician.” The managers and artists organized the collections into groups according to their “natural affinities” as the best means of showing their natural order and beauty. They also projected a series of public lectures on the different branches of natural philosophy, zoology, mineralogy, geology, American antiquities, and fine arts illustrated in the museum’s collections. At least one of the lectures came to pass in December 1819, six months before the museum opened, when Drake lectured on mineralogy and geology.31 Among the most popular displays in the museum was its collection of “the utensils, weapons and trinkets of our Indian tribes.” Some of the artifacts were obtained directly from the tribes themselves, other found in the vicinity of abandoned villages, or excavated from stone or earthen mounds. Drake hoped to see that part of the cabinet enlarged. “I trust that we are not disposed to forget that the curiosities which it contains, are the memorials of a people, who were lately the high-minded proprietors and sovereigns of the country which we now inhabit.” Drake commended “the curiosity that would seek to preserve from oblivion some memento of a people that seem to be doomed to inevitable extinction.” He further noted that “our country exhibits older and nobler monuments than the recent vestiges of our Indian tribes. The number, extent and regularity of our mounds, and the implements of stone and copper which they contain, afford incontestable proofs that a people more numerous, enlightened and social, than the wandering hordes found on the discovery of this continent, had previously been its inhabitants.” When were the mounds erected and deserted? What happened to the people who built them? Did they become “extinct,” migrate to Mexico, or “slowly degenerate” into the existing tribes? And what were the causes of those events? Questions connected with the origin, era, and fate of the Mound Builders framed scientific problems that could only be solved by studying the things they left behind. Those remains, perforce, had to be gathered, preserved,

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and compared to each other and to the ornaments and implements belonging to “the existing tribes.” The Western Museum, affirmed Drake, had the potential of becoming a resourceful venue of enquiry into the aboriginal history of America. There were, for example, several fragments of earthenware on the shelves of the museum. Most of these were found in Ohio and Kentucky at former village sites of “the present tribes.” But one specimen came from the center of large mound in a western suburb of Cincinnati and another, made by one of the tribes that inhabited the Red River in Louisiana, reportedly had been made within plain view of the person who donated it to the Western Museum. Both the earthenware from the Cincinnati mound and the historic vessel from Louisiana shared a common characteristic: both were examples of shell-tempered pottery (made with pounded river shells and clay). Drake considered that shared characteristic to strongly imply “a common origin of the art among the former and the latter inhabitants of this region; or a transmission of it from one to the other, and consequently a derivation of the existing tribes from the people whose monuments overspread our country.” Nothing definitive could be ascertained from a sample of one but Drake reasoned well nonetheless. His conclusion would be sustained by later findings, at least to the degree that they established a link between the Mound Builders and the Indians based upon material remains. Given the paucity of available information—and the propensity of many observers to either ignore, minimize, or deny similarities in the customs of the Mound Builders and historic groups of North American Indians—Drake’s linkage of Mound Builders to later Indian peoples was not insignificant. Marine shells from a Cincinnati mound offered equally suggestive evidence regarding the possible “migrations, if not the origin, of the same people.” The museum contained three large sea shells removed from a burial in an elliptical mound near the center of Cincinnati. The lip and internal parts of the shells had been removed so they could

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serve as vessels. The most interesting question that could be asked of them, said Drake, was “from whence were they brought?” The two largest shells were of the same species and belonged to the genus Buccinum. Shells of that type were not found along the Atlantic shore but were found in the West Indies. It seemed a likely supposition that the shells found their way into an Ohio mound from the Florida coast or possibly the shores of Cuba. The third and smallest shell belonged to the genus Murex, which is characterized by a reversed spire (turned from right to left). It was the opinion of Clifford that shells of this conformation were the same as those used by the Hindus in conducting certain religious rites. Drake considered Clifford’s Hindu theory an unwarranted conclusion. “There is a reversed murex, however, in the northern European seas; and until it is ascertained that they, or some of our own waters have not supplied this, as well as the buccina which were found with it, such a bold speculation will not be received without hesitation.”32 The Western Museum Society for Drake was but another means of giving agency to the interests and aspirations of the Western Country as a self-conscious region of the nation and to the vital interest of the nation at large. Relations between the states and the Union had to be based upon the principles of equality, independence, and reciprocity, without which there could be no permanent prosperity, just as interactions between the United States and foreign nations had to be based upon those same principles. The economic dependence on Europe was “equally disastrous and degrading” for those who lived in the interior regions of the country as for those in the East. Westerners could not trade with foreign countries without making an inland voyage of more than a thousand miles down the Mississippi River, or a difficult overland journey across the Allegheny Mountains. The interests of the nation and its sections were mutual, and in a nation organized like the American republic, “private and public prosperity are inseparable” and “knowledge is the basis of both.” Scientific and

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educational institutions like the Western Museum were the handmaidens of prosperity, happiness, and independence, and “our exertions for their benefit should never relax.” Thus Drake’s vision for the Western Museum reflected both his nationalism and regionalism, which he saw not as antithetical values but rather reciprocally reinforcing and beneficial ones that reflected the nature of the American Union. Many of his fellow Westerners shared his views as part of their own regional identities.33 Such were the lofty and hopeful sentiments expressed at the opening of the Western museum in June 1820. The collections of the museum came from several different sources. A large number of persons contributed items by sale, donation, and field collecting. Drake donated his cabinet of minerals, organic remains, fossil bones, and western antiquities to the society as the nucleus of its collection. The managers sponsored new explorations at Big Bone Lick, in Kentucky, so famous for the remains of the mammoth and “arctic elephant” from whence they obtained many specimens. James Griffiths (another curator at the museum), John J. Audubon, and especially the principal curator Robert Best made valuable collections of the quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and fishes of the West. The U.S. consul general at Rio de Janeiro, Condy Raguet, with assistance from several other Americans living in the Brazil, collected several hundred natural history specimens, which they forwarded to the managers of the Western Museum. Dorfeuille merged his own cabinet of Egyptian antiquities, foreign and domestic birds, and western amphibians with the museum’s collection and sometime between 1823 and 1826 purchased the antiquities, fossils, and minerals that once belonged to Clifford. According to one estimate published in 1826 the museum housed 100 mammoth and arctic elephant bones; 50 bones of the megalonix; 33 quadrupeds; 500 birds; 200 fishes; 5,000 invertebrate animals; 1,000 fossils; 3,500 minerals; 325 botanical specimens; 3,125 medals, coins, and tokens; 150 specimens of Egyptian antiquities; 215 American antiquities; 112 colored

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microscopic designs; various views of American scenery and buildings; the tattooed head of a New Zealand Maori chief; together with about 500 specimens of miscellaneous curiosities.34 But the shining prospects of the Western Museum soon dimmed. It failed to achieve its overly ambitious goals because the managers naively assumed that public audiences shared their scientific interests and sense of civic mindedness. The scientific significance of its collections and the noble aims that created them did not translate into sustainable resources. Neither public patronage nor private munificence was able to offset the cost of maintaining and augmenting so large a collection. The museum managers tried to sell the collection in March 1823 in order to recoup outstanding debts but found no takers.35 The managers severed their connection with the museum altogether by giving the collections to the curator Dorfeuille that same year. Dorfeuille remained the sole proprietor and manager of the Western Museum from 1823 until 1839. Early in his management Dorfeuille continued to promote the scientific and educational aims established by the Western Museum Society. Benjamin Drake—the historian, editor, literary raconteur, and younger brother of Daniel Drake—and the Cincinnati journalist Edward Deering Mansfield lauded his efforts at keeping the museum a viable concern. “The exertions of Mr. Dorfeuille, to render it worthy of the Society by which it was founded; and of the encouraging patronage which it has received, have been zealous, directed by good taste, and successful.”36 An original piece of doggerel, written for John P. Foote’s Cincinnati Literary Gazette in March 1824, further shows that Dorfeuille’s efforts as the “mighty Magician” of the Western Museum met with local approbation and appreciation. The poem also strikes a note of displeasure with the managers of the Western Museum for abandoning the enterprise they had begun with such enthusiasm and golden expectations. Wend hither ye members of polished society— Ye who the bright phantoms of pleasure pursue— 172

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To see of strange objects the endless variety, Monsieur Dorfeuille will expose to you view. For this fine collection, which courts your inspection, Was brought to perfection by his skill and lore, When those who projected, and should have protected Its interests neglected to care for it more. . . . . . . Lo, here is a cabinet of great curiosities, Procured from the red-men who were once our foes— Unperishing tokens of dire animosities— Darts, tomahawks, war-cudgels, arrows, and bows; And bone-hooks for fishes, and old earthen dishes, To please him who wishes o’er such things to pour; Superb wampum sashes, and mica-slate glasses Which doubtless the lasses much valued of yore. . . . . . . But here I must stop, without naming a fourth of ’em, And request you to come, and observe for yourselves The number, variety, neatness, and worth of ’em— All which make a fairy-land peopled with elves: While the mighty Magician of these scenes elysian Is plain to your vision the moment you come; And if you have leisure, and taste for true pleasure, You’ll find him a treasure—nor care to go home.37 The museum remained an ornament of the community for several more years under Dorfeuille’s management. Flint described the museum in June 1827 as “a rich study for the naturalist. . . . Everything is scientifically arranged, according to the new nomenclature. It is a curious fact, that the arrangement of nature into genera and species is that which is most pleasing to the eye.” By far the most striking feature of the museum, said Flint, was the case containing “the remains from the Indian mounds,” which provided visitors much about which to solemnly Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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muse and converse regarding the evidence of a remote and unknown past that stood before them. The materials included the crania of individuals belonging to different tribes, which prompted Flint to render an erroneous opinion: “Much, as the faces of the living Indians seem to be formed in one mold, the facial angle of the retreat of the forehead in all most all the individuals [from the mounds] is different.” Flint’s inference, an incorrect one it should be noted, is that the more ancient Indians, those whose crania had been removed from the mounds, presumably were anatomically different from the existing tribes whose skulls were supposedly all alike. The interaction of Native American and Euro-American peoples, genetically and in every other way, did not leave anyone anatomically unaltered, yet the supposed truths of craniology held many nineteenth-century archaeologists and ethnologists spellbound. Anatomic evidence is important, but it is not the alpha and omega of anthropology as it was in the nineteenth century and even into the early twentieth century. No less arresting was a variety of implements, pottery, and seashells recovered during the excavation of the mounds. The examples of pottery at the museum included “a figure moulded from Clay, with three faces, in forming the features of which, no inconsiderable skill is evinced, reminds us of the engraving of idols from the Bramin temples, in India.”38 This was the so-called triune vessel that once belonged to Clifford and figured in Atwater’s work in the first volume of the Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society. The vessel was the source of much profitless speculation by both Clifford and Atwater. Sadly, we do not today know the whereabouts of the Ohio and Kentucky earthenware and other archaeological specimens once on the shelves of the Western Museum, including the Clifford material, all of which were subsequently dispersed and apparently lost—the very antithesis of the museum’s original purpose! After 1829, the Western Museum took on a decidedly more sensational cast. It featured life-size wax figures and the mechanized diorama called the “Infernal Regions” and “Dorfeuille’s Hell”—complete with 174

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dwarfs, ebony imps with eyes of flame, reptiles devouring youth and beauty, lakes of fire and mountains of ice, and Minos (a black-robed Satan) ruling over the pandemonium. Thereafter the “Infernal Regions” became the museum’s most popular feature and completely supplanted the original educational and scientific purposes of its founders. The idea for the exhibit appears to have been first suggested to Dorfeuille by Frances Milton Trollope during her residence in Cincinnati from 1828 to 1829.39 Hiram Powers, an ingenious mechanic who previously worked for the Cincinnati clockmaker Luman Watson, created and maintained the “Infernal Regions.” Powers left the museum in 1834 and later became an accomplished sculptor. So far as archaeology and natural science were concerned, however, the contributions of the museum were a thing of the past. Later visitors to the museum expressed far more disappointment than approbation. The English traveler Charles Augustus Murray, who visited Dorfeuille’s museum in the spring of 1834, was one of the disenchanted visitors. He had heard so much about the value of its scientific collections but was surprised at what he found. “The museum contains little worthy of notice; moreover, its contents, mean as they are, are miserably deficient in order and arrangement. . . . There are a few fossil mammoth bones of extraordinary size, and also a number of skulls found in some of the ancient mounds, differing materially in form from those of the modern race of Indians”—the official line as it were. Harriet Martineau visited the museum in June 1835 where she found “some trumpery among much which is worthy to remain.” Among the trumpery was a mermaid “not very cleverly constructed, and some bad wax figures, posted like sentinels among the cases of geological and entomological specimens.” Yet all in all she still considered the museum a “highly creditable” establishment. The New Yorker Charles Fenno Hoffman was more critical of what had become of the Western Museum. He found the collections of pottery and domestic utensils excavated from the mounds to be extraordinarily interesting, but described Dorfeuille’s theatrical production on the second floor of the Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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museum as a “piece of charlatanism”—a “gross and impious humbug” and prime example of “disgraceful mummery.”40 The legacy of the Western Museum is a mixed one. What began in 1820 as an educational institution for promoting science in the West after 1829 became a house of wonders run by a true showman. The museum’s original collections remained on the first floor, yet many of them became infested with insects and were turning to dust. Yet Dorfeuille never lost interest in natural history and American antiquities, even though he took the museum in directions that perhaps he himself did not initially envision. The museum had to either pay or close its doors. Dorfeuille’s obituary in the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer noted that at the time of his death from consumption in July 1840 he had in his possession a manuscript on the “Antiquities of America.” According to his wife Janette Dorfeuille, her husband had for some time projected a work on the subject and devoted the whole of the winter and spring of 1839–40 preparing it for publication. The manuscript, or at least a catalog of the archaeological ornaments and implements in Dorfeuille’s collection, was still in the possession of his wife in 1847 when Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis unsuccessfully attempted to have it copied. Dorfeuille’s manuscript on the “Antiquities of America” does not appear to have survived.41 While Drake and other community leaders at Cincinnati were founding the Western Museum between 1818 and 1820, Caleb Atwater of Circleville undertook the first attempt at making a systematic survey of the mounds under the aegis of the American Antiquarian Society. One of the aims of the society—founded at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1812—was to promote the study of American antiquities. Isaiah Thomas, Nathaniel and William Paine, Levi Lincoln, Aaron Bancroft, and Edward Bangs petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to incorporate the American Antiquarian Society, which occurred on October 24, 1812.42 The founders of the American Antiquarian Society recognized the benefits arising from the association 176

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of individuals for the purpose of promoting knowledge. Concerted action could bring about more results in a few years, Isaiah Thomas observed, than individuals working in isolation could achieve over long periods of time. The model for the American Antiquarian Society was the Society of Antiquaries in England and similar societies in Europe. Matthew Parker (the archbishop of Canterbury), William Camden, Robert Cotton, and others established the forerunner of the Society of Antiquaries in 1572. James I suppressed the society, fearing it might become a politically subversive element, by refusing to grant it a charter. It was revived in 1717, incorporated in 1751 as the Society of Antiquaries, and began publishing the findings of its fellows in 1770 under the title Archaeologia. A College of Antiquaries also existed in Ireland. David Steuart Erskine founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780, which received a royal charter in 1783. The first volume of the Archaeologia Scotica: Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland appeared in 1792. A society of antiquaries existed at Upsal in Sweden and another at Copenhagen in Denmark, the latter being established in 1742. The value of learned societies and institutions in Europe that preserved the remains of ancient times was self-evident to the founders of the American Antiquarian Society. Studies of “American Antiquities, natural, artificial, and literary” were no less deserving of attention and presented “a large field for research, for sublime reflection, and for amusement.” Antiquaries made enquiries of the remote past and formed collections of antiquities in order to distinguish truth from fiction and the credibility of facts from bold fabrications. The antiquary provided the historian with authentic materials and presented the philosopher with “a faithful source of ingenious speculation, while he points out to him the way of thinking, and the manners of men, under all the varieties of aspect in which they have appeared.” The study of antiquity possessed great humanistic value to its aficionados who never questioned that the study of remote times and forgotten peoples had timeless lessons to impart to the present and future.43 Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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It was the “immediate and peculiar design” of the American Antiquarian Society to discover the antiquities of the American continent and make provision for collecting and preserving them.44 The Reverend William Jenks of Boston—a Congregationalist clergyman, professor of oriental language and English literature at Bowdoin College, and corresponding secretary of the American Antiquarian Society—struck a hopeful note in his address at the first anniversary of the society in October 1813. It appeared to him that the taste for antiquarian research in cultivated in Europe was beginning to awaken among his own countrymen. It was well met, therefore, that aims of the fledgling American Antiquarian Society included “the acquisition, description, and preservation of American antiquities.” Jenks’s conception of American antiquities was a broad one, which included ancient documents, fossil specimens, and Indian antiquities. The last class of remains was of particular concern. “The ancient Indian nations of our continent demand our first attention. Here an extensive field of enquiry opens at once.” Jenks also echoed Barton on population decline and social declension among the American aborigines. He affirmed that the condition of American aborigines “indicates a deterioration in numbers, spirit and skill” when compared to the circumstance existing among them at earliest knowledge of their existence but did not elaborate. Antiquarian research into the origin and purpose of western mounds—“the only striking evidence we have of [an] ancient population, and the progress of arts in remote times”—laid great claim to the attention of an antiquarian society that aspired to be a national institution in the scope of its interests, collections, and membership.45 “AB” of Boston (possibly Aaron Bancroft, a founder of the American Antiquarian Society and member of its governing council) agreed. AB proposed in a letter to the editor of the North-American Review in May 1815 that a public undertaking should be made to explore the ancient remains found in the western states. He hoped that American learned societies and “liberal individuals” would undertake such investigations and do so more thoroughly than had been done in the 178

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past. The problem of identifying who had constructed the mounds, he believed, could only be solved through excavations. He suggested that the proposal might be worth the attention of the recently established American Antiquarian Society at Worcester or possibly of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The interest taken in the Ohio mounds by public-minded individuals in Massachusetts throughout the nineteenth century is an intriguing story dating to the discovery of the Marietta earthwork in the late eighteenth century. AB must have been pleased to learn that the American Antiquarian Society was sponsoring the work of a transplanted New Englander living at Circleville, Ohio, who was about to write the first detailed account of American antiquities.46 Caleb Atwater (1778–1867), a native of North Adams, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Williams College, initially prepared himself for the ministry but turned instead to the study of law. He arrived at Circleville in 1815, began a legal practice, and received an appointment as the U.S. postmaster in 1817. Atwater was a man of learning and of wideranging interests. He was a member of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York and the American Antiquarian Society. Atwater, Daniel Drake of Cincinnati, Samuel P. Hildreth of Marietta, and Hugh Marie Breckenridge of Baton Rouge were among the eighteen candidates elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society on April 15, 1818, as a direct result of the society’s interest in recruiting persons of information who were in a position to promote the study of the mounds.47 Few individuals, indeed, were better suited by interest, inclination, and situation to advance that objective than Atwater, who began his antiquarian investigations sometime after he moved his family to Circleville in 1815. Precisely when he did so is unclear but they were certainly underway by the time the council of the American Antiquarian Society elected him to membership in April 1818, and probably sooner. Atwater communicated his descriptions of archaeological sites and artifacts in a series of letters written between 1818 and 1819 to the president of the American Antiquarian Society, Isaiah Thomas. He Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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Fig. 6. “Ancient Works at Circleville: Ohio.” The circle and square in combination were conventionalized and common designs among the earthworks of the Scioto Valley. The circular embankment shown here gave the town of Circleville its name. The map appeared as plate 5 in Caleb Atwater’s “Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States,” published in the first volume of Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (1820). Guy W. Doan, an attorney at Circleville, assisted Atwater in surveying the site. The remains at Circleville have long since been obliterated and were in danger of meeting that fate when Atwater and Doan made their survey.

wrote most of those letters in haste and carelessness. Important information and extraneous matter were blended together, requiring the publication committee of the American Antiquarian Society to expend considerable time and labor in distilling his discursive correspondence into a publishable manuscript. His letters were “the hurried productions of a professional man, constantly engaged in various branches of business.” Atwater’s handwriting was not always legible, resulting in mistaken place names and other errors. The plans and drawings he submitted were the first and only draughts, while the distance between Circleville and Worcester rendered it impractical to send 180

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Fig. 7. “Ancient Works, on the North Fork of Paint Creek near Chillicothe: Ohio.” Samuel Williams of Chillicothe, who communicated “many interesting facts” concerning local antiquities to Atwater, probably also made the survey of the North Fork works shown here. The mound complex on the North Fork of Paint Creek, a tributary of the Scioto River in south-central Ohio, later became known as the Hopewell Mound Group. It is today one of five Hopewell sites preserved within the National Park Service’s Hopewell Culture National Historical Park at Chillicothe, Ohio. Plate 6 of Caleb Atwater’s “Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States,” published in the first volume of Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (1820).

Atwater either the edited manuscript or the printed proof sheets for revision and correction. The result was a “want of good understanding and harmony” between the author and the publishing committee. It was hardly a matter of surprise that errors were made during the editing and printing of the manuscript—mistakes that in some instances tended to cast doubt on the accuracy of the work as a whole. Those misprints must have been exacerbating for Atwater whose stated purpose in investigating the subject of American antiquities was to correct Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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Fig. 8. “Ancient Works, on Paint Creek.” Atwater’s map indicates three works located on the main branch of Paint Creek west of Chillicothe, Ohio. Perrine Kent surveyed the works for Atwater and George Wolfley of Circleville made the drawing. Atwater’s references for these “forts” also indicate the presence of mounds and what he called “wells” and “furnaces.” His map gives the area enclosed by the earthen walls or embankments in acres and tenths. Paint Creek probably derives its name from the large amount of red ochre (dehydrated iron oxide) found there, which is a natural pigment used by native peoples as paint during the prehistoric and early historic eras. Plate 7 of Caleb Atwater’s “Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States” published in the first volume of Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (1820).

errors of fact and opinion. Such gaffes were regrettable but not altogether fatal to achieving the author’s ends.48 Errors of fact and opinion, however regrettable, did not negate the overall importance of Atwater’s investigations. As an anonymous author wrote in introducing Atwater’s work in the first volume of the Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, “Our knowledge of this singular nation [the Mound Builders] is as yet very limited.” He seconded the ethnocentric but not unmeaning observation made by William Robertson that “it is extremely difficult to procure satisfying information concerning nations while they remain uncivilized. To discover their true character under this rude form, and to 182

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select the features by which they are distinguished, requires an observer possessed of no less impartiality than discernment.” Neither the unknown author, Robertson, nor Atwater were impartial observers but they were discerning ones. And Robertson’s ethnocentrism was certainly softer than that of many of his contemporaries. Atwater undertook his investigation of the subject of American antiquities from what at the time was essentially a closed book. “If it be thus difficult to take the picture of the living man, what must be the labour of drawing a portrait of him from the works of his hands, which for ages have been mouldering away? But nil desperandum.” Researches such as those made by Atwater and others in the Western Country were being conducted “with renewed vigor; and new discoveries are daily made.”49 Atwater aimed at making the subject of American antiquities something more than the idle tale of misinformed travelers, few of whom had closely examined them. “Should the inhabitants of the Western States, together with every written memorial of their existence, be swept from the face of the earth, though the difficulties of future Antiquarians would be increased, yet they would be of the same kind with those, which now beset and overwhelm the superficial observer regarding the subject of American antiquities.” Mooted questions concerning the origin, era, and assumed purposes of these works remained “lost in a labyrinth of doubt” and unsubstantiated speculation. Those who would decipher the riddle of the mounds through the often erroneous and contradictory literature on the subject, said Atwater, were often more perplexed than enlightened. The notable exceptions to that statement were all too few in number. De Witt Clinton, Henry Marie Brackenridge, Daniel Drake, Thaddeus Mason Harris, and Samuel P. Hildreth were not to be placed among “the common herd of scribblers” whose uninformed impressions and opinions themselves denoted a distinct problem to truth-seekers. Those knowledgeable and trustworthy writers, by contrast, bore no resemblance to “the ignis fatuus, which, as the poet says, leads to bewilder, Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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and dazzles to blind.” Atwater strongly objected to the instant expertise of writers who drew conclusions after seeing only one mound.50 The need to compare the remains of Ohio to those of like character in other states, a line of enquiry that might indicate whether they belonged to the same people and the same era, also found a place in Atwater’s account. It was the contents of the mounds in those different regions that would presumably tell the tale. Atwater made unspecified temporal distinctions between the ornaments, implements, and human remains found in mound deposits. He recognized differences in the more recent burials of “Indians” and the earlier internments of the presumably unknown people who had actually built the mounds. “Our antiquities belong not only to different eras, in point of time, but to several nations; and those articles belonging to the same era and the same people, were intended by their authors to be applied to many different uses.” It was a reasonable surmise given the paltry amount of available evidence. Yet Atwater overreached himself when he confidently declared that the human remains found in mounds were entirely dissimilar from those he attributed to North American Indians. “The skeletons found in our mounds never belonged to a people like our Indians. The latter are a tall, rather slender, straight limbed people; the former were short and thick. They were rarely over five feet high, and few indeed were six.” Comparative craniology led Atwater to the same conclusion. After examining more than fifty skulls removed from the mounds, he confidently declared that the crania of the Mound Builders and Indians were entirely different. “Their [the Mound Builders’] foreheads were low, check bones rather high; their faces were very short and broad; their eyes very large; and, they had broad chins.”51 Atwater’s tripartite division of American Antiquities distinguished between those belonging to the “Indians of the present race” (North American Indians), those belonging to peoples of European origin, and those belonging to the unknown people who constructed the ancient earthworks and mounds. The antiquities he attributed to North American Indians are described as being “neither numerous nor very 184

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interesting.” Articles of this class consisted of stone axes and knives, pestles used in the preparation of maize, arrowheads, and other articles “so exactly similar to those found in all the Atlantic states, that a description of them is deemed quite useless. He who wishes to find traces of Indian settlements, either numerous, or worthy of his notice, must visit the shore of the Atlantic, or the banks of the larger rivers, emptying themselves, into it, on the eastern side of the Alleghenies.”52 The statement is a misconception yet one that very few of Atwater’s contemporaries would have thought to challenge. His distinctions between the physical remains, ornaments, and implements of Mound Builders and Indians, no less than the confidence with which he made them, is a benchmark in the history of the Mound Builder mythos. Those assumptions continued to build and by the mid-nineteenth century had hardened into a formidable paradigm and one that would only be gradually overthrown. Atwater’s antiquities belonging to peoples of European origin category were trade goods—articles exchanged with the Indians inhabiting the Ohio region from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Trade goods were not infrequently found within Indian mounds. Those examined by Atwater were found with more recent internments at or near the surface of mounds, where later groups of Indians sometimes buried their dead. While that was not true of all mounds in all cultural regions of North America, it was true of the older mounds examined by Atwater in Ohio. The occasional finding of French medals, Spanish coins, “George the II” and “Caroline” coins, and even the occasional Roman coin, represented Atwater’s European antiquities. The lead plate deposited at the mouth of the Muskingum River during the expedition of Celeron Bienville in 1749 was another example of remains within this class. Atwater made no mention of Celeron’s lead plate in his account for the Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society but does specifically refer to it as an example of antiquities belonging to people of European origin in a letter to the recording secretary of the society, Rejoice Newton, Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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in August 1818. A failure to note the context in which articles of European manufacture were sometimes found in the mounds could easily lead one astray.53 Given the trade that occurred between Europeans and Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it should be not matter of surprise that articles of European origin were occasionally found within the mounds as well as in proximity to them. But those curiosities, Atwater insisted, arrived in the Ohio Valley by the agency of European explorers, traders, or travelers subsequent to the construction and abandonment of the mounds. One also had to seriously consider the mischievousness of pranksters. “That some persons have purposely lost coins, medals, &c. &c. in caves which they knew were about to be explored; or deposited them in tumuli, which they knew were about to be opened, is a well-known fact, which has occurred at several places in this western country. In one word, I will venture to assert, that there never has been found a medal, coin, or monument in all North America, which had on it one or more letters, belonging to any alphabet, now or ever in use among men of any age or country that did not belong to Europeans or their descendants, and had been brought or made here since the discovery of American by Christopher Columbus.” Later in his narrative Atwater again declared that “no article has been found, within my knowledge, which contained on it either letters or hieroglyphicks. Several stories to the contrary, have been propagated, but, on inquiry, they had no foundation in truth.”54 Atwater’s third class of antiquities belonged to the people who constructed the mounds. He attributed the origin of those remains “to a people far more civilized than our Indians, but far less so than Europeans.” The mounds and their contents represented the class of remains most interesting to “the antiquarian, the philosopher, and the divine.”55 Here again Atwater’s dismissive attitude toward the antiquities he attributed to North American Indians is quite telling. It epitomizes the problem of the Mound Builder-Indian dichotomy in the description and classification of archaeological materials, which skewed 186

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discussions of who had built the mounds and when because of a priori assumptions. What Atwater referred to as the remains of Indians (“the present race”) and those of the earlier groups who constructed the mounds were important since they identified the presence of earlier and later deposits of artifacts and human remains frequently found within the same mounds. Yet the manner in which he and many other early writers interpreted those temporal differences was an impediment to understanding the cultural history of the mound-building areas of the eastern United States. It obscured the existence of both continuity and change within the archaeological record. The familiar Mound-Indian dichotomy overemphasized differences and understated similarities existing between the artifacts (“relics” in the parlance of the day) of the prehistoric mound-building peoples and their historic descendants. Atwater’s antiquarian investigations began with great promise, only to end in bitterness and disappointment. He reported to Rejoice Newton at the American Antiquarian Society in August 1818 that he needed money if he was to continue his investigations any further. He could not afford to ruin himself financially through the further prosecution of his researches. He informed Newton that his labors had already cost him two hundred dollars, and estimated that the cost of publishing his drawings and survey maps in a suitable manner would be a staggering seven thousand dollars at the least—well beyond what commercial publishers and booksellers were willing to pay.56 Yet despite his losses he hoped to continue his archaeological investigations southward of Ohio, if he should be provided with the necessary means. “Should the patronage bestowed on this work, enable me to pursue my investigations [further], it is my intention to extend my survey quite down to the Mexican Gulph, and possibly beyond it; and if, through a want of patronage, a period [i.e., an end] should be put to my labours, yet, it is hoped, that others may be able to complete what, under untoward circumstances, I have begun.”57 That support was not forthcoming. Atwater could take pardonable pride in what he had accomplished Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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under difficult conditions but it would indeed be left to others to continue what he had so earnestly begun. Atwater’s descriptions of archaeological materials and sites are still of interest today. The Circleville works he surveyed and mapped, for example, no longer exist. He stood upon firm ground when he described and classified the mounds and earthworks but much less so when he attempted to account for the origin of the people who had built them. His theory that the mounds of Ohio were built by Hindus who migrated to the Ohio Valley before moving southward into Mexico is not supported by creditable archaeological evidence. Atwater’s mound-building Hindus and progenitors of the Toltecs were a figment of his own imagination and that of his authority, Clifford. Even so Atwater still bears reading by those who would understand something of the curiosity and passion that motivated the antiquarian investigators of the early and mid-nineteenth century and the intellectual and cultural framework in which they thought and wrote. His conjectures concerning the origin, identity, era, and fate of the Mound Builders no longer serve us, but his interest in surveying and mapping mounds still does. Atwater’s speculations, unlike his written descriptions and site plans, were often made in the absence of supporting evidence—ironically the same tendency for which he criticized superficial observers who lacked firsthand knowledge of their subject. The confident assertions made in the following commentary by Atwater are examples: “It is true, that no historian has told us the names of the mighty chieftains, whose ashes are inurned in our tumuli; no poet’s song has been handed down to us, in which their exploits are noticed. History has not informed us who were their priests, their orators, their ablest statesmen, or their greatest warriors. But we find idols that show that the same gods were worshipped here as in Mexico—The works left behind them are exactly similar to those in Mexico and Peru; and our works are continued quite into that country.”58 Atwater, a former theology student and Presbyterian minister, strongly adhered to the authority of scriptures concerning the question 188

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of human origins. He saw no quarrel between archaeology and the Bible on the subject. Similarities in the construction and content of burial mounds among the ancient peoples of Europe, Asia, and America, he insisted, validated the veracity of the Old Testament regarding the common origin of all humanity. Atwater’s defense of the Mosaic account of creation was unqualified. “Let those who are constantly seeking for some argument, with which to overthrow the history of man by Moses, consider this fact. Such persons have more than once asserted, that there were different stocks or races of men; but this similarities of works almost all over the world, indicates that all men sprung from one common origin. I have always considered this fact, as strengthening the Mosaic account of man, and that the scriptures throw a strong and steady light on the path of the Antiquarian.” He was certain that the more scholars examined the antiquities of the United States and those found in other quarters of the globe, the more evidence would be found that further corroborated “the truth of the Mosaick history. The discoveries of the Antiquarian throw a strong and steady light upon the scriptures, while the scriptures afford to the Antiquarian the means of elucidating many subjects otherwise difficult to be explained, and serve as an important guide in the prosecution of his investigations.” Archaeologists, however, could not follow the evidence wherever it led in the face of such a priori assumptions. Atwater presents yet another notable example of Bruce G. Trigger’s “impasse of antiquarianism.”59 Witness further the equally confident testimony of Reverend William Jenks who expounded his views on the correspondence of Revelation and ancient history before the American Antiquarian Society in October 1813. Jenks and Atwater sang from the same hymnal regarding the truth of scriptures on the subject of human origins and antiquity. Jenks gave no ground to those who questioned the unimpeachable authority of the Bible. “Infidels have been found, who attempt to invalidate its proofs, or deny its authenticity. They have attacked the historical narrations of the scriptures, and with great zeal Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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endeavored to enlist to their service, the records, whether fabulous, interpolated, suppositious, or genuine, of ancient nations.” Skeptics brought forward those ancient records in order to impugn and indict the historical veracity of the scriptures. Deistical writers, Jenks protested, ridiculed and scorned the Bible and discarded its chronology in order to undermine the foundations of the Christian religion. “That there are difficulties attending the adjustment of sacred chronology, none, who are versed in studies of that nature, will deny.” As for himself, Jenks was unwilling to start any investigation into the history of humankind and its principal events without the divine guidance of the scriptures simply because the enquiry presented problems and intricacies.60 Antiquaries, at least those who opinions Jenks countenanced, compared and connected the histories of different countries and nations in order to harmonize sacred and profane history—and not to set them at odds against each other. The high antiquity assigned to Egyptian history, for example, was “a favorite theme with infidels.” The French savant Charles-François Dupuis (1742–1809), a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and the National Institute of France, took a secular view of the origin of religious worship in his three-volume Origine de Tous les Cultes, ou Religion Universelle (1794). Constantin-François de Volney (1757–1820) had earlier adopted a similar line of secular thought toward the universal nature of all religion in his two-volume Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787) and again in Les Ruines, ou, Méditation sur les Révolutions des Empires (1791). Both scholars, said Jenks, thought that the Egyptian signs of the Zodiac were probably fifteen or seventeen thousand years old, an antiquity inconsonant with the presumed age of man according to scriptures. “But this pretended antiquity beyond the accounts of Moses is amply disproved by the critical investigations of learned Antiquaries”—those antiquaries, at least, who affirmed Jenks’s own fixed assumptions and conclusions regarding the history of humankind. “And the whole has tended to establish the great facts

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of a deluge, the re-peopling of the earth from a single family, and a subsequent compulsory dispersion.”61 The fact that similarities existing in ancient mythological conceptions might be explained by other means, which the learned Jenks was doubtless aware, served no purpose in his unqualified defense of divine truth concerning human origins and diasporas to different quarters of the globe. The British scholar Jacob Bryant (1715–1804), whose three-volume A New System, or, an Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1775–76) concluded, according to Jenks, that all the mythologies “related to the history of the first ages, and to the same events, which are recorded by Moses was one of his authorities.” Jenks likewise approved of the antiquarian researches of the Anglo-Welsh linguist Sir William Jones, another of his “votaries of recondite learning.” Jones cofounded the Asiatic Society of Bengal and its highly respected Journal of the Asiatic Society. Ancient mythology and the Mosaic account of human origins according to that antiquary corroborated each other. It was a sweeping claim yet one that Jenks and many other clergymen and laypersons accepted as an article of faith. There was little if any distance between the grounds assumed by Atwater and Jenks on the subject on human origins and antiquity. Nor are there better illustrations of the need to dissever biblical ethnology from the archaeology and ethnology of the New World. Here was an issue that grew in intensity during the anthropological debates of the mid- and late nineteenth century.62 Jenks and Atwater were both convinced that antiquarian investigations would eventually confirm and not discredit scriptural authority regarding human origins and antiquity. The problem required more time and labor before it could be conclusively resolved, if not to the satisfaction of all then at least to some like Atwater and Jenks who believed that the preponderance of evidence was already accumulating in that direction. “How barren then soever the theme of Indian antiquities may appear at a superficial glance, because they present so few

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of those means of remote investigation, which are common on the old continent, as books, and monuments for recording important events, or commemorating distinguished characters; yet it may be found that etymological enquiry, cautiously and diligently pursued, with a careful investigation of religious rites and ceremonies, and the prevailing manners, will connect the history of our Indian population with the ancient achievements of the early descendants of noah .” Jenks applauded “the unremitting perseverance” of his fellow countryman Benjamin Smith Barton, whose linguistic researches embodied in the two editions of his New Views of the American Indians (1797, 1798) confirmed, said Jenks, the views of Bryant and Sir William Jones. Atwater took the same position, though stated his grounds less elaborately and philosophically than Jenks.63 The reviews of Atwater’s work are important cultural texts in their own right. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, an accomplished naturalist with considerable field experience in surveying and describing Indian mounds, anonymously appraised Atwater’s account in William Gibbes Hunt’s Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine published at Lexington, Kentucky, from August 1819 to July 1821. Hunt’s monthly periodical was a self-conscious exponent of the intellectual and cultural aspirations of its region. Several of Rafinesque’s early writings appeared in its pages. His analysis of Atwater’s account formed part of a larger review of the entire first volume of Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, which appeared in Hunt’s Western Review for September 1820.64 The subject of American antiquities, said Rafinesque, was one of particular interest “to us in the West,” for it was within “our own section of the union” that those remains were most numerous. It was gratifying, therefore, that the founders and officers of the American Antiquarian Society, which aspired to be a national institution, specifically solicited the communication of authentic accounts of Indian mounds and sought the assistance of members of the society who resided in the western

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states to assist in fulfilling that aim. Such expressions of regional identity or sectionalism in relation to the mounds were not uncommon during the antebellum era, especially by those like Rafinesque who had first knowledge of the subject. Here was a western theme that westerners, either native-born or transplanted ones like Rafinesque, embraced as part of their own identities and the cultural and scientific aspirations of their region.65 Rafinesque was both complimentary and critical of Atwater’s exposition although on balance he dwelt more on errors of omission and commission. He judged the work to be a valuable contribution, containing “a mass of important information, deserving the attention of the antiquary and man of science.” But it was a production that also contained regrettable “errors and defects” that Rafinesque hastened to point out. On the whole he damned with faint praise. “Mr. Atwater has displayed great zeal, perseverance, and enthusiasm, and we think he is entitled to no small credit for what he has effected.” It was all the more unfortunate, therefore, that the work was marred by “errors, and even some striking contradictions.” In the early part of Atwater’s narrative, for example, he maintains that the remains under investigation were unequivocally “forts” and “fortifications” and derides the notion that some of the remains were used for religious purposes. Yet toward the end of his treatise Atwater holds that many of the monuments were Teocalli or Mexican temples, or at least their prototypes—religious sites to be certain. Rafinesque also charged Atwater with failing to acknowledge the predecessors to whom he was indebted for some of his views and opinions, notably Rafinesque’s colaborer John D. Clifford as well as Samuel Latham Mitchell, John G. Heckewelder, and most tellingly Rafinesque himself.66 Rafinesque expected a complete enumeration and description of all the important monuments in the western country, an anticipation in which he was disappointed. He readily acknowledged Atwater’s industry, the value of much of the information he presented, and

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the admirable public spirit in which he undertook his investigations. Nevertheless “we beg leave to suggest that his labours are not yet complete.” Rafinesque believed that some of his descriptions of sites were “incorrect” and that there were several monuments he failed to describe. “We have seen surveys of some, from sources the most authentic, differing very materially from those of Mr. Atwater.” He questioned the accuracy of Atwater’s plan of the ancient works at Newark, Ohio; those at Marietta, Circleville, and Paint Creek near Chillicothe; that of the work on the Kentucky shore of the Ohio River opposite the mouth the Scioto River; and his plan of an ancient fortification on the Little Miami River. Rafinesque listed the works that were either omitted from Atwater’s account or only barely mentioned. He further lamented that some of Atwater’s site plans did not adequately delineate “the physical state of the ground” upon which the mounds and enclosures were situated, that absence of which did not indicate their “actual geographical connection.”67 Rafinesque’s was more respectful of Atwater’s treatment of the central questions connected with the origin of the mounds and the identity and fate of their builders but far from uncritical on that subject too. Atwater supported the theory that the mounds “were not the work of the ancestors of our present Indians.” They were raised by another people who emigrated here from Asia in remote times. He traced the steps of the ancient people who erected the mounds from Ohio and other western states to Mexico and Peru, citing Clavijero and other Spanish authorities in support of his southern migration theory. It was there that Atwater stated the belief that the horrid accounts of the Mexican sacrifices of human victims probably had their counterpart among the Mound Builders. “And, upon the whole, we have almost as much evidence of the existence of human sacrifices among those who built our elevated squares and works of that class, in North, as we have in South, America.” The Mound Builders originated, as Atwater believed, in India. After their arrival on the American continent, their works increased in number, size, and regularity as they 194

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migrated southward toward the lands where they finally settled (Mexico and Peru). Those who built the elevated-square or truncated-pyramidal mounds, said Atwater, had probably practiced human sacrifice. Was not human sacrifice a religious practice asked Rafinesque? Had not Atwater elsewhere in his work ridiculed the idea that some of the sites may have served a religious purpose? Were those not incompatible positions? Rafinesque certainly thought so. “On the whole we have been both amused and instructed by the perusal of Mr. Atwater’s memoir.” The work was a useful and important compendium and excellent supplement to the work of Atwater’s predecessors, again Rafinesque being one. But the author did not demonstrate “originality of thought” and the work could lay no claim to “any peculiar merit for excellence of arrangement or perspicuity of method.” Rafinesque’s unfavorable comments earned him Atwater’s undying animosity, which, according to Rafinesque’s biographer Charles Boewe, resulted in a campaign by Atwater designed to damage Rafinesque’s reputation.68 Atwater received a more favorable assessment from the governor of the Michigan Territory, Lewis Cass. Cass, who had a serious interest in the history of American Indians, wrote an anonymous and substantive analysis of Atwater’s account that appeared in the North American Review for April 1821.69 “It may at first seem singular,” Cass noted, “that an association should be formed for exploring the antiquities of a country, the discovery of which, in a wilderness state, and inhabited only by savage tribes, is an event so recent, that the appellation of ‘the New World,’ which was then given it, is still retained as appropriate; and which possesses no architectural ruins, no statutes, sculptures, and inscriptions, like those of the old World. Destitute, however, as north America may be of any such monuments of art, and of former grandeur, there are topics, connected with its original population and unwritten history, to excite the inquiries and occupy the researches of the learned. . . . the question, whence America was first peopled, has never been satisfactorily answered.”70 Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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That question assumed new importance in light of the remains of antiquity found along the borders of rivers west of Alleghenies, which bespoke the former presence of a presumably large population. The ancient mounds and earthen enclosures led Cass to infer, like so many observers before and after him, that they were erected by people “who had made greater advances in the arts and in improvement, than the present race of Indians, or than their ancestors, since the Europeans have been acquainted with them.” He further noted that the ancient remains of the West, no less than the languages spoken by the continent’s aborigines, provided unequivocal evidence that as “new” as America was, among the nations of the globe its original inhabitants were a very old people. Both the novel subject of American antiquities and the characteristics of the languages spoken by American aborigines were important subjects for antiquarian investigations. Taken together they held great promise for determining “what stock of the Old World” originally peopled the New World. Yet time was of the utmost essence so far as the study of American antiquities could cast any light upon such an intriguing but veiled subject. Each passing year saw more mounds destroyed and their contents scattered even when preserved. “We think it highly important that all such relics should be carefully preserved in some public museum; as a comparison of them with those taken from the northern Asiatic mounds, and those from the Teocalli at Mexico, will show where those who constructed the works on the Ohio and the Mississippi were descendants of the Tartars or Scythians and progenitors of the Mexicans, or rather of their predecessors, the original inhabitants of Peru.” Thus Cass—like Cutler, Harris, and Atwater—vaguely associated the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley with ancient Mexicans and Peruvians.71 The original inhabitants of the American continent arrived, Cass believed, from Asia, and that “their separation from the primitive stock” of their race had occurred at an uncertain but early day. As he observed in an address before the Michigan Historical Society at Detroit in 1829,

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Much labor and research have been devoted to an inquiry into their origin and migrations. Many idle notions have prevailed respecting these topics, unworthy now of serious examination, except as they furnish evidence of the waywardness of the human intellect. That they are branches of the great Tartar stock, is generally believed at the present day. Many points of resemblance, both physical and moral, leave little doubt upon the subject. But why, or when, or where the separation occurred, or by what route, or in what manner, they were conducted from the plains of Asia to those of America, it were vain to inquire, and impossible to tell.72 If those views were not altogether original to Cass they were certainly representative of mainstream assumptions and assertions. Atwater’s work also was known in Europe, where it appeared in the atlas published by Friedrich Wilhelm Assall at Heidelberg in 1827. According to Atwater’s daughter, Belinda Atwater Foster, his investigation of Ohio antiquities earned him election to the Archaeological Society of Denmark, the French Academy, the Royal Academy of Great Britain, and the Royal Academy of Belgium.73 His renown prompted Karl Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, to visit Atwater at Circleville on May 9, 1826, during his travels through North America. “He is a great antiquarian,” said Bernhard, “and exists more in the antiquities of Ohio, than in the present world.” It was a most astute observation. Bernard spent an entertaining evening with Atwater inspecting his archaeological and mineralogical collections.74 Atwater, who struggled financially throughout life, later found it necessary to sell those collections to help support himself and his family. He sold the collection to the “Cincinnati Museum,” where it is said to have been destroyed by fire some years later.75 He died at Circleville on March 13, 1867, in his eighty-ninth year. Atwater lived a full and useful life yet by all accounts he died a disillusioned, despondent, and largely forgotten man. The peripatetic historian Henry Howe, another sharp observer,

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made Atwater’s acquaintance during a visit to Circleville in 1846. Howe found a careworn and sorrowful man. He described Atwater as “a queer talker, and appeared to me like a disappointed, unhappy man. . . . His life appears to have been a struggle with penury.” He seldom if ever practiced law yet had a large family to support—six sons, three daughters, and a wife whom Howe described as his greatest asset and comfort. Atwater sold his books by solicitation for a meager return, which Howe believed was his only visible means of support.76 A retrospective review of Atwater’s monograph on American antiquities appearing in the Western Monthly Review for March 1828 reflects the general view regarding the value of his work among most contemporaries—by no means a unanimous opinion but most certainly a representative one. The anonymous writer, probably the editor of the periodical, Timothy Flint, remarked that “he [Atwater] has certainly given the most faithful account of the Indian mounds, monuments[,] and antiquities, that we have seen. The western public clearly stands indebted to his industry and research in this ample field.” The general views of American antiquities that appeared after the publication of Atwater’s work were for the most part based upon his observations and were, consequently, so unoriginal as to contain little of value worth reporting. “Entire reliance may be placed on Mr. Atwater’s drawings and descriptions, of what he himself has seen; and he has probably seen and examined these subjects more extensively than any other man among us.”77 Portions of that favorable appraisal are most certainly true. Atwater, with the exception of his leading critic Rafinesque, had examined the subject of American antiquities more extensively than any of his contemporaries, or for that matter more than anyone else for several decades to come. Yet not all of Atwater’s contemporaries and successors shared Flint’s confidence that entire reliance could be placed on his survey maps and descriptions, several of whom, most notably Rafinesque, challenged their accuracy—correctives that were both necessary and proper.

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Atwater’s work, despite its shortcomings, remains a benchmark in the history of American archaeology. His place within that narrative, moreover, frames ironic and troubling questions about archaeology’s past. He and his contemporaries had little occasion or reason to question whether their motives and actions were pure. But later observers have sometimes perceived their efforts at archaeological salvage in a much different light than they did. Atwater is a significant exemplar of the antiquarian tradition in nineteenth-century America, which produced a body of literature that by and large legitimized the appropriation of indigenous cultures and the dispossession of Native peoples during the early republic. Whether he was a conscious agent in that process himself, or merely provided an ideology that justified the appropriation and dispossession of American Indians, is a debatable point. Yet archaeology and ethnology have often been the handmaidens of colonialism and imperialism as the history of anthropology readily attests. Nineteenth-century American archaeologists, not excluding Atwater, were hardly an exception. His archaeology at worst was an incongruous medley of conjectures reflecting his monogenist assumptions about human origins and his dismissive attitudes toward North American Indians; at best it is a descriptive account of remains by an intelligent and dedicated individual.78 Whether Atwater wrote on prairies, mammoth bones, mounds, or the history and prospects of his adopted state of Ohio, he exhibited, as one reviewer respectfully noted, “the ‘esprit de corps’ of antiquarians in an uncommon degree.”79 There are many ironies, paradoxes, and inherent tensions here. Antiquaries and community leaders like Drake and Atwater sought to make lasting records of the mounds at the same time they were striving to promote the economic development of their communities. Those were incompatible values since migration, the establishment of new settlements, and the growth of established ones posed a direct and immediate threat to the continued existence of the mounds. It is no different today as those in cultural resource

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management and historic preservation well know and just as often lament. But who, in all fairness, can gainsay the enduring value of the efforts of Drake and Atwater? The concern they expressed that so many of the ancient works were being destroyed was laudable by the standards of their own day or any other. Mounds and earthworks were being obliterated in almost every location in which they were found. Brick makers, as Atwater noted, took a particularly heavy toll.80 Concern over describing and surveying the mounds occurred in direct response to their wanton destruction. Lewis Cass, for example, applauded the assiduousness of Atwater’s exertions as an archaeological investigator. Atwater’s measurements and engraved plans of the mounds were “particularly valuable and meritorious, because the antiquities which he has so minutely and accurately described are constantly mouldering away, and every year becoming more and more indistinct; and, as the forests are cleared, settlements made, and the land cultivated, they will one after another be leveled and obliterated.”81 Atwater’s work is neither altogether praiseworthy nor blameworthy. The significance of Atwater’s work is all the more fully framed when compared to the somewhat peculiar and self-indulgent theorizing of Samuel Latham Mitchell whose conjectures also found a place alongside those of Atwater in the first volume of the Transactions and Collections of American Antiquarian Society. Mitchell, professor of natural history at the University of New York and vice president of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York, was certain that the American aborigines were not a race sui generis. They presumably originated in northern and southern Asia among peoples with whom they shared a common genealogy but apparently came here by diverse and circuitous routes. Indeed Mitchell seemed to be open to any number of scenarios but was wedded to the Scandinavian theory. He proudly noted in a letter to De Witt Clinton in March 1816 that he arrived at that conclusion “by a process of reasoning not hitherto advanced.” Mitchell had earlier presented his views on the migrations of the Malays, Samoieds, Tartars, and Scandinavians to America in an introductory 200

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discourse delivered in November 1816 at the College of Physicians at New York as part of his lectures on natural history. It is best to present his views as he did. Emigrants from Lapland, Norway, and Finland had settled themselves in Greenland before the advent of the tenth century, from whence they passed over into Labrador and from there migrated to a country called Vinland. Mitchell accepted the opinion he attributed to Clinton, who once mentioned to him in conversation that the old fortifications and other antiquities at Onondaga, New York, possessed “a Danish character.” It was a thunderbolt revelation for Mitchell—a veritable epiphany. “In the twinkling of an eye I was penetrated by the justness of his remark. An additional window of light was suddenly opened to me.” Mitchell thought he could trace the Scandinavians as far south as the St. Lawrence River and further supposed they had left Punic inscriptions here and there marking the former locations of their dwelling places. The Cambrian followers of the Welsh prince Madoc also found a place among his intrepid and motley band of adventurers. Mitchell read far too much into Clinton’s off-the-cuff remark about the supposed Danish character of the works at Onondaga. Either Clinton changed his opinion in the matter or Mitchell had misunderstood him, because Clinton unequivocally stated a different view in his discourse before the New York Historical Society in December 1811. “I believe we may confidently pronounce that all the hypotheses which attribute those works [in New York] to Europeans, are incorrect and fanciful.” He took that position upon three grounds: first, on account of the present number of the works; second, that every appearance indicated they were erected a long time before the discovery of America; and third, their form and manner differed from European fortifications both in ancient or modern times. “It is equally clear,” he added, “that they were not the work of the Indians [i.e., any of the historic tribes living at the same locations since the arrival of Europeans].”82 It might appear at first blush that the last statement by Clinton entirely negates the former. Yet it was logical in Clinton’s mind and Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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those of many of his contemporaries who shared his assumptions. He was making a temporal distinction between pre-Columbian remains and those of later Indian peoples and not a genetic or biological one (i.e., he was not saying that those who built the mounds were a nonIndian race). Thus Clinton could say in the same breath that it was both erroneous and far-fetched to attribute the earthworks of western New York to Europeans and also deny that they had been constructed by “Indians.” His statement should not, ipso facto, be interpolated as meaning no Indians (i.e., Native or indigenous groups) at any point in time. It would be otherwise difficult, indeed, to understand his threefold reason for denying that the earthworks in western New York were attributable to any European people. Clinton’s position pinpoints the cognitive dissonance that often arises when the indefinite language of the period encounters our own assumptions and understandings that carry more specific meanings. The problem is present in a good portion of the nineteenth-century literature. Even so, it still renders Mitchell’s statement that Clinton recognized “a Danish character” in the earthworks at Onondaga a problematic assertion. Clinton may have made in his reported conversation with Mitchell a general structural analogy between the earthworks at Onondaga, New York, and similar remains found in Denmark and nothing more. But if so, the context of that casual remark is now lost. Either way, Mitchell’s statement is incongruous with Clinton’s known views on the subject.83 Mitchell’s confusion in the matter may also have sprung from another source. Clinton did, in fact, draw attention to “remarkable” correspondences between American antiquities and similar structures erected by the ancient Britons and Danes in his Memoir on the Antiquities of the Western Parts of the State of New-York (1818). He made those comparisons, however, not to suggest that the American mounds and earthworks had actually been built by the ancient Britons or Danes. He believed, rather, that such resemblances indicated that the architects of the mounds and of the Danish remains “were, in all probability, of 202

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Scythian origin.” He based that conjecture on the authority of the statement made by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder that the name “Scythian” was commonly applied to all the nations formerly living in northern Europe and Asia—a leap of faith to be certain, but certainly a different argument than the one attributed to Clinton by Mitchell. Mitchell’s “twinkling of an eye” revelation regarding the origin of the mounds was his and his alone.84 Mitchell’s eye-opener regarding Danish or Scandinavian Mound Builders was as original and accommodating as it was confused and problematic. According to Mitchell the Scandinavians as well as the Welsh slowly penetrated the interior of the American continent. “The Danes or Finns, (and Welshmen, for I am willing to include them) performing their migrations gradually to the southwest, seem to have penetrated to the country situated to the south of Lake Ontario, and to have fortified themselves there”—apparently a reference to the earthen enclosures or “forts” of the Mound Builders. It was there that the Tartars or Samoieds probably first encountered them. “The Antiquarian of America will probably find that the Scandinavians emigrated about the tenth century of the Christian era, if not earlier. They may be considered, not merely as having discovered this continent, but to have explored its northern climes to great extent, and to have peopled them, three or four hundred years at least, before Christopher Columbus was born.” Putting the Scandinavians in North America in the tenth century was one thing (about which Mitchell was essentially correct) and attributing the origin of the mounds to them quite another. It is difficult to understand how Mitchell’s Scandinavian emigrants would have had the time to construct works of such obvious antiquity over such an extensive range of territory unless one assumed they were here as long or even longer than the Indian tribes themselves—an argument that not even Mitchell himself ever made. Such fanciful theorizing about the origin of American antiquities led absolutely nowhere, however correct regarding a pre-Columbian Scandinavian presence in North America.85 Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions

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While Atwater too occasionally lapsed into unwarranted conjecture, an imaginative fantasy about a Hindu migration to the New World for example, atonement for those indiscretions is more easily granted him given the descriptive and documentary merits of his work, which represent the first general survey of western antiquities. Whatever the flaws in his methods, interpretations, and those arising from the editing and inadequate proofreading of his monograph, and there are several, the work still has a transcendent significance in the history of American archaeology. Atwater’s enthusiasm for the subject of American antiquities at times unquestionably ran away with the better part of his judgment. Yet it was that very same ardor that propelled him onward in his investigations in the face of difficulties both financial and physical. That fervor is clearly instanced in the following letter written to Isaiah Thomas, president of the American Antiquarian Society, when Atwater submitted his memoir for publication in January 1820. “While traversing the country where these ancient works are found; tracing the outlines of the works; making diagram sketches of them, seated upon the summit of a lofty tumulus, which overlooked all the works belonging to some once celebrated spot, gilded by the rays of the setting sun—how anxiously have I wished for the company of someone like the person to whom these observations are addressed, so that he might participate with me in the emotions which filled my breast!”86 Atwater did not always interpret the testimony of the mounds correctly, but his account gave a better idea of their characteristics than any that had come before.

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4

A Dialectical Discourse Constructing the Mound Builder Paradigm

The Mound Builder paradigm was an incremental construction rather than an epiphany. Significant points of convergence and divergence accented the discourse regarding the origin and era of the mounds. The Mound Builder paradigm cannot legitimately be attributed to a single writer, school of thought, or period but to several. It emerged by degrees from the 1780s to the 1840s, although it was essentially in place when Caleb Atwater published his work on the mounds in 1820. Yet the bifurcated dialogue about Mound Builders and Indians built upon understandings, assumptions, and assertions dating to the earliest published accounts of American antiquities, and even beforehand regarding the origin of American Indians. The construction of the Mound Builder archetype was a dialectical process—the interaction and conflict of opposing ideas, traditions, and tendencies: “Mound Builders” vs. “Indians,” romanticism vs. empiricism, unsubstantiated theorizing vs. the gathering of hard evidence. Yet received opinion on the subject is wanting in several particulars. Distinct lines of assumption and argument are seldom traced to their sources or discussed in relation to the particular problems under discussion by particular writers. Scholars of different stripes and hews created a wide-ranging conversation about the mounds and the identity of the people who built them. Archaeological investigators with field experience—those who attempted to accurately describe, survey, and map the mounds— stand in bold contrast to their contemporary mythmakers.

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A somewhat tormented and erratic figure who nevertheless made original contributions to American archaeology was Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, as noted in the previous discussion of Rafinesque’s criticisms of Atwater’s work. While Rafinesque accomplished much in his scientific investigations as a naturalist and anthropologist, many of his contemporaries distrusted him. Learned societies in Philadelphia, where he lived from 1826 until his death in 1840, refused to publish his work, while the linguist and specialist in the Lenape language Pierre-Étienne Du Ponceau (more commonly given as Peter Stephen DuPonceau), secretary of the American Philosophical Society, appears to have purposely shunned him. If Rafinesque’s cotemporaries were uncertain about him, later observers have been even more so. His character, personality, and reputation have been subjects of frequent comment. He has been described as an eccentric, an erratic genius, an errant naturalist, an egocentric, and even a lunatic. Rafinesque’s strangeness is the stuff of legend in the history of the natural sciences, prompting Victor Wolfgang von Hagen to once refer to him as a most “unnatural naturalist.”1 More is the pity to his defenders, who regard him as a misunderstood genius whose scientific contributions as a naturalist and early anthropologist deserve more recognition than they have received. He was, as his biographer Charles Boewe observes, “a man of uncommon zeal” whose ardor and accomplishments have not been fully appreciated or understood.2 Rafinesque’s ethnological theories, in contrast to the value of his largely descriptive archaeological fieldwork, have fared little better at the hands of historians. Samuel Foster Haven, the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, placed Rafinesque’s conjectures about the peopling of America set forward in his “Ancient Annals of Kentucky” (1824) under the head of “vagaries.” He acknowledged him as a man of considerable scholarly and scientific attainments—a “laborious student in almost every conceivable department of knowledge”—adding that he only lacked “the faculty of judicious discrimination to secure him a distinguished name among men.” Daniel Brinton’s opinion of 206

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Rafinesque’s theories was equally unfavorable. His “Ancient Annals of Kentucky” was “an absurd production” based upon “the flimsiest foundations” while the pages of his American Nations (1836) were “filled with extravagant theories and baseless analogies.” American historian Justin Winsor noted Rafinesque’s “eccentricities and unstableness of head” in 1889, but that his works were not entirely worthless owing to his “acute observation.” Ephraim George Squier had earlier rendered a very similar judgment. Walter W. Taylor also fairly noted in his overview of the history of archaeology that “Rafinesque carries his views on the trans-Pacific and Atlantis-derived peopling of America to extreme limits.” Others have similarly ridiculed Rafinesque without ignoring the better qualities of his scholarship. Robert James Farquharson, a physician and student of American Indian languages and antiquities, said of Rafinesque in 1879 that he had “eaten of ‘the insane root.’ ” Yet Farquharson also credited Rafinesque with discovering the presence of phonetic or alphabetic elements in some of the aboriginal languages of America.3 Rafinesque announced that discovery in a letter to Peter Stephen DuPonceau published in the Saturday Evening Post in January 1827. There existed, Rafinesque said, several “ancient Alphabetical Glyphic Inscriptions” indigenous to the American continent. He made that statement in reference to the inscriptions at Otolum near Palenque in Chiapas. Working from the plates published in Antonio Del Rio and Paul Felix Cabrera’s Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City Discovered Near Palenque (1822), Rafinesque determined that the characters inscribed on the temple walls at Otolum were alphabetic. The curvilinear characters of the Otolum inscription were different from any others with which he was familiar, and formed “square groups in vertical series.” He considered the characters to be entirely distinct from Aztec or Mexican symbols. He claimed to be able to read some of them but offered no translations. Yet Rafinesque believed he would be able to do so at a future point in time by comparing the Otolum inscriptions with all known forms of alphabetic writing. “I flatter myself A Dialectical Discourse

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with the hope of being able to restore this alphabet,” he wrote, elements of which he saw in the ancient Libyan alphabet and that of the modern “Turacs” (the Tuareg or Berber language spoken in Libya and northern Africa).4 Rafinesque is a complex and enigmatic figure, an unorthodox genius who alienated himself from many of his contemporaries and placed himself on the margins of the American scientific community. Opinions regarding his character and trustworthiness have remained divided. Clio has not been kind to the memory of Rafinesque’s proclivity for excessive theorizing as an anthropologist. An impartial evaluation of his accomplishments and failings as a scholar is difficult since a well-defined wall of impressions and prejudices stands between Rafinesque and our distant perceptions of him. His remarkable life and intriguing character must be evaluated cautiously. Stephen Williams has well said on that score that is as difficult to render justice to Rafinesque today as it was in his own time.5 The negative opinions of anthropologists regarding the genuineness of the Walam Olum manuscript have only compounded the problem of assessing Rafinesque’s diverse interests and attainments. And that is most certainly true of Rafinesque’s contribution to archaeology and ethnology. The Walam Olum, Boewe observes, has “brought him whatever fame—or notoriety—he now enjoys in prehistory.” Alas, for poor Rafinesque, that is most certainly true. David M. Oestreicher, after making a thorough examination of the Walam Olum, concluded that it was an out-and-out forgery. As for the question of whether Rafinesque was the perpetrator of the fraud or was himself one of several victims in accepting its authenticity, Oestreicher sees no evidence of the latter.6 Yet the final judgment of Rafinesque cannot stop there. The documentary and descriptive aspects of his archaeological fieldwork stand in stark contrast to his imaginative theories about the origins and affinities of peoples based upon his classification of languages and alleged reading of glyphs. One can separate the wheat from the chaff in his writings on a wide range of subjects. His offerings on archaeology 208

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between 1820 and 1838 are significant. His surveys and descriptions of archaeological sites in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama are original contributions to knowledge and are still consulted by archaeologists, especially those in Kentucky. His account of six mound groups and enclosures in Montgomery County, Kentucky, near Mount Sterling, is a representative example. Rafinesque’s discussion of the site originally appeared as the second of three letters on American antiquities written to Thomas Jefferson, which appeared in the Kentucky Reporter in August and September 1820.7 Rafinesque based the account on his own firsthand observations in the field. The value of his fieldwork as an archaeologist receives the most complete treatment in Boewe’s John D. Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities” [and] Related Material by C. S. Rafinesque (2000), a work that goes a long way toward granting Rafinesque his due as an early archaeological investigator.8 Not everyone who made significant contributions to the debate about the mounds was an original archaeological investigator like Rafinesque. James Haines McCulloh Jr. of Baltimore (ca. 1793–1869) conducted no mound surveys or explorations. Instead, McCulloh was a fact finder and synthesizer who scrutinized and weighed the existing literature on American antiquities. He reasoned well and his philosophy was sound. The matured views that McCulloh presented in his Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, Concerning the Aboriginal History of America Researches published in 1829, as opposed to some of the premature opinions found in the 1816 and 1817 editions of the work, offered a sober second thought on the subject by critically commenting on the available evidence and received opinion. McCulloh, indeed, was one of the most respected writers on aboriginal America during the early nineteenth century. Nor were his enquiries solely restricted to North America. His interests were hemispheric in scope. Michael D. Coe and George E. Stuart, for example, have appreciatively noted McCulloh’s contribution to the study of ancient Mayan writing.9 McCulloh’s views on the likely origin of the mounds carried weight among likeminded contemporaries. Historians have accordingly A Dialectical Discourse

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bestowed a considerable amount of attention on his opinions. The notice is certainly warranted although important aspects of his archaeological thought as a whole are imperfectly known, as is the degree to which his ideas changed regarding the origin of the mounds. McCulloh is an interesting figure about whom we know far too little. He attended Princeton College before entering the Medical College at the University of Pennsylvania, earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1814, and received a commission in the U.S. Army as a garrison surgeon on July 17, 1814. He served at Fort McHenry in Baltimore and at Ellicott’s Mills during the remainder of the war. He afterward saw service at Fort Detroit in Michigan from March 30, l815, to November 15, 1815. McCulloh received an honorable discharge from the army on April 24, 1816.10 He had already acquired by that time an abiding interest in natural history and insatiable curiosity about the origin of American aborigines. It was McCulloh’s stated intention to travel westward to conduct scientific investigations and he hoped to visit Jefferson at Monticello en route. A letter of introduction from Joseph Hooper Nicholson of Baltimore to Jefferson makes the purposes of McCulloh’s propose trip westward quite clear. Nicholson was a Maryland legislator and judge who supported Jefferson during the presidential election of 1800 and one of McCulloh’s influential acquaintances in Baltimore. “One of his objects,” said Nicholson, “is to look into the Mineralogy and aboriginal History of our Country,” subjects in which Jefferson himself was deeply interested. McCulloh’s anticipated trek to the western country, however, never happened. His service as a surgeon in the U.S. Army from 1814 to 1816 put an end to the projected investigations.11 Yet McCulloh’s literary labors continued apace. He began writing what became the first edition of his Researches on America; Being an Attempt to Settle Some Points Relative to the Aborigines of America, etc., published at Baltimore in 1816. According to McCulloh he wrote most of the work before 1813 “under the disadvantages of youth, occupation, and a limited library.” His service as an army surgeon during 210

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the conflict with Great Britain averted his research and prevented him from bringing the work forward for several more years. It was at some point during his absence from Baltimore in 1816 that McCulloh allowed youthful ambition to get the better part of judgment. He impetuously permitted Coale and Maxwell of Baltimore to print a 130-page edition of his “imperfectly arranged notes, and crude materials of an essay,” even though he had neither seen nor worked with the manuscript for nearly two years. His absence from Baltimore at the time of its publication even prevented him from correcting proofs. Not surprisingly, the production contained many “errors, many inadvertencies, and in some instances, appear to express opinions the very opposite to what was intended.”12 McCulloh dedicated the work to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, found by Sir William Jones at Calcutta in 1784, whose highly regarded transactions were greatly coveted by students of antiquity. Although the dedication is somewhat gratuitous on the part of a literary novice it is indicative of McCulloh’s broad interests and his desire for recognition as a scholar. The following year McCulloh brought forward a 220-page revised edition of the work under that same title printed by Joseph Robinson at Baltimore. He offered the 1817 edition to the public in the hope it would be worthy of “the reflection and attention of the philosopher, the antiquarian, and the naturalist.”13 The second edition of Researches was indeed an improvement but the work was still uneven in quality. The last chapters and the appendix in particular needed further gestation. The work is far from a masterpiece but some of its more autobiographical passages provide insight into the source of McCulloh’s historical consciousness and what motivated his researches on aboriginal America. The humanistic value of studying the origins of American aborigines, McCulloh avowed, were simply too compelling to be neglected. everything connected with the history of man attracts our sensibility; and [just] as men look forward to remembrance . . . so we are looking backward to the former races of living men . . . who we feel A Dialectical Discourse

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must have been actuated by like views, desires, fears, and subject to all the changes, casualties, joys and misfortunes, which are in the picture of the world before us at present. This interest is manifested in all the enquiries which men have incessantly directed towards their progenitors; and in the memorials of every kind, which they have attempted to set up and preserve. The common mortality to which all generations are subject, adds a peculiar feeling and tenderness to the interests universally felt; when we inquire for those who have been, and no longer are. We look back for the traces of their being, with a pleasing pensive desire to know more of them;—a desire which is not quashed; but rather grows under the difficulty of carrying on the enquiry, though the accumulation of years and ages.14 McCulloh was a man of eclectic interests. He was no less interested in the theological problems connected with the peopling of the New World than with their scientific bearings. He evinced a serious interest in theology and wrote upon the subject in later life.15 Theological concerns are conspicuously and significantly present in all his writings on the origins and antiquity of American aborigines. McCulloh was a committed monogenist who saw little reason to question the assumption that all of humankind sprang from a common source. As he observed in 1817, “I have not thought it necessary to examine the opinion, which supposes two or more different creations of men or animals. The best naturalists have agreed in the [common] identity of the human race, and that animals have descended in like manner, from certain original pairs; these observations concurring with the Pentateuch, should be conclusive.” That was certainly the orthodox Christian position. And again, “The inspired writings give us the first accounts of the original formation of nations; they are the most ancient, and surely the most accurate histories. But in them no more is given than is barely sufficient to inform us of the beginning and state of man; and to illustrate that is the theological part of the volume.”16 212

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McCulloh assiduously continued his historical pursuits over the next twelve years. He published the final incarnation of Researches in 1829 under the revised title of Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, Concerning the Aboriginal History of America. By that time, McCulloh’s views had matured considerably and the volume had grown to a robust 535 pages. The scope of his analysis in the 1829 edition of his work is much broader, deeper, and includes a much improved appendix “On the Monuments, Fortifications, Mounds, etc. of North America.” There he presented his final conclusions on the subject of American antiquities after more than a decade of gathering facts and reflecting on their meaning. McCulloh conducted no field investigations of his own. Indeed, he was himself quite explicit in the matter: “Our information upon these antiquities, from not having had the agreeable opportunity of personal inspection, is entirely derived from the observation and description of others.”17 His statement that he served as a medical surgeon during the War of 1812 “on the frontiers” is a vague reference to his tour of duty at Fort Detroit from April to November 1815 and not to any time spent in Ohio. Nor does his military service record indicate that he was ever stationed in Ohio at any time during or after the war. McCulloh’s statement that he never had the opportunity of personally inspecting American antiquities would also seem to preclude the possibility that he examined mounds and earthworks at some point during his military service at Detroit or elsewhere in the Michigan Territory. Notwithstanding that direct testimony McCulloh has nevertheless been credited with having conducted investigations of mounds in Ohio during his service in the U.S. Army at some point during the War of 1812. The statement is a surmise for which there is no confirming evidence and one often repeated in the secondary literature.18 The confusion as to McCulloh’s purported explorations appears to stem from his discussion of human remains found within the mounds of Ohio and the caves of Kentucky and Tennessee. His comments on the subject were a critique of Atwater’s statement that the skeletons A Dialectical Discourse

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unearthed in the mounds indicated that they were a shorter and stouter race than the North American Indians. McCulloh contrasted that opinion with the one advanced by Daniel Drake, a trained anatomist. Drake saw no appreciable difference between the human remains recovered from the mounds and the anatomical characteristics of existing Indian tribes. McCulloh considered Drake to be the better judge in the matter. He further noted that the desiccated human bodies (popularly called “mummies”) discovered in the saltpeter (potassium nitrate) caves of Kentucky and Tennessee were “very plausibly” supposed by some to belong to the same race that erected the mounds. McCulloh examined several of those dehydrated remains when they were publically displayed in Baltimore and saw nothing in their appearance that appreciably differed from the physical remains of American Indians. His brief observations on the nature of skeletal and cranial remains from the mounds are informed but not based upon his own explorations of mounds or caves.19 It was McCulloh’s discernment and willingness to change his mind in light of new evidence that sets him apart from most early archaeological observers. Samuel Foster Haven, author the first history of American archaeology in 1856, praised McCulloh’s perspicacity and set the appreciative tone in assessing his work echoed by others many times over. “No more perfect monument of industry and patient research connected with this subject has been published.” Cyrus Thomas, director of mound explorations at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology and a man customarily sparing in his praise, rendered this judgment on McCulloh’s treatment of the subject of American antiquities: “One of the ablest early advocates of the Indian origin of these works was Dr. McCulloh; and his conclusions based, as they were, on the comparatively slender data then obtainable, are remarkable, not only for the clearness with which they are stated and the distinctness with which they are defined, but as being more in accordance with all the facts ascertained than perhaps those of any contemporary.”

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Adding to that encomium Robert Silverberg observed that McCulloh’s “ideas ran counter to many popular delusions,” and that in his own time he was “a prophet without honor.” Clark Wissler was far more critical. Wissler objected to the author’s style of writing and went rather hard on his analysis. “Had McCulloh possessed a great mind like Gallatin he would have produced the first great classic critique upon the culture origins of the aboriginal civilizations of Mexico and the Andean region instead of producing a poorly organized and ineffectual book.” Damning with faint praise Wissler concluded that “nevertheless he deserves a place in the history of anthropological thought during the period 1800–1860.” Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff, taking more of a historicist position, considered Wissler’s criticism to be altogether unfair since “it demanded more than could have been expected of any American antiquarian of McCulloh’s time.”20 Willey and Sabloff ’s objection is certainly warranted. No one, including a great mind like Gallatin, was then in possession of sufficient data to make the kind of hemispheric analysis expected by Wissler. McCulloh’s enquiries have significance for other reasons too. A critical issue in the history of American archaeology is the extent to which early observers did or did not recognize continuity between the archaeological record and early ethnographic accounts of North American Indians. The nineteenth-century debate about cultural continuity and discontinuity, while fragmentary, is not without interest. McCulloh’s place in that discussion, moreover, is particularly significant. Willey and Sabloff argue that McCulloh’s most significant contribution to the archaeology of his day “was his denial that there was an early[,] separate Moundbuilder culture.” Their major contention is that the “Mound Builder vs. Native American” debate of the nineteenth century was not as uncomplicated and clear-cut an issue as it is often understood and represented. “It is not altogether a simple issue; from early on, as in the case of McCulloh, there were scholars who were convinced of a long continuity of the Native American past which

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would embrace the builders of the Tumuli of the eastern United States as well as their more recent descendants. At this early juncture, such persons were usually in their minority and in opposition to the more popular opinion which saw the Moundbuilders as a ‘lost race.’ ”21 Robert C. Dunnell held a contrary opinion. He maintained that early archaeological and ethnological observers believed that the tribes in eastern North America lacked the degree or state of social development necessary to have constructed the mounds. Yet there was a notable exception to that view—the Natchez. Several of the authorities mentioned in Dunnell’s assessment believed that of all the North American Indian tribes known to Europeans the Natchez and cognate tribes (i.e., the southeastern or “Florida tribes” as they were once commonly called) could have been the direct, lineal descendants of the Mound Builders. They did so precisely because the Natchez possessed the kind of complex society they believed would have been necessary among a mound-building people. It met the social requirements as they understood them. Dunnell further argues that with a few significant exceptions—Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848) and Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man (1876)—that the Mound Builder hypothesis after 1840 was restricted to popular accounts like John D. Baldwin’s Pre-historic Nations (1874). It is perhaps questionable whether Baldwin’s treatise was a “popular” work in the true sense of the word. But even if one concedes the point, the idea that the Mound Builder paradigm was no longer taken seriously within scholarly circles is still problematic. Nor is it any more tenable a statement that Squier and Davis and Wilson were among the few scholars who still clung to the old paradigm. It all depends on what one means by “the Mound Builder hypothesis,” how the early authorities understood and explained its premises and conclusions, and the extent to which we recognize that there was not one but several competing Mound Builder hypotheses.22 Invariably McCulloh is aligned with the school of writers who attributed the mounds and earthworks to the ancestors of North 216

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American Indians. While that generality is correct concerning the views he expressed in 1829, it is not an adequate appraisal of his archaeological thought as an evolving whole. Several of the most salient aspects of McCulloh’s evaluation of evidence and line of reasoning—arguments that resonated most loudly with his contemporaries and that significantly clarify his actual views—are altogether absent in the assessments made by Thomas and Silverberg. Nor do their interpretations take into account how much his position on the identity of the Mound Builders changed since he first wrote on the subject in 1816 and 1817. McCulloh’s opinions on the Mound Builders in 1829 were 180 degrees removed from the views he entertained in the earlier editions of his work. He was satisfied in 1817 that the mounds and their contents indicated a state of society far more advanced than the one he attributed to North American Indians. He then regarded the mounds and earthworks as being “much superior to anything which we know the Indians around to have ever attempted; and a very slight view must satisfy us that these works owe their erection to the combined exertions of a numerous and organized population; a state of society altogether incompatible with the habits of any of the Indian nations, with whom were are acquainted.” And concerning the key question of what people had built the mounds he answered that they were possibly “an ancient aboriginal white people.”23 McCulloh initially accepted the medley of “Indian traditions” related by John Poage Campbell that posthumously appeared in the Port Folio for June 1816 that included one such yarn. Certain traditions among the Shawnee, the Sac and Fox, and other unidentified tribes, said Campbell, testified that Kentucky had once been inhabited by “white people.” Campbell did not suppose that the people in question were “white” in the strict sense of the term, but rather that as a relative statement they had been whiter or fairer skinned than neighboring tribes. Yet if Campbell was willing to make that stipulation, others were more than ready to believe that the Mound Builders had been an unknown “white” group or groups in the strict racial sense of the word. A Dialectical Discourse

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Presumably it was they who built the mounds of Ohio and Kentucky before being eradicated by the Indians.24 Campbell’s traditions regarding white Mound Builders have long been relegated to the province of myth. And it was doubtless because McCulloh at first so guilelessly accepted their importance that he later adopted such a critical stance toward what he considered to be vague and groundless theories regarding the identity of the Mound Builders, not excepting those he once indulged in himself. Twelve years later McCulloh renounced his earlier views and assumed a new position regarding the presence of white Mound Builders. He somewhat awkwardly and contritely noted in the 1829 edition of his work that “few persons have been properly qualified to express an opinion on the subject, not only being generally deficient in that kind of antiquarian knowledge, absolutely necessary to enable them to appreciate the subject under consideration, but in reality the monuments themselves are not yet sufficiently known or described. . . . We can speak with some knowledge of this matter, from the fact of having ourselves maintained a theory on this subject a few years since, which on greater research and better acquaintance with aboriginal institutions, we have abandoned for the general views of the ensuing pages.” It was a forthright if painful statement. Whereas he once attached importance to those traditions, he no longer considered them of any consequence whatsoever. While they might possibly suggest the manner in which the Mound Builder were dispossessed of the land though warfare with “the ruder tribes,” they were of little if any value in identifying the people who constructed them. “But that they were a race of white men, is unsupported by anything but their vague and very uncertain traditions, which cannot be deemed of sufficient correctness to establish the point. If there be any semblance of truth in their story, it most probably alludes to a conflict with some early settlement of French or other Europeans in these countries, which tradition has magnified into a great and important war, in which the Indians, the heroes of the tradition, were the conquerors.”25 218

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Just how far McCulloh had traveled in his views on the subject is indicated by the following statement regarding the state of society generally attributed to the Mound Builders. The general belief that the mounds belonged “to a race advanced in mechanical and even scientific requirements” he considered an overstatement, as was the corresponding conclusion that the Mississippi Valley had once been the home of “a nation eminently superior to any of the Indian tribes we have hitherto discovered on this continent.” It was then a settled conviction with him that “the greater and more extensive works of this kind, have been raised by some imperfectly civilized tribes, superior indeed, to the barbarous Indians found in possession of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, etc., but who had been driven off to other regions, or had been amalgamated into the ruder tribes, in consequence of some successful invasion of these last.” Even so, McCulloh still saw little in the mounds and their contents that could not have been accomplished by “the ruder tribes.” The evidence bearing upon this point supported no other conclusion: “nothing has been hitherto discovered on opening mounds that indicates any state of civilization materially different from that of ordinary Indian society; and certainly not surpassing the demi-civilization of the Florida tribes.” The more imposing earthworks had most likely been built by the Natchez, Taensas, and Maubiliens, or at the very least by their ancestors. As for what he considered to be the ruder or more inferior class of aboriginal remains, he thought it unnecessary to look any further than the Wyandot, Iroquois, and other “barbarians” who had presumably intruded upon the more ancient inhabitants.26 McCulloh believed that at least part of the Lenape or Delaware Indian migration tradition concerning the Talligeu, Talligewi, or Alligewi related by the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder was a plausible scenario for explaining the ultimate fate of the legendary Mound Builders. According to that tradition the Lenape resided for hundreds of years in a distant western region of the continent before gradually migrating eastward. After many years of journeying, they A Dialectical Discourse

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at length reached the Namaesi Sipu (the Mississippi River). There they encountered the Mengwe (the Lenape word for the Iroquois and from whence the name Mingo is derived) who were also migrating eastward in search of new homelands. Groups of the emigrating Lenape and Mengwe soon discovered that the lands east of the Mississippi were inhabited by a powerful people living in many large towns. The Lenape knew that people as the Talligeu or Talligewi. Colonel John Gibson, a Pennsylvania trader and former Indian captive who reportedly spoke several Native languages fluently, was of the opinion that the proper appellation of that people was not Talligewi but rather Alligewi—a designation still reflected in the names Allegheny River and Allegheny Mountains. The Lenape, Heckewelder further noted, still called the Allegheny River the Alligewi Sipu (the River of the Alligewi). Even as late as 1727 the name “Alleghens” is found on the map appearing in Cadwallader Colden’s The History of the Five Nations. Heckewelder thought Gibson’s opinion the correct one.27 Details contained in the tradition regarding the Alligewi are important given the prominent place it held within the Mound Builder debate. So too are the circumstances in which the Heckewelder received the tradition from his Lenape informants. Accounts of both follow. “Many wonderful things are told of this famous people. They are said to have been remarkably tall and stout, and there is a tradition, that they were giants among them, or people of a much larger size than the tallest of the Lenape. It is related that they had built to themselves regular fortifications or entrenchments, from whence they would sally out, but were generally repulsed.” Heckewelder did not question the veracity of that statement. He had himself observed many such structures attributed to the Allegewi by the Lenape during his travels as a missionary. He observed an earthen embankment in 1786 near the mouth of Huron River on the north side of Lake St. Clair about twenty miles northeast of Detroit. He also saw similar structures in 1789 on the Huron River east of the Sandusky River, six to eight miles distant

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from Lake Erie. Heckewelder visited the site east of the Sandusky River while traveling with fellow missionary Abraham Steiner during a visit to the Moravian mission of New Salem on the Petquotting (Huron River) in present-day Erie County, Ohio.28 “Outside of the gateways of each of these two entrenchments [east of the Sandusky River], which lay within a mile of each other, were a number of large flat mounds, in which, the Indian pilot said, were buried hundreds of the slain Talligewi,” whom Heckewelder thereafter referred to as the Alligewi in deference to the linguistic acumen of Gibson. Heckewelder’s unidentified Indian guide was presumably a Lenape. The ensuing conflict between the Lenape and Alligewi, the tradition continues, resulted in the defeat of the latter. While still encamped on the western side of the Mississippi the Lenape asked permission of the Alligewi to settle among them. They refused the Lenape’s request but did grant them permission to cross their lands and settle further to the east of the Alligewi. But as they began to cross the Namaesi Sipu the Alligewi attacked the unsuspecting Lenape, who then formed an alliance with the Mengwe and returned favor against the Alligewi. Great battles were fought in which many warriors fell on both sides. “The enemy fortified their large towns, and erected fortifications especially on large rives and near lakes,” where the Lenape and Mengwe relentlessly struck at them. The war with the Alligewi lasted many years during which they received no quarter from their assailants. At length the beleaguered Alligewi determined to abandon the country and leave it to their conquerors. They fled down the Mississippi and never returned.29 McCulloh did not accept the entire Lenape migration tradition at face value—the part about the Alligewi being giants he sat down as fable—but the statement that they escaped their enemies by descending the Mississippi River intrigued him. “Excepting the story of the giants, there is nothing improbable in this tradition.” He conjectured that the Alligewi fled to Louisiana, where they either settled or amalgamated “with some of those demi-civilized people we have described

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under the general appellation of Florid[i]ans.” The Natchez, according to their own traditions, said McCulloh, had in former times lived along the Ohio River, which seemed to support the supposition that in ancient times they Natchez had been known to the Lenape as the Allegewi. “This story, therefore, confirms the opinion we have entertained of a connexion between the founders of the monuments of the western country, and the Natchez, Taensas, etc.”30 The connection made by McCulloh between the Mound Builders and the Natchez and Taenas is a reflection of McCulloh’s social theory or what he called “the social history” of American aborigines. He divided that history into two “unequal divisions” much as Samuel George Morton did a decade later. One division included the “savage or barbarous” tribes and the other “demi-civilized” groups. His “savage or barbarous” class was disproportionately large and encompassed the entire American continent. Only the Natchez and other of the so-called Floridian tribes of the United States; the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians; and the Muyscas of Colombia constituted the “demicivilized” peoples of the Americas. He characterized the aboriginal peoples who formerly resided in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia as “advanced in their progress to civilization, beyond any of the adjoining Indian tribes.” At the time of the Hernando De Soto expedition the Natchez, one of the so-called Floridian groups, were sedentary, intensely agricultural, and differed in degree from “the ruder tribes” with whom they were neighbors.31 McCulloh considered the Natchez and Taensas to be among the groups of American aborigines who had reached “the first, or lowest stage of that imperfect civilization to which a few aboriginal nations had attained, previous to the voyage of Columbus.” The so-called Floridian or Gulf tribes—archaic designations for the tribes residing in what is today Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia— when first known to the Spanish and French were “advanced in their progress toward civilization, beyond any of the adjoining Indian tribes.” Among those groups were the Natchez and the Taensas. McCulloh 222

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perceptively noted, however, that when those groups were first described by Europeans they were already “in an almost ruined state, from wars and other calamities, which had begun to subject their social institutions to decay, even before the time of [the] European discovery.” When the De Soto expedition march through southern part of the United States between 1539 and 1542 the Cherokee and Chickasaw, who were living near the Natchez and Taensas if not among them, were “desolated” by pestilence. De Soto’s men carried “death and destruction” wherever they went. Yet the Natchez and other Floridian groups only differed by degree from “the ruder tribes” with whom they were neighbors. They too subsisted by hunting and fishing but were more intensely agricultural, more sedentary, and lived under “a despotic government.”32 McCulloh also appears to have been at least hypothetically open to a possible connection between “the natives of Louisiana and the Tolecks, at least in a slight degree.” He made that tentative association based on the name Tula—the designation that Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas gave to one of the districts or towns visited by De Soto, which McCulloh thought had been located somewhere in northeast Texas. “Tula in the history of the Toltecks was the capital of their ancient country.” It was unwarranted, he noted, to assume that the Tula visited by De Soto was the ancient seat of the Toltecs based solely upon a coincidence in place names, “but it may have been named after it, as was the case with the city in Anahuac, by some nation or people directly or indirectly connected with that anciently demi-civilized people; and who carried this word with them wherever they made settlements, as in Mexico, Yucatan, etc.” McCulloh did not elaborate his conjectural Toltecan connection any further, adding only that the degree of civilization possessed by the Toltecs was “very analogous to that we have described as pertaining to the Natchez, and other Florid[i]an nations.”33 McCulloh was neither the first nor the last observer to suggest a theoretical Natchez-Toltec association. Manasseh Cutler and Benjamin Smith Barton made the affiliation before him and William Henry Harrison (who made an Aztec affiliation), Samuel George Morton, A Dialectical Discourse

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Ephraim George Squier, and coauthors Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon afterward. The same “state of society” argument supported the kindred views of all of those authorities, although Morton and his disciples Nott and Gliddon added a supposedly Toltecan cranial type as further evidence that the Natchez were a kindred people if not Toltecs proper. Yet to give McCulloh his due as an early archaeological writer it is only proper to note that John Wesley Powell and Cyrus Thomas echoed several of McCulloh’s sentiments as they endeavored to put an end to artificial distinctions between Mound Builders and Indians in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The views and opinions embodied in the 1829 edition of McCulloh’s Researches are those upon which his reputation deservedly rests. They are instructive on several levels, and not the least of which is that the Mound Builders vs. Indians paradigm was not always a straightforward proposition. It had several permutations based upon the particular set of assumptions and constructions under consideration— variables that are too seldom reflected in the historiography. At root cause is the inadequacy of the nineteenth century’s ubiquitous and problematic phrase “lost race” for understanding the nuances of intended meanings—at least in regard to particular points of enquiry. An antiquary in a favorable position to investigate the mounds firsthand was James McBride of Hamilton, Ohio. McBride was no theorist or synthesizer on the model of a McCulloh or a Barton but rather a methodical field man. At various junctures of a busy life, McBride’s multifarious activities embraced merchandizing, architecture, banking, civil engineering, and several avenues of public service. As respectable as those attainments were, however, his most enduring contributions were made as an amateur archaeologist and historian. McBride is a prime example of the antiquarian chronicler of which the nineteenth century provides so numerous and significant an offering. Those diligent investigators devoted a significant amount of time and labor to gathering original archaeological and historical materials. They did

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so, moreover, with an enthusiasm and single-mindedness that commands respect and admiration, however inadequate their methods and interpretations relative to later developments in archaeological method and theory. As a chronicler of early settlement in the Miami Valley and a surveyor and delineator of prehistoric Indian sites, McBride made significant contributions to both history and archaeology. Indeed, the value his researches in these fields led several of his contemporaries and successors to lament that he has received less recognition than is his due.34 No subject was of greater interest to McBride than the numerous prehistoric Indian mounds and earthworks of the Miami Valley. The great number of remains lying between the Little Miami and the mouth of the Great Miami in southwestern Ohio indicated the former presence of a relatively dense population. McBride expended much time, money, and effort in surveying these works and in collecting a valuable cabinet of artifacts. One of the leading objectives of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, established in Columbus, Ohio, in 1831, was to collect all that was known about the “the labors of a race now extinct.” The society sought to promote a more systematic approach to the study of the mounds by encouraging those living near them to make accurate diagrams and full descriptions on its behalf.35 Few members of the society were more auspiciously situated to achieve that end than McBride. The Miami Valley presented a rich field for research. Archaeologists have recorded the sites of at least 221 mounds in Butler County, Ohio, alone, besides 30 other earthworks and aboriginal sites of various descriptions. Only Ross County in the Scioto Valley has a greater number of mounds and earthen enclosures in the State of Ohio. The Great Miami River meanders widely through Butler County from the northeast to the southwest, dividing the county into two unequal sections. Most of the county lies west of the river and is drained by numerous creeks that run in a southeasterly direction to the Miami. It is along the alluvial terraces or “bottom” lands of those

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Fig. 9. James McBride (1788–1859) of Hamilton, Ohio. McBride was a self-educated and remarkably talented individual who undertook significant fieldwork in the Miami Valley of southwestern Ohio between 1828 and 1847. McBride’s partner in those endeavors was John W. Erwin, a civil engineer and one of the most experienced surveyors in the state. Frontispiece to James McBride’s posthumously published Pioneer Biography (1869).

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tributaries that the mounds and enclosures of the Miami Valley are most numerous. The largest earthworks stand at the broadest extent of these bottoms, often at the confluence of streams. The soil at these junctions is among the most fertile and easily cultivated. McBride knew these sites well and fully understood how precarious the chances were of their continued survival. The farmer’s plow, the platting of new towns, the construction of turnpike roads, and the building of the Miami Canal threatened them with eminent destruction. As a young surveyor McBride had himself been involved in laying out the first county roads in Oxford Township in Butler County between 1808 and 1811. He surveyed the first road through Oxford Township in 1808 when the site of Oxford and its future university were nothing more than a stand of blazed trees and a flowing spring of water. It was doubtless during those early years as a surveyor that he had his fist encounters with the prehistoric Indian mounds and earthen embankments located along the tributaries of the Great Miami River. When McBride first arrived in Hamilton in 1807 most of the mounds and enclosures in the Miami Valley were still undisturbed. They were covered with mature trees of the same size, species, and ages as those found in the surrounding woodlands. Moreover, on the very summits of these works were the remains of large trees that had already fallen and decayed, suggesting an even remoter antiquity.36 But when McBride made the majority of his archaeological surveys during the 1830s the land on which many of them were located had been cleared and brought under cultivation. The effects of plowing along the sides of the embankments greatly reduced their original dimensions. There was also abundant evidence that several of the mounds had recently been opened by local inhabitants. McBride lamented that a more conscious and concerted effort was not being made to preserve at least some of the remains precisely as they were found. The demolition of a small mound within the University Square at Oxford, Ohio, for example, elicited the following response: “It is to be regretted that this was done; it [the mound] ought to have been preserved entire, with the natural A Dialectical Discourse

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forest-trees which grew on it, as a shady grove, in which the students might retire to study, or ruminate on the existence of that race by whom these ancient works were constructed.”37 McBride made his first known archaeological survey in 1828. Although he appears to have occasionally excavated mounds, surveying constitutes his greatest contribution to archaeology. McBride recruited the able assistance of John W. Erwin in that enterprise in 1836. McBride and Erwin continued to survey the mounds and enclosures of the Miami Valley over the next two decades. Erwin was probably the most experienced surveyor in Ohio. He was an assistant engineer on the National Road at Richmond, Indiana, between 1825 and 1835, laid out numerous turnpike roads in the 1830s, and became an engineer on the Miami Canal in 1842. McBride, who had considerable surveying experience in his own right, knew a better surveyor when he saw one. Erwin shared McBride’s interest in making detailed records of the mounds and earthworks while it was yet possible to do so. As McBride noted to fellow antiquary Charles Whittlesey in December 1840, the mounds and earthworks in his vicinity were rapidly disappearing: “the only memorial[s] of a former people, now only known by those remains of their skill and industry.” With compass, chain, and level, McBride and Erwin recorded the dimensions of local works and noted their relationship to the topography of the surrounding countryside.38 The McBride-Erwin surveys made between 1836 and 1847 are among the most accurate surveys of archaeological sites made during the nineteenth century.39 McBride informed another fellow antiquary and correspondent, Wills De Hass of Wellsburg, Virginia, in October 1845 Fig. 10. (opposite) “Map Exhibiting a Section of Six Miles of the Great Miami Valley, with its Ancient Monuments. By J. W. Erwin for James McBride.” John W. Erwin’s undated map served as the model for Squier’s “Map Exhibiting a Section of Six Miles of the Paint Creek Valley, with its Ancient Monuments,” constructed in 1847. Erwin made the original drawing for McBride on April 25, 1840. Plate 3 of Squier and Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848).

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that he and Erwin had completed about twenty-five survey maps. He thought it would take at least two or three more years to complete the survey of all the known works in the Miami Valley. His intention was to compile this data into an archaeological map and present it to a learned society for publication. His preference was the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, an organization of which he was a charter member and through which he had already published some of his early surveys.40 McBride meticulously compiled these surveys into bound notebooks, which were greatly sought after by other investigators who wished to make copies of their contents. The originality and value of these materials established his reputation as an archaeological investigator and in 1846 earned him election as a corresponding member of the American Ethnological Society in New York.41 Besides making surveys, McBride collected an outstanding cabinet of archaeological and ethnological artifacts. He acquired most of the collection as gifts from friends and acquaintances who knew his taste for collecting. Very few if any of the items in his cabinet were obtained by mound excavations directly undertaken either by himself or jointly with Erwin. Some were recovered from sites destroyed during construction of the Miami Canal, while others were found on the surface during McBride’s surveys or given to him by local farmers. The collection also included a small number of historic calumets, trade goods, and “Indian curiosities” indirectly acquired from the groups of the Osage and Cherokee residing west of the Mississippi. When McBride obtained a contract in 1826 to supply provisions to the army at Cantonment Gibson in the Arkansas Territory he made arrangements with local merchants to obtain several items from the Osage and Cherokee Indians who traded there.42 He made watercolor drawings, pencil sketches, and descriptions of the contents of his collection, both archaeological and ethnological materials, which he often drew to the size and color of the original objects. The places of origin for the objects in his cabinet, when known, were faithfully recorded.

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At the time of McBride’s death in 1859 he left some three thousand manuscript pages relating to archaeology, history, and biography. He had collected a choice library of some 2,500 volumes of theological, legal, scientific, literary, and historical works, including complete files of several national and local newspapers he complied between 1814 and 1856. An anonymous but appreciative compiler of local history and biography later described McBride’s library as the largest and rarest of its kind then in Ohio, “probably the richest in the incunabula of the West.”43 McBride’s death resulted in the collection being dispersed, however. Some of his autographed books were sold to individual collectors. But tragically most of his newspaper files and rare pamphlets were sold to a paper mill and converted into pulp—a mindless act that Henry Howe decried as an “irreparable loss” to history. A few of McBride’s newspaper files were fortunately spared the paper mill and sent to the Ohio State Library. The library board transferred the files to the Ohio Historical Society in 1927. McBride’s historical manuscript collections and bound volumes of correspondence met a much kinder fate. Appropriately they went to the Ohio Historical and Philosophical Society (the Cincinnati Historical Society since 1963), an organization he helped charter in 1831 and whose objectives he so ably embodied in his historical and archaeological researches.44 Happily, McBride’s bound volumes of archaeological surveys, field notes, and drawings of artifacts also survived. William Sansom Vaux of Philadelphia (1811–82) purchased the McBride collection in 1859 at a public auction. McBride’s will empowered the executors of his estate to sell the materials, requiring only that they be sold as a whole and not divided. While it was reportedly McBride’s stated wish that the collection should go to a public institution in Ohio, he made no provision in his will that the collection remain in the state, as later claimed by those who lamented its sale.45 Vaux respected McBride’s wishes. He willed the entire collection to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The McBride materials have been on indefinite loan to the Ohio

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Historical Society since 1960.46 The Cincinnati physician, geologist, and antiquary John Locke appreciatively said of McBride that “it is fortunate for the history and science of the west that a few amateurs like Mr. McBride have preserved from oblivion many unique and valuable specimens.”47 The passage of time has not changed that verdict. Archaeological fieldwork today bears but slight resemblance to that undertaken by McBride and Erwin. But with due allowance for the state of archaeological enquiry in the early and mid-nineteenth century their investigations are in many ways no worse for the comparison. McBride was a successful business man and a self-educated and selfeffacing researcher who made no claims to being scholarly. Yet his contemporaries readily recognized his scholarly bent and respected his fieldwork as an archaeologist and a writer of local history. What has been aptly referred to as McBride’s only intellectual “aberration or eccentricity” was his belief in the concentric spheres theory advanced by John Cleves Symmes Jr. in 1818. Symmes held that the earth was hollow, open at both poles, and habitable within each of its four concentric circles. McBride made a wooden model of the earth that Symmes used to illustrate his hypothesis in his lectures. He also promoted Symmes’s theory in an anonymously published book, a youthful enthusiasm he may have later regretted. Given the originality of his contributions to American archaeology, he may perhaps be allowed that one unfortunate and unguarded enthusiasm.48 A kindred spirit was Charles Whittlesey of Cleveland, Ohio. Whittlesey, like McBride and Erwin, got his facts about American antiquities by making firsthand observations in the field. Whittlesey arrived at his interest in archaeology along a much different path than the selfeducated McBride. Although not altogether indifferent to theory Whittlesey had little patience for those who theorized about archaeological remains, or any other scientific subject for that matter, without having themselves made firsthand observations. Whittlesey entered U.S. Military Academy in July 1827 at age nineteen and graduated in

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July 1831. The scientific training he received at the academy, especially in the study of mathematics, later served him well as a geological and archaeological surveyor. Upon graduating, he was initially commissioned a brevet second-lieutenant in the Sixth Infantry and transferred to the Fifth Infantry at Fort Howard in Wisconsin in October 1831. He saw service in Black Hawk’s War before resigning his commission in September 1832. Whittlesey next took up the study of law. He was counselor at law at Cleveland in 1835 and from 1836 to 1837 coproprietor and editor of the Cleveland Daily Gazette, which later became the Cleveland Herald and Gazette. But his larger claim to attention is as a geologist, archaeologist, and historian.49 An act passed by the Ohio legislature on March 27, 1837, authorized the first Ohio geological survey in an effort to promote the development the state’s natural resources. William Williams Mather, also a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and former instructor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at West Point, directed the survey as the chief geologist. Whittlesey received appointment as the topographical engineer with the intention that his surveys would be the basis of a topographical map of the state. The proposed map was to show the contours and physical character of the country, “as if it were actually spread before the eye of the observer.” The construction of such a detailed map, if it was to be more than a good approximation of surface features, would require a method of triangulation similar to that used in the U.S. Coastal Survey. Mather estimated that the completion of a trigonometric survey of the entire state would require an expenditure of at least one hundred thousand dollars, which went well beyond what the Ohio legislature was willing to appropriate. The projected map was not to be, but the fieldwork that Whittlesey undertook as a member of the geological corps was a formative experience nonetheless. It established his expertise both as a geological and an archaeological surveyor and affiliated him with several eminent members of the scientific community.

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Fig. 11. Charles Whittlesey (1808–86). Whittlesey began surveying mounds as the topographical engineer on the first Ohio Geological Survey in 1837. In an era when the best archaeologists tended to be geologists, he was one of the best. His career exemplifies the close developmental relationship between geology and archaeology in the nineteenth century. He was first and last an empiricist who was more interested in describing and classifying the mounds and less in theorizing about theme ahead of his facts. Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection.

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Jared Potter Kirtland, a distinguished naturalist and professor of the theory and practice of medicine at the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati, took charge of botany and zoology on the survey.50 The aforementioned John Locke was an assistant geologist. The other assistant geologists were Dr. Samuel P. Hildreth of Marietta (who served as the paleontologist), Caleb Briggs of Massachusetts, and John Wells Foster of Zanesville. Locke, Hildreth, and Foster, like Whittlesey, later distinguished themselves in their archaeological avocations. Nearly a half century later, when Whittlesey was the sole surviving member of the geological corps, he recalled his former coworkers as men “whose talents and acquirements should not be forgotten or their labors obscured by those of another generation of observers.” It was fitting that Whittlesey remembered the members of geological survey fondly. Those associations served him well in his subsequent endeavors as a geologist and archaeologist. Whittlesey’s work as the topographer on the survey illustrates the close developmental relationship between geology and archaeology in the nineteenth century.51 Geologists often made the best archaeologists in an era when archaeology had not yet found its footing as a bona fide discipline. Archaeological training per se was nonexistent. Geologists understood taxonomy, surveying, field collecting, and the material composition of artifacts. Geology as a science was itself yet in its infancy. But the state geological surveys provided opportunities to survey mounds and enclosures and at least a modicum of state support to do so. The first state geological surveys were those of North and South Carolina in 1823 and 1824, and by 1836 ten other eastern and southern states had followed suit. Archaeology was a secondary consideration in the state geological surveys, the primary purposes of which was to promote the economic development of their respective states. Yet they were nonetheless a boon in the early development of archaeology, especially during an era when government support for science was minimal.52 It was during the first Ohio geological survey that Whittlesey made his first surveys of archaeological sites. Several of the survey maps of A Dialectical Discourse

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earthworks give the elevations and depressions of embankments through vertical profiles and show each in relation to the adjacent topography. The 1837 survey of the Marietta earthworks, made for Whittlesey by Samuel R. Curtis,53 is an example of the general method that Whittlesey proposed to use in platting the archaeological surveys made during the Ohio Geological Survey.54 Once published, those surveys would be a lasting record of a vanishing landscape.

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Many of these ruins of a lost race are to this day without a description, while their forms and dimensions are fast disappearing under the operation of the plough and the spade. For it is in the rich valleys of the Miami, the Scioto, and the Muskingum, where the modern agriculturist now cultivates the soil, that an ancient people, more numerous than the present occupants, pursued the same peaceful avocation at least ten centuries ago. And upon the sites of modern towns within these valleys, as at Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Circleville, Piketon, Portsmouth and Marietta, the ancients located their cities, of which distinct traces exist. . . . Research and enquiry will doubtless develop a connected system of antique structures, upon all the tributaries of the Scioto, and its kindred streams, leading to the Ohio. . . . The evidences of remote population and labor, now apparent within the State of Ohio, will, when collected in one mass, surprise all who have not bestowed attention upon the subject of Western Antiquities.55 Whether the mound-building peoples in the valley of Ohio were more populous than the inhabitants Ohio in 1837 as Whittlesey thought is perhaps questionable. But there can be little doubt that making a lasting record of what remained of those works was an obligation he believed that the present owed to both the past and the future. Whittlesey challenged the still popular notion that the name “fortifications” correctly applied to any of the earthworks examined during his fieldwork in southern Ohio. After inspecting the earthworks at Marietta, Portsmouth, at Piketon in Pike County, and several sites in 236

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Ross County, he found no “elements of military strength, or evidences of a warlike intention.” Quite to the contrary, the rectangular and circular designs of the enclosures were without exterior ditches. While some had interior ditches they would have been useless as a means of defense. They also had numerous openings along their sides and corners that would render them equally indefensible. Whittlesey surveyed and sketched nine separate earthworks during the first year of the survey and collected enough materials for the delineation and description of more than thirty by the end of the second year. He estimated that an equal number of works remained to be explored. He did not seem advisable to him to publish the surveys already made until all had been surveyed and mapped.56 Whittlesey initially intended to include the completed plans and descriptions of archaeological sites as part of the survey’s final report. Much to his disappointment, however, those plans were thwarted when the survey unexpectedly ended due to a lack of legislative funding and without the completion of a final report. Nor had any provision been made for preserving the survey’s papers, field notes, and maps. Whittlesey estimated that at the time of the survey’s termination only about one-third of the known archaeological sites in Ohio had been surveyed. It was then that Joseph Sullivant of Columbus proposed that Whittlesey continue his investigations at Sullivant’s expense. The surveys were to be jointly published and the costs incurred by Sullivant. Whittlesey made additional surveys toward that end in 1839 and 1840. But due to Sullivant’s ill-health the project was never completed. Whittlesey’s delineations and descriptions of archaeological sites made during the geological survey set a high standard for his contemporaries, although they have not been above criticism by later surveyors.57 William Henry Harrison, a future president of the United States, also found the subject of American antiquities one deserving of his attention. Harrison presented his observations on the origin and purpose of the Ohio mounds in “A Discourse on the Aborigines of the A Dialectical Discourse

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Valley of the Ohio” published in the first volume of the Transactions of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio in 1839.58 He described the mounds which he had personally inspected, elaborated his theory of forest succession as a means of estimating their age, and speculated on the probable identity of the people who had built them. Harrison’s discourse was one of the most widely cited works during the midnineteenth century. He took a deep interest in prehistoric remains, especially those near his home at the junction of the Great Miami and Ohio River, but also had firsthand knowledge of the works on the original site of Cincinnati. As a young army officer, Harrison was among those who accompanied Anthony Wayne in August 1793 in examining the low embankments of earth that once covered the upper plain at Cincinnati. The mounds and other earthworks of Ohio Valley, said Harrison, attested that the country had once been occupied by a numerous and industrious people. Unknown centuries had elapsed since the time they were occupied and abandoned by those who erected them. While pondering the ultimate fate of the Mound Builders (what happened to them and whither did they go?), Harrison concluded that their departure from the Ohio Valley must have been a matter of necessity. If they yielded to “a more numerous and gallant people”— which he thought likely—then what country received them as fugitives?’ And what became of the people who drove them into exile? Had both the Mound Builders and their purported vanquishers taken flight before “a new swarm from some northern or southern hive?”59 Were the Mound Builders extirpated or did they migrate in the face of

Fig. 12. (opposite) “Marietta Works.” Surveyed by Charles Whittlesey, 1837. Among the descriptions and plans of earthworks contributed to Squier and Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley was this map of the Marietta earthworks. The late Jim Murphy has shown that the survey was actually made for Whittlesey in 1837 by Samuel D. Curtis, an engineer on the Ohio-Erie Canal. Squier and Davis mistakenly attributed the survey to Whittlesey. Nor did Whittlesey himself ever identify Curtis as the surveyor or correct Squier and Davis’s incorrect provenance.

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superior numbers and constant war? The mounds themselves provided Harrison clues upon which to construct his conjectures regarding the condition and character of the people who built them. The number and extent of the remains indicated a large population “congregated in considerable cities” at several favored locations. There could be little doubt that they were an agricultural people, for no people who lived primarily from hunting could sustain such a large population. He further inferred that existence of “a national religion” among them, the observances of which were as “pompous, gorgeous, and imposing” as any that a “semi-barbarous nation could devise.” There was also a large priesthood, “and altars often smoking with hecatombs of victims.” Harrison easily imagined that the “temples” at Circleville, Grave Creek, and Newark “annually streamed with the blood (if not of thousands, like those of Cholula and Mexico) of hundreds of human beings.”60 Harrison affirmed that the historians of Mexico, those who recorded the fact that the ancient Mexicans first arrived there in the middle of the seventh century, had probably indicated the fate of the Mound Builders. He curiously states in support of that opinion, however, that Bishop James Madison of Virginia subscribed to the view that the Aztecs and the people who built the North American mounds were one and the same people. Yet Madison made no such statement in his account of the fortifications of the western country published in the sixth volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society in 1804. Indeed, Madison makes no mention of Aztecs, Toltecs, or any other Mexican group. He attributed the origin of the mounds to the custom known to exist among many of the North American Indian tribes of periodically collecting and depositing the bones of the deceased relatives at one place—the same opinion expressed by Jefferson. Madison considered the mounds, earthworks, and rock carvings he examined along the Kanawha, Guyandotte, and Elk Rivers in Virginia to be curious works of “Indian labour.” He saw no need to look any further in explaining their origin and purpose. Unless Madison expressed belief in an Aztec-Mound Builder connection in 240

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private conversation, correspondence, or a fugitive text before his death in 1812, which he may well have done, the opinion that Harrison attributes to him is incorrect.61 Harrison was persuaded that an Aztec connection existed nonetheless. He concluded that the Ohio Mound Builders were assaulted on both their northern and southern frontiers, retreated in both directions, and at length made their last stand on the banks of the Ohio River. He based that opinion on the different character of the works located along the Ohio River and those in the interior of the state. He was convinced that the extensive works at Circleville and Newark were not constructed as military or defensive works, whereas those along the Ohio were designed for that purpose. The remains at Marietta, Cincinnati, and at the mouth of the Great Miami River “have a military character stamped upon them which cannot be mistaken.” The works at the mouth of the Miami and those at Circleville “never could have been erected by the same people, if intended for defense.” The architects who designed and built the works on the Miami appeared to understand the importance of “flank defenses,” and if their “bastions” were not as perfectly formed as those designed by modern engineers, they admirably served the same purpose. The positions of their long lines of “curtains” were also just as they should be in providing for defense.62 Harrison further conjectured that if the people who constructed the Ohio mounds were really the Aztecs then the “Miami fortress” seemed to indicate the direct route of their migration to Mexico. They descended the Ohio River and at length arrived at Anahuac where they founded a great empire. There, after the passage of untold ages, they forgot their former homes on the banks of the Ohio. Thus Harrison, like Manasseh Cutler, Thaddeus Mason Harris, and Caleb Atwater before him, attributed structural similarities between the mounds and the teocalli of Mexico to a common origin. It was a leap of faith to assume that such resemblances in forms translated into ethnic identities, yet one that Harrison and many of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors willingly made. Those comparisons A Dialectical Discourse

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both within and without the Mississippi Valley were important but fell well short of establishing connections or the identity of the Mound Builders and pre-Mexican Aztecs (Harrison consistently said Aztecs instead of Toltecs). Yet Harrison confidently interpreted those correspondences in modes of construction as proof “that they must have been erected by the same, or a kindred people, derived from the same stock. . . . If the Aztecks were not the authors of the Ohio works, we can only account for the ultimate fate of those who were, by supposing that they were entirely extirpated.”63 The antiquity of the mounds was an open question but those examined by Harrison were unquestionably centuries old. Nature itself provided the clues. The process by which a forest is restored to its original or first growth condition after being cleared is extremely protracted. The nature of the second growth, moreover, is initially altogether different from the mature forest it succeeded. Measured in human terms the difference between the first and second progression of trees remained conspicuous for several generations. Abandoned clearings made during the initial settlement of the Miami Valley after nearly fifty years of growth bore little resemblance to the mature trees in the neighboring woods. The dissimilarity of species and the order of appearance among second-growth trees was so striking as to encourage the belief “that at least ten time fifty years would be necessary” before the second growth could be approximated or incorporated into the first. Yet the sites of the ancient works along the Ohio “present precisely the same appearance as the circumjacent forest.” Growing upon the mounds and earthen embankments one found the same variety of mature trees found in the contiguous woodlands together with the decayed remains of yet older ones. The time necessary for those trees to reestablish themselves after the abandonment of the mounds gave pause for thought. “Of what immense age, then must be those works, so often referred to, covered, as has been supposed by those who have the best opportunity of examining them, with the second growth, after the ancient forest state had been regained.”64 242

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That the Mound Builders were somehow connected with the aboriginal peoples of Mexico was an established theory by the early nineteenth century. The postulate had significant variations as articulated by different writers. Hildreth was of that persuasion and believed that the pyramidal mounds at Marietta served as platforms for temples or other public buildings. He likened the platform mounds to works described by Stephens at Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, and to similar sites in Central America. He regarded the architects of the Mexican and Central American works as being further advanced in the arts than the northern Mound Builders, yet maintained that the mounds and stone teocalli had been constructed by a people possessing similar habits and a common type of government.

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It may be objected that they are too distant from each other ever to have been built by the same race. Allowing they were not of the same nation; yet similar wants and similar habits of thinking would probably lead to very similar results. But there can be no reasonable objection to their being erected by a colony from Mexico, where the same works are found as in Central America. Neither is there any serious objection to their being the parent tribe of the Mexicans, driven away southerly by the more northern and warlike tribes; and these the structures which precedes [sic] the more perfect one[s] of stone.65 Of those alternative hypotheses, Hildreth thought it more likely that the Mound Builders were the ancestors of the ancient Mexicans. Harrison would not have disagreed with that open-ended postulate. Written accounts of Ohio mounds also appeared in the popular press as well as in the transactions and proceedings of learned societies. A significant example is the account and accompanying engraving describing the partial exploration of the Grave Creek Mound in presentday West Virginia by Thomas Townsend. Townsend, a Wheeling physician and naturalist, was present at the long-awaited excavation. His narrative appeared in the Cincinnati Chronicle (February 2, 1839). A local crew A Dialectical Discourse

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excavated the mound between March and June of 1838. Although touted as a scientific exploration the workmen conducted the excavation under uncontrolled conditions. The alleged discovery of a small engraved stone in the mound’s upper vault or chamber occasioned little comment at the time. Townsend merely reported the finding of a stone bearing what he called “Indian hieroglyphics.” But a decade later antiquaries both at home and abroad devoted a large amount of ink and energy to the authenticity of the Grave Creek inscription and the meaning of its enigmatic characters. Conflicting testimony regarding precisely where the stone was found, by whom, and when became important points of enquiry. That uncertainty, the suspected pecuniary motives of those who fitted up a macabre “museum” of artifacts and human remains inside the mound, and the impossible medley of what some interpreted as ancient alphabetic inscriptions resulted in one of the most significant and protracted archaeological controversies of the nineteenth century.66 Other accounts, influential though untrustworthy, merit mention but little more. Josiah Priest’s American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West (1833) is the prime example of such a book. Priest’s American Antiquities went through three revised editions within the first year of its publication. And he had this to say in presenting the third revised edition of American Antiquities to the public in 1833: “If we may be permitted to judge from the liberal subscription this work has met with, notwithstanding the universal prejudice against subscribing for books, we should draw the conclusion, that this curious subject, has not its only admirers within the pales of Antiquarian Societies.” The title-page of the fifth edition, moreover, states that the Albany publishers Hoffman and White printed 22,000 copies within 30 months and once again for subscribers only. And therein lay the problem for those trying to establish archaeology as something more than hearsay evidence or the pipe dreams of armchair antiquaries. Priest’s American Antiquities exceeded the author’s expectations. It directly appealed to popular interest in the subject and perhaps also to a desire for further investigations. Priest examined what he 244

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Fig. 13. View of the Grave Creek Mound. Workmen partially explored the interior of the Grave Creek mound in what is today West Virginia during an excavation that began on March 19, 1838, and continued at least until June 16. The letters A and B in the woodcut engraving denote the excavation of two horizontal shafts or tunnels into the mound’s upper and lower vaults. The alleged recovery of a small, inscribed stone from the mound’s upper chamber initially elicited little comment. A decade later, however, a heated archeological controversy erupted over the inscription’s authenticity and the meaning of its enigmatic characters. The engraving and accompanying account of the excavation of the Grave Creek Mound by Thomas Townsend appeared in the Cincinnati Chronicle (February 2, 1839).

supposed to be evidence “that an ancient population of partially civilized nations, differing entirely from those of the present Indians, peopled America many centuries before its discovery by Columbus.” What is more, he imagined that he had proven it. Priest ventured opinions as to what nations may have settled in America and built the mounds and conjectured about what might have happened to them. He thought it highly probable that not only Asiatic nations colonized the New World soon after the Flood, but that other ancient nations also migrated here during different eras of time. His reading of American prehistory was as accommodating as it was fanciful. The A Dialectical Discourse

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Polynesians, Malays, Australasians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Israelites, Tartars, Scandinavians, Danes, Norwegians, Welsh, and the Scotts all colonized America at different points in time. He further attempted to establish that the peopling of America occurred before the Flood and was “the country of Noah, and the place where the ark was erected.”67 It must be said in all fairness to Priest that he clearly states on the title page of his work and in the preface that American Antiquities was a compilation drawn from various sources and not based on his own original explorations or observations. Being derivative in itself is not necessarily a sin. But it should give an author all the more reason to be more contrite and less gratuitous in offering up what Priest somewhat proudly called his “original and novel opinions.” Even some of the descriptive passages borrowed from others are occasionally garbled and some of his references confused—all symptoms of instant expertise. Owing to the difficulties attending the subject Priest asked that “any disorder and inaccuracies” in his inferences not call forth “the severities of criticism.” That plea not only begged the question but in Priest’s case it was a forlorn hope. Throwing himself on the mercy of scholarly opinion—a tough court—did not spare him the censure he clearly anticipated and justly deserved owing to the work’s inaccuracies and wild conjectures. The book’s wide circulation only compounded the problem. Samuel Foster Haven referred to Priest’s production as “a collection of odds and ends of theories and statements,” many of which were derived from Rafinesque, “a sort of curiosity-shop of archaeological fragments” indiscriminately gathered and without questioning the authenticity of his materials. Justin Winsor similarly dismissed Priest’s work as a compendium of borrowings “with worthless comment.”68 Accounts of the mounds based on folklore and exaggeration rather than science nevertheless continued apace. The nineteenth century is replete with examples of those who never let facts get in the way of a good story. The fecund imagination of William Pidgeon is another case in point. Pidgeon, like Priest, is a notable precursor of 246

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pseudo-archaeology. The flights of fancy embodied in Pidgeon’s Traditions of De-coo-dah and Antiquarian Researches (1852, 1853, and 1858), indeed, are complementary. Pidgeon’s work represents Mound Builder mythology at high tide. The author’s narrative is loosely based on Pidgeon’s actual experiences as a traveler together with many wonderful embellishments. Much of it, indeed, is a series of tall tales fabricated whole cloth. De-coo-dah, Pidgeon’s eighty-nine-year-old informant, is purportedly a member of the extinct “Elk Nation.” He is the last of his tribe, or at least the last of its prophets, from whom De-coo-dah is said to be descended. It was his people and other ancient tribes, said the loquacious De-coo-dah, who built the mounds before being amalgamated into later groups of North American Indians. De-coo-dah then instructed Pidgeon as to the origins and uses of the mounds based on traditions handed down through his family. Pidgeon at one point floats the idea that the his mythical Elk Nation, and presumably other mound-building groups too, were descended from European colonizers and possibly also from Egyptians. The swarms of the Old World hived in America and left their imprint upon its antiquities. Pidgeon kept his options open. Romans, Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Danes, Saxons, Egyptians, and Hindus had at one time all been Old World colonizers of the New.69 Pidgeon produced no evidence supporting that imaginative reading of American prehistory, just a willingness to believe that such had been the case based on severely strained analogies. The underlying assumption in Pidgeon’s embroidered and larger-than-life scenarios is clear. The mounds were built by someone other than the ancestors of the North American Indians who presumably replaced the lost tribes who built mounds in the Upper Mississippi Valley as monuments of their former existence. Theodore J. Lewis demonstrated in 1886 beyond a reasonable doubt that Pidgeon fabricated much his supposed research and distorted what he actually undertook. Indeed, it is not altogether clear from reading Pidgeon’s inspired narrative—It is so mind-boggling and beyond belief—whether he intended the book A Dialectical Discourse

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to be taken seriously or consciously wrote it in the tradition of a farce. As Robert Silverberg has noted, however, several archaeological writers in the 1870s and 1880s uncritically cited Pidgeon’s hardly creditable narrative without question or comment.70 Yet the popularity of the works by Pidgeon and Priest did not confer credibility, only evidence of naiveté and the appeal of the mythologies surrounding the mounds and the supposed identities of their ancient builders. So far as the scientific community was concerned the Pidgeons and Priests of the world were pariahs and the bane of those who consciously endeavored to place American archaeology on a scientific foundation. Historians have noted the degree to which nineteenth-century myths about the Mound Builders disparaged American Indian peoples and attempted to justify their removal from harm’s way (the advance of “civilization,” the touch of which was supposedly death). While one should not overstate the importance of that correlation it undeniably existed as a tenet of the assimilationist assumptions and policies of the federal government and as a fellow traveler of ideas and assumptions relating to national destiny. “Manifest Destiny” per se did not emerge as full-blown doctrine or popular mantra until the 1840s and 1850s but its basic assumptions were in place before that time. Witness, for example, the telling allusion to the departed Mound Builders made in Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress delivered on December 7, 1830. It was in that address that Jackson made the case for the idea of Indian removal, a stated desideratum or goal of the federal government since the presidency of James Monroe. Jackson’s rhetoric on the occasion was as telling as unrepentant. Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

.

Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country; and philanthropy has been long busily engaged in devising means to avert it. But its progress has never for a moment been arrested; and one by one have many tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race, and to tread on the 248

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graves of extinct nations, excites melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes, as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another. In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.71 The Native groups residing with the existing states of the Union would make way for their Euro-American successors just as the Mound Builders had presumably yielded to the fierceness of the “savage tribes” who invaded their territory and either exterminated them or drove them into exile. It was a comforting argument—a fiction that rationalized the removal policy as a matter of utility and the achievement of long-standing goals on the part of the federal government. Three years later William Cullen Bryant, the romantic American poet and editor of the New-York Evening Post, expressed much the same idea in “The Prairies.” Whether Jackson’s message to Congress influenced Bryant in any way it is not presumed to say. But as the editor of the New-York Evening Post and a warm supporter of Jackson he likely knew of its contents. The view of the Mound Builders expressed in “The Prairies” is not only contemporary with those expounded by Jackson but also congruent. Bryant wrote the poem after traveling on horseback across the Illinois prairies in 1832. There, amidst a rolling sea of prairie grass his mind turned to the ancient mounds and earthworks he encountered along the way. Byrant’s melancholy musings on the Mound Builders appear in the second stanza of the blank-verse poem he composed either in 1832 or 1833. It first appeared in print as a contribution to an enlarged edition of Bryant’s Poems published at Boston and New York in 1834. It is a requiem for the mythic Mound Builders; not as they actually were but as the inspired Bryant imagined them. As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed, Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides, A Dialectical Discourse

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The hollow beating of his footstep seems A sacrilegious sound. I think of those Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here— The dead of other days!— . . . Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. . . . The red man came— The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce, And the mound-builders vanished from the earth. The solitude of centuries untold Has settled where they dwelt. . . . All is gone— All—save the piles of earth that hold their bones— The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods— The barriers which they builded [sic] from the soil To keep the foe at bay—till o’er the walls The wild beleaguers broke, and, one by one, The strong holds of the plain were forced, and heaped With corpses.72 Bryant’s elegy makes no linkage between the ancient Mound Builders and North American Indians—the former are represented as a departed race that had either been destroyed or driven into exile by the latter. The descendants of those alleged persecutors of the Mound Builders, many of whom were then experiencing removal to new

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reservations west of the Mississippi under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, were about to meet a similar destiny. Curtis Dahl has noted that the myth of the vanished Mound Builders served as a convenient allegory for a land-hungry nation inexorably pushing westward and dispossessing Native peoples of their lands. It was a parable that justified an aggressive Indian policy and salved the conscious by providing a useable past. Silverberg echoed Dahl’s conclusion. “Men in search of a myth,” he reminds us, “will usually find one, if they work at it.”73 The Mound Builders and their presumed fate held a significant place in popular thought and also influenced American Indian policy. One should not overstate the significance of those connections but they are unquestionably there to a greater or lesser degree. But the premises of that mythology were not the primary concern of those who investigated the mounds as a subject of intrinsic human interest. Archaeological investigators during the period proved themselves more than capable of producing fictions and falsehoods of their own. But purposeful mythologizing, Priest and Pidgeon aside, was not their first and foremost purpose, if sometimes a secondary result. Alice B. Kehoe has succinctly stated the place of the Mound Builder mythos within the history of nineteenth-century American archaeology and American history as a whole. “That scenario replicated the contemporary conquest of the indigenous nations of America, implying that the conquest was just retribution.” The process was tantamount to denying American aborigines a place in history, for “the people without history”—Eric R. Wolf ’s artful phrase—could have no vested interest in the land.74 Native Americans within that paradigm could not be active agents; only passive victims. It is a view of the past that long held a privileged place in the master narrative of American history. Notwithstanding the more recent views of historians, archaeologists, and educators who have called for a rethinking of conventional time perspectives and benchmarks involved in teaching American “history”— broadly and inclusively defined—vestiges of older

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assumptions continue to linger. It would be instructive, for example, if more teachers and students took the long view of an American past that reaches back to the end of the last glacial period (about 13,000– 16,000 years ago by the most recent reckoning). Archaeologists, historians, and educators have no more daunting challenge than to surmount those deeply engrained tendencies and that insular and truncated chronology of the American past.

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5

American Archaeology An Infant Science Emerges

The 1840s were exciting and expansive years in the development American archaeology and ethnology. The explosion of interest in those subjects during that decade arose from a set of concurrent circumstances, the establishment of new learned societies, scientific explorations in the trans-Mississippi West, and a series of significant publications. The establishment of the American Ethnological Society in 1842 gave new impetus to archaeological and ethnological researches, while the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846 promoted all branches of scientific enquiry, including the rather nebulous subjects of American archaeology and ethnology. The exploration of prehistoric remains and the assimilation of new sources of ethnographic information further stirred the expansion of anthropological enquiry. As the United States expanded beyond the Mississippi new regions opened to exploration and new groups of Native peoples brought under study. The descriptions and paintings in George Catlin’s two-volume Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) record the way of life existing among the Native peoples encountered during his travels from 1832 to 1839. The work exudes romanticism in the tradition of Rousseau and Chateaubriand yet remains an enduring contribution to American ethnology nevertheless. Similar interest attended Lieutenant John C. Frémont’s exploring expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in 1842 and to Oregon and California in 1843 and 1844. The published report

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of those expeditions appeared in 1845 during a heady period of national expansion.1 Archaeologists, ethnologists, artists, and army topographers conducted their investigations and travels as part of a much larger geographical reconnaissance within both the settled and unsettled portions of the United States. The rapid inventory of new data stimulated scientific enquiry across many fields of research as the nation gradually came to know and lay claim to the vast regions west of the Mississippi. William H. Goetzmann commented on this very point in Exploration and Empire. “All across the whole range of human knowledge—in cartography, geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, archaeology, and ethnology—the direction and achievement of the Great Western Reconnaissance was clear.”2 The explorations conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1846 and 1847 were the vanguard of national expansion in the trans-Mississippi West. Goetzmann described the corps as an “instrument of selfconscious nationalism”3—agents of manifest destiny within the territories ceded by Mexico to the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. Scientific enquiry and the westward movement advanced in lock step during the 1840s and 1850s just as it had east of the Mississippi during earlier periods of American history. Thus the ongoing exploration of the mounds, and the institutions supporting it, became part of a much larger geographic and scientific reconnaissance and broadened discourse.4 Nor were journeys of discovery restricted solely to the United States. The publication of John Lloyd Stephen’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan in 1842 increased interest in Mesoamerican antiquities and the hope that similar explorations would one day be undertaken among the mounds and earthworks of the Mississippi Valley. The mound explorations jointly conducted by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis in Ohio from 1845 to 1847 were a noteworthy step in that direction, as were the less well-known but significant investigations conducted in Louisiana and 254

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Mississippi by Montroville Wilson Dickenson from 1837 to 1846. Equally significant were the ethnological collections, vocabularies, and publications resulting from the first United States Exploring Expedition of 1838 to 1842. The publication of Charles Wilkes’s five-volume narrative of the expedition in 1845 and of Charles Pickering’s Races of Man, and Their Geographical Distribution in 1848, the ninth volume in the reports of the expedition, continued to expand the frontiers of ethnographic knowledge.5 American archaeology and ethnology were emerging fields of enquiry and consciously taking their first steps toward becoming sciences. The Philadelphia physician, geologist, and anatomist Samuel George Morton observed in the American Journal of Science and Arts for July 1846 that “Nothing in the progress of human knowledge is more remarkable than the recent discoveries in American archaeology. . . . Of the builders [of the mounds] we know little besides what we gather from their monuments, which remain to astonish the mind and stimulate research. They teach us the value of archaeological facts in tracing the primitive condition and cognate relations of the several great branches of the human family; at the same time they prove to us, with respect to the American race at least, that we have as yet only entered upon the threshold of investigation.” An enthused Ephraim George Squier declared that “the study of man, physiologically and psychically, is confessedly the noblest which can claim human attention; and the results of such study must lie at the basis of all sound organizations, social, civil, or religious. . . . The study of man, in this comprehensive sense, constitutes the science of Ethnology. The elements of this science are the results the ultimate’s of all other sciences; it begins where the rest stop. . . . The existence of Ethnology, as a science, presupposes a general high attainment in all other departments of knowledge. It is essentially the science of the age. . . .” It was a matter of just pride with strident cultural nationalists like Squier that several of the most recent and valuable contributions to ethnological science were the productions of American authors. No American Archaeology

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other quarter of the globe, he insisted, offered a greater opportunity for conducting ethnological investigations. “Nowhere else can we find in so close proximity, the representatives of the races and families of men, of origins and physical and mental constitutions so diverse.” It was also on the American continent that one encountered “a grand division of the human race whose history is involved in night, and the secret of whose origin and connections affords a constant stimulus to investigations of a strictly ethnological character.” The American continent was under that view one vast ethnological laboratory. It was for that reason that “Ethnology is not only the science of the age, but also that it is, and must continue to be, to a prevailing extent, an American science.”6 The founding of the American Ethnological Society at New York gave scholars an important venue for presenting the results of their investigations and for monitoring archaeological, ethnological, and geographical research from around the globe. Albert Gallatin and John Russell Bartlett established the society on November 14, 1842, and its founding members adopted a constitution on December 7, 1844. They were joined in that endeavor by a small number of members from the New-York Historical Society and there was an overlap in membership between the two societies for several years. Gallatin and Bartlett effectively promoted the fledging science of ethnology and drew other devotees of the subject into the ranks of their new society as resident and corresponding members. Bartlett’s autobiography suggests that he played a larger role in the founding of the American Ethnological Society than is sometimes acknowledged, yet Gallatin’s stature, resources, and passionate interest in the ethnology of North American Indians cannot be underestimated. Gallatin’s home on Bleecker Street became a salon for discussing ethnological matters and his purse financed the first two volumes of the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society in 1845 and 1848. The society’s constitution stipulated that its purpose was to undertake “inquiries into the origin, progress, and characteristics of the various races of 256

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man.” Its members sought to promote ethnological investigations in the broadest sense of the term ethnology—a branch of knowledge they defined as the study of “Man and the Globe he inhabits.” They also conceived ethnology to be an applied field of knowledge. The expanding commercial and maritime interests of the nation, the missionary enterprise at home and abroad, and the comparative study of languages made the subject of ethnology one of “practical utility.”7 Given those aims the mound explorations of Dr. Montroville Wilson Dickeson generated considerable interest among the members of the American Ethnological Society. Dickeson’s place within the history of American archaeology merits reconsideration. He is an interesting study in many respects. Born at Philadelphia in 1810, his family subsequently moved to Woodbury, New Jersey, where Montroville received his early education. His love of the natural sciences manifested itself an early age. Even as a schoolboy Dickeson was already an incurable collector of natural history specimens: birds, insects, reptiles, mammals, shells, and the study of taxidermy were his passion. He also gathered fossil specimens from the cretaceous marl beds of southern New Jersey that were greatly valued by paleontologists familiar with his collection. Dickeson began the study of medicine about the year 1828 under the tutelage of Dr. Joseph Parrish of Philadelphia, a prominent local physician, surgeon, and popular lecturer on chemistry. Dickeson’s collecting activities as a naturalist soon came to the attention of Samuel George Morton, Thomas Bellerby Wilson, and Peter Arrell Browne—all pillars of the scientific community in Philadelphia. After completing his medical studies, Dickeson began a residency at the Philadelphia Dispensary and became a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in October 1846. He also became a member of the American Ethnological Society of New York in 1847, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in September 1848, a fellow of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen, and a member of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.8 American Archaeology

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Fig. 14. Montroville Wilson Dickeson (1810–82). A Philadelphia physician, geologist, and archaeologist, Dickeson was one part scientist, one part romantic, and one part lecturer and showman. He explored several mounds in Louisiana and Mississippi upon his own resources from roughly 1837 to 1846 and assembled a large archaeological collection. His findings generated considerable interest among the members of the American Ethnological Society at New York. Frontispiece to Dickeson’s American Numismatical Manual, 2nd ed. (1860).

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Dickeson was no less passionate about archaeology than paleontology and no less accomplished. He resigned his residency at the Philadelphia Dispensary to explore Indian mounds in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys between 1837 and 1846. His motives for spending those years traveling and opening mounds at the expense of his Philadelphia medical practice are not entirely clear. His aims, therefore, must be attributed to intellectual curiosity and to both a romantic and scientific interest in the subject of American antiquities in the absence of a better explanation. Dickeson possessed those attributes in ample and equal measure. He had this to say, for example, concerning his irrepressible interest in the mounds: “It is the mystery, the impenetrable mystery veiling these aged sepulchers, which gives them an interest for the traveler’s eye.” Time had “flung the silvery mantle of old” around the moss-grown and decayed towers and abbeys of the Old World and “the beautiful frescoes of Herculaneum and Pompeii.” The origins and circumstances of their ruin were the stuff of history and “their years may be enumerated.” But the ancient mounds of America stood silent. “But who shall tell the era of the origin of these venerable earth heaps!—the race of their builders, the purpose of their erection, the thousand circumstances attending their rise, history, and desertion— why now so lonely and desolate?” It was that interest which sustained his years in the field.9 Dickeson’s interest primarily centered on adding archaeological specimens to his cabinet, especially mound crania, but that was not the sum of his fascination with archaeology. He was also interested in describing different types of mounds and their internal features. He made detailed field notes and sketches of southern mound groups and drawings of associated artifacts. His cross-sectional diagrams of the mounds he excavated through trenching and dropping vertical shafts show their internal structures: their stratigraphy and the position of human remains and artifacts within them. Cutting trenches and sinking shafts, like the forty-two-foot shaft dropped by Dickeson and Dr. Daniel Gould Benbrook of Natchez into the Seltzertown mound American Archaeology

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near Washington, Mississippi, is no longer considered a legitimate means of exploring mounds. Field methods today document spatial relationships between burial features and the structure and arrangement evidenced in each burial. Yet digging vertical, horizontal, and diagonal shafts and trenching, however crude the technique, continued into the early twentieth century. Many of the sites examined by Dickeson were subsequently obliterated by the plowshare and the spread of settlement in the fertile and mound-rich areas of Mississippi and Louisiana. His archaeological collection and related field notes and sketches are, consequently, both invaluable historical and archaeological records. Dickeson was not, however, always consistent in his field methods. Sometimes, as in his oft-depicted excavation of a large mound on the Feriday plantation, he was at pains to carefully note the stratigraphy of the mounds and the relative positions of artifacts and human remains found within them. Yet on other occasions he was hurried and less painstaking owing to the different circumstances in which he labored. His excavation of the Ferguson mounds at some point in 1846—located in Jefferson County, Mississippi, some eighteen miles above Natchez— stands in stark contrast to his more meticulous work at the Feriday mounds. When Dickeson visited the Ferguson site it consisted of seven conical mounds. Five of them were designed in the form of a flattened circle and two more stood a short distance above them. “Extensive roads diverge from this system of mounds all over the country, and one of them may be traced for seventy miles, passing by most of the large tumuli in the State. The first it touches is the great Seltzertown mound.” Dickeson’s laborers dug into the largest of the Ferguson mounds from the top and sides. “A short distance brought them to the skeletons, all flatheads. Our time being limited, we paid but little attention to stratification, and simply endeavored to get as many relics as possible. In the large mound we sunk a shaft eight feet wide and fifteen feet deep. . . . From this mound was excavated a stone pipe carved to

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represent a flathead Indian in a sitting posture holding a pipe in his hands.” In the side of one of the smaller mounds at the site, Dickeson found buried at the head of a skeleton “three finely finished vases filled with ashes and curiously wrought ornaments.10 Dickeson stored the artifacts collected during his southern travels, when they were not on display in museums and at public expositions, on the second floor and in the attic of his parents’ Lombard Street home in Philadelphia. He donated to the museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in October 1846 “a very extensive collection of specimens in fossil zoology, comparative anatomy, and Indian relics &c., obtained from the Natchez bluffs, the southern lakes and rivers, the aboriginal mounds, &c.” He also at that time, or shortly afterward, deposited six human crania, four of which were from mounds near Natchez, Mississippi. The curators of the museum displayed the Dickeson collection in association with Samuel George Morton’s extensive series of human and animal crania and the academy’s comparative anatomy collection. The Free Museum of Science and Art of the University of Pennsylvania (today the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) purchased the Dickeson collection of artifacts—at least those not sold or exchanged during Dickeson’s lifetime—from his younger brother Dr. William T. W. Dickeson of Media, Pennsylvania, in 1899.11 The circumstances in which Dickson acquired, arranged, and displayed his collection speak volumes about the ideology and culture of archaeological collecting in the mid-nineteenth century. His motives and attitudes as an archaeological collector were by no means unique but certainly significant and worthy of remark. His brother William stated that he valued artifacts not as curiosities but as a scientific specimens and original sources of knowledge. “In forming this collection he was animated not by any craze for curios—he looked upon antique objects with the eyes of a scholar and the knowledge of a scientist, and in their aggregation deduced many lessons of value to himself

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and those who came after him, as illustrating the manners and customs of ancient peoples.” And Dickeson himself, indeed, presented the collection in his “scientific lectures on American aerchiology [sic]” as illustrations of “the antiquities and customs of the unhistoried Indian tribes, who dwelt on this continent 3,500 years ago.” He also held forth on how the mounds were constructed together with the geological, mineralogical, and botanical bearings of the subject. Many of his contemporaries and successors viewed the collection in precisely the same way. Indeed, the archaeological collection and related archival material remain valuable sources of information regarding archaeological sites and cultures in the localities where he conducted fieldwork.12 Dickeson’s archaeological collection was almost as well traveled as himself. He exhibited selected specimens from his cabinet at the Agricultural Fair held at Washington, Mississippi, in July 1842, at another fair at Natchez, and also displayed it at Washington College. The collection traveled with him to many different cities in circa 1852, where Dickeson lectured on the subject of American archaeology and displayed an imposing panorama of the Mississippi painted by the itinerant Irish painter John J. Egan (1810–82). Egan painted the 348foot moving landscape in 1850. The panorama is comprised of a series of Indian mounds on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and dramatic and vividly imagined scenes of Indian life. The paintings are based on Dickeson’s sketches and drawings “made on the spot.” The canvas, mounted on rollers, slowly unfolded before Dickenson’s audiences as he lectured. A broadside promoting the lectures described the panoramas in language reminiscent of theatrical handbills that no doubt served as the model. “This interesting scenery consists of diagrams mathematically drawn from actual survey of the various forms and relative positions of fifty-two distinct arrangements of conical mounds, earthen effigies, and Herculean embankments, interspersed through and along the vale of the Mississippi and tributaries, from Brown’s

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Ville, Pa., to the spurs of the Rocky Mountains. Together with many strange and wonderful Aboriginal or Ancient American paintings [pictographs and petroglyphs].” The St. Louis Art Museum acquired the vista in 1953. It is one of the few nineteenth-century panoramas still extant.13 Dickeson’s illustrated lectures on “Indian Antiquities” were part science, romance, and a good deal of showmanship. The course of lectures sponsored by the Jefferson Institute of Philadelphia in circa 1851, for example, struck the following note: “To us as Americans what History can be more interesting than that of our aborigines[?] The monuments and relics found in the United States show that the earlier races had arrived at a considerable degree of civilization.” The splendor of American antiquities, numbering “three hundred thousand,” rivaled the temples and pyramids of the Old World. Egypt, Greece, and Rome have had their historians and even the tragic tales of Herculaneum and Pompeii still echoed through time. The story of American antiquities, by contrast, remained largely unknown: “America, where are found the most wonderful Antiquities in the World, and these too coeval with the earliest works of man[,] has suffered her primordial History to remain buried in the earth, and obscured by the hand of time.” American antiquities were faithful witnesses that revealed the ordinary arts “among both the Aborigines [prehistoric groups] and our present Indians.” They also “had a just claim to be considered as an indirect source to true Chronology” and insight into “their religious culture and external life.”14 Dickeson’s illustrated lectures were but the beginning of the collection’s many sojourns. The artifacts formed the “Indian Cabinet” exhibited at the City Museum of Philadelphia in 1854, a short-lived venture founded by Dickeson and located on Callowhill Street below Fifth. Dickeson’s name appears as professor of Natural Sciences at the City Museum, his brother William as curator, John E. McDonough (rather tellingly) as stage manager, and John J. Egan as scenic artist.

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At another time, the “Dickeson Collection of Arts and Science” resided in a new museum on Chestnut Street above Sixth. The specimens displayed, according to an undated press clipping, were “curiosities,” minerals, and natural history specimens. Dickeson opened another museum during the winter of 1867–68 on the third floor of the Swain Building located on Seventh Street below Chestnut, which proved to be another brief enterprise. Nor were Dickeson’s collecting interests limited solely to natural history and archaeology. He also built a significant historical library. Leavitt, Strebeigh, and Company sold Dickeson’s collection of rare books and pamphlets on early American history at a public auction held at New York in January 1867. His collections—historical, archaeological, and natural history specimens—had by that time become a veritable omnium-gatherum reflecting Dickeson’s proclivities as a sometimes undisciplined and indiscriminate collector. His cabinet also included Chinese curiosities sold at a public auction in Philadelphia and several hundred artifacts from Peale’s museum he purchased during the 1850s. Dickeson displayed selected artifacts from his archaeological collection in the Main Exhibition Building at the 1876 Centennial at Philadelphia and again in Memorial Hall at Fairmount Park in 1885.15 Dickeson gave an account of his mound explorations in Mississippi and Louisiana before the American Ethnological Society at New York at some point in either 1846 or 1847. John Russell Bartlett, the secretary of the society, also gave an appreciative notice of Dickeson’s investigations and archaeological collection in the second volume of the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society in 1848.16 Bartlett reported that Dickeson had opened 150 mounds, mostly in Mississippi, Fig. 15. (opposite) “Indian Antiquities.” Dickeson delivered a course of six lectures on American archaeology sponsored by the Jefferson Institute in circa 1851. He illustrated the discourses with diagrams, paintings, and “upwards of ten thousand specimens” of American antiquities collected during a period of twelve years research of the mounds of the Mississippi Valley. Broadsides Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

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but in some instances had extended his archaeological explorations into Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. While excavating the imposing Seltzertown mound, a pyramidal or truncated mound containing an area of eight acres at its summit, Dickeson recovered a large quantity of human remains. Most of the crania exhibited artificially flattened heads compressed by the use of cradle boards during infancy. The Seltzertown mound also yielded numerous pieces of finely finished pottery and various kinds of ornaments and beads. The large quantity of human and animal bones deposited in the mound established, Bartlett said, that it was “a vast mausoleum or cemetery of the ancient race.” Dickeson divided the mounds, again according to Bartlett, into six classes: outposts, ramparts or walls, telegraphs or lookouts, temples, cemeteries, and vaguely termed “tent or structure mounds.” The functional assumptions of those classifications were problematic but few questioned them at the time. Many of the mound groups examined by Dickeson were located on the tops of ridges and surrounded with earthen walls. The walls often formed “perfect squares and circles,” evincing an obvious design or plan: “if from the centre of one of these [mound] groups a circle were traced, it would strike the centre of each mound, both large and small.”17 Dickeson assembled a large collection of materials illustrating the customs and arts of the Mound Builders. He brought upward of one hundred pieces of finely wrought pottery back with him to Philadelphia, which he temporarily deposited together with other “Indian relics” and fossils in the museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences. Dickeson provided Bartlett with a catalog of his collection, selections from which Bartlett published to give an idea of the scope and variety of its contents. Dickeson found buried with the occupants of the mounds stone idols, clay stamps, and mica mirrors; stone axes, bushels of projectile points (identified as “arrow heads” or as “arrow points” and “spear points”); silver and copper ornaments; beads of jasper, chalcedony, agate; freshwater pearls; and carved bones and numerous example of human crania. He reported that the examination of skulls revealed 266

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the practice of a kind of basic dentistry. His collection of well-preserved human crania from the mounds numbered sixty, which he reportedly recovered from several thousand human skeletons unearthed during explorations. Dickeson’s collection of mound crania, Bartlett observed, possessed great interest from “an Ethnographic point of view, for the rigid test to which all his results have been subjected, have satisfied him that these skulls belonged to the ancient race. Like the gentlemen in Ohio [Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis] . . . the Doctor can at once detect the mounds and remains of the ancient, from those of the modern race.” Bartlett further noted that some of the mounds examined by Dickeson were constructed in three different eras. “At the top were the remains of the present race of Indians; digging lower he found these remains accompanied by ancient Spanish relics, of the period of the earliest Spanish visit to these parts; and below these, he discovered the remains and relics of the ancient race.”18 Samuel George Morton, always on the lookout for mound skulls to add to his cranial collection, took great interest in those recovered during Dickeson’s excavations of southern mounds. Dickeson, for example, opened one of the mounds located on the estate of John A. Quitman in July 1843. The site was eight miles north of Natchez between the Mississippi River and the bluffs, just opposite the lower end of Fairchild’s Island. There he dug a two-foot-wide trench and found seven rows of human skeletons numbering twenty-four in all—apparently all males. The remains lay fully extended on their backs with their heads to the east and their hands resting upon their chests. All the skulls, with three exceptions, “were flattened lengthwise . . . . All the mounds in the immediate neighborhood, and in the adjoining burial-places in the same bottom, have crania flattened in the upper conical form.” Dickeson recovered eleven intact crania from the Quitman mound, an unusual number given that most were too severely decayed to be removed owing to their age, the nature of the soils in which they were interred, and the weight of the superincumbent earth. Morton’s interest in Dickeson’s mound crania stemmed from the fact that Morton American Archaeology

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supposed them to be the remains of the Natchez Indians. He regarded the Natchez to be an intermediate link between the semi-civilized and barbarous tribes that comprised his Toltecan and Barbarous divisions of the American race. Morton thought it likely that the Natchez were the descendants of the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley.19 What little more is known of Dickeson explorations of mounds in Mississippi and Louisiana must be gleaned from an obscure series of articles appearing in the Lotus—a short-lived weekly newspaper devoted to science, literature, and the arts published at Philadelphia by J. Shipley Jones between April and September 1848—broadsides and newspaper accounts of his public lectures on American archaeology, and the two manuscript catalogs of his collection of American antiquities in the Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. He also gave an imaginative interpretation of “aboriginal coins, or money” in his American Numismatical Manual in 1859.20 But no account of Dickeson’s archaeological fieldwork appeared in a scientific journal or monograph other than Bartlett’s précis in the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society. Dickeson contemplated writing a work on “American Antiquities” but never saw the project through to completion. He worked solo and sometimes idiosyncratically. The significance of his archaeological investigations must be assembled from disparate and fugitive sources. Dickeson’s well-traveled “Indian Cabinet” remained a source of popular interest and lectures enhanced by his flair for theatrics. When he exhibited the collection at the City Museum in Philadelphia in October 1854 a handbill touted the cabinet “as the most complete in the country.” It was not a hollow claim for at the time it probably was. But the claim made on another occasion that the collection numbered “upwards of ten thousand specimens of American Antiquities” is more problematic reflecting Dickeson’s penchant for exaggeration. Nor was that an isolated instance. He also stated that the pyramidal mounds and temples of the United States numbered “upwards of three

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hundred thousand” and that his painted panorama covered over 15,000 feet of canvas. What has survived of the panorama at least measures 380 feet—a more credible figure. How many of those overstatements can be directly attributed to Dickeson, to printing errors, or to the overexuberance of printers and promoters in writing puffs for his lectures is difficult to say. Yet the responsibility for such statements always rests with the lecturer or writer, fairly or otherwise, even when they are not the source of blunders and oversights. In Dickeson’s case, however, there is every reason to believe that such statements originated with him or were at least countenanced by him. It is not the least of several problems connected with his reputation as an archaeologist. Such hyperbole raises nagging questions about the credibility of some of Dickeson’s claims, though by no means all. Given his broad learning and varied experience he did not need to exaggerate his legitimate and significant accomplishments even though he clearly did so. Yet aggrandizement was the language of museum handbills during the era of “General Tom Thumb” and P. T. Barnum, who offered the American public a steady diet of all manner of marvels. Richard Viet, a serious student of Dickeson’s archaeological career, has well said on this point that “he was fond of exaggeration; in fact, at times he seems more showman than scientist. Several of the items in his collection may be frauds, including a galena crystal inscribed with an ankh, the ancient Egyptian sign for life. . . . One must recognize, however, that in the museum field Dickeson was competing with the likes of P. T. Barnum, then the theatrical proprietor of the American Museum in New York City. Dickeson’s exaggerations seem tame in comparison with Barnum’s famous hokum.” Others have not been so generous. Calvin S. Smith, a geologist and archaeologists on the Mississippi Geological Survey, described him as “a Philadelphia showman and archaeologist, whose methods and conclusions were perhaps not always strictly scientific.” Dickeson may perhaps be excused for indulging in that foible of

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popular culture in his efforts to sell tickets to his illustrated lectures and to keep the City Museum of Philadelphia a going concern.21 Dickeson’s time-bound interpretation of the collection reflects many common assumptions and ideas regarding the Mound Builders in the mid-nineteenth century. Stewart Culin has noted on this point that “without accepting these notions or passing upon Dr. Dickeson’s statements, the collection has a scientific value which cannot be disregarded, as it comprises material from mounds in Mississippi and Louisiana which have now entirely disappeared and concerning which other data are lacking.” Richard Viet, Stephen Williams, and Robert Silverberg have joined Culin in acknowledging the significance of his archaeological fieldwork, collections, and popular lectures. These assessments, especially the substantive appraisals by Culin and Viet, are not uncritical but appropriately appreciative. Dickeson’s showmanship and archaeological interpretation no longer serves us but the artifacts, field notes, sketches, and the catalogs of the collection still do. He would perhaps be happy with that assessment, however qualified concerning certain aspects of his assumptions and activities. His archaeology reflects the conjunction of the countervailing traditions of romanticism and empiricism. Those antithetical orientations or habits of mind awkwardly coexisted in the mid-nineteenth century and often in the same minds. Nowhere did they more significantly converge than in the thought of Dickeson—an intriguing personality and accomplished archaeological raconteur.22 The most important institutional development for American anthropology during the mid-nineteenth century was the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. Ethnological enquiries regarding “the different races of men in North America” were among the objects toward which the Smithsonian’s annual income and research program were devoted, which included “explorations and accurate surveys the mounds and other remains of the ancient people our country.” Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian, observed in December 1847

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that investigating the remains of the ancient inhabitants of the United States was a subject of research that deserved “immediate attention.” The study of the mounds was “a highly interesting field, and what is done in regard to it should be done quickly. Every year the progress of civilization is obliterating the ancient mounds, cities and villages are rising on spots they have so long occupied undisturbed, and the distinctive marks of these are every year becoming less and less legible.”23 In light of those interests and desiderata, the original surveys and explorations conducted by the aforementioned Ephraim George Squier and Dr. Edwin Hamilton Davis attracted an unprecedented amount of scientific attention. Squier—a native of New York and an aspiring journalist—came to Chillicothe from Hartford, Connecticut, as editor of the Scioto Gazette. He possessed an able pen, some knowledge of surveying, and an intense curiosity about American antiquities. Davis—a physician and a self-declared “moundologist” at Chillicothe, Ohio—contracted the “antiquarian malady” at an early age. He had cultivated a serious interest in Ohio antiquities at least since his days at Kenyon College. Squier and Davis shared a mutual interest in bringing the prehistoric Indian mounds and earthworks of the Mississippi Valley under closer scrutiny and earnestly pursued that aim during the two years of their collaboration. The results of the Squier-Davis investigations appeared as the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1848). “It was concluded,” said the authors, “that if these monuments were capable of reflecting any certain light upon the grand archaeological questions connected with the primitive history of the American continent, the origin, migrations, and early state of the American race, that then they should be more carefully and minutely, and above all, more systematically investigated.”24 Squier and Davis set about that business with a decided sense of urgency and purpose. “The importance of a complete and speedy examination of the whole field cannot be over-estimated. The operations of the elements, the shifting channels of the streams,

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the leveling hand of public improvement, and most efficient of all, the slow but constant encroachments of agriculture, are fast destroying these monuments of ancient labor, breaking in upon their symmetry and obliterating their outlines. Thousands have already disappeared, or retain but slight and doubtful traces of their former proportions.”25 The scene of the Squier-Davis investigations was the Scioto Valley of southern Ohio—an area rich in evidence of prehistoric habitation and there was none more so within the State of Ohio. The investigators estimated that there were no less than one hundred enclosures and five hundred mounds in Ross County alone. According to their own testimony, Squier and Davis excavated approximately two hundred prehistoric Indian mounds and surveyed some one hundred earthen enclosures between the spring of 1845 and the spring of 1847. With pick, mattock, and shovel their workmen explored the interiors of local mounds through vertical shafts dropped from summit to base while Squier and Davis carefully recorded their internal structure, relationship to the surrounding topography, and the exact conditions under which they found artifacts and human remains. How many of the two hundred excavations they claimed to have made were superintended by Squier, how many by Davis, and how many by both is not known. These would be interesting and important details given their later falling out and the controversy surrounding their mutual contributions to the investigations. Nor do we know the names of the workmen and friends who accompanied them in the field. But it is abundantly clear from both the unpublished and published materials relating to the Squier-Davis explorations that they were conducted under the direct supervision of either one or both of them and observations recorded and sketches made on the spot. An account of the Squier-Davis explorations by Benjamin Silliman Sr., editor of the American Journal of Science and Arts, appeared in that periodical in September 1846. It is based on the preliminary findings reported by Squier at a special meeting of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science in July 1846. Silliman’s relation is an example of 272

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Fig. 16. Ephraim George Squier (1821–88). Photographic portrait, 1872. Squier, a journalist by trade with some knowledge of surveying, arrived in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1845 as editor of the Scioto Gazette. His interest in the subject of American antiquities prompted him to join Edwin Hamilton Davis in conducting surveys and explorations of local mounds, leading to the publication of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley as the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge in 1848. Squier brought forward Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York in the second volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge in 1851 based on his archaeological explorations in western New York. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image #sia 2012–6120.

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the interest excited by the Squier-Davis investigations among learned societies in the East. Silliman, who attended the meeting of the academy, wrote a précis of Squier’s presentation in a printed letter to the English geologist and paleontologist Gideon Algernon Mantell. Silliman reported that by July 1846 Squier and Davis had opened eighty mounds and had personally superintended the excavation of more than sixty. The explorations, said Silliman, differed from all previous ones not only in the number of mounds excavated but the thorough manner which they were conducted. Squier and Davis cut entire sections of mounds from top to bottom, revealing their internal structures and contents. There could be no doubt in light of those investigations that the mounds were artificial constructions notwithstanding the surmise of the American geologist Edward Hitchcock, professor of chemistry and natural history at Amherst College, that they were the result of diluvial action. “Although it may seem arrogant in one who has never personally inspected the celebrated mounds of our western states,” said Hitchcock, “I hesitate not to advance the opinion with great confidence, that they are almost universally the results of diluvial and fluviatle action.” He based that judgment solely on the view anonymously avowed by John Russell of Bluffdale, Illinois, in the first volume of the Illinois Monthly Magazine and his own observations on supposedly similar diluvial deposits in Massachusetts with which he was familiar. Russell did not believe that the horizontal strata composing the mounds were artificial. Mounds under the Russell-Hitchcock hypothesis originated naturally. The Mound Builders had simply Fig. 17. (opposite) Edwin Hamilton Davis (1811–88). Photographic portrait, circa 1860. Davis contracted “the antiquarian malady” as a student at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. He established a medical practice at Chillicothe in 1839 and in 1845 joined Ephraim George Squier in investigating the mounds of the Scioto Valley, a collaboration resulting in the publication of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley in 1848 as the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Davis’s contributions to the Squier-Davis investigations earned him coauthorship of the work but only after a significant controversy with Squier over their relative contributions to the investigation. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image #sia-sa-458.

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appropriated them as ready-made burying places. Russell and Hitchcock advanced that theory as overconfidently as erroneously.26 Silliman further informed Mantell that the investigations of Squier and Davis had yielded other important findings as well. The investigators assembled an archaeological collection at Chillicothe illustrating the arts, customs, and even the very craniology and physiognomy of the ancient peoples who had built them. They reportedly recovered no less than six thousand articles of stone, bone, and metal from the mounds, forming what was probably the largest archaeological collection then in the United States, the Montroville Wilson Dickeson Collection of American Antiquities being the other contender. Yet no one previously had gathered so large a number of artifacts from a single, concentrated locality. The animal-effigy pipes and human-head effigy pipes recovered at Mound City were unique and it would be many more years before archaeologists disinterred similar caches from the mounds. It was the best documented archaeological collection that had yet been brought together. As for the identity of the Mound Builders, Silliman could only echo what was by then an already well-established supposition. “The races that constructed these works were probably the precursors of the Mexicans and Peruvians, and may have either deserted their structures to move further south, or been driven from them by war.” Most certainly that was the opinion of Squier and Davis too.27 The Squier-Davis investigations were conducted mostly, if not entirely, at Davis’s expense. He accompanied Squier in the field whenever his medical practice permitted. Exploring mounds was an expensive business and one that Davis later said had cost him over five thousand Fig. 18. (opposite) “Map of a Section of Twelve Miles of the Scioto Valley with Its Ancient Monuments.” Squier and Davis conducted their archaeological surveys and explorations in the Scioto Valley of south-central Ohio, a major center of prehistoric settlement. The map shown here indicates the location of enclosures and mounds, their relationship to the surrounding topography, and designates the enclosures and mounds described in the text. Squier delineated the map in 1847 and the lithographic firm of Sarony and Major of New York made the engraving. Plate 2 of Squier and Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.

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dollars.28 Davis’s interests primarily centered on the excavations and the patient and painstaking restoration of pipe and pottery fragments recovered from the clay basins or “altars” at the base of the mounds, but he also participated in the surveying. Davis’s name appears with Squier’s as a surveyor on twenty-eight of the survey maps published in Ancient Monuments and on one as the sole surveyor. The survey of the extensive Newark earthworks bears the names of Charles Whittlesey, Squier, and “E.H.D.” It is dated “1837–1847” reflecting the fact that Whittlesey surveyed the earthworks in 1837 and Squier and Davis resurveyed the site in 1847. Squier appears as the sole surveyor on one map and on two others his name appears with surveyors other than Davis. How many of the excavations were personally supervised by Davis, by Squier, or both jointly cannot now be determined, as noted above. But Davis’s letters to Morton and to Samuel Foster Haven clearly indicate his active involvement in the investigations. Davis possessed detailed knowledge of the internal structure of the mounds and the different classes of materials found within them. The surveys of enclosures made by Squier and Davis, like those of their contemporaries James McBride and Charles Whittlesey, may be said to be relatively accurate in most instances but not absolutely so in all. The survey teams of the Bureau of Ethnology (later the Bureau of American Ethnology) demonstrated the inaccuracy of some of Squier and Davis’s site plans during the bureau’s resurvey of the Ohio mound in the 1880s. More recent survey work also identifies inaccuracies or distortions in several of Squier and Davis’s published plans. The degree to which those problems are attributable to the fieldwork of Squier and Davis, errors made during the process of engraving, or to both is difficult to say. Answers to those questions could only be obtained by reconstructing the data originally recorded in Squier and Davis’s “Field Book.” Unfortunately, that record appears to be lost. Squier and Davis provide but one example of the method used in their surveys. They did so in order to answer any skepticism that might exist

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concerning the regularity of the circles occurring among the earthworks classified by the authors as “Sacred Enclosures.” Plate 20 in Ancient Monuments is a map of an enclosure located in Liberty Township in Ross County, Ohio, eight miles southeast of Chillicothe. The investigators surveyed the site together in 1846 and Squier delineated the site plan at a scale of five hundred feet to the inch. Squier and Davis’s plate of the Liberty Township enclosure includes a “Supplementary Plan A,” accompanying text, and an explanatory note. The supplementary plan shows the location of seven stations (flags) placed three hundred feet apart upon the circular embankment as a means of determining the diameter and regularity of the circle. “The compass was then placed alternatively, and the bearing of the flag [station] next beyond ascertained. If the angles thus determined proved to be coincident, the regularity of the work was placed beyond doubt.”29 Manuscript notes, earlier drafts of the text, and proofs of lithographic plates in the Squier Papers at the Library of Congress show the manuscript during various stages of completion. But the penultimate draft of the Squier-Davis manuscript, like their “Field Book,” no longer appears to be extant. The original woodcuts used in illustrating Ancient Monuments perished in the Smithsonian fire of 1865. It is possible that the completed manuscript and the field book of the Squier-Davis surveys met the same fate.30 While it might be regrettable that Squier and Davis gave only one example of the method used in measuring the earthworks it is certainly understandable why they did so. Ancient Monuments is a monograph of 306 pages, 48 lithographic plates, and 207 woodcut engravings. The cost of adding such raw data to the plates and text would have made the expense of publishing an already costly work even more so. The expense of adding additional text and supplemental plans was prohibitive. It would appear, based on subsequent resurveys of the archaeological sites described and figured in Ancient Monuments, that surveys of Squier and Davis are no more and no less accurate than

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those made by other archaeologists during the early and mid-nineteenth century. The lithographic plates, woodcut engravings, and descriptions appearing in Ancient Monuments certainly give a better-than-general idea of the form, position, and characteristics of these works and far surpass in detail and accuracy the site plans given by Caleb Atwater. But they are not in all instances as accurate as Squier and Davis would have it. All things considered, however, it is a minor complaint. One still can credit them with providing the world with the most detailed and accurate account of American antiquities that had yet appeared. It should also be noted that the manuscript drawings of their site plans, both those surveyed by Squier and Davis and those surveyed by others whose plans also appear in Ancient Monuments, are in some instances more accurate than the published versions, which demonstrates the ongoing value of consulting manuscript sources of site plans and comparing them to published versions whenever possible. Liberties were sometimes taken during the engraving process, honest mistakes made, and occasionally the orientation of mounds in relation to others unintentionally inverted on the printed page. The geometric earthworks have been the source of much conjecture since Euro-Americans first encountered them in the late eighteenth century. The combination of a single square and two circles at several of sites surveyed by Squier and Davis in the Scioto Valley raised an interesting question as to what those combinations might mean: “they are exact squares, each measuring one thousand and eighty feet [per] side,—a coincidence which could not possibly be accidental, and must possess some significance. It certainly establishes the existence of some standard of measurement among the ancient people, if not the possession of some means of determining angles.”31 Charles Whittlesey shared that opinion. Whittlesey later presented evidence before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1883 that the Mound Builders used a standard unit of measurement based on even divisors. It is a subject that has received a considerable amount of interdisciplinary attention over the last three decades. William F. Romain suggested 280

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that the Hopewell unit of measure was 1.053 feet and specifically credited them with knowledge of right angles, perpendiculars, and congruent obtuse angles. Romain further indicated that the design and orientation of these sites are possibly astronomical alignments, as do the findings of Bradley T. Lepper and those of Ray Hively and Robert Horn.32 Squier and Davis classified enclosures and mounds based on their form, position, internal structure, contents, and supposed purposes. They divided enclosures into three classes and the mounds into four. Each division, however, still formed part of a “single system” and purportedly represented the work of “the same people.” Enclosures, sites bounded by embankments of earth or stone, are classified as “Works of Defense,” “Sacred Enclosures,” and those of a miscellaneous character. The mounds are similarly identified as “Altar” or “Sacrificial Mounds,” “Mounds of Sepulture,” “Temple Mounds,” and “Anomalous Mounds.” Altar Mounds were found within or near Sacred Enclosures, possessed stratified soil features, and erected over symmetrical basins or “altars” of burned clay or stone. Squier and Davis associated the basins or altars with human sacrifices or thought them to have been somehow connected with the religious beliefs and customs of their builders. They found the largest deposits of aboriginal art within this type of mound. Temple Mounds were thought to have been platforms for religious structures. They received close attention from Squier and Davis due to perceived structural similarities between them and the more elaborate stone teocalli of Mexico and Central America.33 Squier and Davis spoke with the greatest authority when describing the artifacts and human remains recovered in their excavations. Like Atwater and Dickeson, they recognized that the ornaments, implements, and human remains found in the mounds were frequently of different eras.34 The lengths to which Squier and Davis went in making these distinctions, however, signaled a new departure in archaeological investigations. The authors documented the exact contexts in which they found artifacts and human remains by providing cross-sectional views of the internal structure of the mounds relative to the locations American Archaeology

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of artifacts and human remains, and indicated the positions of their vertical, horizontal, and diagonal excavation shafts. They are far more detailed than cross-sectional views of mounds found in Dickeson’s field notes and probably also more trustworthy. Repeatedly in Ancient Monuments the reader is reminded of the need to discriminate between the artifacts and skeletal materials found in original mound deposits— those at the base of the mounds—and those of “the more recent races of the aborigines” in the intrusive deposits nearer the surface. A failure to make those temporal distinctions easily led to false conclusions concerning the actual era of the mounds and the customs and social conditions existing among the people who built them. Squier and Davis characterized the ornaments, implements, and ceremonial artifacts recovered from the earlier mound deposits as being more numerous, made of finer materials, and more skillfully crafted than those attributed to “the modern race of Indians” found in later burials and other intrusive deposits.35 The craftsmanship exhibited by the fragments of ornamental pottery vessels recovered from Mound City led Squier and Davis to favorably compare them to the most elegant Peruvian examples to which they reputedly bore a striking resemblance. The sculptured stone effigy pipes from Mound City and the sculptured stone tablets from Clark’s Work (today known as the Hopewell site) were similarly regarded as belonging to “a higher grade of art.” Such remains, the authors argued, could only have been produced by a people considerably skilled in the decorative or minor arts, a people presumably more advanced than any known group of North American Indians.36 Those who labored to establish that the prehistoric ancestors of several groups North American Indians had at one time built the mounds later censured Squier and Davis’s arguments for overestimating the superiority of Mound Builder art over that possessed by at least some historic groups of North American Indians. According to Charles Rau, Davis later recanted that opinion after examining pottery that Rau collected at a site on the left bank of Cahokia 282

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Creek in western Illinois opposite St. Louis. Aboriginal potters working at the site decorated their productions by tracing lines on the surface. Rau recovered one small fragment of pottery that in his opinion exhibited a higher degree of skill in the art of decoration than any of the others he found at the same place. Comparing that fragment with the one represented in figure 5 on plate 46 of Ancient Monuments obtained from an unidentified Ohio mound (probably Mound No. 3 at Mound City), he noted that the ornamentation of these vessels was nearly identical. “Having seen the best specimens of ‘mound’ pottery obtained during the survey of Messrs. Squier and Davis, I do not hesitate to assert that the clay vessels fabricated at the Cahokia creek were in every respect equal to those exhumed from the mounds of the Mississippi valley, and Dr. Davis himself, who examined my specimens from the first-named locality, expressed the same opinion.”37 As repositories of aboriginal art the mounds of the Scioto Valley provided Squier and Davis with abundant evidence of the artistic attainments, burial customs, and the presumed “connections and communications” of their ancient makers with other parts of the American continent. The most important of their explorations were those at Mound City, a thirteen-acre enclosure containing some twenty-three mounds. There, in 1846, they recovered a cache of nearly two hundred stone effigy pipes from Mound No. 8, also known as “the pipe mound.” Depicting various species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and four representations of the human head, the admirable workmanship and apparent antiquity of these pipes were the source of much comment. These sculptures pay mute testimony to the artistic attainments of their makers, while the human-head effigies indicate hairstyle, ornamentation, and facial markings. Regarding the “predominant physical features” represented by these pipes Squier and Davis observed that they did not essentially differ from that of “the great American family, the type of which seems to have been radically the same through the extent of the continent, excluding, perhaps, a few of the tribes at the extremes.”38 American Archaeology

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Thus “the race of the mounds,” so vaguely and frequently invoked in the archaeology of Squier and Davis, was physiologically the same as the American Indian, notwithstanding their consistent misuse of the word “race” when making distinctions between earlier mound-building peoples and later “Indians.” The authors clearly did not regard the earlier groups to be the direct descendants of the North American Indian groups living in the Ohio Valley during the historic era; that is, the tribes residing there from the mid-eighteenth century onward, most of whom had migrated there from all points of the compass. They were not arguing that the earlier mound-building peoples were a non-Indian race in a biological, genetic, or physical sense. They inappropriately used the problematic and all-too-accommodating word “race” to make both temporal and what we would today call cultural distinctions (i.e., they possessed a different “state of society” to use a period phrase). The presumably extinct “race of the mounds” to which Squier and Davis referred was neither the lost tribes of Israel, Phoenician colonizers, nor the Welsh followers of the legendary Prince Madoc. The ancient and semi-mythical Mound Builders were American aborigines though presumably not the ancestors of any of the groups residing in Ohio at the earliest knowledge of Europeans (an unproven proposition—in some instances maybe and in others maybe not). But those were temporal, ethnic, and cultural distinctions and not racial ones in the strict sense of the term as we employ it today. The context of those particularities is confused by the indiscriminate use of the term race—a fundamental problem in much of the early literature relating to the mounds. Squier and Davis clearly believed that the Mound Builders and the Indians belonged to Morton’s “American race,” which included all American aborigines ancient and modern. They were indigenous to the American continent regardless of whether they originated here as autochthonous peoples, as some racial theorists believed, or migrated from Asia at a period so remote as to be time out of mind. It would be many more years before Franz Boas untangled the Gordian knot of race, ethnicity, and culture. 284

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Equally problematic is Squier and Davis’s analysis of the animals and birds represented in Mound City effigy pipes. The authors misidentified seven of the effigies pipes as representations of the tropical lamantin, manitus (or sea cow) and several bird-effigy pipes as tropical toucans. Their attempt to explain the presence of these effigies in an Ohio mound consequently led them to erroneous conclusions. The presumed manatee pipes were at first regarded as “monstrous creations of fancy,” but Davis later announced to Squier his singular “discovery” that they were a specific variety of lamantin known as the “roundtailed manitus, Manitus Senigalensis, Desm.” Since manatees were only found a thousand miles south of Ohio, they concluded that there had been “a migration, a very extensive intercommunication, or a contemporaneous existence of the same race of over a vast extent of country.” In any event, the representations of manatee were “too exact” to have been made by someone not well acquainted with them and their habits.39 Henry W. Henshaw overthrew those conclusions in 1880 by showing that the supposed tropical manatee and toucans depicted in Ancient Monuments were probably indistinct representations of indigenous otters and raptorial birds.40 It is one of several instances when Squier and Davis misread their evidence and arrived at an erroneous conclusion. As for the origin and ethnic affinities of the Mound Builders Squier and Davis allowed their readers to arrive at their own conclusions. Indeed, on the question of origins they are altogether silent. The clues to the authors’ guarded views on the ethnic affinities of the Mound Builders were, nevertheless, readily apparent to those who carefully followed the threads of their analysis. Morton’s Toltecan identification of Squier and Davis’s Mound Builder cranium, the apparent structural similarities existing between the truncated-pyramidal mounds of the Mississippi Valley and those of Mesoamerica, the presence of serpent symbolism, and the assumption that the Mound Builders were socially and artistically more advanced than known groups of North American Indians (and by extension their prehistoric ancestors) led Squier and American Archaeology

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Davis to but one conclusion. The evidence of their investigations indicted “a connection more or less intimate between the race of the mounds and the semi-civilized nations which formerly had their seats among the sierras of the Mexico, upon the plains of Central America and Peru, and who erected the imposing structures which from their number, vastness, and mysterious significance, invest the central portions of the continent with an interest not less absorbing that that which attaches to the valley of the Nile.”41 Thus Squier and Davis attempted to link “the race of the mounds” to the aboriginal peoples of Mesoamerica and Peru. They were neither the first nor the last nineteenth-century observers to do so. Davis received a visit at Chillicothe from the celebrated Dr. Montroville Wilson Dickeson in December 1847. Squier was then in Columbus, Ohio, serving a brief stint as the clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives. Davis reported that Dickeson had opened some 152 to 200 mounds in Mississippi and Louisiana and had gathered a large number of artifacts. He learned during Dickeson’s visit that his colleague had indeed accomplished much. Davis was not, however, uncritical of Dickeson’s work, observing that he knew “more of osteology than mounds.” Davis found Dickeson’s notebooks and sketches to be of great interest and “some wonderful” but concluded that he conducted his explorations over too wide a field and embraced too many subjects. Certainly Dickeson had something yet to learn of “moundology.” Davis found his field methods to be “too loose,” at times unreliable, and based on many “hearsay facts.” Davis also criticized the manner in which Dickeson used black slave labor in opening mounds: “The negroes dig and he sketches.” Davis found the use of slaves to be a “very cozy” and inexpensive arrangement but regarded the exactness with which Dickeson recorded his findings inferior to that used by himself and Squier. Davis reportedly cautioned Dickeson that in excavating mounds locality alone could be deceiving. What Davis called “a ruder class of Indians” had succeeded the Mound

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Builders in the Mississippi Valley. The later Indians were buried in the same localities, which meant that one could not accept vicinity alone as a valid criterion for assigning the origin and era of the people who had built the mounds. Dickeson was certainly aware of that fact and made similar distinctions between original internments and intrusive ones of later date, although apparently not to Davis’s satisfaction. Dickeson reportedly expressed great admiration for the work of Squier and Davis and regretted that he missed Squier during his brief stay. He proposed an exchange of artifacts with Davis from what were then the two largest archaeological collections in the United States.42 Squier also regretted having missed Dickeson during his visit to Chillicothe. Had they met he would have proposed to him a plan to determine whether the antiquities of the northern and southern Mississippi Valley were contemporaneous in origin. The larger and more regular truncated-pyramidal mounds in the South were particularly intriguing since Squier believed them to more nearly resemble the teocalli of Mexico than those in the Ohio Valley. Inconsistent with the idea that the southern remains marked an advance in social development, however, was “the fact” that copper, silver, and lead were found in northern mounds, but none of those metals had yet been found in the South (Squier was then unaware that Dickeson had recovered copper ornaments in his investigations and many more were found in later investigations). The absence of large enclosures in the Gulf States, works so conspicuously present in the Ohio Valley, was another important consideration. Squier regarded many of the northern enclosures, those not thought to be sacred enclosures, to be defensive in origin. He accepted their absence in the South as supporting the hypothesis that the Ohio Mound Builders were driven south by pressure from their enemies. Once removed from a state of constant warfare the need for erecting defensive works disappeared.43 The relative age and character of the southern mounds were important problems of

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research—problems he would address should he be afforded the means of continuing his investigations southward. Squier’s attitude toward Dickeson, however, was far more critical than deferential. He was suspicious of both his claims and methods and impatient with the amount of attention he received from Bartlett and Morton. Bartlett in particular was impressed with Dickeson’s account of his explorations and archaeological collection given before the American Ethnological Society. Squier admitted that Dickeson appeared to have accomplished a great deal in his mound explorations but dismissed his greatly touted collection of 16,000 arrowheads as being of little consequence. Displaying a trace of jealously, perhaps, he asserted that he could produce an “infinite number” of arrowheads, but that the quantity of such specimens was far less important archaeologically than a representative sampling: “An hundred specimens illustrating their various forms are just as good as a wagon load.” But Dickeson’s collection of mound pottery was an entirely different matter. Squier wanted to compare Dickeson’s specimens with those recovered by himself and Davis from Mound City. The crania recovered in Dickeson’s investigations were of no less interest. Squier wondered if it was possible that Dickeson had recovered the remains of the Natchez Indians from the mounds but refrained from making such a conjecture since he knew very little of the character of aboriginal remains in the South.44 Squier’s own interest in extending his mound investigations into the lower Mississippi Valley partly explains his critical attitude toward Dickeson. Dickeson had unwittingly become the rival of Squier and Davis for the attentions of the Bartlett and Morton and their attempt to secure financial assistance from the American Ethnological Society for conducting further investigations. Sources of funding for archaeological investigations were scarce to nonexistent in the mid-nineteenth century and scholarly outlets for research few in number. But competition for support and recognition of one’s labors was no less keen and individual sensitivities among scholars no less pronounced. Dickeson, like Squier, had a talent for self-promotion. Both were intellectual 288

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entrepreneurs who found themselves at cross-purposes.45 Squier regarded Dickeson as a competitor and more than hinted that he might be a charlatan. Dickeson’s penchant for exaggeration drew down upon him Squier’s censure. He charged Dickeson with exaggerating the number of mounds he had excavated, which reportedly had grown from 492 to 1,000. “This has certainly been a good growing season for the Dr.’s crops!”46 Squier also expressed disbelief at Dickeson’s claim to have discovered a fossilized human bone (os innominata) at Grand Bayou near Natchez, Mississippi. Dickeson further claimed to have found other human bones associated with the fossilized remains of the extinct mammoth at the same location. Squier could not believe that Dickeson actually intended to publish such “fictions.” The publication of Dickeson’s purported discoveries would do “infinite mischief ” and bring discredit to archaeology, “for the mass of men prefer the wonderful and extravagant to the simple and true.” Archaeological pretenders, a class of investigators that presumably included Dickeson, should be publicly crucified by way of “wholesome example.”47 No aspect of the Squier-Davis investigations received more attention among their contemporaries than the recovery of the celebrated “Mound Builder” cranium from a small, inconspicuous hilltop mound in the Scioto Valley in 1846. It is also the least understood. The conclusions of the authors based upon that find have often been misinterpreted by historians. That the Mound Builders and American Indians anatomically belonged to one and the same race Squier and Davis never doubted. Davis was quite consistent on this point when he commented on a skull removed from the central mound of a semi-circular group of thirteen mounds located near Madison, Wisconsin. Increase A. Lapham and Joshua Dwight Whitney, a geologist and chair of chemistry at University of Iowa, surveyed and excavated the oval-shaped mound in June 1859 at the invitation of the property owner George Patten Delaplaine. Whitney was at the time working on the Iowa geological survey.48 Lapham and Whitney opened the largest mound of the Madison group. American Archaeology

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Fig. 19. “From an Ancient Mound in [the] Scioto Valley.” Side view of Squier and Davis’s celebrated Mound Builder cranium. Thomas Sinclair of Philadelphia, lithographer. F. French, delineator. Squier and Davis recovered this unusually well-preserved specimen from the base a small hilltop mound about four miles south of Chillicothe. Samuel George Morton made careful measurements of the cranium and described it as exhibiting “features characteristic of the American race,” but above all what he denominated as the Toltecan family of which the Peruvian head could be taken as the standard or type. The prominent characteristics of the skull marked it, said Morton, as “a perfect type” of an American aboriginal cranium. Plate 47 of Squier and Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.

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After reading Lapham’s detailed report on the excavation, Davis reportedly remarked at a meeting of the American Ethnological Society in New York that in exploring more than one hundred mounds during his investigations with Squier he had found only one or two crania in a good state of preservation. Based on the particulars contained in Lapham’s account of the excavation, and the presumed accuracy of his accompanying drawing of the reconstructed skull, Davis did not hesitate in accepting it as belonging to the people who had originally constructed the mound; that is to say, that it was deposited in an original mound internment and not an intrusive or subsequent burial by an American Indian group of later date. “No marked difference,” Davis tellingly added, “is observable between the [mound] crania and those of our Indians.” Anatomically they were one and the same with reasonable allowance standard deviations. Morton expressed the same opinion in Crania Americana (1839) and again his Enquiry Into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America (1842). Davis considered Morton’s views on the subject as conclusive and saw no reason to dissent from that opinion in light of subsequent evidence. The characteristics exhibited by Lapham’s Wisconsin mound cranium only further confirmed Davis in that opinion.49 Witness further the comments of Squier and Davis regarding the human-head effigy pipes they recovered from Mound No. 8 at Mound City in 1846. The physiological features exhibited by those pipes provided further evidence to the authors of the racial unity of the ancient Mound Builders and Indians of later date. The hairstyle, ornamentation, and facial markings depicted in the pipes suggested that the “predominant physical features” of those who made and used them did not essentially differ from that of “the great American family, the type of which seems to have been radically the same through the extent of the continent, excluding, perhaps, a few of the tribes at the extremes.”50 Charles Pickering held essentially the same opinion. He partitioned humankind into eleven races in his Races of Man (1848) and classified American aborigines throughout the American continent as belonging American Archaeology

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to the “Mongolian Race.” He also believed that the human-head effigy pipes recovered at Mound City by Squier and Davis had defining racial characteristics “and the features are unequivocally those of the Mongolian race.” The human-head effigy pipes and the animal-effigy pipes recovered at the site, said Pickering, “afford another instance of the universal rule in monumental architecture, that the most ancient works are not only the most gigantic and enduring, they manifest great refinement of workmanship, and purity of taste.” He did not elaborate his “universal rule in monumental architecture,” nor attribute a source. But whatever the derivation of Pickering’s developmental concept he was surprised to see such elegant craftsmanship exhibited in mound pipes. “In this instance, however, refinement was unexpected from tribes who were evidently in the ‘hunter state.’ ”51 Squier and Davis assigned the Mound Builders a more refined or “semi-civilized” state of society than they attributed to Indian peoples of later date. But they made no argument for genetic or physical differences. Davis, for example, described the features of the humanhead effigy pipe figured on page 245 of Ancient Monuments, also recovered from Mound No. 8 at Mound City, as being “peculiarly Indian,” and further noted that it attracted much attention in the United States and Europe as representing the “true type of the MoundBuilders.”52 And he further drew attention to the physiognomy displayed by the imaginative bird-man effigy pipe—a human head on the body of a bird—recovered from the surface of an unidentified enclosure near Chillicothe. Davis once described that bird-man pipe as an American “Sphynx,” noting that that it too possessed “Peculiar Indian features.” He expressed the opinion to Morton that some of the human-head effigy pipes from Mound City displayed “Mexican or Central American features, while others were characteristic of the

Fig. 20. (opposite) Reduced front and vertical views of Squier and Davis’s Scioto Valley skull. Plate 45 of Squier and Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.

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more northern tribes.” One pipe he thought to be almost a facsimile of a carved effigy described by Stephens as a “death’s head.” Davis similarly drew the attention of members of the American Ethnological Society in November 1860 to the features exhibited by a “terra-cotta image” recovered from an unidentified Ohio mound as more closely resembling “the Asiatic types” than anything that had yet been found on the American continent, “especially the angle of the eye.” It was an altogether impressionistic observation yet one that leaves no doubt as to Davis’s views in the matter. The physical type of the Mound Builders resembled that of other American aborigines and at least implied an Asiatic connection.53 Squier and Davis purposefully avoided the use of the word “Indian” when discussing the mounds and their contents in order to avoid the suggestion that they were of a relatively recent origin. There were, however, a few notable exceptions to that statement. Squier departed from custom in two brief communications to the American Journal of Science and Arts concerning the discoidal stones and smoking pipes that he and Davis had recovered from the “Indian mounds” of Ohio.54 Generally they regarded the term “Indian” in connection with the mounds as being more confusing than not. We look at it from exactly the opposite perspective today. Since it was not known by what name the Mound Builders called themselves (those self-designations are still unknown, and, archaeologically speaking, unknowable), Squier and Davis coined the unfortunate phrase “race of the mounds” as their designation of choice for the ancient and nameless people who constructed the mounds in distinction to historic groups of North American Indians associated with several of the same localities. Who, then, was Squier and Davis’s “mysterious race of the mounds”? They certainly were not interlopers from the Old World. Squier and Davis’s “race of the mounds” belonged to Morton’s Toltecan division of the American race. There is no logic to their assumptions, arguments, and conclusion outside of that interpretation. Squier and Davis’s Mound

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Builders were pre-Mexican Toltecs who presumably dwelt in the Mississippi Valley before migrating south to the valley of Anahuac. That argument was no more correct than those who posited that the Mound Builders were Phoenicians or the lost tribes of Israel. But it was decidedly a different argument.55 The mound-building cultures of North America were not pre-Mexican Toltecs, nor were they ethnically connected with the prehistoric societies of Mexico, Central America, and Peru as Squier and Davis and several of other early writers suggested—and some of them among the more informed. That is not to deny that intercultural contacts and influences between Mesoamerica and North America did not radiate in both directions, but we need not divide the American race into “semi-civilized” and “barbarous” divisions or families in order to account for the mounds and the people who built them. Yet the hegemony and tyranny of the nineteenth-century construct of “race” belied complexity, contingency, and variability in the archaeological record (attributes that define all human societies past and present) and replaced it with a uniform and static conception of the archaeological and ethnological past that cultural anthropologists of a later day found seriously wanting. Notwithstanding Squier and Davis’s antiquated interpretation and nomenclature Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley endures as an archaeological classic because of the work’s scientific arrangement, its descriptive and documentary qualities, and its comprehensive scope. It was the most complete account of the prehistoric Indian mounds of the United States that had yet appeared. While speculation is not absent from its pages it is kept subordinate to facts to the extent that the authors understood them. Squier and Davis’s frequent recourse to ethnographic accounts and use of intercultural analogies was admirable for the time, although sometimes overdrawn.56 Apart from the results of their own fieldwork in the Scioto Valley Squier and Davis also published original surveys by John Locke, James McBride and John W. Erwin, Charles Whittlesey, Samuel P. Hildreth,

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and Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, together with the original contributions of others. Squier and Davis attempted a synthesis of all that was then known about archaeological remains in the Mississippi Valley based upon their own localized investigations and the original materials of Locke, McBride, Whittlesey, Hildreth, and Rafinesque. Those contributions greatly added to the scope, depth, and significance of the work. Yet concern over the acknowledgment of those contributions, including Davis’s own contributions to the investigations, became a source of controversy—both at the time of the publication of Ancient Monuments and for several years later. The controversy over acknowledgment of contributors delayed publication of Ancient Monuments and deeply troubled Joseph Henry and the regents of the Smithsonian Institution. It was Squier who found himself at the center of the storm.57 The surveys made by McBride and Erwin of archaeological sites in the Miami Valley of southwestern, Ohio, together with and McBride’s related field notes and drawings of artifacts, form a conspicuous feature of Ancient Monuments. Both Squier and Davis visited McBride on different occasions in 1846 when they reported on the progress of their investigations at Chillicothe. McBride generously lent his bound volumes of surveys and drawings to Squier in January 1846, who presented them before the American Ethnological Society along with the surveys and drawings made by himself and Davis. The investigators proposed McBride’s name as a corresponding member of the American Ethnological Society in recognition of what he had accomplished in his own investigations of the mounds. Davis was particularly keen on examining McBride surveys, drawings, and field notes, hoping to publish selections from them together with the results of his own investigations with Squier. He solicited the use of those materials assuring McBride that he would receive full credit for his contributions. McBride agreed to Davis’s proposition and granted him permission to publish his manuscript drawings and field notes.58 Davis later cautioned Squier to be certain that McBride’s name was placed on all his surveys being prepared for publication, understanding that he had expressed concern 296

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over receiving due credit for his contributions. Davis’s concern proved well founded. The issue of granting due credit to McBride for his contributions to the investigations became a matter of contention. It was not McBride who raised the issue, however, but his surveying partner John W. Erwin. The controversy over the use of McBride’s descriptions and plans centered on the publication of Squier’s preliminary account of his investigations with Davis that appeared in the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society—an article that appeared under Squier’s name only. McBride, after reading the pamphlet version of the article published by Bartlett and Welford in November 1847, wrote Squier that in the larger work forthcoming from the Smithsonian “I should be pleased if you would either in the description of the work, or in a conspicuous manner on the map, state on what date and by whom surveyed.”59 McBride was also at pains to have Squier acknowledge the frequent assistance he received in making his surveys from Erwin. He cautioned Squier that “if the names of those who aided in making the surveys are not mentioned, I fear that fault will be found with myself or you for the omission.” He asked Squier to identify his contributed surveys as having been made by “James McBride & John W. Erwin.”60 McBride’s advice to Squier unfortunately came too late. Erwin wrote a stinging letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Gazette in December 1847 that charged Squier with appropriating the credit due to McBride for his years of original research. Erwin indicted Squier for failing to properly credit McBride for his survey of an earthwork located on the Great Miami River in Butler County. “Had I not been acquainted with this work, I should have taken it for granted that it was among the number of one hundred or more which Mr. Squier had surveyed at his expense.” Even though Squier dated the survey in question and had, in fact, placed McBride’s name upon it, Erwin complained that the credit was so small and indistinct that it required the “aid of good glasses” to find it.61 He further charged that Squier failed to properly identify McBride as the surveyor of American Archaeology

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another mound in Butler County that he mentioned in the text but did not figure as an illustration. Erwin’s understanding of matters was that when McBride generously placed his bound volumes of surveys and drawings in Squier’s hands, it was with “an express understanding” that he would receive full recognition for his original investigations. “This would have been done by a noble minded man without such an understanding, but some men have no other way to bring themselves into notice than upon the labor of others.” Erwin knew how much time and money McBride expended in collecting the materials lent to Squier and how anxious he was that they someday be published. “Those who know Mr. M. are satisfied that he would scorn to appropriate to himself credit which justly belonged to another, and that he has no desire to acquire fame at the expense of others, without giving due credit therefore.” Erwin hoped the situation would be rectified in the larger work forthcoming from the Smithsonian.62 The serious charges made in Erwin’s letter deeply troubled George Perkins Marsh—a regent of the Smithsonian, a member of the American Ethnological Society, and a promoter of Squier’s investigations with Davis. If McBride had made his surveys independently of Squier, said Marsh, he had every right to expect that his name should appear as delineator as well as surveyor. McBride eased tensions by solemnly assuring Squier that he had full confidence in his integrity. He disclaimed any previous knowledge of the letter in the Cincinnati Gazette. He was unaware that his name was mentioned in the letter, or in any manner connected with it, until Squier brought the issue to his attention. He solemnly assured Squier that he knew nothing of the letter or who had written it. But given his earlier statement of concerns he surely must have suspected that Erwin was the author in question. McBride denied having ever doubted that Squier would do anything other than give him proper credit for all his contributions. McBride did, however, ask his son-in-law to call on Squier during his visit to New York in January 1848. He asked him to inspect the engraved maps that were being made from his surveys and to see how the engraving 298

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and printing of the work was progressing.63 One may infer from that request that McBride wanted to insure that both his name and Erwin’s appeared on the engravings, but McBride at no time appears to have been involved with the accusations that Erwin leveled against Squier in the Cincinnati Gazette. One must conclude that Erwin’s animus was motivated more by his own anonymity at Squier’s hands than by any alleged ill use of his friend McBride. Squier had, in fact, placed McBride’s name on the survey in question, albeit in a manner unacceptable to Erwin. McBride further acknowledged that Charles Whittlesey had written him stating his fear that Squier would not give McBride due credit for his surveys. Whittlesey, as Squier soon discovered, also harbored serious doubts as to whether he would receive proper acknowledgment for his own contributions. Squier requested the use of those surveys in October 1847 in order to make the Smithsonian monograph as comprehensive as possible. Since Ohio’s antiquities were fast disappearing, Squier noted, Whittlesey’s surveys would greatly assist in recording their location and true character. “Once carefully surveyed etc., and whatever maybe the fate of the originals, their peculiarities will be preserved for the inspection of the curious which may follow us.”64 Whittlesey generously obliged Squier’s request by contributing at least twenty surveys of ancient works in various locales but mostly of sites located in northern Ohio. After the appearance of Squier’s account for the American Ethnological Society, however, Whittlesey had second thoughts about contributing his surveys to the larger work to be published by the Smithsonian. Whittlesey, like Erwin, objected to the ungenerous “spirit” of Squier’s account for the American Ethnological Society and his annoying tendency of ignoring the contributions made by his predecessors. “A reader not otherwise acquainted with the fact would infer that before you there were none worthy of notice . . . [and] that you are the original and principal source of information.” Such worthy investigators as Rufus Putnam, Thaddeus Mason Harris, Daniel Drake, Caleb Atwater, American Archaeology

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John Locke, and James McBride deserved far better than anonymity at Squier’s hands. Fearing that his own contributions might go unrecognized Whittlesey informed Squier that he could not be so accommodating as to allow his labors to be appropriated by another. He requested the return of his plans and descriptions to “abide future events.” It was only after Whittlesey received a full explanation of Squier’s intentions that he again agreed to their use and apologized for any injury he might have made to Squier’s feelings or reputation. Whittlesey nevertheless regretted that he and Davis had not joined him in producing, with the aid of the American Ethnological Society and the Smithsonian, a full and complete account of the subject that would omit none of the works that had yet been surveyed within the State of Ohio. Whittlesey wrote Squier after the publication of Ancient Monuments informing him that the acknowledgments of his investigations in that work were satisfactory and met his expectation of “full justice.”65 Squier also made extensive use of the Rafinesque manuscripts lent him by Brantz Mayer in 1846. He was particularly interested in Rafinesque’s archaeological field notes and plans. Rafinesque made several surveys and descriptions of mounds and earthworks in the southeast and published several accounts of sites in Kentucky.66 There was no controversy concerning the manner in which Squier used the Rafinesque materials at the time of their publication in Ancient Monuments; only recently has that issue arisen.67 Squier published Rafinesque’s plans and descriptions of mounds and earthworks in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama in Ancient Monuments, as well as his descriptions of several sites in Kentucky in the American Journal of Science and Arts for July 1849.68 He characterized Rafinesque’s descriptions of archaeological sites in that journal as “brief, crude, and imperfect.” Yet it must be said in fairness to Rafinesque that his plans are generally accurate in the sense that they locate sites and indicate their salient features. In some instances, moreover, the engraved versions of Rafinesque’s site plans appearing in Ancient Monuments differ in detail from Rafinesque’s 300

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original drawings, suggesting that they were either embellished or perhaps even redrawn during the engraving process. Rafinesque’s original plans in those instances are more accurate than the engraved versions published by Squier. Engraving manuscript maps in the nineteenth century was not always a straightforward proposition. Here is yet another example of the value of examining archival materials relating to published accounts of archaeological sites when it is possible to do so. Liberties were often taken in the process of delineating and printing engravings regarding potentially significant details but also in relation to scale. Honest mistakes were made.69 Squier mined a rich vein in his use of Rafinesque’s archaeological and ethnological manuscripts. But the charges leveled against Squier by Charles Boewe that he “was less than candid” in acknowledging Rafinesque as his source, that he “pillaged” and “looted” Rafinesque’s manuscript materials, and that he sometimes credited Rafinesque’s field sketches and sometimes did not are all overstated claims. It is a curious assertion since the very opposite is true. Squier clearly and consistently acknowledged that he was publishing original Rafinesque materials as part of his own works. He did so in the preface, in the text, and upon the face of the published surveys appearing in Ancient Monuments as well as in his article in the American Journal of Science and Arts.70 There is only one instance in which he did not credit Rafinesque as the source of an illustration; figure 78 of Ancient Monuments is described as the “representation of an article of clay, found a number of years ago, in a mound near Nashville, Tennessee. It has the form of a human head, with a portentous nose and unprecedented Phrenological developments.”71 Boewe further observes that “it is even more inexcusable that they [Squier and Davis] also remained ignorant of Rafinesque’s published descriptions of Kentucky archaeological sites,” even though the authors specifically note that Rafinesque had published “several brief papers” relating to antiquities of the Mississippi Valley. It was in no way germane to their purposes for Squier and Davis to enter into a discussion American Archaeology

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of Rafinesque’s earlier writings (copies of which may or may not have been in their possession). But it was in every way relevant for them to publish the original Rafinesque site plans that did come into their possession, with due credit, in order to make their work as comprehensive as possible. Given that objective and the significance of Rafinesque’s fieldwork it was in no way inappropriate for Squier and Davis to publish his descriptions and plans of archaeological sites; passing them over in silence most certainly would have been. Rafinesque, who died in 1840, left his unpublished archaeological materials to posterity. So far from doing Rafinesque a disservice by publishing his archaeological manuscripts Squier and Davis greatly benefitted him. Making that argument is not to say that Squier could be insensitive and self-serving in his characterizations, as most certainly was often the case. Davis’s own contributions to the Squier-Davis investigations likewise became a matter of contention. The Squier-Davis association ended in an acrimonious dispute over their respective contributions to the investigations. Davis was particularly resentful of the manner in which Squier received most of the credit for the work. Squier wrote the manuscript, delineated the surveys, and appears to have spent a proportionately greater amount of time in the field than Davis, while Davis hired the labor for the excavations, assisted with the surveying, and supervised the explorations whenever his medical practice allowed. The artifacts recovered in the Squier-Davis investigations remained in Davis’s possession, notwithstanding Squier’s claim to half-ownership. Davis regarded the collection as the sole recompense for his years of antiquarian investigations. He doubtless valued the collection all the more owing to his feud with Squier. Relations between Squier and Davis became increasingly strained after the end of their field work. The final break in their partnership came on September 22, 1847, when Davis read the resolutions of the American Ethnological Society recommending publication. He immediately penned an angry letter to Squier, which would be his last. Davis 302

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“was not only disappointed, but grieved to find they [the committee] had stepped out of their way to inflict severe injury on my character.” What so enraged him was the original wording of the committee’s second resolution: “we agree the work prepared by Mr. Squier on the subject is an object of great general interest . . . worthy of the subject and highly creditable to the Author.” Davis challenged the committee’s authority to determine the authorship of a manuscript submitted under joint signature, which he considered “a breach of our private understanding.” Davis had never privately nor publically claimed credit for writing the manuscript. Those honors he readily acknowledged belonged to Squier. “But my dear sir, there are many other considerations no less worthy of honour; connected with the authorship of such a work. For instance, the scientific portion, requiring so much patient research into all branches of geology, mineralogy, conchology, and even natural history together with many subjects too numerous to mention here. Yet [research] requiring that archaeological acumen which is alone the result of long experience in conducting investigations. I can’t conceive that you desire to appropriate the whole credit of the work, as the resolution does to yourself; nor will I as yet permit myself to believe it was intended.”72 Squier expressed astonishment at the implications made in Davis’s letter in what would also be his last known letter to Davis. He saw nothing objectionable about the report and denied any influence upon the committee’s action or language. “I suggested nothing, asked nothing; knew nothing of it.” Such feuding caused concern to the ever-cautious Joseph Henry who worried that a public fray over Davis’s contributions to the investigations would damage the reputation of the Smithsonian. He grew even more concerned in November 1847 when the preliminary account of the investigations for the American Ethnological Society appeared under Squier’s name only. Observations on the Aboriginal Monuments of the Mississippi Valley identified Davis as Squier’s “associate” and in a footnote implied that Davis would be coauthor of the larger work forthcoming from the Smithsonian. Since American Archaeology

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Squier’s account was an abstract of the larger work, Henry regretted that Davis’s name had not appeared alongside Squier’s as a coauthor. Leaving nothing to chance concerning the inaugural publication of the Smithsonian, Henry intervened. He insisted that Davis be present at New York during the printing and engraving of the work and delayed its publication until Squier and Davis came to an agreement concerning their relative contributions to research. He bluntly informed Squier, moreover, that he had to change his attitude toward Davis. “You must make up your mind to act not only justly but perhaps generously to Dr. D. I can assure you nothing will be lost by this course.”73 It is interesting to note in that regard the changes made in the edited version of the evaluative report of the American Ethnological Society published in the preliminary materials of Ancient Monuments. The word “Author” that had so incensed Davis is there replaced by “authors.” Just as tellingly, the preface of the work, greatly extended beyond its original scope, generously acknowledges the authors’ many debts to those who promoted their investigations and contributed the results of their own researches. Davis’s long-standing interest in American antiquities, his activity as an archeological collector, and his contributions to that part of the research involving the natural sciences are duly acknowledged. So too are the contributions of McBride, Erwin, and Whittlesey. Only then did Ancient Monuments make its belated appearance in September 1848, although the Squier-Davis controversy, privately at least, continued for many more years. The archaeological collection that originated in the Squier-Davis investigation also continued to have an intriguing history of its own. Davis left Chillicothe in 1850 to accept the chair of materia medica and therapeutics at the newly founded New York Medical College.74 He took his “antiquarian and ethnological collections” with him and at no time acknowledged Squier’s claim to half-ownership of the artifacts recovered in their collaborative excavations. Only a small number of Mound City pipes and fragments remained in Squier’s possession. Davis would never again be an original investigator in the field but 304

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continued his archaeological interests as a collector, lecturer, and member of the American Ethnological Society. He gave four wellattended lectures on the “Mounds and Earthworks of the Mississippi Valley” at the Lowell Institute of Boston in March 1854,75 which he repeated in New York and Brooklyn. Davis illustrated his lectures with diagrams, plates, and artifacts in his collection. He continued to augment his cabinet for comparative and illustrative purposes with prehistoric artifacts from Mexico, Central America, Peru, and Denmark, and frequently rearranged the collection for exhibition. He participated in the proceedings of the American Ethnological Society at New York as a resident member and chaired the society’s committee on antiquities throughout the 1850s and 1860s. There he and Squier moved uneasily in the same orbit but both men remained estranged and sensitive about their former association.76 When Davis later became strapped for money he sold his archaeological collection in January 1864 to William Blackmore (1827–78) of Liverpool and London. Blackmore was an entrepreneur and investor in American railroads. He had a serious interest in archaeology and ethnology and was himself an inveterate collector.77 Blackmore learned of Davis’s interest in selling the collection during a visit to New York in December 1863. He believed the collection ideally should remain in the United States but made Davis an offer of purchase after receiving assurances that historical and antiquarian societies in the United States had declined to buy them. Davis believed the proper repository for the artifacts would have been the Smithsonian Institution, but its secretary Joseph Henry was determined to keep the Smithsonian out of the museum business for as long as possible. Blackmore purchased “the Davis Collection of American Antiquities” for ten thousand dollars in January 1864—the amount Davis estimated he had spent in its recovery and care. The terms of sale specifically note that Davis offered the collection to the New-York Historical Society before selling it to Blackmore. They make no mention of Squier who was then photographing and surveying archaeological sites in Peru.78 Davis regretted American Archaeology

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the sale of the collection abroad but was somewhat consoled that “foreigners and strangers so appreciate a collection containing specimens showing the highest degree of art yet developed in the stone age of this or any other continent.”79 Blackmore established a museum at Salisbury, England, in 1864 to properly house and display the Davis Collection. The Blackmore Museum opened amid much fanfare on September 5, 1867, and also featured archaeological and ethnological collections from Europe, Africa, the East Indies, Mexico, South America, and the South Pacific. The British Museum purchased the Ohio materials recovered in the Squier-Davis investigations when the Blackmore Museum disposed of its non-European collections in 1931.80 The Davis Collection today forms part of the North American Indian collections of the British Museum. Interest in the collection has remained constant over the years and it has been the object of periodic pilgrimages by American archaeologists.81 Davis eventually made at least three sets of plaster casts of the materials that he and Squier recovered from the mounds of the Scioto Valley. All three sets eventually found their way into museum collections in the United States. The Smithsonian purchased a full set of Davis’s casts as study pieces in 1868; casts of Mound City materials went to Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1871, along with casts of objects from Central America, Mexico, and Peru; and a third set went to the American Museum of Natural History in 1874.82 Davis sold the molds used to make these casts to the Smithsonian Institution in 1884, along with a catalog documenting the circumstances under which he acquired the originals. It is not a little ironic that the Smithsonian Institution ended up with a set of casts of the Davis artifacts and the molds from which they were made but not the originals. The irony was by no means lost on Davis. The publication of Squier and Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley in the fall of 1848 was a scientific and cultural event of some moment.83 Critical notices of this “Great American Work” 306

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as the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge struck a strong note of cultural nationalism. The work immediately conferred respectability on the authors, the recently established Smithsonian Institution, and the infant science of American archaeology. The Smithsonian had spared no expense in printing the monograph and only the most accomplished lithographers and engravers were employed in making the work’s copious illustrations. Joseph Henry favorably compared Ancient Monuments with pardonable pride to any similar study that had yet been published.84 Squier’s explorations and surveys with Davis even earned him, thanks to Henry, an honorary am degree from Princeton College. Henry arranged for the degree to be conferred so that Squier’s “A. M.” could appear on the title page with Davis’s “M. D.” Henry sought to lend added prestige to their work and further ensure its favorable reception among the learned.85 Although Henry vaguely alluded to scattered criticisms that the Smithsonian chose to publish an “ethnological” work, instead of a treatise on physical or practical science, those comments were more than drowned-out by the accolades. More representative of learned opinion were the views expressed by Nathaniel F. Moore, president of Columbia College; Francis Wayland, president of Brown University; and Alpheus Spring Packard Sr., professor of ancient language and classical literature at Bowdoin College. Moore had recently read what seemed to him “to be a studied vindication of the steps taken by the Institution in publishing the work of Messrs. Squier and Davis, but the volume now issued from the press carries with it its [own] justification.” He believed the work would everywhere be considered “a curious and valuable contribution to knowledge, a kind that was much needed.” Wayland expressed a similar sentiment. “I think you have been fortunate in commencing the series with the volume on ‘The Ancient Monuments in the Mississippi Valley.’ It is an addition to human knowledge and peculiarly adapted to the present condition of ethnological inquiry.” He was certain it would be well received at home and abroad. Packard, who American Archaeology

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claimed for himself a serious interest in the subject of American Antiquities, found it most gratifying that the Smithsonian began the series with a treatise on “a past and forgotten race.” What struck him about the monograph was the “the clearness, definiteness, and reliability” with which the investigators reported their findings.86 European savants were no less enthusiastic about what Squier and Davis had accomplished than their American counterparts. The expatriated British ethnologist George Robins Gliddon was particularly instrumental in promoting interest in Ancient Monuments and other American productions among his acquaintances in Europe. It was through Gliddon that Squier’s researches first came to the attention of Luke Burke of the London Ethnological Journal and Edme-François Jomard, president of the Geographical Society of Paris. Jomard gave notices of Squier’s archaeological discoveries in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie.87 The German naturalist and world traveler Baron Alexander von Humboldt, perhaps the most respected scientist of his day, was no less impressed by Squier’s researches. “With Dr. Morton’s Crania Americana,” Humboldt is reported as saying, “the work of Mr. Squier [no mention of Davis] constitutes the most valuable contribution ever made to the archaeology and ethnology of America.” Similar praise for Ancient Monuments came from Swiss archaeologist Adolphe Morlot, who described the work in his General Views on Archaeology (1861) as “one of the most splendid archaeological works ever published.” And the following year, in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Morlot dubbed Ancient Monuments “as glorious a monument of American science, as Bunker’s Hill is of American bravery.” What impressed Morlot was the scientific “spirit” of the work, and he credited Squier and Davis with discovering the Copper Age in America.88 Such was the general consensus on the Squier-Davis researches until the founding of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879. Indeed, the reverence with which the views of Squier and Davis were generally received placed an enormous burden on the next 308

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generation of archaeologists who labored to overthrow some of their erroneous conclusions. Henry W. Henshaw of the Bureau of American Ethnology began the task of debunking the honored authors in 1880. Henshaw’s reanalysis of the animal-effigy pipes from Mound City corrected their exotic zoological identifications of tropical manatee and toucans and the theory of a southern connection for the Mound Builders based upon that supposed evidence.89 Cyrus Thomas, director of mound explorations at the Bureau of American Ethnology, rejected the functional assumptions of the authors’ “imperfect and faulty” classification of mounds and enclosures in favor of a less theoretical taxonomy. The sacrificial “altar mounds” of Squier and Davis, for example, are now believed to have been crematories and not places of human sacrifice. Thomas’s field agents in Ohio, James D. Middleton and Gerard Fowke, demonstrated the relative inaccuracy of some of the SquierDavis surveys after resurveying several Scioto Valley sites in 1887.90 Much to Thomas’s surprise, however, he also found that Squier and Davis’s estimates of the geometric regularity of these sites were born out by the more accurate surveys of Middleton and Fowke. It should be noted in regard to Thomas’s warranted critique of the Squier-Davis surveys, however, that teams of field assistants conducted the government-supported fieldwork of the Bureau of American Ethnology with resources that far exceeded those available to Squier and Davis. Their surveys, conducted under limiting circumstances and far from ideal conditions, appear to be no more and no less accurate than other amateur surveys conducted in the same period. Significantly, however, their site plans and vertical elevations of the mounds gave the world the clearest conceptions of the general characteristics and different types of mounds that had yet appeared. It was the hold that their “mysterious race of the mounds” had on the scientific community and popular thought that had to be disproven and discarded. The descriptive and documentary features of the work, consequently, have aged far better than its more theoretical aspects. Indeed, in some instances American Archaeology

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the Squier-Davis survey maps and descriptions are the sole surviving records of sites since destroyed or greatly altered in their original configurations. Ancient Monuments directed popular and scholarly interest to the subject of American antiquities as no previous work had. In the final analysis, this is the legacy of Squier and Davis. Archaeologists have remained respectful of the pioneering researches of Squier and Davis notwithstanding these important correctives. Even though their extinct “race of the mounds” subsequently proved to be none other than chronologically and culturally distinct groups of North American Indians and not pre-Mexican Toltecs, Ancient Monuments has lost none of its interest as a descriptive account of archaeological sites and artifacts. The Johnson Reprint Company of New York photographically reproduced the work in 1965, while AMS Press reprinted it for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in 1973. The Smithsonian reissued a 150th anniversary edition of Ancient Monuments in 1998 that includes a valuable introduction by David J. Meltzer, an index, and an equally helpful bibliography of references cited by Squier and Davis.91 By documenting the contexts in which the explorers recovered artifacts in their excavations, by carefully discriminating between intrusive and original mound deposits, and by promoting the systematic surveying and mapping of prehistoric sites threatened with destruction, the work of Squier and Davis long served as a model of empirical observation and reporting.

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6

Origin, Era, and Region An Expanding Field of Archaeological Enquiry

The development of the ideas, methods, and theories that defined American archaeology as an emerging science in the 1840s correspondingly indicated future lines of research. The fieldwork undertaken in the 1850s primarily focused on further delineating the similarities and differences existing between the archaeological remains of the upper, central, and lower Mississippi Valley and those bordering Lake Erie in northern Ohio and western New York. Those were not only important points of enquiry regarding the origin and era of works within those different localities but also raised fundamental questions relating to the larger problem of human origins and antiquity in the New World. A series of archaeological monographs published in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge between 1851 and 1855 addressed those difficulties and further promoted the development of American archaeology: “Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York” (1851) by Ephraim George Squier, “Descriptions of Ancient Works in Ohio” (1852) by Charles Whittlesey, and “The Antiquities of Wisconsin as Surveyed and Described” (1855) by Increase A. Lapham. Individuals acting on their own interests, inclinations, and resources likewise contributed to an expanding field of archaeological enquiry. The circumspect views set forth in Daniel Garrison Brinton’s Notes on the Floridian Peninsula; Its Literary History, Indian Tribes and Antiquities (1859), for example, are less well known but also a notable part of an emerging research agenda in the study of American antiquities.

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The mounds and earthworks of western New York were the first to receive attention. No sooner had the results of the Squier-Davis investigations been put to press than Squier finalized arrangements with the secretary of the Smithsonian Joseph Henry to continue his search for the Mound Builders into the western counties of New York. He conducted those investigations under the joint auspices of the NewYork Historical Society and the Smithsonian Institution with the combined support of two hundred dollars. Given the difficulty that Henry had with Squier over recognition of Davis’s contributions to research during the publication of Squier’s first Smithsonian monograph, it is indeed a testament to Henry’s patience and objectivity that he continued to support Squier’s fieldwork and publish his findings. Henry recognized Squier’s ambition as well as his ego and occasional truculence. Yet he also knew him to be a capable writer and experienced field investigator. Talent trumped temperament in Henry’s program for launching Smithsonian publications. He published Squier’s monograph on the “Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York” as part of the second volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. The Smithsonian accepted the manuscript for publication in October 1849 and published it in 1851. Squier took up residence in New York City during the fall of 1848 in order to supervise the printing and distribution of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The precarious financial circumstances that tormented him throughout his early career were at that time particularly acute. The pursuit of science, he reported to John Russell Bartlett in February 1848, had so far left his pockets quite empty. It was then that Squier’s friends and promoters within the New-York Historical Society and the Smithsonian came to his assistance. Bartlett and George Henry Moore raised one hundred dollars from the members of the New-York Historical Society to help defray the cost of continuing his investigations into the state’s western counties. Henry could only offer an equal amount, since half the income from the Smithsonian’s founding bequest had been devoted for the next three 312

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years to the erection of a suitable building. Modest as that support was it at least came at a propitious moment and enabled Squier to again return to the field. Henry further agreed that the Smithsonian would publish the full results of his investigations in the second volume of its Contributions to Knowledge with a preliminary account to appear in the Proceedings of the New-York Historical Society. The publication of a second Smithsonian monograph further confirmed Squier’s reputation as a pioneer of archaeological investigations.1 Squier’s fieldwork in western New York has received far less attention than his better-known fieldwork in Ohio.2 Yet the surveys and explorations he made there are significant in their own right. Those investigations were a logical extension of his work in Ohio and were regarded as such by Squier and the learned societies that promoted his researches. The unity of thought and recurrence of theme that connect Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York and Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley isolate important components in Squier’s anthropological thought. Squier met the same high standard of critical enquiry in reporting his findings in Aboriginal Monuments established by his first Smithsonian monograph. Moreover, the extent to which Squier modified and elaborated his earlier views on the subject of American antiquities in his second Smithsonian monograph has not been fully appreciated. His use of historical documentation and ethnological analogies in the comparative study of archaeological evidence in New York was in keeping with his earlier work in Ohio and with later anthropological practice.3 Aboriginal Monuments is the fullest statement of his views on the character of Indian defenses, the construction of mounds by historic North American Indian tribes, and on aboriginal sacred enclosures and temple mounds of the North American Indians. His analysis of the earliest historical records relating to North American Indians in arriving at those conclusion is particular noteworthy. The aboriginal remains of western New York were smaller and fewer in number than those in the Mississippi Valley. But like them they Origin, Era, and Region

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had been the subject of much interest and speculation. The existence of burial mounds and earthen enclosures in the region became generally known with the beginning of Euro-American settlement in the area during the late eighteenth century. De Witt Clinton gave the first connected view of their extent and character in a paper read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York in 1817 and published at Albany the following year. Clinton gave brief accounts of enclosures he examined in Onondaga and Chenango counties and raised important questions relating to the antiquity of the works and their proximity to others in the same region. The first volume of John V. N. Yates and Joseph W. Moulton’s History of the State of New-York (1824) also noted the presence of archaeological remains and speculated about their place in the aboriginal annals of New York. Further notice of the subject appeared in James Macauley’s Natural, Statistical, and Civil History of the State of New York (1829) and, more importantly, in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Notes on the Iroquois (1847). There Schoolcraft noted that “a series of old forts, anterior in age to the Iroquois power, extends along the shores of Lake Erie, up to the system of water communication which has its outlet into the Alleghany through the Conewongo. There are some striking points of identity between the character of these antique military works, and those of the Ohio valley; and this coincidence is still more complete in the remains of ancient art found in the old Indian cemeteries, barrows, and small mounds of western New York, extending even as far east as the ancient Osco, now Auburn. The subject is one worthy of full examination.”4 None of those accounts were based on original surveys. Actual surveys were necessary before a comparative study could be made and legitimate conclusions drawn about their origin, antiquity, and probable relationship to aboriginal remains found elsewhere in the eastern United States. If these works were found to be geometric in form; that is, true circles, ellipses, and squares, a common origin with those found in the Mississippi Valley would be implied. If their dimensions were

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irregular in form, a different origin and, perhaps, a different era would likewise be suggested. Such temporal and spatial considerations loomed large in Squier’s fieldwork. The relative situation, number, range, and form of works in western New York could only be determined through a county-by-county survey. No less important was determining the characteristics of associated artifacts and other evidences of occupation. Descriptive fieldwork and the systematic classification of data alone could offer clues to the origin, antiquity, and assumed purposes of the works in question. Squier’s fieldwork in western New York, though but a beginning, was a significant first step in that direction. Squier initially assumed that the earthworks in New York were the northeastern terminuses of a larger defensive network extending diagonally through northern and central Ohio to the Wabash River in Indiana. Squier and Davis classified the works falling within that range as defensive structures. They attributed the enclosures and mounds of New York to the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley and drew attention to their close resemblance in position and form to those of northern Ohio.5 Thus the initial problem to be addressed by Squier’s fieldwork in New York was to determine whether the prehistoric remains of the state were built by a frontier colony from the Ohio Valley or represented the “ruder beginnings” of a people who subsequently migrated south where they erected the more elaborate antiquities of the Mississippi Valley.6 The results of Squier’s investigation in western New York, however, led him to an entirely different conclusion regarding both the origin and era of the earthworks of New York and those in northern Ohio. As had been the case in Ohio, Squier received invaluable assistance from several individuals during the course of his investigations in New York. Letters of introduction from officers and members of the New-York Historical Society and the American Ethnological Society preceded him in the field. The letters solicited assistance and

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information from the enlightened and public-spirited antiquarians who resided in areas containing aboriginal remains.7 Squier received, in turn, other letters of introduction from kindred spirits at Syracuse, Rochester, Lancaster, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Manilus to their counterparts elsewhere in western New York. The cooperation of local informants, some of whom accompanied him to the field, was of inestimable value to Squier. Such assistance enabled him to determine the exact locations of works whose existence were often unknown outside their immediate vicinity.8 Junius H. Clark of Manlius in Onondaga County, Dr. T. Reynolds of Brockville in St. Lawrence County, Augustus Porter of Niagara, and Moses Long of Rochester all eased Squier’s way. Especially valuable was the assistance received from Lewis Henry Morgan of Rochester and Orsamus Holmes Marshall of Buffalo. With such able assistance, Squier could indeed accomplish much in a short period of time. The cooperation that Squier received from Morgan is particularly noteworthy. He shared Squier’s interest in making accurate surveys of the state’s antiquities before they were destroyed by the farmer’s plow. Morgan had personally made surveys of several works with accompanying drawings or ground plans with the intention of submitting a brief report on the subject to the regents of University of the State of New York at Albany. It was indeed a “singular coincidence” that he met Squier at Rochester only ten days after having prepared those drawings. Morgan gave Squier the locations of works near Geneva and Cayuga and they appear to have made a joint survey of a work located near Victor.9 Morgan provided Squier with Iroquois place names for some of the sites examined and suggested that he incorporate them into his completed work. He even agreed to contribute an ethnological map of the state of New York, with accompanying text on “aboriginal geography” and the principles of the League of the Iroquois.10 The appearance of Morgan’s map in Squier’s forthcoming Smithsonian monograph received advance notice but never materialized. Because of Squier’s diplomatic appointment to Central America in 1849 and his departure 316

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for Nicaragua he and Morgan never completed the arrangements for the map to be engraved. Francis Parkman regretted that Morgan’s map did not appear in Squier’s finished work,11 but the map did appear in Morgan’s League of the Iroquois published the same year.12 Squier conducted his investigations in western New York over eight weeks from October to December of 1848. The delays and difficulties involved in getting his first Smithsonian monograph printed and distributed prevented him from beginning fieldwork in the spring and summer as he originally planned. Despite drenching rains, “oceans of mud,” and snowstorms that frequently slowed his progress, he located some one hundred enclosures, surveyed about fifty or sixty, excavated a small number of mounds, and collected a large number of artifacts. Following the meanders of river roads and bridle paths, he took careful note of the relationship between natural features and the location of archaeological remains. His fieldwork embraced seventeen western counties but was mostly confined to Jefferson, Monroe, Livingston, Genesee, and Erie counties. He found a far greater number of remains in these localities than he had at first supposed. Indeed, he learned of the existence of far more works than his funds and the lateness of the season allowed him to examine. He hoped the regents of the University of New York at Albany might aid in the continuation of his fieldwork the following spring.13 Unfortunately, that assistance was not forthcoming. Squier made a preliminary report of his findings before the NewYork Historical Society at the conclusion of his fieldwork in December 1848.14 The Smithsonian Institution accepted the larger work for publication on October 20, 1849, upon the recommendations of Brantz Mayer and William W. Turner of the American Ethnological Society. “Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York” made its public appearance in 1851 as part of the second volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge.15 Since the cost of producing the lithographic plates, engravings, and text made it far too expensive to be generally accessible the Smithsonian permitted a more affordable Origin, Era, and Region

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edition to be republished at Buffalo by George W. Derby the same year. The privately printed edition contains stereotyped copies of the original plates and engravings appearing in the Smithsonian edition and a revised text. Squier added collateral materials and appended a supplemental or “synoptical view” of the ancient remains in the Mississippi Valley in order to facilitate comparisons between them and those in western New York.16 The findings presented in Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York were indeed significant. Squier estimated that from 200 to 250 earthworks formerly existed in the state as a whole, probably half of which had been eradicated or greatly defaced. Many of the sites he visited had met precisely that fate. “It is a little discouraging and a good deal to be regretted that nearly all the ancient works, and many of the most interesting ones, which have for any length of time been exposed to the plough are entirely obliterated or so much broken in upon, that their outlines can no longer be traced. I have just come in time to save a number, which will exist only on paper in a very few years.”17 The enclosures for the most part were smaller than those in Ohio and their embankments were lower in elevation. Almost all were found in high places such as the bluffs of lake terraces and the summits of limestone ledges. They were occasionally found in the lowlands but always positioned on a hill, dry knoll, or the banks of streams. Almost invariably the earthworks were built near a source of water with their gateways or openings facing those sources. That uniformity of position indicated to Squier that such works were built for defensive purposes. Some of those remains were previously thought to be true circles, ellipses, and accurate squares, suggesting a common origin with works in the Mississippi Valley. Squier’s surveys, however, showed them to have been constructed not on geometric principles but in conformity with the topography of the land on which they stood. It was also previously assumed that none of the works were found on the first terrace of the central lakes. That belief gave rise to the widely received opinion that works situated on the second and third terraces were built after the 318

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lakes had subsided and the first terraces formed, a circumstance suggesting a remote antiquity. In attempting to verify that assumption, however, Squier discovered works located indiscriminately upon the first and the upper terraces as well as on the islands of the lakes and rivers of western New York.18 Further evidences of homogeneity in the former habitation of those sites appeared in the character of associated artifacts. Squier located numerous excavated pits or caches where the former inhabitants had kept stores of parched corn. Caches were invariably dug in the most elevated and dry points of land. Many of them yet held bushels of carbonized corn and the remains of bark and slips of wood used to line them. The sites of lodges could yet be traced at many enclosures where burned stones, charcoal, and ashes were found mixed with animal bones, pottery fragments, broken pipes, and occasional ornaments of beads, stone, bone, and shell. Fragments of quartz and shell-tempered pottery were abundant while the pipes were mostly made of clay and often fashioned into effigies of animals, the human head, or otherwise ornamented. Most of the artifacts resembled those in use among the Iroquois and other tribes who formerly resided in western New York. Such evidence suggested that these sites were permanently occupied as fortified villages and were of comparatively recent origin.19 “I have seen no works yet which I feel disposed or warranted to ascribe to the race of the mounds.”20 Squier remained enamored of the idea that an earlier and presumably more skilled aboriginal people had erected the mounds of the Mississippi Valley. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his discussion of artifacts. In contrast to his enthusiasm for the “higher grade of art” claimed for the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley, he did not regard the materials recovered during his investigations in New York of sufficient importance to warrant a detailed notice. He valued the aboriginal art of New York only “as relics of a race fast disappearing, and whose existence will soon be known to history alone. It is to be hoped that, however insignificant they may seem, they may Origin, Era, and Region

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be carefully preserved and treasured for public inspection, in places or institutions designed for the purpose.”21 That wish was partially fulfilled. The Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York established a State Cabinet of Natural History in 1848, which also included a Historical and Antiquarian Collection. The regents issued a circular soliciting the donation of archaeological, ethnological, and historical specimens to the cabinet, and were interested in the materials recovered during Squier’s fieldwork. They purchased those materials from Squier in May of 1849 for fifty dollars when they became a part of the state cabinet at Albany.22 The aboriginal materials and trade goods that Squier collected during his fieldwork in western New York were significant sources of information. The specimens included flint points and various articles of pottery collected from former Seneca and Cayuga villages, as well as several “ancient enclosures” and various articles of pottery and human remains from a burial mound on Tonawanda Island in the Niagara River excavated by Squier in November 1848. Geographically the donation included artifacts from Cayuga, Monroe, Livingston, Erie, Jefferson, Genesee, and Ontario counties, a few from unidentified localities, as well as an unspecified number of nondescript items from “altar mounds” and “sepulchral mounds” in the Mississippi Valley. The aboriginal materials represented in the collection were suggestive, however vaguely, of continuity in the occupation of western New York by the Seneca and Cayuga from historic times back to late prehistoric era.23 While the “pottery pipes” were clearly of historic origin (trade goods) the flint and ceramic items found within “ancient enclosure” and the mound on Tonawanda Island were of aboriginal production dating to an earlier period, although the aboriginal materials were not, Squier believed, to be assigned a very high antiquity. However ill-defined the cultural and chronological sequence, the suggestion of continuity was inescapable. Burial mounds were other key indicators in Squier’s investigations. He examined several “bone mounds,” occasionally found in 320

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association with earthen enclosures. He attributed those mounds to the practice, common among several groups of North American Indians, of periodically gathering the bones of their ancestors. William Bartram, Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Jean de Brébeuf, Francis Creuxius, and other early observers described the ceremony as the “Festival of the Dead.” Charlevoix described the observance in detail among the Huron and Iroquois. Families that had lost members during the previous eight years collected their bones and reburied them in a common grave. A small number of other burial mounds in western New York were of a different character than the bone mounds that Squier attributed to the Festival of the Dead. He found that most of those mounds had already been opened under the “idle curiosity” of local inhabitants known as “ ‘money-diggers’ ”—those who looted mounds in search of hidden treasure. Money-diggers, said Squier, were “a ghostly race of which, singularly enough, even at this day, representatives may be found in almost every village.” Squier was fortunate enough to find a mound upon Tonawanda Island that had escaped their “midnight attentions.” He did not regard the mounds he explored in western New York to resemble those of the Mississippi Valley. The earthen enclosures of western New York were far more numerous than burial mounds and received most of Squier’s attention. His surveys of those sites implied a defensive origin.24 The evidences of long habitation found within many of the enclosures suggested that most were fortified villages. Nothing positive about their date could be affirmed even though heavy forests covered many. Squier thought that too much emphasis had been placed on this circumstance since a heavy forest in itself was not necessarily an indication of great age: “for we may plausibly suppose that it was not essential to the purposes of the builders that the forests should be removed.” The trees in some instances may have predated the construction of some earthworks on which they grew. Even so, he found trees growing on the embankments of works that were from one to three feet in diameter. If they had Origin, Era, and Region

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grown subsequent to the construction the works, that circumstance would date their origin beyond the era of the European discovery in the fifteenth century. He did not, however, regard this circumstance as in any way justifying the inference that the tribes who built the mounds and earthen enclosures of western New York were earlier than those found residing in the area by the first European explorers. Squier saw further evidence of an historic or late prehistoric origin for these sites in associated artifacts and human remains. The clay pipes, pottery, and ornaments he found in situ were “absolutely identical” to those identifying the village sites occupied by the Cayuga and Seneca in the seventeenth century. Human remains likewise suggested a comparatively recent origin. Squier found cemeteries located near many of the enclosures that contained well-preserved skeletons. Save for the absence of European trade goods the remains did not essentially differ from skeletal materials found at abandoned Indian villages. Squier concluded that if the earthworks of western New York could be shown to be of ancient origin they must have been “not only secondarily but generally occupied by the Iroquois or neighboring and contemporary nations, or else—and this hypothesis is most consistent and reasonable—they were erected by them.” Squier bolstered this hypothesis with historical evidence. In all probability, the Iroquois had erected the embankments of the enclosures as earthen supports for palisades used in fortifying their villages. The disappearance of embankments shortly after contact with Europeans he attributed to the introduction of iron implements that enabled the palisades to be secured in the ground without the need for earthen embankments. Contact with Europeans also introduced new forms of warfare after the acquisition of firearms, which no doubt accounted for the absence of palisades at later villages. The origin of the earthworks disappeared from the living memories of most Indian peoples whose ancestors had built them with the lapse of time. Squier argued that the manner in which the Iroquois palisaded their early villages, as described in David Cusik’s History of the Six 322

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Nations for example, undoubtedly applied to the erection of the more ancient embankments examined during his fieldwork. Early accounts describing the stockades surrounding the villages of the Iroquois made this conclusion seem all the more plausible. Squier interrogated these sources in support of his opinion that all the earthworks of western New York marked the sites of stockaded villages once inhabited by the Iroquois. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Lewis Henry Morgan, Orsamus Holmes Marshall, and Francis Parkman were all conversant on the Iroquois practice of erecting stockades on the perimeter of their villages in the seventeenth century.25 Squier consulted those authorities in support the conclusion that the stockaded villages once inhabited by the Iroquois explained the origin of the older earthworks examined during the course of his own investigations. The preponderance of archaeological and historical evidence bearing upon this subject led him to a conclusion little anticipated when he began his investigations in New York. Squier had no doubt based upon those explorations

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that the earth-works of western New York were erected by the Iroquois or their western neighbors, and do not possess an antiquity going very far back of the Discovery. Their general occurrence upon a line parallel to, and not far distant from the Lakes, favors the hypothesis that they were built by frontier tribes—an hypothesis entirely conformable to aboriginal traditions. Here, according to these traditions, every foot of ground was contested between the Iroquois and the Gah-kwas [either the Erie or the Neutral Indians]26 and other western tribes; and here, as a consequence, where most exposed to attack, were permanent defenses most necessary.27 The antiquities of western New York were significant illustrations of the means by which the Iroquois fortified their villages. They further established that the Iroquois were more sedentary and agricultural in their habits than previously supposed and that they had also occasionally built mounds. Yet he otherwise regarded those structures as possessing little relevance to “the grand ethnological and archaeological Origin, Era, and Region

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questions involved in the ante-Columbian History of the Continent.” He still regarded the elusive Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley to be an earlier aboriginal people whose intellectual and social attainments were superior to the “savage or hunter tribes of North America.” The architects of the mounds in the Mississippi Valley, he confidently asserted, had not erected the earthworks and mounds of western New York. More than ever Squier was convinced that his search for the origin, migrations, and affinities of the ancient Mound Builders had to be directed southward of the Ohio Valley. Squier’s investigations in western New York also led him to change his earlier opinion regarding the origin and era of the enclosures of northern Ohio. He no longer attributed those works to the same people who had construction the mounds in central and southern Ohio but thought them to be of comparatively recent date and probably of a common origin with those of western New York.28 Charles Whittlesey of Cleveland, long a student of the aboriginal remains throughout Ohio, at least initially accepted that conclusion. He had no doubt that the earthworks of western New York described by Squier were part and parcel of the system of similar structures found along the southern shore of Lake Erie. Whittlesey always regarded the works in northern Ohio to be of a more recent origin than those in central Ohio. He further acknowledged that Squier made a strong case for attributing those in western New York to “the present Indians,” which he had not previously believed to be the case.29 Whittlesey must have harbored doubts on that point, however, for he later changed his mind. He vaguely postulated the presence of a third mound-building people who were distinct from either the Indians (historic tribes) or the more ancient Mound Builders and possibly intermediate between them in point of time. “Mr. Squier in his ‘Antiquities of Western New York’ attributes them [the earthworks] to the Indians, but upon grounds that do not seem to me sufficient.” It is difficult to explain those two conflicting statements by Whittlesey except to assume that he had rethought the earlier opinion he expressed to Squier.30 324

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The findings embodied in Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York significantly modify Squier’s earlier views on the origin and era of the archaeological remains of northern Ohio and western New York and further clarify his views on the presumed character of the Mound Builders. There he also continued to press archaeology’s claims to scholarly attention. In commenting on the large amount of unprofitable and unphilosophical speculation about the origin and purposes of aboriginal remains in New York he launched what for him had become a quintessential exhortation.

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Rigid criticism is especially indispensable in archaeological investigations, yet there is no department of human research in which so wide a range has been given to conjecture. Men seem to have indulged the belief that here nothing is fixed, nothing certain, and have turned aside into this field as one where the severer rules which elsewhere regulate philosophical research are not enforced, and where every species of extravagance may be indulged in with impunity. . . . The Indian who wrought the rude outlines upon the rock at Dighton, little dreamed that his work would ultimately come to be regarded as affording indubitable evidence of Hebrew, Phoenician and Scandinavian adventure and colonization in America; and the builders of the rude defenses of Western New York, as little suspected that Celt and Tartar, and even the apocryphal Madoc, with his “ten ships,” would, in this the nineteenth century of our faith, be vigorously invoked to yield paternity to their labors!31 Squier’s second Smithsonian work is also important for the content of the elaborate appendix that is longer than the monograph proper. Those supplemental materials seldom enter into analyses of his archaeological thought. A good portion of the subject matter is intimately connected with Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, while the remainder elaborates the central issues and problems raised in the text of Aboriginal Monuments. Here Squier continued to take an enlarged view of his subject by developing cultural analogies between Origin, Era, and Region

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the Old and New Worlds as he more circumspectly did in Ancient Monuments under the guarded, prudent, and exacting hand of Joseph Henry. Those analogies are connecting links between Squier’s Smithsonian monographs. In making those extended comparisons, however, Squier hastened to note that no connection or common origin between the aboriginal remains of the Old and New Worlds should be inferred. Such similarities were “the inevitable results of similar conditions” existing among distinct and widely separated peoples.

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Human development must be, if not in precisely the same channels, in the same direction, and must pass through the same stages. We cannot be surprised, therefore, that the earlier, as in fact the later monuments of every people, exhibit resemblances more or less striking. What is true physically, or rather monumentally, is not less so in respect to intellectual and moral development. And it is not to be denied that the want of a sufficient allowance, for natural and inevitable coincidences, has led to many errors in tracing the origin and affinities of nations.32 One need not look for common origins and mysterious cultural dependencies to explain similarities existing between the aboriginal remains of America and those in other parts of the world. Many observers before and after him made precisely the same point but none more convincingly. Nor did oft-cited resemblances in religious ideas, symbols, and customs make popular theories connecting the peoples of the Old and New Worlds any more tenable (the lost tribes of Israel being the most prevalent). As Squier noted elsewhere, analogies were the results of natural causes: uniformities in man’s intellectual makeup, natural circumstances, and human nature; nothing more or less. His caveat against attempts to derive American aborigines from Tartary, Hindustan, or the Mediterranean based solely upon parallels in religious and customs is yet a further example of that critical attitude. Those who persisted in doing so based upon the alleged proofs of analogy 326

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ignored a more plausible explanation such as that made by the English theologian William Warburton (1698–1779) in his two-part Divine Legation of Moses (1737, 1741). According to Warburton they committed “the old, inveterate error that a similitude of customs and manners, amongst the various tribes of mankind most remote from each other, must needs arise from some communication. Whereas human nature, without any help, will in the same circumstances always exhibit the same appearances.”33 Similarities between the customs and ways of life among the various families of man alone did not establish a connection or communication between them. Human wants and needs were universally the same, as were the cognitive processes of the human mind. Analogies should not be ignored but developed with caution. Resemblances did not ipso facto provide sustainable grounds for “sinking the Atlantides in an overwhelming cataclysm, or leading vagrant tribes ‘through deserts vast, and regions of eternal snow’; or invoking the shadowy Thorfinn, or the apocraphal ‘Madoc, with his ten ships,’ to account for the form of a sacrifice, or the method of an incantation!” That thread of logic ran through all of Squier’s early anthropological writings and clearly reflects the developmentalist assumptions of American ethnology in the mid-nineteenth century.34 The appendix of Aboriginal Monuments also contains Squier’s overview of mound-building practices among existing groups of North American Indians. He drew upon those examples to support his attribution of the mounds in western New York to the bone burials of the Iroquois or their neighbors and the earthworks to the former sites of their stockaded villages. He recognized that some of the mounds in the South, like those in New York, were of comparatively recent origin and directly attributable to tribes still residing there in the historic era. Squier called to witness Bartram’s account of the Florida Indians heaping earthen mounds over the remains of family members in the Festival of the Dead as an explanation of their probable origin. He also accepted Thomas Jefferson’s belief that recent tribes of Indian constructed the burial mounds described in his Notes on Virginia.35 Origin, Era, and Region

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It is difficult in light of those opinions to firmly place Squier within the “lost race” school without further comment or qualification. Any assessment of his archaeology that fails to do so confuses more than clarifies. Even though Squier continued to make problematic distinctions between those remains and the mounds and earthworks that he and Davis had earlier explored in Ohio, he did not think that all Indians at all points in time were incapable of building mounds. Yet problems of nomenclature and related assumptions persisted nonetheless. Squier still cleaved to the problematic phrase “the race of the mounds” in referring the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley. And he did so in ways that contradicted his own evidence and arguments and have sometimes confounded historians. He argued thus: “We have no satisfactory evidence that the race of the mounds passed over the Alleghenies; the existence, therefore, of a few tumuli to the east of these mountains, unless in connection with other and extensive works, such as seem to have marked every step of the progress of that race, is of little importance, and not at all conclusive upon this point; especially as it will hardly be denied that the existing races of Indians did and still do occasionally construct mounds of small size.”36 Squier clearly recognized that some of the historic North American tribes had at various times built mounds yet he continued to believe that the venerable Mound Builders were unconnected with any of the historic tribes of eastern North America, with one possible exception. The more sedentary Natchez and Florida tribes bordering the Gulf of Mexico possessed a state of society at earliest knowledge of them that would have enabled the construction of so many large and numerous mounds and the higher grade of art he attributed to their contents. Squier regarded the Floridian groups to be “the connecting link between the gorgeous semi-civilization of Mexico and the nomadic state of the Northern families,” while the Natchez had “assimilated more nearly to the central American and Peruvian stocks [of ] the Toltecan family than

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had the other eastern tribes.37 He was willing to theoretically accept that some of the southeastern groups might be the descendants of his enigmatic “race of the mounds,” but certainly not the Iroquois nor, apparently, any other group north of the Gulf tribes. Not all of Squier’s contemporaries concurred with his views on the origin of the earthworks of western New York. Lewis Henry Morgan disagreed with his general attribution of “Trench Enclosures” to the Iroquois. “There is no fact in Indian history more certain,” said Morgan, “than that they are not.”38 He agreed that some of those works could be assigned such an origin but others he believed were works of earlier mound-building groups and not the Iroquois. Morgan accepted the remains at Geneva, Pompey, and Levonia as Iroquoian works of a comparatively recent date. The “Palisade Fortification” near Geneva in Ontario County he identified as a Seneca work but the presence of bastions indicated that the Seneca had erected the earthwork with the assistance of either the English or French. Major General John Sullivan destroyed the structure during his expedition against the Seneca in 1779. A fragment of a palisade at one of the openings was still above ground when Morgan surveyed the site in 1847 and among the items he contributed to the state historical and antiquarian collection at Albany. Morgan attributed the remainder of the aboriginal remains in New York to the earlier period of the “Mound Builders.” Those works marked the presence of “a race, whose name we know not: neither know we the era of their departure.”39 Morgan interpreted aboriginal art as further evidence of different Mound Builder and Iroquois occupations in New York. He saw two distinct classes of remains and eras. The first class of remains belonged to the pre-Columbian period, or “the era of the ‘Mound Builders,’ whose defensive works, mounds, and sacred enclosures are scattered so profusely throughout the west.” The second class were of later date and attributable to the Iroquois and “the fugitive races, who, since the extermination of the ‘Mound Builders’ have displaced each other in succession,

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until the period of the Iroquois commenced.” Morgan regarded the remains of the Mound Builders as evidence that they possessed “a semi-civilization and considerable development in the art of agriculture.” Implements of copper, chert, stone, porphyry, and earthen materials of elaborate and ingenious workmanship identified the former habitations of the Mound Builders quite apart from their mounds and enclosures. “The fugitive specimens belonging to this period [Morgan’s Mound Builder period], which are occasionally found within the limits of our State, are much superior to any of the productions of the earlier Iroquois”;40 that is, the “earlier Iroquois” being the remote ancestors of the existing Iroquoian groups in distinction to the more ancient and presumably “semi-civilized” Mound Builders. Morgan further advanced that opinion by drawing on aboriginal traditions. Since the Iroquois had preserved the names of several of their ancient localities, he saw no reason to doubt the veracity of historical traditions as to which works were built by their ancestors and which not. When he commenced his studies of Indian lore, he wrote Squier, he looked upon such traditions as mere vagaries. He later changed his mind. The historical traditions of the Iroquois, in contrast to fables designed to merely instruct or entertain, were capable of explication.41 Morgan elaborated that position in the League of the Iroquois: Mingled up with this mass of fable, were their historical traditions. This branch of their unwritten literature is both valuable and interesting. These traditions are remarkably tenacious of the truth, and between them all there is a striking harmony of facts. Anyone who takes occasion to compare parts of these traditions with concurrent history, will be surprised at their accuracy, whether the version be from the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Seneca, or the Mohawk. The embellishments gained by their transmission from hand to hand are usually separable from the substance and the latter is entitled to credence.42 330

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Squier had no quarrel with the importance that Morgan placed on historical traditions for no one had a keener interest in collecting them than he. He was more guarded than Morgan, however, when calling upon them to explain archaeological problems. However interesting and important oral traditions were, in many particulars relating to American antiquities they were not conclusive. But notwithstanding that cautiousness, Squier readily accepted that many of the mounds and earthwork in western New York were attributable to the Iroquois. Orsamus Holmes Marshall, another New York antiquarian of the right sort, disagreed with Morgan and agreed with Squier. Marshall saw no evidence of an occupation of western New York earlier than the Iroquois:

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There is no satisfactory evidence of the existence in this vicinity, of a race preceding the Indians. The “mound-builders”: that mysterious people who once spread in countless multitudes over the valleys of the Ohio, the Mississippi, and their tributaries, never, so far as diligent research has been able to discover, dwelt in this locality. The ancient fortifications, tumuli, and artificial structures that abound in Western New York can all be referred to a later date and a modern race. But at what precise period, and by what particular people they were constructed, are questions which have hitherto eluded the most diligent historical research. The Senecas are equally ignorant on the subject.43 The opposing views of Morgan and Marshall epitomize the diversity of opinion on the subject of the Mound Builders in the mid-nineteenth century. In the face of such uncertainty, it is not surprising that Squier’s guarded views were received as authority for many years to come. Archaeologists have remained respectful of Squier’s pioneering contribution to the archaeology of western New York, despite the incorrectness of certain of his conclusions. The distinction that he made between the Mound Builders and Indians as distinct “races” was a false dichotomy and blind alley. What they were actually describing Origin, Era, and Region

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were ethnic, cultural, and chronological differences among prehistoric sites and artifacts. The consistent misuse of the term race for ethnicity and culture is a problem found throughout the early archaeological literature and nowhere more so than in the writings of Squier. Squier’s survey maps and descriptions, by contrast, represent original and enduring contributions to knowledge. William M. Beauchamp’s Aboriginal Occupation of New York (1900) is respectful of what Squier accomplished as a surveyor with the limited means and time available to him. Later investigators, like William A. Ritchie, also continued to appreciate his efforts. Ritchie credited Squier with having produced survey maps that in most cases were probably reliable. That may sound like faint praise. But be that as it may in many instances his surveys are the only records of sites subsequently destroyed. As Ritchie further commented, “No serious exception will be taken to his conclusion that the earth-walled structures of western New York were erected by the Iroquois not long before the discovery, although it is now clear that Owasco culture groups, preceding the Iroquois, were the authors of some. His limited experience with New York burial tumuli, however, evidently concealed, even from his experienced eye, the connection with the vastly more numerous Hopewellian mounds of Ohio, in whose exploration he had pioneered.” Francis (Francesco) Scardera has used Squier’s descriptions and survey maps in relocating and identifying prehistoric earthworks in Jefferson County, New York—both those obliterated in whole or part as well as in the rediscovery of “lost” sites in his reconstruction of a greatly altered landscape.44 As noted earlier, Squier never resumed his fieldwork in New York as planned. He was entirely without the means to do so even though he knew of other archaeological sites that the lateness of the season prevented him from examining.45 Instead of returning to the field in the spring as he had expected, he accepted a diplomatic appointment to Nicaragua in April 1849. It would be the antiquities and Indian peoples of Central America that would command his anthropological interests for many years to come. Squier would never again be an 332

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original investigator of archaeological remains in North America. He looked forward to a time when steps might be taken to investigate what still remained of the mounds of western New York before more were destroyed or further degraded by the farmer’s plow. Yet he held out little hope that such would be the case. Most of the mounds and earthworks, he believed, were destined to meet the same fate that befell most of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region, the last of whom were then fighting against removal from the state. Squier’s chance encounter with a small band of Seneca living along the margins of Tonawanda Creek in Erie County, an area abounding in traces of ancient and more recent Seneca occupancy, prompted him to reproachfully comment about those who hungered for what was left of Seneca lands. The Seneca still living on Tonawanda Creek were “sullenly defying the grasping cupidity of those who, Shylock-like, sustained by fraudulent contracts, are impatient to anticipate the certain doom which impends over this scanty remnant, and would deny them the poor boon of laying their bones beside those of their fathers.”46 Archaeological reconnaissance continued in Wisconsin through the fieldwork of Increase Allen Lapham, a man of wide-ranging interests and talents to match. Among his manifold pursuits was a determination to survey and map the effigy mounds that formed such a conspicuous yet imminently threatened feature of the Wisconsin landscape. Lapham—a self-taught geographer, geologist, meteorologist, botanist, and archaeologist—was born at Palmyra, New York, on March 7, 1811, the fifth of thirteen children born to Seneca Lapham and Rachel Allen. Seneca Lapham was a canal contractor and engineer and Increase began adult life at age thirteen working with his father and older brother Darius on the canals in New York, Kentucky, and Ohio. It was an invaluable apprenticeship. His first job was cutting stone and carrying the surveyor’s rod on the Erie Canal near Lockport, New York. Surveying was a skill that later served him well as a surveyor and mapper of the Indian mounds of Wisconsin. Increase attended the grammar school of Mann Butler at Louisville for a brief period of time. Origin, Era, and Region

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But frugal family circumstances and the frequent moves of his father working on different canals denied him the opportunity of a formal education. What the youth lacked in that department he more than compensated for by his well-honed skills as a close observer of nature and his lifelong pursuit of self-culture. A skilled draftsman, he became a canal engineer and surveyor during in the 1830s. Lapham worked with his father on the Miami Canal at Middletown, Ohio, for a brief period in 1826 and from 1830 to 1833 on the Ohio Canal between Cleveland and Portsmouth, Ohio. He served as secretary of the Ohio Board of Canal Commissioners from 1833 to 1836 and deputy surveyor of Franklin Country, Ohio, in 1835. The twenty-five-year-old Lapham came to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the spring of 1836 at the invitation of Byron Kilbourn. He and Kilbourn had previously worked as engineers on the Miami Canal. The initial plan was that Lapham would be chief engineer on the projected Milwaukee and Rock River Canal—a project that never materialized. Nevertheless, Lapham saw many other opportunities in the new Wisconsin Territory and decided to stay on as a resident of Milwaukee.47 There he met Ann M. Alcott whom he married in 1838, a union resulting in five children. Lapham immediately turned his scientific interests to the topography, natural resources, and antiquities of his newly adopted state. As the deputy surveyor of the Wisconsin Territory he surveyed town plots, attended to land claims, and in 1844 brought forward his Geographical and Topographical Description of Wisconsin—a veritable boon for prospective emigrants. “New settlements,” Lapham noted, “are commenced almost every day, and soon grow into important places without any notice being taken of them by the public. Towns and villages spring up so rapidly that one has to ‘keep a sharp look out’ to be informed even of their names and location. The building of a town has in great degree ceased to be a matter of much interest.” Lapham knew whereof he spoke. He was himself a part of that emigration and both an agent and chronicler of Wisconsin’s

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rapid development. He could well appreciate the irony of promoting the economic and cultural development of Wisconsin on the one hand and wanting to preserve the monuments of an ancient people who had once resided there on the other. Lapham gave brief notices in his Geographical and Topographical Description of Wisconsin of the remains at Aztalan in Jefferson County and earthworks representing quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and the human form found in various localities of the state. Nearly a decade later he would systematically survey, map, and describe those sites just before the farmer’s plow and the rapid growth of towns and villages destroyed many of them.48 It was a short step for Lapham to apply his surveying skills and knowledge of the geography and geology of the Wisconsin Territory to studying its numerous Indian mounds. He made known in the Milwaukee Advertiser of November 24, 1836, only five months after his arrival in Wisconsin, the existence of a turtle-effigy mound at Prairies Village (today Waukesha) and of other effigy mounds at different localities. Given the speed with which many of those remains were being destroyed or defaced Lapham made a public appeal for their preservation. He asked landowners in Wisconsin to take immediate steps to preserve the ancient remains located on their properties. He hoped that the antiquities of Wisconsin would not suffer the same fate that had already befell so many mounds and earthworks located in other states and that future travelers would be spared the need to lament their loss. “Now is the time, when the country is yet new, to take the necessary measures for their preservation, which does not require that the land on which they are found should remain useless, for if sown to grass or planted with fruit trees it may be made to yield a rich return without injuring the ancient works.” Lapham was saddened to report, however, that human remains found in a burial mound at Prairies Village had been unceremoniously removed in order to make room for the landowner’s crop of potatoes. “Such sacrilege should be made a punishable offence by the law.”49

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While that was decidedly a minority opinion in 1836 it was by no means an anomalous one among historically conscious individuals. Nathaniel F. Hyer expressed the same concern over the preservation of Wisconsin’s antiquities in the Milwaukee Advertiser in February 1837. Hyer also understood that the spread of settlement in the Wisconsin Territory presented a clear and present danger to the perishable memorials of the Mound Builders. He was particularly interested in the remains at Aztalan. When vague reports began to circulate in 1836 that traces of “an ancient walled city” existed in the western region of the Wisconsin Territory, Hyer set out in the company of unidentified friends to find the rumored remains. He first examined the site in October 1836. He made sketches as best he could and returned early in January 1837 in the company of other friends with compass and chain to make a survey. The unknown architects of “The Citadel” built the supposedly ruined city on the west branch of Rock River in the town of Jefferson due west of Milwaukee. The embankments at the site enclosed about twenty acres. Hyer named the site Aztalan, a name he took from the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, who noted that according to Spanish accounts the Aztecs of Mexico were “usurpers” who had migrated from the North. The northern country from whence the Aztecs migrated they called Aztalan. The country known to the Aztecs as Aztalan, Humboldt believed, must be searched for north of the forty-second degree of latitude. He arrived at that conclusion after examining Aztec records or manuscripts painted on leaves of prepared animal skins. Those writings or symbols related the tradition of the migration from Aztalan to Mexico. The opinion of John Delafield, author of An Enquiry into the Origin of the Antiquities of America (1839), further supported that theory. According to Delafield, the name Aztalan derived from two “Mexican” words: atl (water) and an (near), which suggested to some at least that the legendary Aztalan had been located somewhere near the Great Lakes. Hyer believed the Rock River site had been constructed for defensive purposes by “a people far more advanced in civilization and the arts, than 336

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the Indian race ever appear to have been.” They were also a people engaged in commerce with groups living far distant from the site’s immediate location. Whatever the origin and actual purpose of the site, he was certain it had been densely populated and would be so again in the not-too-distant future: “but we are determined to preserve these ruins from being ruined.”50 The mounds of Wisconsin attracted a greater or lesser degree of attention elsewhere too. The published report of Major Stephen Long’s expedition of 1823 gave passing notice of the earthworks at Prairie du Chien and numerous remains on the Wisconsin River near Petit Cap au Grès. Thomas Say, William H. Keating, and Samuel Seymour, all members of the Long expedition, examined the works and reported that the bluffs bordering the Wisconsin, about four miles above its mouth, were covered with mounds and “parapets.”51 Richard C. Taylor gave a more complete account of the animal-effigy mounds in volume thirty-four of the American Journal of Science Arts for July 1838. Taylor identified these remains as “Indian mounds” and “Indian antiquities” that had been constructed by earlier aboriginal groups, but not, presumably, by any of the tribes residing in Wisconsin at that time and for some years earlier. Taylor’s conclusion that the effigy mounds found in the southern two-thirds of what is today the state of Wisconsin (he only described and figured a few of them) were probable representations of clan totems (representations of animals relating to the families or descent groups comprising different tribes) is certainly a reasoned one. The effigy mounds may well have been representations of animaltotems that held particular meaning for certain tribes or certain descent groups within tribes. But they could just as easily have been representations of supernatural beings in Native cosmologies (spirit animals that dwelled within the three realms of the universe—sky, earth, and water), or possibly even symbolic depictions of both animal totems and supernatural beings. Given the repetition of certain designs it is not be supposed they were altogether random shapes. Stephen Taylor followed Richard C. Taylor’s account of the effigy mounds with an Origin, Era, and Region

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extensive account of his own, which appeared in volume forty-four of American Journal of Science and Arts for October–December 1842. Stephen Taylor’s account primarily relates to the earthworks located at and near Muscoda on the Wisconsin River, although he also described and mapped Aztalan. One should also mention that Dr. John Locke surveyed several works between the Four Lakes and the Blue Mounds, which appeared in his report on the geology of the lead mining district published in 1844. All surveys and descriptions that had been published to date appeared in Squier and Davis’s chapter on the effigy mounds of the northwest in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848).52 Those early notices directed attention to the Wisconsin mounds but much fieldwork remained to be done. More sites needed to be surveyed and in a more sustained and systematic manner. Lapham determined to conduct archaeological fieldwork in Wisconsin so far as personal circumstances and finances permitted. When he received a diploma of membership in the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen in October 1846 he used the opportunity to make a pro forma solicitation of their assistance in bringing the mounds of Wisconsin under closer study. Lapham does not appear to have received a response to that enquiry. But three years later he was more successful with the American Antiquarian Society. Writing to the society on November 26, 1849, Lapham requested support for conducting explorations and surveys of the mounds of Wisconsin, which resulted in a request for an estimate of the cost for the proposed investigations. Lapham believed that much could be accomplished for about five hundred dollars. Impressed with the opportunity to once again promote original investigations of the mounds presented by Lapham’s proposal, the Council of the American Antiquarian Society agreed to advance him three hundred dollars to outfit his explorations. Another two hundred dollars would be sent upon request if necessary for the completion of investigations.

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The animal-effigy mounds of Wisconsin differed essentially from effigy mounds found elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley. Some were designed and erected on such a large scale that it was only after surveying and mapping them that their animal forms became apparent. Some of the sites were previously surveyed and described by U.S. engineers engaged in surveying Wisconsin and adjacent areas. But a systematic investigation of the effigy mounds of Wisconsin remained a desideratum. Similarly, questions concerning their origin and era relative to aboriginal remains found in other regions of the Mississippi Valley remained largely unanswered. The Council of the American Antiquarian Society believed that funding and publishing the results of Lapham’s proposed investigation of “these anomalous monuments” would be a suitable supplement to the society’s earlier publication on the subject of American antiquities by Caleb Atwater. Here, indeed, was a promising field of investigation.53 Lapham and Samuel Foster Haven, the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, completed the arrangements for Lapham’s fieldwork in the early spring of 1850. He would commence his investigations at the expense of the American Antiquarian Society, periodically report the progress of his explorations, and at their conclusion furnish the society with his field notes and drawings in preparation for publication. Lapham commenced his archaeological survey of Wisconsin in May 1850 in the vicinity of Milwaukee, began his “grand tour” across the rest of the state toward the end of June of that year, and started the last leg of his reconnaissance in May 1852. Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, took great interest in Lapham’s work. Henry agreed to publish the results of the investigations conducted on behalf of the American Antiquarian Society. It was an arrangement not dissimilar to that he earlier made with the American Ethnological Society to publish the work of Squier and Davis. The Smithsonian Institution accepted Lapham’s manuscript for publication in December 1853. It appeared in the seventh volume of the

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Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge issued in June 1855 and the sponsorship and support of the American Antiquarian Society was duly acknowledged.54 Lapham consciously undertook his archaeological reconnaissance in circumstances we would today call salvage archaeology. As noted above, he had drawn attention to the need to preserve the mounds as early as 1836 and little more than a decade later surveyed and mapped them under the aegis of the American Antiquarian Society. He was, like several of his predecessors and successors, decidedly a man on a mission. An expanding agriculture frontier, the creation of new settlements, and the construction of canals threatened archaeological remains in Wisconsin at the very locations selected by the effigy-mound cultures to erect earthworks and villages. Those sites provided the most fertile and easily tilled soils, an abundance of game and fish, and access to water communication and portages between rivers. The grading of streets in Milwaukee, for instance, claimed the mounds once found there in what was an all too familiar scenario. When Lapham visited the Aztalan site in June 1850, to cite a further example, he found that many of the mounds had been partially opened, the southern part of the citadel was a cultivated field, and the northern part covered in trees. Such scenes evoked thoughts of the transitory nature of human endeavor and achievement. After spending an hour in such contemplation atop a high and commanding mound at Aztalan, the presence of an ancient and unknown past moved Lapham to write home: “The folly of human affairs is strikingly illustrated in these monuments of the dead. They have utterly failed to hand down any certain knowledge of the people who have erected them. They are lost—gone—returned to dust—and are forgotten.”55 Joseph Henry fatalistically bespoke that same reality in introducing Lapham’s work in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge series in June 1855. Little if any doubt existed that the earthworks of Wisconsin accurately surveyed and described by the author “are soon to be obliterated by the march of improvement.” Henry was not wrong. 340

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Fig. 21. Ancient Works at Aztalan. The comparative study of earthworks located in different regions of the Mississippi Valley was a decided desideratum in the nineteenth century and a leading objective of the fieldwork conducted in Wisconsin by Increase A. Lapham. Lapham surveyed the Aztalan site between June 28 and July 3, 1850. Most of the archaeological remains in Wisconsin are nonlinear animal-shaped effigy mounds and to a lesser extent human-shaped effigies. The truncated-pyramidal mound at Aztalan, a geometrically constructed mound, more closely resembled those found in the Ohio Valley and the Lower Mississippi Valley. Plate 31 of Lapham’s “Antiquities of Wisconsin,” published as article 4 in volume 7 of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1855).

As Lapham himself noted with equal parts sadness and justified satisfaction, some of the sites he examined were “destroyed immediately or within a few days after my survey.” The existence, character, and location of those sites would be known thereafter only through his survey maps and descriptions. “My office has been faithfully to fulfill the duties of the surveyor.” It was a task to which Lapham was well suited. He largely left the comparison of facts and deduction of general principles to others, however. Writing to Samuel Foster Haven in October 1850, for example, he noted that all of the animal effigies in the eastern part of the state appeared to point southward, “a fact Origin, Era, and Region

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that may suggest some theory as to their design.” But he constrained himself from making any further comment as to the possible significance of the observation.56 It would be hard to overestimate the descriptive and documentary value of Lapham’s explorations. It has been estimated that perhaps as many as two-thirds of the effigy mounds have been destroyed in Wisconsin since Lapham first began surveying and mapping those remains. It is little wonder that his work is often cited or that the University of Wisconsin issued a facsimile reprint in 2001.57 Lapham’s surveys and descriptions were as thorough as they were purposeful. Ever the naturalist and geographer, he arranged his study according to the natural provinces of Wisconsin (river valleys and lakes) rather than the artificial political boundaries of counties. Counties at that time in the state’s history were fluid and subject to change by the state legislature. He also identified localities by providing the numbers of the sections, townships, and ranges used by the government in surveying the public lands of the United States instead of the names of the towns. His categories of analysis were the ancient works located in the vicinity of the western shore of Lake Michigan, those in the basins of the Pishtaka River, the Rock River, the Neenah or Fox River of Green Bay, the Wisconsin River, the vicinity of Lake Superior, and those found in miscellaneous localities. The basins or drainages of rivers, the numerous lakes of the region, and the associated trails were natural corridors of travel and trade. Those avenues of communication strongly influenced, if they did not actually determine, settlement patterns and the distribution and utilization of natural resources among both prehistoric and historic cultures. The mental geography among those early peoples and cultures translated into portages, watersheds, rivers, lakes, trails, and the time necessary to travel on and between them during different seasons. Those same thoroughfares provided access to other water and land routes that communicated with other Native peoples and provided access to natural resources far distant. Lapham’s approach was the best method of determining whether there was any order or 342

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system in the distribution and character of remains found within the different riverine and lacustrine areas of the state—a leading objective of his investigations. Lapham noted the location of mound groups relative to topography and the position of one mound group to another across the entire state to see if any arrangement suggested itself. So far as Lapham was able to determine, the effigy mounds contained no human remains or artifacts beyond a few dispersed fragments that might well have found their way there by accident rather than by design. Large numbers of the small conical mounds he examined also contained no deposits. What he described as middle-size and large conical mounds, by contrast, almost invariably contained evidence of one or more burials. Remains in those interments were always found in an advance state of decay. He recovered only one cranium in a sufficient state of preservation to be restored by Dr. Philo Romayne Hoy of Racine, Wisconsin. Hoy measured its longitudinal, parietal, and zygomatic diameters; the occipital-frontal arch, length of the face, and facial angle. Lapham’s interpretation of that skull shows him to be a devotee of phrenology, or at least open to its claims. His chart of “Affective Organs,” prepared for him by a “phrenological friend,” is based on the phrenology of the German physician Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832). Spurzheim held positions at the University of Vienna, Paris, the Royal College of Physicians at London, and was a disciple of the “cranioscopy” advocated by the German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828). Spurzheim adopted Gall’s cranial method as a purported means of identifying the personality and the degree of development in the moral and intellectual faculties of individuals based upon the shape of their heads. Spurzheim’s phrenology, though long since discredited, had currency within some quarters of the American scientific community in the mid-nineteenth century as well as in popular culture. Americans were no strangers to fashionable phrenological parlors and the reading of heads through the personality “bumps” on the curvature of the skull. Spurzheim’s views and opinions, notwithstanding their wide appeal, were also controversial.58 Origin, Era, and Region

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Fig. 22. Mound skull from Racine, Wisconsin. The advanced state of decay in which explorers found most of the crania interred in the original mound deposits made their recovery and restoration rare. Dr. Philo Romayne Hoy of Racine, Wisconsin, who assisted Increase A. Lapham in his fieldwork at Racine in 1850, restored the skull shown here and took measurements of its longitudinal, parietal, and zygotic diameters, occipital front arch, length of the head and face, and facial angle. Physical anthropology in the United States traces its origin to the craniology or “cranioscopy” of the mid-nineteenth century, a collateral department of archaeological enquiry too often entangled with the pseudo-scientific principles of phrenology. Plate 53 of Lapham’s “Antiquities of Wisconsin,” published as article 4 in volume 7 of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1855).

Not everyone was enamored of the doctrines advanced by Gall and Spurzheim. Lapham himself, indeed, was uncertain about phrenology’s claims to attention. He prefaced his phrenological reading of the mound cranium with the following cautionary note: “Although the principles of this professed science may not be true in all their details, yet its nomenclature affords the means of presenting the conformation of the skull in a definite manner.” Notwithstanding that caveat he was clearly attracted to phrenology. Lapham’s chart delineates 344

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the relative development of the propensities, sentiments, perceptiveness, reflectiveness, and the respective subcategories assigned to each of the “affective organs.” The nature of those organs, theoretically at least, indicated the traits and attributes of the deceased individual to whom the skull once belonged. According the Lapham, the “affective, or feeling faculties, prevail over the intellectual, in the proportion of 4.3 to 3.9.” It is an interpretation that squarely aligned with prevalent perceptions and stereotypes of Native Americans. So much so, in fact, that Lapham himself blushed somewhat in presenting his findings. “Whether these figures can be relied upon as indicating the character and disposition of the individual to whom the skull belonged, may be doubted; though it will be perceived that their indications correspond with the general character of the aborigines, in the large cautiousness, individuality, &c., and the deficient constructiveness, calculation, &c.” It was certainly not the strongest part of Lapham’s otherwise reasoned analysis of evidence. Yet his views on the subject were far from anomalous, however jarring today. Aside from that aberration, Lapham’s conclusions are otherwise quite compelling. His descriptions and surveys are significant contributions to knowledge in every sense. His survey of the bird-effigy mounds at Maus’ Mill along the Lemonwier River is a case in point.59 Archaeological enquiry also expanded into the Floridian peninsula outside of institutional channels. Daniel Garrison Brinton undertook fieldwork there during the winter of 1856–57, while still a student in college, during a brief residence to recoup his health. He did so without a sponsor, acting entirely upon his own initiative. His investigations were neither as systematic nor as sustained as those undertaken under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution and the American Antiquarian Society, but still significant. The results of those investigations appeared in Notes on the Floridian Peninsula: Its Literary History, Indian Tribes and Antiquities (1859), in a brief but discerning chapter on antiquities and an equally clear-sighted appendix on the so-called mummies of the Mississippi Valley—a subject that once attracted a great amount of Origin, Era, and Region

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largely profitless attention. His views on American antiquities are the earliest expression of opinions on subjects that Brinton continued to develop in his later and better-known writings. Brinton’s biographer, Regna Darnell, notes that Notes on the Florida Peninsula “introduced full-blown many of the substantive and methodological interests characteristic of Brinton’s mature career.”60 There he exemplifies the same critical attitude toward received opinion that characterized his later writings. Comparing his own archaeological observations to the available literature on the subject, he explained, modified, confirmed, or rejected the opinions of previous writers. Brinton used analogies to give his localized study broader appeal to archaeologists and historians that made the work something more than a local interest story or set of detached and isolated facts. He traveled east of the St. Johns River and from there to the Gulf as far south as Manatee. His observations on the mounds, aboriginal roads or highways, shell heaps (both natural and artificial), and Indian “Old Fields” that came under his observation are not insignificant. He gives measurements of the archaeological sites he examined but does not indicate whether or not they are based on surveys. He excavated a mound on Amelia Island east of Fernandina at some point during 1856 and another mound six miles by water above Lake Monroe. While digging in the mound above Lake Monroe he found small blue-andwhite glass beads he believed were “undoubtedly inhumed at the formation of the tumuli,” indicating that the construction of the mound occurred after the commencement of trade with Europeans. Yet Brinton’s description of the mound is so sparse as to make it impossible to Fig. 23. (opposite) “Ancient Works at Maus’ Mill, Lemonwier River.” The animal-effigy mounds of Wisconsin were far more numerous when Increase A. Lapham surveyed them in the 1850s. He surveyed several just before their destruction. The bird-effigy mounds at Maus’ Mill, surveyed by Lapham in 1852, are representative of similar structures found elsewhere in the state. The outlines or designs of the effigies in some instances were not apparent until they were surveyed and their features traced on paper. Plate 50 of Lapham’s “Antiquities of Wisconsin” published as as article 4 in volume 7 of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1855).

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determine whether the beads and human remains were intrusive deposits of a later date than the construction of the mound itself, notwithstanding Brinton’s opinion that they were an original internment.61 Be that as it may, Brinton did not believe the mounds he examined were of a great age, nor did he think one needed to look any further than the Native peoples of the New World to explain their origin. “We need no fanciful hypothesis to explain the reason and designate the time of these constructions. The bare recountal of the burial rites that prevailed among the aborigines is all sufficient to solve the riddle of bone-mounds both as they occur in Florida and in other States.” Neither did he see anything in the objects recovered from the mounds and those found in their vicinity, not even excepting pottery, that materially differed from those in use among Indian tribes when first known to Europeans. Those observable similarities corroborated the opinion that all of earthworks—those in Florida, the other Atlantic states, and the majority of those in the Mississippi Valley—“were the production, not of some mythical tribe of high civilization in remote antiquity, but of the identical nations found by the whites residing in these regions.” Whereas Schoolcraft assigned the pottery of Florida an intermediate position between the relatively unadorned ceramics of the northern tribes and the more artful productions of Yucatan and Mexico, the numerous examples that Brinton examined from various localities on the Florida peninsula “never seemed to indicate a civilization so advanced.”62 Brinton’s brief appendix on “The Mummies of the Mississippi Valley” reinforces his views on the inordinate amount of misplaced speculation luxuriated on the subject of American antiquities. Conjectures concerning the origin and era of the desiccated corpses (“mummies”) periodically found in the copperas (ferrous sulfate) and saltpeter (potassium nitrate) caves of Tennessee and Kentucky being prime examples. Although those suppositions were wrong-headed, from an historical point of view they are instructive as to how myths are created as well as their popular appeal. Several of those curiosities 348

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were not only well traveled—they were exhibited at New York and Baltimore—but also made the rounds in scientific journals and travel literature. They received comment in the Medical Repository, the Analectic Magazine, and the first volume of the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society. They also received notice in Henry Marie Breckenridge’s Views of Louisiana, Timothy Flint’s Recollections of the Last Ten Years, and the American Journal Science and Arts. As a medical student and emerging anthropologist, Brinton took a deep interest in the subject. He believed that neither the origin nor the era of those remains had yet been satisfactorily established. Those who had previously written on the western mummies rejected out of hand the idea that the remains were attributable to any of the known tribes associated with the region in which they were they were found, and presumably their ancestors as well, in preference for the Malays, Tartars, or South Sea Islanders as the most rational explanation of their likely origins—anyone except the peoples Native to the American continent. The mummies found in the caves of Kentucky were wrapped in three layers of coverings: dressed and undressed deerskins, split-cane mats, and a woven material variously called “blankets,” “sheets,” and “cloth” decorated with wild turkey feathers and those of other birds. As in the case of the mounds and their contents, the well-preserved remains found in those caves suggested to some the existence of a higher state of artistic achievement than allegedly possessed by any of the existing tribes of the Mississippi Valley. The supposed anatomical nature of the bodies and their light hair color seemed equally irreconcilable with an Indian origin. Brinton considered those suppositions to be altogether groundless. The celebrated mummies of Tennessee and Kentucky in his estimation were of a comparatively recent origin and no doubt attributable to an unknown group of American aborigines. The lighter color of hair he attributed to the chemical properties of copperas and nitrate soils in the caves beneath which they were found, an opinion earlier expressed by Alexander H. Bradford in Origin, Era, and Region

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American Antiquities (1841). Brinton hastened to add, however, that some of the better-wrapped and probably later interments still retained the black hair of “the true Indian.” Very few were willing to attribute the origin of the mummies to any of the Indian tribes living in the immediate vicinity at the time of the settlement of Tennessee and Kentucky in the eighteenth century. But even if one accepted the correctness of that view it was still unwarranted to seek an exotic or foreign origin for the people who had entombed their dead in caves: “it is quite unnecessary for me to refer in this connection to those numerous and valid arguments, derived both from tradition and archaeology, that prove beyond doubt that this tract, and indeed the whole Ohio valley, had changed masters shortly before the whites explored it, and that its former possessors when not destroyed by the invaders, had been driven south.” That scenario might not be entirely true either. But it was at least based upon tradition, however uncertain, and archaeological evidence, however tenuous and open to interpretation. More importantly, Brinton saw no reason to attribute cave mummies to interlopers from Malaysia or Oceania.63 Seven years later Brinton elaborated his earlier opinion on the identity of the Mound Builders in the Historical Magazine for February 1866. There he affirmed that the civilization or culture of the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley developed in situ. Those societies were original and were not derived from anywhere else. Brinton saw no need to look any further for the origins of American civilization than the places where it was found. “To find the origin of this approach to semi-civilization we have no occasion to call in an external Toltecan or European impulse.” The cultivation of Zea mays and beans on the fertile and extensive bottom land or alluvium of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers supported a sedentary and agricultural existence that was not entirely dependent upon hunting. “Such surroundings nurtured an independent germ of civilization, similar to those that arose on the alluvial plains of the Rio Gila, the Euphrates, and the Nile.” Brinton 350

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was a monogenist. But taking the position that humankind had a common origin was not the same as holding that all human societies and cultures did as well. More than enough time had elapsed between humankind’s distant and uncertain origins and the earliest known periods of human existence for divergence and differentiation to have occurred in their ways of life. Similarities among ancient peoples in different quarters of the globe could be attributed to independent inventions—occurrences entirely attributable to the psychic unity of man—while other and later similarities were attributable to migrations and borrowings. “The anxiety to trace all civilizations to a common source finds no favor in exact history.” Brinton would articulate that conviction many times over through a long and distinguished career as an anthropologist.64 Alexander von Humboldt, Brinton’s ultimate authority in such matters, observed in the Cosmos that “geographical investigations regarding the ancient seat, the so-called cradle of the human race, are not devoid of a mythological character.” He believed the civilizations of antiquity sprang from different sources for similar reasons. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s elder brother, agreed. Wilhelm observed in an unpublished work “On the Varieties of Languages and Nations” that neither in history nor in authentic tradition “was there any period of time in which the human race has not been divided into social groups. Whether the gregarious condition was original, or of subsequent occurrence, we have no historical evidence to show.” Yet the elder Humboldt was certain that correspondences in certain traditions existing independently of each other in different parts of the world were attributable to “an identity in the mode of intellectual conception, which has everywhere led man to adopt the same conclusion regarding identical phenomena; in the same manner as many myths have doubtlessly arisen, not from any historical connection existing between them, but rather from an identity in human thought and imagination. . . . It is in vain that we direct our thought to the solution of the great problem of the first origin, since man is too intimately Origin, Era, and Region

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associated with his own race and with the relations of time to conceive of the existence of an individual independently of the preceding generation and age.” Such questions lay beyond the reach of history and experience and could not be solved by inductive reasoning from philological evidence alone, yet its elucidation “ought not to be sought from other sources.”65 What was true of linguistic evidence was also correct so far as recorded history was concerned. Alexander von Humboldt affirmed that we cannot pinpoint a time or place where there was a common, primeval origin for the human race or for the dawn of civilization.

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History, as far as it is based on human testimony, knows of no primitive race, no one primitive seat of civilization, and no primitive physical natural science whose glory has been dimmed by the destructive barbarism of later ages. The historical enquirer must penetrate through many superimposed misty strata of symbolical myths before he can reach that solid foundation where the earliest germ of human culture has been developed in accordance with natural laws. In the dimness of antiquity, which constitutes, as it were, the extreme horizon of true historical knowledge, we see many luminous points, or centers of civilization, simultaneously blending their rays.66 These are views to which Brinton fully subscribed. There was simply no compelling reason to believe that the semi-civilization he attributed to the Mound Builders had not developed naturally from the situations in which those cultures had existed. Humans in all ages and in all places possessed the same cognitive processes and had the same basic needs. The civilization of the Mound Builders developed in an extremely fertile region that provided everything necessary to sustain it. Those societies were entirely homegrown. The Mound Builders flourished in their localities for an unknown period of time, but most certainly for a millennium or more, before the “Rugged northern races drove in upon and extinguished this feeble glimmer of light.” Whether the intruders came from the northwest or the southwest was an alluring but 352

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uncertain question that might never be adequately answered. But whoever they were, and regardless of the direction of their ingress, they “recoiled with crushing weight” upon the Mound Builders who had developed “an embryo civilization.”67 Whether the ancient Mound Builders were driven from the ancestral seats by invaders as Brinton and any number of other nineteenthcentury authorities maintained is a problematic formulation—maybe and maybe not. Population decline and cultural disruption due to disease, intertribal warfare, and the establishment of new trade networks acting in concert most likely resulted in out-migrations and absorptions of older mound-building populations. Distinct ethnic identities and tribal cultures were altered if not altogether lost. Some of those changes may well be attributed to the passage of time and social dynamics at work within indigenous societies. Native American cultures were not static entities even before the arrival of Europeans. It is an important line of enquiry lacking definitive answers.68 Yet reason, analogy, and history all point in that direction even when hard archaeological evidence is lacking. The advance spread of European diseases into the interior during the early fifteenth century doubtless contributed to population collapse while the reorientation of trade routes to be closer to French, English, and Spanish trade goods caused migrations. In order to consider intertribal warfare a contributing factor to depopulation, one need not subscribe to the old ruse that just as the Mound Builders yielded to an invading horde (presumably the North American Indian tribes of later date), the Indians were in turn destined to relinquish their lands to Euro-American trespassers. “And the mound-builders vanished from the earth” as the poet William Cullen Bryant phrased it in “The Prairies” (1834). Yet in the face of such uncertainty Brinton’s position that the moundbuilding tribes were indigenous peoples still stands. There is, in fact, no need to look for “this approach to semi-civilization” or “this feeble glimmer of light” outside of North America. We would perhaps phrase it differently today but his view is essentially correct. Origin, Era, and Region

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Consistent with that opinion is Brinton’s attribution of the reputedly “Celtic Antiquities” of New England (stone piles) described by John Finch in the American Journal of Science and Arts for 1823–24 to the ancestors of the Algonquian tribes. Curiously and inexplicably, however, Brinton made no mention of the fact that what he described as Finch’s “well prepared article on the subject” identified those remains as Celtic antiquities and American aborigines as the descendants of the Celts.69 It is difficult to know what to make of that singular omission. Brinton perhaps passed over Finch’s Celtic ascription merely as a matter of convenience: it did not suit Brinton’s argument to draw attention to Finch’s Celtic thesis so he simply ignored it, or else he was at least open to the possibility that the Algonquians were descended from Celtic ancestors. It should be noted on this point that Brinton did not accept the idea that American aborigines were migrants from Asia, which might suggest that he was receptive to the idea of a Celtic origin for at least some American aborigines—not so much convinced, perhaps, as intrigued and open to the possibility. But Brinton gives no hint whether he actually subscribed to that belief, which would be inconsistent with the grounds he elaborated throughout his career for explaining perceived cultural similarities existing between widely separated cultures. Thus Brinton’s complimentary comment regarding Finch’s “well prepared” account is intriguing but ultimately apropos of nothing. It does bear mentioning, however, that Finch was the first of a long line of observers in the United States who found a Celtic presence in prehistoric America. Imaginative and alternative interpretations of the archaeological record by the Celtic School continued apace, much to the chagrin of archaeologists who have explained such similarities upon different grounds since the mid-nineteenth century—as, indeed, did Brinton himself. Charles Whittlesey likewise contributed to the expanding archaeological discourse. Whittlesey, who first examined mounds and earthworks during the Ohio Geological Survey of 1837–38 and contributed several

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surveys to Squier and Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, submitted several more of his original surveys to Joseph Henry in April 1850 for publication in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Those site plans were not among those he contributed to Squier and Davis’s work. Whittlesey accurately described them as “a supplement to the descriptive part of the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge.” Henry referred Whittlesey’s manuscript to Brantz Mayer and Squier for evaluation and based upon their positive recommendations accepted it for publication in May 1850. The article appeared in the third volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge in June 1852.70 Whittlesey’s work consists of a scant fifteen pages of text describing eighteen archaeological sites that are represented on seven plates of survey maps. He surveyed most of those sites between 1837 and 1840 but in two instances the surveys are dated 1850. Not all of the plates are dated. And again, as in earlier volumes of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, the lithographers were Sarony and Major of New York. The plans are all based on original surveys by Whittlesey with the exception of the map of the then obliterated ancient works at Cincinnati, which is based on the diagram delineated and published by Daniel Drake in 1815. Whittlesey wanted those descriptions and surveys added to the common stock of knowledge. “My object has been throughout merely to present additional facts for the use of the antiquarian, performing the part of a common laborer, who brings together materials wherewith some master workman may raise a perfect edifice.” He largely abjured speculation, but a few of the observations concerning the geographic range of mounds and other earthworks made in his introductory remarks bear mention. Whittlesey believed the numerous mounds in Wisconsin, which were of lower elevations and of smaller dimensions, “belong[ed] to a different race or a different era” than those in southern Ohio. And those bordering the southern shore of Lake Erie differed from both classes of remains and were probably also of a different age or people.

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“I do not feel inclined to attribute the great works of Central and Southern Ohio to the progenitors of our Aborigines; but in regard to those of Wisconsin and Minnesota there is room for doubts and ample discussion on this point.”71 Doubts and room for debate there most certainly were. Whittlesey’s views epitomize the uncertainties still attending the subject of American antiquities as well as the inadequacy of its problematic assumptions and terminology regarding “races.” Archaeological evidence remained open to irreconcilable interpretations regarding the people to whom the mounds were attributable so long as the problematic assumptions of the “Mound Builder-Indian” dichotomy remained in place. Whittlesey well knew after more than a decade of conducting archaeological investigations the difficulties that often attended the making of accurate surveys and maps. The elevations of earthen embankments were often degraded by the elements, grazing cattle, and the unyielding action of the farmer’s plow. The distances, directions, and areas of works could also be obscured or hidden from view by thick undergrowth and standing fields of grain. The time of year and weather conditions presented their own challenges. Those circumstances did not always allow for minute measurements to be made over all parts of an earthwork. In those instances, said Whittlesey, the measurements determined by survey had to be supplemented by “an eye sketch.” There were also problems of scale with engraved maps that made short and subtle features of works incapable of representation. Yet whatever fault might be found with his fieldwork, it stands in stark contrast to those who excavate mounds merely to gratify an idle curiosity or a pet theory. A seeker of Captain Kidd’s treasure, Whittlesey wryly observed, removed fifteen feet of the apex of a work near Jacktown in Licking County, Ohio, and sank a shaft nearly to the bottom. Whatever he found in that excavation, if anything, went unrecorded and was lost to archaeology. Whittlesey also disapprovingly but fatalistically noted that most farmers disregarded the presence of earthworks on their property and were even at pains to remove 356

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them. An enclosure located a mile east of Granger in Medina County, Ohio, met the common fate of many. The property owner built a barn on the south side of the work and a house on the west. “As usual, the present proprietor appears to have a specific grudge against his predecessors [the Mound Builders], and by dint of much ploughing and scraping has nearly demolished the ancient monuments of their labor.”72 McBride, Whittlesey, Squier, and Lapham made noteworthy beginnings in describing, surveying, and mapping the mounds with reasonable though relative accuracy as part of an expanding field of archaeological enquiry. Yet few who bothered to take an interest in the subject of American antiquities were satisfied that the archaeological reconnaissance of the Mississippi Valley was moving quickly enough. Despite the interest and support given to archaeological investigations by the Smithsonian Institution and the American Antiquarian Society, many mounds continued to be encroached upon, degraded, and destroyed at an alarming rate. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, librarian of the American Academy of Arts and Science at Boston, deplored the fact that the inhabitants of the western states generally paid so little attention to the monuments of a former age and a largely forgotten people. Bowditch made that observation in February 1850 after rediscovering the map of the ancient works at the Muskingum that had been communicated to the academy by Winthrop Sargent on March 27, 1787, and reflected on the fate of American antiquities over the ensuing years. The denizens of Marietta were somewhat of an exception to the general indifference accorded the mounds but even there the noble intentions and efforts of the founders of the community to preserve them had been compromised. The great mound (“Conus”) survived at Marietta as a public cemetery, as did two of the truncated-pyramidal mounds that still stood in areas designated as public squares. But by the late 1840s the walls of the graded way or “Sacra Via” were, according to Squier and Davis, “rapidly disappearing” due to the traffic and encroachments of Warren Street that followed its length and breadth. Origin, Era, and Region

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One cultural landscape was consuming another at Marietta and at many other localities throughout the Mississippi Valley. Bowditch, who had recently visited the walled village known as Fort Ancient on the Little Miami River, struck a similar note of regret upon finding that certain features at the site were in jeopardy of being destroyed. The long passage way leading to the main entrance of Fort Ancient, which until relatively recently had been flanked by embankments, had become so obliterated from plowing that he could discern only the slightest traces of them. Bowditch bemoaned such losses in words that recalled Squier and Davis’s unheeded plea for government patronage in promoting the surveying and mapping of the mounds while it was yet possible to do so.

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The United States government sends out its corps of observers to study the Dead Sea, and the Antarctic regions, and to learn the habits of the untamed inhabitants of the islands of the Pacific Ocean. It is right so to do. But why should it not also employ an efficient body of men thoroughly to investigate all these interesting structures in the West? Much has been done by individual observers; among whom all honor is due to the authors of the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. But much remains yet to be performed. It should be done by [the] government, done soon, or it will be too late.73 Bowditch was not the only nineteenth-century observer to lament societal indifference to the fate of American antiquities. The problem was formidable and probably irremediable. The first Americans knew the best sites to select as settlements as did their Euro-American successors, who often chose the very same sites for exactly the same reasons. Those wanting to promote the rapid economic development of the West on the one hand and to preserve the memorials of the region’s first inhabitants on the other were decidedly at cross-purposes. Those conflicting values often centered themselves within the lives of those who

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sought to survey and map the mounds before it was too late to do so. Caleb Atwater, Samuel P. Hildreth, and Charles Whittlesey, and Lapham knew those tensions firsthand, as did several others of his ilk. They were in the best position to understand that paradox and clearly did so. One set of interests spurred the other. Who, indeed, was in a better position to recognize the urgent need to describe, survey, and map the mounds than those who vigorously engaged in promoting the economic development of their respective communities and states? A further tension existed between archaeological excavation (a destructive process) and the oft-stated desire to preserve the mounds for posterity just as they were found. It was better to survey and map them under that view than to open them and remove their contents—at least under certain circumstances. Yet it was not difficult to accommodate or rationalize both goals. Archaeological sites threatened with imminent destruction should be surveyed, mapped, and excavated. Not all mound explorations during the nineteenth century can be attributed to misplaced curiosity and overt grave robbing although many certainly can be. Haphazard pothunting contributed nothing beyond archaeological looting. It must be said on that score, however, that far more mounds perished in the nineteenth century due to the farmer’s plow, the growth of towns and cities, the construction of canals, and looting by anonymous pothunters than at the hands of vocational archaeologists. The construction of highways, dams, suburban housing developments, and shopping malls in the twentieth century took yet a further toll. Archaeology remains at risk under many different scenarios. Making that point excuses none of the insensitivity and excesses that occurred through the large-scale excavation of mounds during the era of archaeological museum-building in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. But it does give the issue historical context and balance that is too often lacking. Insensitivity existed alongside sincerity then as now. Whittlesey, Squier, and Lapham believed they were

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doing good service in surveying and mapping mounds. And in the case of Squier that also included excavations, most of which he conducted jointly with Davis in the Scioto Valley in southern Ohio, and a much smaller but not insignificant number during Squier’s fieldwork in western New York. Those early investigations were the basis of later developments as archaeologists continued their enquiries into the origin, era, and regional characteristics of American antiquities.

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7

Archaeology as Anthropology The Coming of the Curators and Professors

The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a self-conscious and specialized anthropological profession—not fully developed but definitely striving toward self-definition and structure. Developments within the discipline of archaeology were an integral part of that process although archaeology remained a somewhat independent and contrary subfield. Avocational archaeologists began to play increasingly diminished roles as professionals both defined and controlled the new anthropological establishment. Tension between avocational and professional anthropologists was sometimes palpable and contentious. Egos and personalities clashed as well as ideas, organizations, and loyalties. The process by which the anthropological community consolidated itself was anything but seamless. Competition between the first American Anthropological Association (hereafter aaa) founded in 1876—not to be confused with the present organization of that name established in 1902—and the subsection on anthropology within the American Association for the Advancement of Science (hereafter the aaas) is a noteworthy example. Notwithstanding kindred interests and an overlapping membership, the subsection on anthropology and the aaa were decidedly at cross-purposes and opportunities for cooperation were virtually nil. The aaa would be a casualty of that rivalry. The first aaa was in effect an extension of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio, which was part of the problem from the standpoint

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of the subsection on anthropology within the aaas . The cool reception given the aaa by the leadership of the aaas was half of the problem; the provincialism of the leadership of the aaa the other half. Yet that mutual estrangement significantly arose from the processes of professionalization, specialization, and consolidation within the emerging discipline of anthropology, which in personal terms translated as who was in and who was out. And a second tier of issues regarding the doctrine of evolution and its implications for the vexed question of human origins, antiquity, and social theory was a further source of alienation and controversy. Here was yet another arena of the age-old battleground between religion and science—between Christian scholars and secularists. The conflict between religion and science informed the founding of the aaa , the American Antiquarian, and animated the entire anthropological community in the late nineteenth. It was yet another nuance in the rift between amateurs and professionals who were diverging at wide angles. The coming of the curators and professors was a product of farreaching changes that had been transforming the organization of knowledge and institutional structures in the United States since the 1840s.1 The processes of professionalization and specialization accelerated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as seen in the emergence of the first generation of professional anthropologists. The establishment of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology (renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1894 until its merger with the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology at the United States National Museum in 1964; hereafter “the Bureau”) in 1879 and the Anthropological Society of Washington that same year reflected the advent of a new infrastructure. Those developments were by no means unique to the anthropological community. The first generation of professional historians established the American Historical Association in 1884 as a result of the same processes of professionalization and specialization. The settings in which archaeologists and historians worked and the venues in which their presented their research put much distance 362

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between themselves as status-conscious professionals and avocational scholars who were outside of their respective guilds. The worlds in which historians and archaeologists researched and presented their findings in the early and mid-nineteenth century, when virtually everyone was an amateur historian or archaeologist, had been greatly altered. The designations “amateur” and “antiquarian” increasingly became pejoratives as professional archaeologists and historians made distinctions between themselves and others. Yet avocational archaeologists did not go quietly into the night. Between 1878 and the early 1890s they founded their own organizations, held their own annual meetings, and launched their own publications. The amateur tradition of American archaeology, indeed, is still alive and well, although relations between avocational and professional archaeologists are somewhat mercurial: sometimes cordial and sometimes frosty. Continuing interest in promoting the study and preservation of the Ohio mounds led a group of concerned citizens to found the State Archaeological Association of Ohio at Mansfield on September 1, 1875. Members of the association included Stephen Denison Peet, Roeliff Brinkerhoff, Matthew Canfield Read, Issac Smucker, and Charles Whittlesey. The chief contribution of this group was the “Antiquities of Ohio” exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the establishment of the first aaa at Philadelphia that same year, and an investigation into the authenticity and supposed meaning of the Grave Creek stone forty years after its alleged discovery in a West Virginia mound. As corresponding secretary of both the Ohio State Archaeological Association and the aaa , Peet was the animating spirit of both organizations. He also launched the American Antiquarian at Cleveland in April 1878, which served as the primary medium of publication and correspondence for American archaeology and ethnology prior to the appearance of the American Anthropologist in 1888. Peet remained editor of the American Antiquarian until 1911.2 Stephen Denison Peet was born in Euclid, Ohio, on December 2, 1831, although he spent much of his childhood in Wisconsin. After Archaeology as Anthropology

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graduating from Beloit College in 1851, Peet prepared himself for the ministry. He attended Yale Divinity Schools from 1851 to 1853 and graduated from the Andover Theological Seminary in 1854. Peet ministered to pastorates in various Congregational and Presbyterian churches in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois throughout a forty-year career as clergyman. His lifelong interest in American antiquities began during his early years in Wisconsin. There he accompanied his father on missionary tours to American Indian communities and encountered the state’s numerous animal-effigy mounds. Peet’s early interest in the Mound Builders never waned. It was during his theological studies, however, that his future interests in archaeology began to take shape. His reading of ancient history and the Bible kindled a passionate interest in Egyptian, Babylonian, Grecian, and Roman antiquities. It was a short step from the study of biblical and classical archaeology to the archaeological remains of the American Midwest. After becoming pastor of the Congregationalist church in Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1873, he became a serious student of local archaeology.3 The idea of a state archaeological association originated with Brinkerhoff and Peet. Brinkerhoff served in the quartermaster corps of the Union Army during the Civil War and attained the rank of brigadier general before mustering out of service in October 1866. He was a prominent figure in the Republican Party and well connected within the state’s political machinery. He and Peet first met, quite coincidentally, during a state convention of Congregationalists held in Mansfield in the summer of 1875. There they discussed their mutual interest in archaeology and the unresolved questions concerning the origin and Fig. 24. (opposite) “Ancient Mounds.” Matthew Canfield Read and Charles Whittlesey’s report on the “Antiquities of Ohio” exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia appeared in the Final Report of the Ohio State Board of Centennial Managers (1877). The mounds shown here from top to bottom are the Miamisburg Mound two miles east of Miamisburg in Montgomery County, Ohio; Tippets Mound in Licking County, Ohio; and a Stone Mound one-and-a half miles southeast of Jacktown in Licking County, Ohio. Plate 11 of Read and Whittlesey’s “Antiquities of Ohio” report in Final Report of the Ohio State Board of Centennial Managers (1877).

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identity of the Mound Builders. Brinkerhoff ’s interest in archaeology stemmed from his study of local history, which he chronicled as the editor and proprietor of the Mansfield Herald from 1855 to 1859. He continued his historical avocation as the founder and secretary of the Richland County Historical Society in 1869, contributing additional historical sketches to the Ohio Liberal in 1873.4 Brinkerhoff recognized the need to systematically survey and map Ohio’s earthworks—a task that had been neglected for many years—and the advantages to be derived from combining private archaeological collections into a state museum at Columbus. Those undertakings were too big and too important to be left to individual enterprise and chance as in the past. They required state aid if they were to be undertaken in a systematic and sustained manner. Each year more archaeological sites were damaged or destroyed by the farmer’s plow, urban growth, and the mindless digging of relic hunters. Valuable information about the internal structure and contents of the mounds that could be preserved through systematic investigations was lost to “pothunters” seeking antiquarian treasure. Archaeological collections were also leaving Ohio by purchase, exchange, and through the explorations of individuals and institutions from outside the state. Both Brinkerhoff and Peet agreed in the face of those issues and problems that there was a need for a state archaeological association. Brinkerhoff ’s connections with the press and the Ohio legislature made him an effective force in the movement to create such an association. Brinkerhoff, the man of means and influence,

Fig. 25. (opposite) “Kettles.” The three specimens of shell-tempered pottery depicted here—“kettle-form pots”—were among the artifacts loaned by private collectors to the Ohio State Archaeological Association for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia. A) is from a mound that once existed on the site of Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus at the confluence of the Olentangy and Scioto Rivers; B) from a mound in Lawrenceburg, Indiana; and C) from a mound near the Mississippi River not far from Memphis, Tennessee. Plate 14 of Read and Whittlesey’s “Antiquities of Ohio” report in Final Report of the Ohio State Board of Centennial Managers (1877).

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and Peet, the Christian scholar and romantic antiquarian, were seemingly unlikely but effective partners. The two men agreed upon a plan of action and immediately sought to recruit all students of archaeology to the cause. They first enlisted the assistance of James E. Wharton of Mansfield and Portsmouth— a newspaper man and former resident of Wheeling, West Virginia. Wharton, a fanciful theorist, had nurtured an interest the subject of American antiquities since the 1840s. He had decided opinions regarding the identity of the Mound Builders that by the 1870s were already contretemps among most archaeologists. He insisted that the Grave Creek stone—allegedly discovered during the excavation of the Grave Creek in Moundsville, West Virginia, between March and June of 1838—was both a genuine archaeological find and that its supposedly Phoenician inscription proved that a Phoenician colony had once existed in ante-Columbian America. Yet Wharton was a newspaper man through and through and a great asset in getting the word out regarding the movement to found a state archaeological association. Over the following weeks and months Brinkerhoff and Peet recruited Norton Strange Townsend of Columbus, Isaac Smucker of Newark, and Manning Ferguson Force and Joseph Cox of Cincinnati. Brinkerhoff and Wharton issued newspaper notices and circulars calling for a state archaeological convention to be held at Mansfield on September 1, 1875. Peet reported that he was receiving encouragement on all sides. “The only cold water is that from Lake Erie at the hands of Col. Whittlesey.”5

Fig. 26. (opposite) Human effigies. The three human effigies represented here are all surface finds collected from widely separated regions and loaned by private collectors for exhibition at the 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. A) is a sandstone effigy from Westmorland County, Pennsylvania; B) is a limestone image plowed up in a cotton field near the base of the Etowa mound, five miles below Cartersville, Georgia; and C) is a pipe of unknown provenience. Plate 15 of Read and Whittlesey’s “Antiquities of Ohio” report in Final Report of the Ohio State Board of Centennial Managers (1877).

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Charles Whittlesey of Cleveland, Ohio, initially gave Peet a standoffish response based upon his previous experience as the topographical engineer on the Geological Survey of Ohio in 1837–38. Whittlesey made several surveys of mounds and other earthworks during the two years of the geological survey before it abruptly ended for want of state funds. He estimated that about one-third of the archaeological sites in the state had been surveyed when the geological survey terminated. Whittlesey, who had done as much and far more than most to promote the surveying and mapping of the mounds, did not think that the proposed association would meet with success unless it received assistance from the Ohio legislature. Given the disappointing manner in which the geological survey ended he had little faith that much was to be expected from that quarter. The interests and energies of most politicians lay elsewhere. Regrettably, he did not imagine that the surveying and mapping mounds or the creation of a state archaeological museum was among them. Despite those reservations, however, the somewhat jaded Whittlesey joined the cause. He became a vice president of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio and was one its most active supporters.6 He was also clairvoyant. The association lobbied the State of Ohio for financial assistance but never obtained it. It had become completely moribund by 1883, if not sooner. A group of historically conscious individuals revived and reorganized the society as the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society in 1885 (the Ohio Historical Society since 1954). The short-lived State Archaeological Association of Ohio, quite apart from its “Antiquities of Ohio” exhibit, did meet with a measure of fleeting success in convening an International Convention of Archaeologist at Philadelphia and the establishment of the first aaa . Among the more significant acts of the Ohio State Archaeological Convention at Mansfield had been the adoption of Peet’s resolution calling for an international archaeological convention during the centennial observance at Philadelphia. The express purpose of the proposed convention would be the formation of “an Archaeological Congress of America.”7 370

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A committee consisting of Peet, Matthew Canfield Read of Hudson, William B. Sloan of Port Clinton, Norton Strange Townsend of Columbus, and Archibald Alexander Edward Taylor, president of Wooster College, issued a circular announcing the Ohio’s association’s sponsorship of an International Convention of Archaeologists at Philadelphia. Arrangements were made for members of the recently organized subsection of anthropology within the aaas to attend the Archaeological Convention at Philadelphia.8 The “Ohio Committee” saw the centennial observance as an appropriate time to reflect upon the achievements of America’s first inhabitants and the need to preserve the fragile traces of their existence. Not only should a greater effort be made to preserve the mounds and earthworks from destruction but steps ought to be immediately taken to bring artifacts under comparative study through the establishment of a state archaeological societies and museums throughout the country. There was further need for a journal that would promote the study of American archaeology and ethnology through exchanges of information and by disseminating the results of original investigations.9 The Ohio Committee’s call for an archaeological convention at Philadelphia bore the endorsements of Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of archaeology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum; Spencer Fullerton Baird and Charles Rau of the Smithsonian Institution; Charles Conrad Abbott of Trenton, New Jersey; Daniel Garrison Brinton of the University of Pennsylvania; Samuel Stedman Haldeman of Chickies, Philadelphia; Charles Colcock Jones Jr. of New York; and Charles Whittlesey—a list of names as impressive as they were effective in promoting the idea of an archaeological convention.10 Brinkerhoff called the convention to order in the Ohio Building at Philadelphia on September 4, 1876, and chaired its proceedings. The delegates received communications of support from the International Congress of Americanists, the Geographical Society of Portugal, and well-wishers throughout the United States and Canada. Alessandro Castellani of Rome—a scholar of Greek and Etruscan art—and Archaeology as Anthropology

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Dr. Heinrich Frauberger—an art historian at the Museum of Industrial Art at Brunn, Austria—made the opening remarks. Papers read by American anthropologists were “The Myths and Myth Makers of the Far West” by John Wesley Powell; a joint paper on “Paleolithic Remains in New Jersey” by Charles Conrad Abbott and Frederic Ward Putnam; “Ancient Earthworks of the Mississippi Valley” by Dr. Montroville Wilson Dickeson; “Antiquities of the Florida Tribes” by Charles Colcock Jones Jr.; and Peet’s contributions on “The Archeology of America and Europe Compared” and “Sources Concerning the Pre-Historic Races of America.”11 At the end of the convention the delegates founded “a permanent” organization named the American Anthropological Association. The object of the new association was to bring together all who were interested in promoting the study of American archaeology and ethnology. The members elected Jones president of the new association, Whittlesey and Brinkerhoff vice presidents, Peet corresponding secretary, and Read the assistant secretary.12 The existence of the first and short-lived aaa (one is tempted to say stillborn) is little known.13 The reason for its demise was competition with the recently organized Permanent Subsection of Anthropology within the aaas . Lewis Henry Morgan and Frederic Ward Putnam organized the subsection at the Detroit meeting of the aaas in 1875, which first convened at the Buffalo, New York, meeting on August 23, 1876. The committee charged with organizing the subsection, chaired by Morgan, sought to make the annual meetings of the aaas the forum for the presentation of papers on archaeology, ethnology, and philology.14 That goal left little room for a rival national organization, especially one sponsored and led by a state archaeological association. Even Peet was uncertain how the aaa could be launched in the face of competition with the aaas ’s subsection of anthropology. Both he and Brinkerhoff were determined to keep the aaa independent of the subsection yet needed members of the aaas to attend and give papers at the meetings of the aaa if the latter was ever to be a viable national organization. Here was a conundrum. Predictably, Brinkerhoff ’s 372

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motion at the Philadelphia convention that the first annual meeting of the aaa be held at Newark, Ohio, in conjunction with the meeting of the State Archaeological Association occasioned what the Philadelphia Enquirer described as “an animated discussion.”15 Putnam wanted the meeting of the aaa to be held at Nashville in association with the meeting of the aaas . Such an arrangement would better ensure the publication of papers and addresses, which would be “a dangerous burden on a new and isolated society.” Whittlesey, a member of the aaas since its first meeting in 1848 and himself a vice president of the aaa , concurred in Putnam’s opinion, as did John Wesley Powell.16 Most members of the Ohio association recoiled from Putnam’s suggestion. They looked upon the aaa as their own creation and sought to protect it from perceived encroachments of the eastern anthropological establishment. It was a self-defeating and ultimately fatal attitude. Brinkerhoff, William B. Sloan of Port Clinton, Ohio, and Samuel Stedman Haldeman of Chickies, Pennsylvania (professor of comparative philology at the University of Pennsylvania) emphatically argued that “oil and water could not be mixed.” If Putnam’s proposal that the annual meetings of the aaa and the aaas be combined were to be adopted by the leadership of the aaa , said Brinkeroff, “it would kill the association and leave its bones to bleach with those of similar societies all over the land.” The annual meetings of the aaas could only offer “a slice of archaeology” whereas “the whole of it was wanted.” The new association “should stand upon its own merits or else die at once on the spot.”17 The Smithsonian Institution and the aaas , Brinkerhoff continued, made important contributions to the field of American archaeology. But those organizations were very broad in their interests and pursuits. The subject of American archaeology was too important to be “merely the addenda of something else.”18 It is clear from that statement that Brinkerhoff envisioned the aaa to be primarily, if not exclusively, a national archaeological association, notwithstanding its public invitation to students of ethnology and Archaeology as Anthropology

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philology to become members. He believed that much was to be accomplished by bringing all those interested in archaeology under the leadership of a national organization. The designation “Anthropological” in the name of the association certainly did not preclude such cooperation and coordinating efforts among the various archaeological interests in the country. But it was a far narrower reading of the mission of the aaa than that broadcast by Peet and those who joined him and Brinkerhoff in the founding the aaa at Philadelphia. The focus on archaeology limited the potential appeal and usefulness of the aaa from the very start since not all anthropologists were archaeologists. Provincialism limited its appeal even further. Pride of locality, affirmed Brinkerhoff, would not countenance the removal of archaeological collections permanently to distant museums for study. It was better to work in harmony with local interests than to compete with them. Brinkerhoff, with pardonable pride of his own, pointed to the work of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio as an example of what could be accomplished through cooperative efforts. The association’s archaeological exhibit at Philadelphia consisted entirely of private cabinets brought together from throughout the state. State archaeological associations, on the model of those in Indiana and Ohio, should be established and recruited into the movement. The scope of the proposed undertaking was so great, moreover, that both the learned and the uninitiated should be invited into the field. No one should be excluded who had the interest and the wherewithal to make a contribution.19 Brinkerhoff ’s sentiment is a clear expression of the tension between professional and amateur archaeologists that has been a significant theme in the practice of American archaeology ever since. And it was particularly acute at the time Brinkerhoff expressed those sentiments, when anthropology was making its first conscious efforts at professionalization and consolidation. His invitation to join in the proposed enterprise received a cool reception among those who now thought and spoke of themselves as practitioners of anthropological 374

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science. Local archaeological societies were fine within their own spheres. But they were suspect, if not altogether anathema, to those who were intent upon creating a national anthropological establishment of, by, and for professional anthropologists. The international convention at Philadelphia adjourned without determining the time or place of the aaa’s first annual meeting, leaving the contentious matter to the discretion of the trustees. Peet doubted whether the aaa could survive so long as it remained in the shadow of the aaas ’s Permanent Subsection of Anthropology. When the Ohio Historical and Philosophical Society and the Cincinnati Natural History Society invited Peet to hold the annual meetings of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio and the aaa concurrently at Cincinnati in 1877, he was eager to accept the offer. Peet was convinced that certain members of the subsection were “disposed to kill our Assn if they can. . . . If they get us to Nashville [at the forthcoming meeting of the aaas] they’ll gobble us. All I want is one separate meeting. If we can get a separate number of men who are not members there[,] they won’t dare to oppose us or attempt to absorb.” Peet believed that William Healey Dall of the U. S. Coastal Survey and arctic exploring fame, another member of the Washington scientific establishment, was hostile to the aaa’s existence and thought Putnam to be of the same mind. That was doubtless true since Putnam was the permanent secretary of the aaas from 1872 to 1897. Brinkerhoff was uncertain about the position of Powell but the latter was a federal government man and no doubt shared the opinions of Dall and Putnam that there should be one national organization. As might be expected, Brinkerhoff raised no objection to the idea of having the aaa meet separately from the aaas .20 Peet’s separate meeting occurred at Cincinnati on September 4 and 5, 1877. The State Archaeological Association and the aaa shared the same letterhead for the event, meeting in the rooms of the Cincinnati Natural History Society at Cincinnati College. The meeting featured the reading of several papers, the mandatory exhibition of local Archaeology as Anthropology

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archaeological collections, and an archaeological excursion to nearby Fort Ancient.21 During that visit, Peet made “a remarkable discovery.” He saw the walls and two mounds at the entrance of the Fort Ancient as bearing a striking resemblance to two coiled serpents, which were apparently engaged in mortal combat: the mounds at the entrance of the enclosure formed the heads of the serpents and the exterior embankments their rolling bodies. Peet’s inspired interpretation of Fort Ancient generated some interest at the time but also opened him to criticism for his pronounced theorizing tendencies. The ever-acerbic Gerard Fowke, for instance, wryly commented on Peet’s imaginative explanations of site features at Fort Ancient—configurations that Fowke insisted were nonexistent.22 The joint meeting of the State Archaeological Society of Ohio and the aaa by all accounts was considered a success by those in attendance. Yet it had lethal consequences. Peet overstated the case in issuing the call for that meeting when he reported the fledgling aaa to be in “vigorous condition.” It was clearly otherwise given its competition with the anthropologists within the aaas . He initially held out hope that those attending the meeting of the aaas at Nashville would also attend the Cincinnati meeting of the aaa after the conclusion of the sessions at Nashville. As he told Brinkerhoff, “Our Anthropological Association did not meet with the kindest treatment after its separate session, but I think we know who are its friends and who its foes.” According to Peet the aaa held its second and last known meeting on August 29, 1879, in conjunction with the twenty-eighth meeting of the aaas at Saratoga Springs, New York. Peet, who did not attend the meeting, told Brinkerhoff that it would likely be absorbed into the aaas .23 It is by no means clear what happened next, or if the aaa even met at Saratoga Springs as Peet informed Brinkerhoff. It is difficult to say whether the organization was incorporated into the aaas as Peet predicted or was simply superseded by the Permanent Subsection of Anthropology without comment. The Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Saratoga 376

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Springs meeting are strangely silent about the aaa , which receives not a single mention. If the aaa was absorbed in the aaas it was done quietly and informally. It is just as likely that the hapless association expired after the Cincinnati meeting. Peet and Brinkerhoff had run headlong into the imperatives of an entrenched anthropological establishment led by Morgan, Putnam, and Otis Tufton Mason—a professor in the preparatory department at Columbian College in Washington dc (now George Washington University) and the anthropological editor of the American Naturalist. All three were men of influence who networked within the aaas ’s Permanent Subsection of Anthropology. They saw no need for two national organizations, especially one so closely affiliated and led by a state archaeological association and so jealous of its turf. Putnam reportedly shared the opinion expressed by Mason that the annual meetings of the aaas were the most appropriate venue for anthropologists to gather and share research. Those sessions should be held, Mason noted, “not to the disparagement of local and State societies, but as a supplemental means of better acquaintance among workers in all parts of the country.”24 Avocational archaeologists were being shouldered to the sidelines in the brave new world of professional anthropology and they knew it. Tension between amateur and professional anthropologists (those who primarily identified themselves as scientists) was at times palpable. The lines of conflict between the new professional class represented by Putnam and Mason and the avocational anthropologists personified by Peet and Brinkerhoff were clearly drawn. Mason presumably spoke for the majority of anthropologists within the aaas . It was a matter of some pride with Mason that he and his cohorts had successfully established the Permanent Subsection of Anthropology within the aaas “because we have not moved always in flowery fields.” As he tellingly noted in November 1882, “Opposition from without [the aaas], no doubt has been experienced, but our chief difficulty is from within. Of these, let us kindly and frankly speak.  .  .  . In plain words, gatherers of relics, skeletons, crania, Archaeology as Anthropology

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ethnological material of every kind, and the data of other branches of anthropology are most necessary in their sphere, every student of this department of knowledge must begin with this and never wholly abandon it, yet they are not necessarily scientists, their work can hardly be called science. Therefore, we shall be of all people the most unwise, if we allow ourselves to rest content with the rudiments of knowledge, and subject ourselves to the ridicule of truly scientific people.”25 It is clear that the anthropologists had carried the day and the emerging field of professional anthropology would thereafter operate on a different footing. In speaking of the professionalization of anthropology in the late nineteenth century, Regna Darnell has observed that “evolutionary theory, armchair anthropology, and independent scholarship were all perceived as threats” within the emerging establishment of professional anthropologists.26 Brinkerhoff and Peet’s aaa was clearly perceived as one such threat. Neither of them were evolutionists but they were perceived as being antiquarians, armchair anthropologists, and independent scholars as indeed they were. Brinkerhoff and Peet were very different men. But both were independent voices with their own ideas, proclivities, and, most menacing of all, a rival anthropological organization. The benefit of hindsight allows us to say the first aaa was national in name only, but that was not yet obvious at the time. The aspirations of the aaa succumbed as much to the localized interests of its leadership and members as it did to the hostility of the Permanent Subsection of Anthropology within the aaas —real or imagined. Members of the old regime were welcome in the new one only to the degree to which they accepted the leadership of the eastern anthropological establishment. Peet, to his credit and the credit of the subsection on anthropology, remained one of the more active members within the aaas for several years after the demise of the aaa . He continued to read papers before the subsection at annual meetings and was a member of the Sectional Committee—a telling committee assignment in its own way. How welcome Peet was among the leaders of the subsection 378

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it is not presumed to say. It should be further noted that he also did minimal fieldwork in Ohio for Cyrus Thomas at the Bureau and kept the pages of the American Antiquarian open to contributors like Thomas who did not share his views on the mounds and perhaps on other subjects too. The journal was very much Peet’s personal pulpit. It had a respectable circulation and Peet remained in the editor’s chair until retiring in 1911. The transactions of the ephemeral aaa did, however, have at least one significant outcome. As the corresponding secretary of the association, Peet established “The Archaeoological Exchange Club.” The aim of the club was to exchange papers and publish a journal of correspondence and specialized studies in archaeology and ethnology. The direct result of that initiative was the appearance of the American Antiquarian in April 1878 edited by Peet. A quarterly journal of early American history, archaeology, and ethnology, the American Antiquarian was an immediate success. Each number of the first volume was larger than the preceding one and by the appearance of the last number for April 1879 the materials from contributors were arriving so rapidly that Peet and his associate editors could scarcely keep abreast of the submissions. Peet sought a general readership and kept the journal comprehensive in its scope. He introduced an Oriental Department to the periodical in the conviction that “Egyptology, Assyriology, and Biblical Archaeology are as appropriate for our pages as are American antiquities”—fields of study that reflected his own long-standing interest in comparative archaeology and ethnology. The Oriental Department grew considerably and with the third number of volume 3 for April 1881 the name of the journal changed to the American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal—a merger of the American Antiquarian and Peet’s other pet publishing project the Oriental and Biblical Journal. After that union the American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal for the most part continued to focus on American archaeology and ethnology. The decision to add biblical archaeology to the contents of the journal not only reflects Peet’s own interests in the subject but was Archaeology as Anthropology

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probably also a calculated attempt to increase subscriptions by adding a greater variety and range of subjects. Peet’s American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal remained the primary medium of correspondence and publication until the end of the nineteenth century among avocational archaeologists like himself.27 It is a comprehensive index of the attitudes and activities of its eclectic members and controversies surrounding archaeological frauds. Matthew Canfield Read, the assistant secretary of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio, later accused Peet of using some or all of the membership dues paid to association as a means of launching the American Antiquarian in 1878. Read took Peet severely to task for the alleged action, charging him with using his position in the association to advance his own reputation. It is impossible at this distance to either confirm or deny Read’s claim. But even if true the assertion seems somewhat misplaced in view of the larger significance of Peet’s periodical within the history of American anthropology.28 The founding of the aaa and the American Antiquarian was yet a further reflection of Peet’s estrangement from the anthropologists within the aaas . His differences with that group ran far deeper than squabbles over venues for annual meetings, influence, and prestige, as detrimental as those tiffs were to the existence of the aaa . A conflict between religion and evolutionary science likewise played a part. One of the reasons that Peet established the American Antiquarian was to address “conflicts of thought.” That was by no means his most important motive for launching the periodical but a significant one nonetheless. The good reverend saw a need to create an anthropological journal that would cooperate with the secular scientific establishment but could also speak independently of it when deemed necessary or desirable. “Anthropology,” affirmed Peet, “is the battleground for all the conflicts of thought now going on between Revelation and Nationalism, faith and skepticism—creation and evolution, etc.” It would be necessary for his proposed journal to “open its pages [to] the controversy.” Significantly, he asked, “Has the time come to appeal to 380

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clergymen[,] theologians, and evangelical Christians etc. to join the standard against the powerful Journals which are now advocating so strongly the skeptical views of the adored thinkers of the scientific world?” Peet saw the aaa and his projected journal as a means of giving a voice to archaeologists and ethnologists with religious sentiments to counterbalance the “strong evolution[ary] sentiments” he attributed to members of the aaas . “We may have to struggle to secure a foothold and this Journal may need to [take] a position as strictly Archaeological—before the real contest is begun.”29 As Peet later observed in the American Antiquarian, religion and science were subjects of great interest to everyone involved with the all-encompassing science of anthropology. He framed the issue unambiguously: “The conflict of thought now concentrates about the science of man. We do not avoid the discussion of these topics, but rather hope to share in the advanced thought upon them.”30 It was good for the longevity of the American Antiquarian that Peet did not use the journal as means of inciting an open confrontation between the Christian faith and science. He opened the pages of the journal to the debate but kept discourse on the subject of religion and science decidedly moderate in tone. He envisioned the American Antiquarian not as a means of exacerbating the controversy by playing to the extremes but rather as a vehicle for mediating the debate in the hopes amelioration. That assumed, of course, that common ground existed between the Christian and secular camps within the anthropological community and that the contributors to the Peet’s journal would be willing to seek it. Very few did. Yet there is no question that Peet was determined that the voice of Christian scholars like himself would be heard through its pages. Owing to the success of the American Antiquarian he wisely chose not to alienate those who did not necessarily move and think within his own orbit. Cyrus Thomas of the Bureau was notably among them. Whatever Thomas’s views on the contest between religion and science, he and Peet were at odds on the subject of archaeology more times than not. Peet both cooperated Archaeology as Anthropology

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with the fieldwork of the Bureau and severely criticized the manner in which they conducted mound explorations. The conflict between religion and science was an important subtext in a good portion of anthropological discourse in the late nineteenth century. Discussion of the issue in the American Antiquarian is a case in point. As the editor of the journal, however, Peet found himself stuck on the horns of a true dilemma. He sought to promote the aims of anthropological science within the framework of his own religious convictions and those of like-minded readers. He managed to harmonize his anthropological and theological pursuits, at least to his own satisfaction, over a long career as the editor of the American Antiquarian and author of several books on various subjects in American archaeology. Yet Peet clearly turned his face against those in the scientific community who, as he believed, sought to banish God from anthropology altogether. Writing to Brinkerhoff in July 1877, a peeved Peet could not have been clearer on the subject: “It is singular that the men of the Am. Assn. have so much control and that so much of the unbelieving sentiment prevails and that that the class has the power. I can see the way before us very clearly as indicating a rally of the Christian scholars of the country. . . . Very quietly but surely we can work together an association which shall be a power in the country.”31 Yet the independent anthropological association that he and Brinkerhoff founded ran a very short course. The demise of the aaa owed far more to the insularity of its leadership and the consolidation of professional anthropological community at large than it did with matters of faith, yet the latter issue never lurked too far beneath the surface. Peet never resolved his private struggle as a “Christian scholar” against the “unbelieving sentiments” he ascribed to those who controlled the aaas . Yet he cooperated more times than not with the scientific community from which he felt estranged. As he confided to an unidentified correspondent in June 1879, probably the Reverend John Thomas Short of Columbus, the evolutionists within the aaas 382

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were as intransigent as they were arrogant and disbelieving. “The Naturalists of the aaas are a very scholarly set and they imagine that no one outside of their circle of young scientific skeptics can do anything.” Yet he was determined to give a voice to scholars, “some of whom are religious,” without regard to “the clique” that sought to rule the aaas .32 It was the secular-minded scholars who carried the day. But if Christian scholars like Peet were unwilling to be silenced they were equally reluctant to discredit the science of anthropology to which they were irresistibly drawn. Brinkerhoff had addressed the issue of scriptural vs. scientific authority in his address at the opening of the Ohio State Archaeological Convention held at Mansfield in September 1875. He framed the subject by asking a trilogy of questions relating to humankind: “What are we? Whence came we? Whether are we tending? It is true we have a written revelation which answers these questions, and many of us, and perhaps all of us who are here today, believe that it answers them rightly, but still we all know and all admit that there is another gospel, which, so far as its revelations are extended, is more conclusively true to most minds than the other. The gospel of Nature is a thing of the senses; . . . and therefore if the gospel of Nature comes into conflict with the gospel of Revelation, the latter must go to the wall. It is inevitable so in the nature of things.”33 Brinkerhoff confessed his belief in the truthfulness of both gospels and their essential harmony. “Nevertheless, let us have the truth, wheresoever it may lead.” By studying the human experience in the remote past, moreover, archaeologists may also catch a glimpse of human destiny. “Archaeology, it is true, is but a single chapter in the gospel of Nature, but is so associated and correlated that its interpretation demands mastery of all others.” Brinkeroff was willing to let rationalism lead where it would on the question of human origins and antiquity. Those were the sentiments of a liberal Christian. It is not known whether Peet agreed with those sentiments in full or only in part, but being a liberal theologian in his own right it is not likely he protested too much, if at all. Peet too believed in the Archaeology as Anthropology

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essential harmony of both ways of looking at the world and regretted that the secularists within the aaas , as he believed, did not share that outlook. Other of Peet’s correspondents to the American Antiquarian shared Brinkerhoff ’s way harmonizing or rationalizing the clash between rival faiths. Matthew Canfield Read, another prominent a member of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio and an accomplished geologist and archaeologist, expressed similar sentiments.34 Read saw many “coincidences” existing between science and scripture in the organic and inorganic makeup of the natural world. There were no irreconcilable differences between the evolutionist’s natural laws and the theists divine will, said Read, so long as Christians accepted the biblical account of creation as an allegory. Read rationalized Genesis and geology as a “theistic evolutionist”—one who believed that the divine will that animated all life was none other than the natural law of the evolutionist. Biblical cosmology and the symbolism of the Garden of Eden, said Read, were intended to be metaphors for making sense of the world and for moral instruction in matters of religion. They should not be regarded as literal accounts of human origins and descent.35 Read’s position on evolutionary science relative to literal creationism is significant, and by extension further clarifies the views of Brinkerhoff, Peet, and like-minded Christians who chose to have faith in both religion and science. That was hardly a new position or argument. It was a view of religious and scientific authority that presupposed “truth” to always be consistent with itself regardless of its source—a fundamental tenet of liberal Christian thought dating back to the natural theology of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and traceable from there as far back as the beginnings of formal Christian thought in antiquity. Most certainly all Christians did not share that conception of truth and authority. But clearly Brinkerhoff, Peet, and Read had, to a greater or lesser extent, worked evolutionary principles into their formulations of faith as Christian scholars. They were not fundamentalists or what 384

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we might today call strict creationists. Yet secularists who were unwilling to meet them halfway in the formulation of their twin faiths were abhorrent to them and a matter of complaint. Nor were the sentiments of Peet, Brinkeroff, and Read regarding the imperious attitudes of the more doctrinaire evolutionists confined to their own circle. Daniel Garrison Brinton lodged a similar objection, even though he himself endorsed evolutionary principles. Brinton’s acceptance of evolutionary theory is clear in his favorable review of Paul Topinard’s L’Homme dans la Nature (1891). Topinard voiced his own adherence to the theory of human evolution in that work—a theory staunchly opposed by the clergy in France and ecclesiastics throughout Christendom. Brinton found it “gratifying” that so eminent a scientist as Topinard was “boldly pronouncing in [evolution’s] favor, and declaring that it is the only possible theory adequate to explain known facts in the physical history of the human species.” He respected Topinard’s work as an anthropologist and his courage in taking a principled stand in the face of formidable opposition.36 But Brinton was by no means an uncritical acolyte of evolutionary thought. He, like Peet, reacted strongly against the imposing and entrenched attitudes he sometimes encountered on the part of evolutionists. Brinton took an evolutionary perspective on the development of society and culture in his own writings but could be quite critical of those who privileged the doctrine of evolution as a sacrosanct and infallible theory. By inflexibly adhering to evolutionary thought as being correct in all its bearings its advocates had merely substituted a religious faith for a secular or scientific one. “It is not only a doctrine but a dogma with many scientists. They look with theological ire on any one who questions it.” Brinton agreed that in the long sweep of human history evolutionary principles explained human development. “But that we have any certainty that it will continue, is a mistake; or that it has been true of the vast majority of individuals or ethnic groups, is another mistake. As the basis of boastful and confident optimism it is as shaky as sand. Archaeology as Anthropology

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Taken in its real value, as the provisional and partial result of our observations, it is a useful guide; but swallowed with unquestioning faith as a final law of the universe, it is not one whit more inspiring than the narrowest dogma or religious bigotry.” According to Albert Henry Smyth, a member of the American Philosophical Society and a Brinton memorialist, he took a deep interest in social and religious questions affecting individuality and conduct, but “he had no sympathy with dogma” whatever its source. Brinton was ever the champion of individualism for whom “the independence of the human mind” was always more important than faith in an unexamined creed.37 Dogma to Brinton was still dogma whether it was a social, religious, or a scientific doctrine or faith. The law of evolution in human affairs he accepted as a “partial” and “provisional” truth and nothing more. Whether it applied to all groups equally was an open question, and it was by no means certain that it was an unalterable law or process of human adaptation and change that ruled human destiny. An evolutionary perspective on humanity could be just as teleological as predestination, election, and divine foreknowledge and just as much of a closed system of thought. The theory of biological evolution among its devotees is seen as giving purpose to nature in much the same way as those who believed in divine design. There are instances when evolutionary theory can be a subjective mode of thought, as some students of the subject have readily attested.38 The coming of the curators and professors wrought many changes in the institutional infrastructure of American archaeology and its evolving position as a subfield of anthropology. Nowhere are those developments more evident than in the career of Frederic Ward Putnam at the Peabody Museum and American Archaeology and Ethnology. Putnam and his field agents in Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee pursued an aggressive agenda. All those collaborations produced significant results. One can take Putnam’s relationship with Dr. Charles L. Metz of Madisonville, Ohio, as a representative case study. Metz’s excavations at Madisonville, those he initially conducted under the patronage of the Literary and Scientific Society of Madisonville and 386

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those later undertaken for Putnam, were arguably as significant as any of his collaborations and more so than most. Metz began excavations at the Madisonville Village Site and Cemetery in the Little Miami Valley of southwestern Ohio in March 1878. The Literary and Scientific Society of Madisonville sponsored Metz’s subsequent work at the site with the cost of the excavations being defrayed through contributions from its members. The Cincinnati Society of Natural History Society also contributed funds to the enterprise, which became the repository of the skeletal materials recovered from the site. Reports on the excavations at Madisonville by Metz, Charles F. Low, and Frank W. Langdon appeared in the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History.39 Metz’s work at Madisonville soon drew Putnam’s attention. Putnam visited the site in 1881 and made arrangements to carry on the work in cooperation with the Literary and Scientific Society of Madisonville. The Peabody Museum agreed to help fund the excavations (and funded them exclusively after 1882) in return for receiving a portion of the materials recovered for its collections.40 The Peabody Museum continued to conduct fieldwork in Ohio throughout the first decade of the twentieth century but the greatest period of activity occurred in the 1880s and 1890s. Many of the sites explored were in the Little Miami Valley (including the Turner Mound Group), the Scioto Valley, and scattered sites at different locations within the state. Roland B. Dixon, Warren K. Moorehead, Harlan I. Smith, John R. Swanton, and Metz did most of the fieldwork at various sites in Ohio, with Putnam paying occasional visits to many of them. The investigations undertaken by the Peabody Museum represent a significant chapter in the history of American archaeology. Putnam sought an annual fund of three thousand dollars to promote archaeological investigations in Ohio “before it was too late.” The time had passed, he said, when haphazard explorations and “chance gatherings” of materials were considered the chief aims of archaeology. This was the great era of explorations and museum building at the Peabody Museum, when prehistoric materials were leaving Ohio literally by Archaeology as Anthropology

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the barrel. Putnam was well on the way to making the museum a major repository of American antiquities. It had the funds to support systematic fieldwork in Ohio and there were many able hands willing to offer their assistance to Putnam as field agents. Ebenezer Baldwin Andrews of Lancaster explored Ash Cave in Hocking County and mounds elsewhere in southeastern Ohio, John Thomas Short of Columbus opened mounds in Delaware County in 1879, and Matthew Canfield Read sent pottery fragments and stone chips from a rock shelter at Hudson in June 1878.41 Putnam’s insistence upon intensive excavation at specific sites and detailed record keeping made excavating mounds anything but a quixotic adventure. Whether one views the Peabody Museum’s large-scale excavations and museum-building efforts in the post-Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act era in a negative, positive, or indifferent light is to a certain extent a matter of perspective. While recognizing that Putnam’s mound explorations are not above criticism and serious objection, there is no doubt that his methodical approach to fieldwork was less random and superficial than that of the unknown numbers of pothunters who clandestinely took to the field in search of articles to sell or trade on the curiosities market—an objectionable practice in its own right that in turn gave incentive to the pernicious practice of manufacturing archaeological frauds. But if Putnam had been solely interested in museum-building his activities in the restoration of Serpent Mound would make no sense. He was equally committed to the preservation of prehistoric sites and well understood the difficulty of maintaining a precarious balance between the need for excavation and archaeological preservation and restoration. Putnam first visited Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, in September 1883 in the company of four of his Ohio collaborators. The uniqueness of the effigy and the unusual geology of the “Serpent Cliff ” (a rugged overhang or ledge that geologists know as a cryptoexplosion) made a deep impression on Putnam and his cohorts who were themselves no strangers to remote archaeological sites. Amidst the brush 388

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and briers of the headland or plateau above the cliff overlooking Brush Creek the undulating serpent effigy unfolded before them for the length of nearly a quarter mile. “The most singular sensations of awe and admiration overwhelmed me,” said Putnam, “at this sudden realization of my long-cherished desire, for here before me was the mysterious work of an unknown people, whose seemingly most sacred place we had invaded.” Putnam, like Ephraim George Squier before him, wondered if this was the representation of the same serpent symbolism found in eastern cosmologies: “Was this a symbol of the old serpent faith, here on the western continent, which from the earliest times in the religions of the East held so many peoples enthralled, and formed so important a factor in the development of succeeding religions?” Putnam felt the presence of the remote past at the site and expressed a sensation that is best conveyed in his own words: “Reclining on one of the huge folds of this gigantic serpent, as the last rays of the sun, glancing from the distant hilltops, cast their long shadows over the valley, I mused on the probabilities of the past; and there seemed to come to me a picture as of a distant time, of a people with strange customs, and with it came the demand for an interpretation of this mystery. The unknown must become known!”42 The sadness of discovering how much the effigy had deteriorated since first being surveyed by Squier and Davis in 1846, however, mitigated his sense of wonder. Serpent Mound, like so many other archaeological sites, was rapidly being destroyed by cultivation. Putnam took steps to save the site in 1885. He secured a pledge from the property owner, “Mr. Lovett,” that the mound would remain undisturbed for a year. Putnam then enlisted the interest and fundraising skills of Alice Cunningham Fletcher of Boston in mounting a financial campaign to save Serpent Mound. Fletcher assisted Putnam in raising about six thousand dollars, which enabled Harvard University to purchase the site in 1886. It was then that Putnam explored Serpent Mound and the adjoining mounds, restored them, and opened the site to the public as Serpent Mound Park. His efforts to save Serpent Mound prompted the Ohio General Assembly Archaeology as Anthropology

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to pass a law in 1888 exempting prehistoric parks from taxation and making other provisions for their preservation—the first such preservation legislature passed in the United States. Harvard deeded Serpent Mound Park to the State of Ohio in 1900 and the site has since remained in the custody of the Ohio Historical Society. Clearly, not every avenue of archaeological research in the nineteenth century was destructive and insensitive, however true those descriptors are for much of it. The founding of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology Bureau in 1879 further institutionalized anthropology and brought significant public patronage to archaeological and ethnological research. An act of the second session of the Forty-fifth Congress established the Bureau on March 3, 1879. The same legislation also consolidated and reorganized four separate geographical and geological surveys, created the Geological Bureau within the Department of the Interior, and transferred to the Smithsonian Institution the results of the anthropological investigations conducted by John Wesley Powell on previous geological surveys. Those national surveys also included archaeological fieldwork in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming and renewed interest in the archaeology and ethnology of the Far West. Powell’s interests in North American Indians were first awakened during his days as a student in Illinois and Ohio. He attended Illinois College, Wheaton College, and Oberlin College, where he obtained a grounding in Greek and Latin but never earned an academic degree. The natural sciences, however, laid fullest claim to his time and attention. What Powell lacked in formal credentials he more than compensated for in fieldwork, firsthand knowledge of his subject matter, and qualities of leadership. Powell’s administrative acumen as director of both the Bureau and the United States Geological Survey, said Neil M. Judd, “quieted the jealousies of certain college professors”— unnamed persons who, formally at least, had better educations than Powell and who seemingly coveted the influence he wielded for themselves. Judd fittingly referred to Powell as “a geologist by profession and anthropologist by preference.”43 390

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Powell set the agenda for research and fieldwork at the Bureau until his death in 1902. Every aspect of its early institutional culture bore the indelible imprint of his interests and personality. And Powell had decided ideas about how the Bureau’s Division of Mound Exploration, established as a subunit in 1882, should be organized and how it should conduct its fieldwork. He did not want investigations of the mounds to proceed along familiar paths. The discovery and early exploration of the mounds of the Mississippi Valley had generated considerable scientific and popular interest in the subject of American antiquities and a new approach was needed to an old subject: “a new field was opened to enthusiastic theorists. Ignoring the fact that many of the historic Indians have practiced the building of mounds, indeed that some are still building them, it was assumed that these works were the vestiges of a dense and extinct population whose advance in civilization was much superior to that of known American Indians. . . . It will be the duty of the Bureau of Ethnology to devote careful attention to this interesting field of archaeology.” Earlier efforts at studying the mounds had been neither illegitimate nor impractical but for the most part suffered from a fatal flaw. “But those who have hitherto conducted the researches have betrayed a predetermination to find something inexplicable on the simple hypothesis of a continuous Indian occupation, and were swept by blind zeal into serious errors even when they were not imposed upon by frauds and forgeries.”44 That statement was but the opening salvo in a long and successful campaign against the old archaeology by the proclaimers of the new one. Not all of the early investigators, it must be said in contradiction of Powell, ignored the fact that many of the historic North American tribes had built mounds. Nor were they all swept away “by blind zeal” either with or without the aid of archaeological frauds. Despite such overstatements, a tendency to which Powell was occasionally prone his point still stands. Powell labored to dispel the myth of a moundbuilding people distinct from Native Americans. He brought a critical attitude toward the evaluation of anthropological evidence, subordinated Archaeology as Anthropology

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theory to the collection of data, and set the tone for the extensive archaeological fieldwork conducted by the Bureau in the 1880s and 1890s. That is not to suggest that Powell did not have predispositions, opinions, and biases, or that he was correct in all of his views and opinions. His ideas on the social, technological, and intellectual basis of “savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civilization,” for example, were greatly influenced by the views set forward by Lewis Henry Morgan.45 However grating we find those categories of analysis, such scientific attitudes and conceptions of social “progress” had great currency on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet Powell’s determination to place the Bureau’s archaeological fieldwork on a scientific footing was a necessary purgative. One need not be an uncritical admirer or an apologist to recognize that Powell did as much as anyone to make archaeology and ethnology more exacting sciences. His critical comments on the limitations attending the use of certain kinds of anthropological data still bear reading. Archaeological investigations in the United States were of great interest and attracted a multitude of laborers to the field. Yet the results of those enquiries were largely unsatisfactory and “the discoveries made have often been illegitimately used, especially for the purpose of connecting the tribes of North America with peoples or so-called races of antiquity in other portions of the world.” The ancient Mound Builders and the later Indian tribes were one and the same people, and all efforts to obfuscate or disavow that fact were exercises in “futility.” That too was not an altogether new idea or discovery but few, if any, drove the point home more forcefully or with greater conviction and clarity of the problem to be addressed. In the study of these antiquities, there has been much unnecessary speculation in respect to the relation existing between the people to whose existence they attest, and the tribes of Indians inhabiting the country during the historic period. . . . It may also be said that mound-building tribes were known in the early history of discovery of this continent, and that the vestiges of art discovered do not excel 392

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in any respect the arts of the Indian tribes known to history. There is, therefore, no reason for us to search for an extra-limital origin through lost tribes for the arts discovered in the mounds of North America. The tracing of the origin of these arts to the ancestors of known tribes or stocks of tribes is more legitimate, but it has limitations which are widely disregarded. The tribes which had attained to the highest culture in the southern portion of North America are now well known to belong to several different stocks. . . . Again, it is contained in the recorded history of the country that several distinct stocks of the present Indians were mound-builders and the wide extent and vast number of mounds discovered in the United States should lead us to suspect, at least, that the mound-builders of pre-historic times belonged to many and diverse stocks.46 Identifying prehistoric mound-building tribes with the distinct tribes or stocks known to history, although a legitimate field of enquiry, was beset with too many limitations and promised “but a meager harvest.” It would be more productive by far if American archaeology concentrated instead on “the origin and development of arts and industries,” yet another way of saying the origin and evolution of society. Here was an absorbing line of enquiry: “and when North American archaeology is pursued with this end in view, the results will be instructive.” Powell had little patience for those who continued to offer gratuitous and vague opinions on the identity of the Mound Builders as if nothing had yet been established. He could be quite brusque in the matter, as is evident in a letter he wrote in March 1885 to the editor of Science, a publication of the aaas . There Powell challenged those, such as the editor, who apparently still labored under the assumption that the race of the Mound Builders was still an open question. Could there still be any doubt that the mounds were built by the American Indian tribes found in possession of the country during the historic era and by their remote ancestors? “There has never been presented one item of evidence that the mound-builders were a people of culture superior Archaeology as Anthropology

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to that of the tribes that inhabited the valley of the Mississippi a hundred years ago. The evidence is complete that these tribes have built mounds within the historic era; and no mounds and earthworks have been discovered superior in structure and contents to those known to have been built in historic times.” The seemingly habitual idea that a nation or people possessing a higher grade of art than that capable of being developed by any of the historic tribes was “wild and baseless; and the fruit of that theory is nothing but exaggeration and false statement.” It was an old argument that “any intelligent anthropologist” would no longer accept as admissible given the present state of knowledge in American archaeology and ethnology. “At the present time,” Powell continued, “we cannot have fewer than seventy [ethnically] distinct peoples among the tribes of North America, and in antiquity the number may have been greater. The mound-building peoples did not constitute a distinct race. Many peoples had built mounds on this continent North America, and some continue to build mounds to this day. The writer has seen a tribe of Indians build a mound.”47 Despite the essential correctness of Powell’s views there is a noticeable reductionist tendency in his argument. Not all of the surviving mounds and earthworks constructed during the prehistoric and historic eras are structurally the same nor are their contents all alike. Moreover, far more of them were of built in the prehistoric era than during historic times. And while there are clearly important continuities in the artistic or aesthetic traditions of prehistoric and historic Indian groups, there are also significant differences. One class or type of artifact was not necessarily “superior” or represented a higher or lesser grade of art compared to the others, as Power rightly insisted, but they do bear different cultural signatures or characteristics by which they are identified in the archaeological record. The Mound Builders were not a “superior” culture relative to the historic tribes but in several instances manifested different cultures— one race; many cultures. The succession of

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chronologically, geographically, and culturally distinct mound-building peoples not only differed among themselves but also from later historic Indian cultures—not in all ways by any means but significantly in some. It was not all continuity and no change but both. Divergences or variations in customs and artistic traditions between prehistoric and early historic cultures were differences of degree and not of kind. Those dissimilarities could be accounted for by disruptions in aboriginal culture occasioned by trade with Europeans and the consequent pandemics that reduced their numbers and weakened the very fabric of indigenous societies and cultures. Powell’s arguments were often overly simplified but his reasoning fundamentally sound. Powell approvingly noted that the mounting evidence no longer left the identity of the Mound Builders in question, and that “gradually the exaggerated accounts of the state of arts represented by the relics discovered in the mounds are being dissipated, and the ancient civilization which has hitherto been supposed to be represented by the mounds is disappearing in the light of modern investigations.”48 Yet it can be objected that in making that point Powell, inadvertently and ironically, minimized the accomplishments of the earlier moundbuilding cultures. It is true that there was not an ancient, non-Indian civilization in the Mississippi Valley (which is clearly what Powell was saying) yet he also denies a civilization to the indigenous cultures who built mounds before the arrival of Europeans. The anthropology of the period seldom accorded the status of civilization upon tribal societies, and many anthropologists today still have well-honed criteria for what they recognize as a civilization relative to other types of society and cultures. They use the term civilization in a more restricted sense than it is often used in popular parlance. Powell, therefore, should not be judged too harshly in the matter. Some of Powell’s later statements about mound-building peoples and cultures track the same line of thought and are equally problematic. In summarizing the conclusions reached in Cyrus Thomas’s final report

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on mound explorations, for example, Powell made several statements that rang relatively true to later investigators and several that did not. His statement that the mound-building tribes possessed “about the same culture-status as the Indian tribes inhabiting the corresponding area when it was first visited by Europeans” again reduces the cultural diversity manifest in the archaeological record. Archaeological and genetic evidence conclusively establishes that “Mound Builders” and “Indians” were racially and genetically one and same people. That was the central aim of Powell’s archaeology that sometimes obscured the cultural diversities that existed too. His forceful arguments against the Mound Builder myth either minimized or ignored those differences, or, as seems the more likely explanation, he simply did not see them. And his categorical statement that “none of the mounds were built for religious or sacred purposes, but some religious ceremony was often performed at the burial” is not only contradictory but is a statement that few archaeologists would accept today. Nor did Powell stop there. Notwithstanding his own cautionary note about the difficulties involved in identifying prehistoric moundbuilding tribes with historic ones—“but a meager harvest” for research—he confidently assigned specific ethnic identities or tribal labels to prehistoric groups based upon the findings of the Bureau’s Division of Mound Exploration. There is no good reason to dispute Cyrus Thomas’s contention that the Cherokees were at one time a moundbuilding people and that they or kindred groups built the mounds of eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and probably those located in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia. It is also just as likely that the ancestors of Shawnee and other central Algonquian groups at one time built mounds containing stone-cist or stone-box graves such those found in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. Powell also attributed the stone graves in the Delaware Valley to the Delaware who were living there at earliest knowledge of their existence. He thought it probable that the works in northern Mississippi were attributable to the

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Chickasaw, those in the Flint River region in southern Georgia to the Uchees, and a large number of the mounds in the Gulf States to the Muskoki group (i.e., Creek). It is indeed possible to make such ethnic affiliations between historic and prehistoric cultures in some instances but not in all. It is a problem that has received considerable attention from archaeologists concerning certain cultural regions within the eastern United States. Making specific ethnic associations between historic and prehistoric groups remains a tentative and often problematic undertaking, although all the mounds were clearly built by “Indians.”49 Powell formed his opinions on the Mound Builder-Indian debate several years before. He explored mounds in Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri in 1858, 1859, and 1860. He examined other mounds as occasion allowed during the American Civil War while campaigning in Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi between 1861 and 1864. But Powell’s epiphany occurred during the exploration of a mound located on the shore of Lake Peoria in Illinois during the fall of 1859. There he recovered a thin sheet of copper cut into an effigy of an eagle. “At the bottom [of the mound], with some articles of pottery, shells, stone implements, etc., an ornament was found made of copper skillfully cut in imitation of a spread eagle, with [the] head turned to one side. Lying by the side of this were a few glass beads.” It was at that moment that Powell, who had previously subscribed to the idea that the Mound Builders were a people more ancient and more advanced in culture that Indian tribes occupying the continent during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, began to question his earlier assumptions. Did the Mound Builders know the art of glass making? There was no evidence supporting such a supposition. And after making a more careful examination of the copper eagle it appeared to be made of “rolled sheet copper.” If the eagle effigy had been made by hammering it “was so deftly accomplished that every vestige of the process had disappeared, leaving only flat surfaces on both sides, with a uniform thickness of metal.” If those articles were the work of the prehistoric Mound Builders they must

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have possessed arts more advanced than any that had previously been discovered in the mounds. “Thus a suspicion arose as to the correctness of the prevailing opinion.”50 And again, while excavating a mound containing a stone grave near Nashville, Tennessee, during the war Powell found more glass beads together with an iron knife extremely rusted from the many years it had been entombed. He concluded from those circumstances that the mounds containing the sheet copper, glass beads, and iron knife were constructed after and not before the arrival of European and the commencement of trade. As he noted before the members of the Anthropological Society of Washington in December 1883, “This was the first suggestion to my mind that the age of the mounds had been misrepresented, and that the general conclusion that the moundbuilders were not tribes found in this country on its discovery was erroneous. Since that time one line of evidence after another has led to the same conclusion.” A more accurate statement would be that the age of some mounds had been misrepresented since certain mounds are considerably older than others. And Powell, indeed, was well aware of that fact as he hastened to acknowledge. “But this conclusion does not overthrow the belief that many of the mounds are of great antiquity . . . and doubtless the inception of mound-building dates far back in remote antiquity.” Yet Powell sometimes overcompensated for past distortions in his unyielding efforts to discredit timeworn myths that denied obvious connection between the prehistoric Mound Builders and the historic Indians of North America.51 It is permissible on this point to allow the demystifier of the mounds to fully speak for himself. The correctness of his view regarding a nonexistent lost race, notwithstanding the above criticisms, can hardly be gainsaid. It is difficult to exaggerate the prevalence of this romantic fallacy, or the force with which the hypothetic ‘lost races’ had taken possession of the imaginations of men. For more than a century the ghosts 398

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of a vanished nation have ambuscaded in the vast solitudes of the continent, and the forest-covered mounds have been usually regarded mysterious sepulchers of its kings and nobles. It was an alluring conjecture that a powerful people, superior to the Indians, once occupied the Ohio and the Appalachian ranges, their empire stretching from Hudson Bay to the Gulf, with flanks on the western prairies and the eastern ocean; a people with a confederated government, a chief ruler, a great central capital, a highly developed religion, with homes and husbandry, and advanced textile, fictile, and ductile arts, with a language, perhaps with letters, all swept away before an invasion of copper-hued Huns from some unknown region of the earth, prior to the landing of Columbus. These hypothetic semicivilized autochthons, imagined to have been rudely exterminated or expelled, have been various identified by ethnologists with the ancestors of the Aztecs or the Toltecs, the Mayas, the Collmas, Chichimecs, or the Pueblos, who have left no sign of their existence save the rude and feeble fortification into which they fled from their foes, and the silent and obscure elevations in which their nobles found internment.52 Powell continued to lead the assault against the Mound Builder paradigm as director of the Bureau, albeit reluctantly. The annual congressional appropriation bill for the Bureau introduced in the House of Representative on February 24, 1881, approved twenty-five thousand dollars for continued ethnological studies of North American Indians. But an amendment to the bill introduced by Representative J. Warren Keifer of Ohio stipulated that five thousand dollars of the appropriation was to be used for “continuing archaeological investigations relating to the mound-builders, and prehistoric mounds.” It was then, according to Powell, that “certain archaeologists” petitioned Congress to expand the scope of the Bureau to include archaeology. That budgetary provision initially surprised Powell and must have come as an unwelcome change for part of the Bureau’s mission. He Archaeology as Anthropology

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candidly acknowledged that it was his “dominant purpose and preference” that the Bureau should “investigate the languages, arts, institutions, and mythologies of extant tribes rather than prehistoric antiquities”—the focus of his own interests. That quickly changed after the amended statute. Powell placed Wills De Hass in charge of preparing a comprehensive plan of field operations that same year in compliance with the congressional appropriation. De Hass was one of those who had successfully lobbied Congress to expand the scope of the Bureau’s investigations to include archaeology, and apparently had also been critical of the Bureau for neglecting the study of American antiquities during its first two years.53 De Hass had been a prominent figure in American archaeology for many years. He promoted popular and scholarly interest in archaeology as chairman of the aaas ’s special committee on archaeology and ethnology, a position he held from 1858 to 1868. He was one of the founders of the American Anthropological Society of Washington in 1879 and one of its first vice presidents. De Hass was an antiquarian of the old school—a lecturer on the subject of American archaeology and a staunch defender of the authenticity of the Grave Creek inscription.54 He had promoted interest in the subject of American Antiquities since the 1850s in papers read before the American Ethnological Society and the aaas .55 De Hass delivered a well-received course of lectures on American prehistoric archaeology at Syracuse University during the spring of 1877, which has been recognized as one of the first lecture series dedicated exclusively to the subject of American archaeology. Otis Tufton Mason gave a brief but approving notice of De Hass’s Syracuse lectures in the American Naturalist, acknowledging them as the first attempt “to popularize in this manner the whole subject of prehistoric archaeology in our country.”56 De Hass was possibly more of an annoyance to Powell than anything else. But he was a fighter and not someone with whom to trifle. Appointing De Hass to the staff of the Bureau was a politically prudent maneuver, if unpalatable to Powell in other respects—an effective way of silencing 400

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a politically well-connected critic. But De Hass, however effective he was as a lobbyist and archaeological lecturer, was not an individual whose inclinations on the subject of the mounds coincided with those of Powell. As a champion of the authenticity of the Grave Creek stone, he carried around too much unwanted baggage. “Anthropology,” said Powell, “needs trained devotees with philosophic methods and keen observation to study every tribe and nation of the globe almost de novo; and from materials thus collected a science may be established.”57 A new breed of archaeologist was wanted and De Hass did not fit the profile. De Hass resigned his position in less than a year for reasons un known. Perhaps he could not get along with Powell, had no taste for administrative work, or was merely satisfied that his efforts as an activist were instrumental in getting the Bureau involved in surveying and excavating mounds. De Hass’s principal contribution to the work of the Bureau is a 256-page manuscript prepared for Powell as an outline of proposed explorations. De Hass drew upon the manuscript in presenting two papers before the Anthropological Society of Washington in May 1879 and February 1880. The first paper was the “Progress of Archaeologic Research in the United States”—a retrospective review of the more important discoveries that had been made in the United States—and the second was “The Mound Builders: An Inquiry into Their Assumed Southern Origin”—a examination of the theory advanced by Lewis Henry Morgan and W. Denton that the Mound Builders had moved into Mississippi from the South (the northern migration theory) as opposed to having originated in the Mississippi Valley before subsequently migrating into Mexico (the southern migration theory). De Hass argued that the Mound Builders did not have a southern origin. Yet he still opposed the idea of Morgan that the Mound Builders “were our own modern Indians,” regardless of which migration theory one maintained. De Hass countered that argument on the grounds that their “customs of living, burial practices, monuments, arts,” and the conformation of their crania suggested they were not—arguments Archaeology as Anthropology

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well calculated to alienate him from Powell. Yet De Hass did not himself assign the Mound Builders an identity, which he appears to have been satisfied to leave an open question. His known view on the subject, however inconclusive, nevertheless marked him as an archaeological dissenter. He did not espouse the party line. The Bureau never published De Hass’s unsung manuscript as a whole. Yet Jon Muller has plausibly surmised that Cyrus Thomas drew upon portions of the manuscript in his essay on burial mounds in the northern sections of the United States published in the Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1888) and perhaps also in his definitive report on the mound explorations conducted in the Twelfth Annual Report (1894).58 What Powell wanted was someone with a scientific background who could develop a systematic program of research and field operations. Since De Hass did not develop a specific and systematic plan of operations, Powell cast about for someone with a scientific background who could.59 Powell appointed Cyrus Thomas as De Hass’s successor and he chose well. Thomas was the former state entomologist of Illinois and a member of the Hayden geological survey in the Dakota Territories. He adopted a scientific approach in designing a systematic and comprehensive plan of research and ably directed the archaeological fieldwork conducted by the Bureau’s field assistants over the next decade. Those investigations were primarily directed at determining once and for all the identity of the venerable Mound Builders of America and of making surveys of them in the face of their ongoing destruction. Thomas was fully up to the task. He struck a hammer blow against any idea that the Mound Builders were anyone other than the ancestors of North American Indians. Thomas was by no means the first authority to conclude that mounds could not be logically attributed to anyone other than the ancestors of North American Indians. Incontrovertible evidence that North American Indians were the architects of the mounds had been steadily mounting since the mid-nineteenth century and reached critical mass

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in last quarter of the century. Nor was there an absence of those who attributed “Indian mounds” to unknown aboriginal groups from the very beginning of the Euro-American encounter with the mounds. Samuel Gardiner Drake, author of Aboriginal Races of North America (1859 and subsequent editions), stated precisely the same opinion. Drake had no predisposition to speculate in the matter one way or another and was exasperated with those who indulged themselves in doing so. There would be time enough to forge theories about American antiquities when investigators had reliable facts with which to work. It added nothing to the common stock of knowledge, affirmed Drake, to write and speak endlessly about Nebuchadnezzar and the Lost Tribes of Israel, or about an imaginary colony of Welshmen and their supposed progeny of Welsh-speaking Indians. Daniel Garrison Brinton is also on record as expressing the opinion that one need not seek an exotic origin for the mounds. One needed to look no further for their source than among the ancestors of the peoples who first populated the American continent. They were the handiwork of American aborigines notwithstanding the notable gaps in knowledge relating to them. Lucian Carr likewise presented historical evidence refuting earlier arguments that the North American Indians were not sufficiently sedentary and agricultural to have constructed the mounds, while Manning Ferguson Force made some of the same arguments later presented by Thomas in a well-informed and carefully crafted paper read before the Ohio Historical and Philosophical Society at Cincinnati in 1879.60 There were, moreover, several archaeological writers such as Thomas Jefferson and Bishop James Madison who had attributed the mounds to North American Indians as a matter of course in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even so preeminent an advocate of the “lost race” school as Ephraim George Squier significantly modified his views after investigating the mounds of western New York in the fall and winter of 1848. Yet one must still give Thomas his due. No one

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before him had approached the subject as methodically or as comprehensively. Nor had they brought so much corroborative testimony together in one place. The weight of evidence and force of logic was simply overwhelming. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of his contributions to the development of American archaeology and ethnology in regard to North American prehistory, even though he sometimes overstated the case and opened himself to criticism regarding his Cherokee hypothesis. The work of Thomas and his field assistance at the Bureau united American archaeology and ethnology in common purpose in studying American antiquities to a greater degree than ever before. It was the unprecedented resources of the Bureau, the scope of its fieldwork, and the critical attitude of its staff toward received opinion that enabled American archaeology to be placed on a new foundation. American archaeology had to be cleansed of the suppositions that biased the perspectives of many of the earlier investigators. Thomas, who did more than anyone else to free archaeological thought from the grip of “lost race” scenarios regarding the Mound Builders, characterized the situation thus: “One reason why so little progress has been made in unraveling this riddle of the American Sphinx is that most of the authors who have written upon the subject of American archeology have proceeded upon certain assumptions which virtually closed the door against a free and unbiased investigation.” Essentially, said Thomas, the question of who built the mounds had been decided even before it was properly investigated and thoroughly discussed. “A few have ventured the suggestion that possibly these ancient works were due to the Indian race found in possession of the country at the time of its discovery by the Europeans. But this suggestion, instead of receiving serious attention and being properly and thoroughly investigated, has generally been thrust aside as unworthy of consideration.”61 One can certainly quibble with that statement. The subject did, in fact, receive serious attention and reflection at the hands of several of Thomas’s predecessors. And those observers did far more than merely 404

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suggest the possibility that the mounds were built by Indians. Yet Thomas’s larger point that preconceived ideas about Mound Builders and North American Indians biased the debate can hardly be denied. Discrediting myths is seldom a pleasant task. It places one in the disagreeable position of slaying cherished ideas, much as the proverbial St. George slew the dragon. Such was certainly the case with all of Thomas’s archaeological writings and most especially his 1894 tome on the Bureau’s mound explorations and his Introduction to the Study of North American Archeology (1898). The first work is far better known than the second. Yet from an historical point of view Thomas’s Introduction was important enough to be reprinted in 1973 for Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.62 His treatment of Native Americans is very much a product of its time. Some of the racist assumptions about intellectual development among American Indians might be surprising when connected with the person widely credited, and correctly so, with restoring the connections between the North American Indians and their prehistoric achievements. Yet those assumptions were also shared by Powell, Brinton, and many of their contemporaries. Thomas’s views are most representative in that regard. At the same time one can second Muller’s assessment that it is a serious mistake to classify Thomas with those nineteenthcentury historians whose truly monumental racism distorted the past. He belongs in no such company. Judged within the context of his times Thomas was, in fact, a progressive. His continued association with William John McGee, author of The Siouan Indians (1895), after the latter was forced out of the Smithsonian for his “pro-Indian” positions was another indication of his willingness to take stances that must have been considered unfavorably by his superiors at the Smithsonian. The paradigm shifted in American archaeology and a new consensus emerged as to the identity of the Mound Builders because of the work of the Bureau. Old assumptions and arguments that lingered outside the anthropological establishment no longer held sway within it. Thomas’s legacy is perhaps best epitomized by one of his own Archaeology as Anthropology

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statements. With a hint of justified satisfaction he noted that henceforth the burden of proof would rest with those who argued that North American Indians had not built the mounds. Thomas does not merit all the credit for that development, but most certainly a good portion. No one did more to lay bare the various lost race scenarios than he. The Mound Builders were neither pre-Mexican Toltecs nor trans-Atlantic colonizers. Anthropologists were satisfied with the nature of the evidence and the soundness of the corresponding conclusions that the mounds were of an indigenous origin. Thomas was one of a long line of observers who assumed that ground but none had been able to summon as much archaeological, ethnographic, and historical evidence in all of its connections in support of that position as effectively as he. Powell deservers a share of the credit too, but the task of synthesizing the data was mostly the work of Thomas. Those who still subscribed to the old “lost race” paradigm were not altogether silenced but their voices noticeably muted. Yet they significantly found themselves on the fringes of anthropology and not in its mainstream. Obdurate adherents to the old faith were purged from the anthropological establishment and their heirs, still among us to be certain, thereafter became “outsiders,” if they had not been so even earlier. Historians have generally recognized the fieldwork of the Bureau and Thomas’s final report as the emergence of “modern archaeology.” Taken together with the fieldwork of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, the work of the Bureau represents what Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff have called “the dawning age of professional archaeology in the 19th century.”63 The Bureau has received the most recognition in this regard. A. Irving Hallowell credited it with having laid “the empirical foundations of archaeology in the United States,” while in much the same vein Jesse Jennings referred to Thomas’s final report on a decade of mound explorations as “the birth of modern archaeology.”64 Yet Putnam’s fieldwork, his work as a museum administrator, and his career as a

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professor of anthropology at Harvard (the first such academic appointment) were equally important. David L. Browman has noted in a much deserved reappraisal of Putnam’s truly remarkable career that his contributions to the development of American anthropology were second to none. Putnam is often set down as being merely a museum man—depictions that Browman summarily dismisses as undeserved “stereotypes.” Putnam was a man of many talents. His influences as a sponsor of archaeological fieldwork, teacher, and popularizer of anthropology made him a pivotal figure in the history of American archaeology in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He did as much as anyone to promote professionalism in archaeology and to anchor it as a field of anthropological enquiry. Browman’s reappraisal of Putnam’s contributions and the earlier accounts of Ralf W. Dexter make that abundantly clear.65 There is no reason to quibble with those thorough and reflective assessments of Putnam’s contributions to the development of American archaeology or to diminish Thomas’s historical stature by comparison. Yet Thomas clearly overstated the case when he asserted that few writers before him had hazarded the opinion that American antiquities could be attributed to “the Indian race,” to use his own problematic phrase, and that few had previously given that likelihood serious attention. It is yet another example of the need for a new anthropological vocabulary or lexicon, one up to the task of reading the archeological record in terms of time, space, and culture outside of the hegemony imposed on it by the catch-all term “race” that flat lined the variables. Even as Thomas assaulted the Mound Builder-Indian dichotomy he could not altogether free himself from the old language.66 Several authorities in the nineteenth century, it should be noted, never questioned whether the Mound Builders and the later Indian tribes anatomically and physiologically belonged to the same aboriginal race. But they were so prejudiced against the perceived capabilities of

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North American Indians (the state of society they attributed to them) that it was difficult for them to think of the Indians as the architects of the mounds. That construct essentially blinded most of the early archaeological observers. But some of them did accept that at least some of the North American tribes might have at one time built mounds. The suggestion was simply too obvious to be entirely ignored or altogether rejected as a possibility, which is not to say that no one ignored or rejected it because many certainly did. Assertions that the “present race” or “modern Indians” had not built the mounds were sometimes temporal, geographical, and cultural distinctions and did not necessarily mean that all North American Indians, at all places, and at all times had never built mounds. Nor were the early observers any more warranted in assigning the Mound Builders a higher state of society, culture, or grade of art than that possessed by North American Indians, for differences between the prehistoric mound-building cultures and historic Indian cultures were matters of degree and not of kind, differences attributable to disruptions in aboriginal cultures that had occurred since the arrival of Europeans and the cumulative effect of several centuries of epidemics, acculturation, and conflicts—both intertribal and with Euro-Americans—and the geopolitical struggles of Europeans and their effects on Native communities. One need only examine the appendix to Ephraim George Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York, Manning Ferguson Force’s “Were the Mound Builders Indians?,” the somewhat fugitive writings of Daniel Garrison Brinton on the mounds and their contents, and Charles Candee Baldwin’s article on “The Migrations of the Ohio Indians” to see that some of the very ethnographic evidence and arguments assembled by Thomas had been presented by others before him. Nor in fairness was Thomas altogether silent about the early writers who recognized that at least some groups of North American Indians were still building mounds when first known to Europeans. He specifically acknowledged that Squier had changed his mind in the matter, recognizing that the mounds and more frequent earthen embankments 408

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of western New York were built by the Iroquois and their ancestors. He further credits James Haines McCulloh, Samuel Gardiner Drake, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Samuel Foster Haven, Sir John Lubbock, Charles Candee Baldwin, Manning Ferguson Force, Daniel Garrison Brinton, Dr. Philo Romayne Hoy, Lucien Carr, William Healey Dall, and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler as recognizing that different groups of Indians had at one time built mounds.67 Thomas further noted several articles he had himself published in the American Antiquarian, the Magazine of American History, Science, the American Anthropologist, and elsewhere on the same score. He could have added Increase A. Lapham to that list as well. It is only by revisiting the works of those early authorities that one realizes that Thomas was more indebted to them, at least for the historical portion of his argument, than he was ever comfortable admitting. His historical amnesia regarding some of his predecessors, in fact, prompted Stephen Denison Peet to complain about Thomas’s “minimizing tendencies.” The reasoned views of Dr. Philo Romayne Hoy of Racine, Wisconsin, on the subject are representative of a much larger sampling of opinion. Hoy, who assisted Lapham in his fieldwork at Racine in 1850, summarized the available evidence on the subject in December 1882. The evidence bearing upon the oft-asked question of who were the Mound Builders led in but one direction. “In view of the foregoing evidence, the legitimate conclusion must follow that the ‘mound builders’ were Indians and nothing but Indians, the immediate ancestors of the present tribes as well as many other tribes that were formerly scattered over this county.” The mound-building tribes differed among themselves in customs and languages just as the Native peoples did when first known to Europeans. Mound building continued among certain North American tribes for a time after they had contact with Europeans but was subsequently abandoned much as the making of pottery, shell-bead wampum, and implements of flint, stone, and copper eventually declined and nearly or completely ceased. Hoy further observed that none of the mounds near Racine with which he was Archaeology as Anthropology

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personally familiar contained a single article of copper. Those mounds were “the older type” and located in a region abounding in copper, a circumstance that supported the inference that they were built before the use of copper became common among the Indians living near the copper regions of Wisconsin. “This is the more likely as the later mounds have not infrequently articles manufactured from native copper. The conclusion follows that the Indians living at no great distance from the copper regions of Lake Superior did mine copper and make various ornaments and implements, not only for their own use, but extensively for the purpose of barter with distant tribe and nations of Indians.” It should be no matter of surprise, therefore, that copper would be found in some Wisconsin mounds and not in others.68 The criticisms and annoyance of Peet aside, there is no denying the significance of Thomas’s contributions to the American archaeology and ethnology. His research was encyclopedic, his approach to archaeological problems systematic, and his presentation of archaeological and historical evidence in support of his claims compelling. There is also the matter of authority. Who, indeed, could speak with more clout on the subject of the mounds than Thomas? The Bureau’s field assistants surveyed, mapped, and described hundreds of mound groups and excavated more than two thousand mounds. Thomas reported in 1887 that the Bureau had obtained no less than thirty-eight thousand archaeological specimens. Its field workers recovered half of the artifacts through mound explorations and the other half through purchases and donations. The duration and geographical range of the Bureau’s mound explorations was unprecedented, as was the meticulousness of the record keeping and cataloging of collections sent to the United States National Museum. When the Bureau’s fieldwork concluded in 1889 its field agents had examined two thousand mounds and collected more than fort thousand artifacts.69 Thomas’s initial team of field assistants were Edward Palmer of Washington dc ; P. W. Norris of Norris, Michigan; and

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Fig. 27. The De Soto Mound, Jefferson County, Arkansas. The geographical range and completeness of the mound explorations conducted by the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology during the 1880s surpassed all previous fieldwork. The number of mounds surveyed and explored and the amount of archaeological materials recovered was unprecedented. Cyrus Thomas directed the work of Bureau’s Division of Mound Exploration and synthesized the findings of his field agents in “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology,” an accompanying paper in the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1890–91, published at Washington dc by the Government Printing Office in 1894. This is plate 9 of Thomas’s report.

James D. Middleton of Carbondale, Illinois. When Palmer subsequently left the division John P. Rogan of Bristol, Tennessee, replaced him. When Norris died in January 1885 Thomas hired J. W. Emmert, who already worked for the Bureau as a temporary employee, as a regular assistant. When Rogan and Emmert vacated their positions as regular agents, Gerard Fowke of New Madison, Ohio, and Henry L. Reynolds of Washington dc succeeded them. Special arrangements with several other individuals who also assisted the Bureau in the field for short periods of time were also made. Thomas embodied the results of those investigations in his “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau

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of Ethnology,” a 742-page monograph published in 1894 as the accompanying paper to the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. He classified mounds by their external form, and not according to how they were presumably used, in an effort to avoid the functional assumptions of the earlier classifications of Squier and Davis. Answering the question of whether “the Indians” had built the mounds, however, was his chief concern. “If it can be shown that some of the mounds and some of the other antiquities of all the different types and classes were made by Indians, or even by people having the same habits, beliefs, and culture status as the Indians, the inference is justifiable that all are the work of the same race or one closely allied in culture.”70 Thomas’s work as director of mound explorations at the Bureau also uniquely positioned him to write the first Introduction to the Study of North American Archaeology published in 1898.71 Prehistoric archaeology was still in its infancy, yet even then the subject was an expansive one, as William Henry Holmes noted in an appreciative review of Thomas’s work in the American Anthropologist in January of the following year. “It is a bold writer,” said Holmes, “who, in the present stage of the study of American archaeology, ventures to monograph that subject, and it is a fortunate one who proves himself capable of compassing the field in a satisfactory manner.” The author’s breadth and depth of materials were of “exceptional value” and his conclusions lucidly stated. The mound-building peoples of North America were “Indians” (as the term was commonly used and understood), the custom of mound building in the Mississippi Valley was centuries old and in some instances continued down to the coming of Europeans, and that the descendants of the mythical lost race of Mound Builders were to be found in several of the existing tribes, notably the Cherokee and Shawnee. Thomas derived American Indians from Asia. All available evidence indicated that “the place of dispersion was in the northwest, and that the course of migration has been south and southeast.”72 Holmes found Thomas’s discussion of Central American remains and culture to be particularly interesting and valuable. “The origin of 412

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the [Central American] peoples he traces generally toward the north, and although suspecting intrusion of foreign elements of culture, discusses the archeologic remains from the autogenous point of view, striving with the usual lack of success to account fully for all the remarkable conditions and extraordinary phases of culture development.” How much the linguistic and cultural diversity of the American continent could be accounted for by interacting with different climates, terrains, floras, and faunas over long periods of time; how they were further modified by migrations, intertribal trade and conflict, and the spread of religious ideas and practices were points of enquiry that had long intrigued investigators. Thomas saw in the mounds and their contents evidence of extensive tribal movements during prehistoric times. Such migrations had no doubt occurred. But the devil is in the details. Attempting to determine which tribe moved from where, to where, and approximately when remains an uncertain exercise. It is based on suggestive but far from compelling evidence. The confidence with which Thomas tracked prehistoric migrations and assigned tribal identities to the prehistoric groups involved opened him to criticisms by fainter-hearted scholars who saw uncertainty where Thomas saw certainty. He interpreted certain archaeological assemblages as denoting a prehistoric Siouan movement from the southeast to the northwest, and others as representing Algonquian and Iroquoian migrations. Whether the migrations of prehistoric tribes had been more or less frequent, or of longer or shorter duration, than frequently occurred among their historic descendants he did not presume to say. Holmes considered Thomas work “far more satisfactory than anything yet written, and it must contribute not a little toward building up the science of archeology in America. It will serve admirably the purpose for which it is presented, and at the same time will form a stepping stone by means of which some other student, utilizing the fuller data of his day, may climb to higher levels.”73 Stephen Dension Peet took a more critical stance on the value of Thomas’s work. Peet’s splenetic review in the American Antiquarian Archaeology as Anthropology

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acknowledged the need for a work summarizing the results of recent archaeological investigations in the United States. He also somewhat begrudgingly allowed that Thomas’s introduction to the subject met that need. Then came the rod, which one suspects had been soaking for some time. While there were pleasing aspects to the work on the whole it fell short of the mark and “in some respects it fails utterly and will prove disappointing to many.” A book purporting to be an introduction the American archaeology should recognize the contributions of more than just the author and his favored writers. Acknowledging worthy predecessors should be a conspicuous feature of such a work yet one regrettably absent in Thomas’s treatment of the subject: “it is like playing Hamlet with Hamlet left out, for very many of the most prominent archaeologists are not even named, and their books do not seem to have been read. The name of Dr. D. G. Brinton appears several times, [but] of Profs. Mason and F. H. Cushing and Prof. Starr just once. But the names of Prof. F. W Putnam, Gen. Gates P. Thruston, Dr. Thomas Wilson. Prof. J. T. Short and many others do not appear at all, and no reference to their writings can be found. These gentlemen have contributed as much to the advance of archaeology in this country as Dr. Thomas, and even more, and there is no reason why they should be ignored so completely.” Mention of Peet’s own writings on archaeological subjects over many years are also noticeably absent in Thomas’s book, a fact to which Peet no doubt took umbrage.74 An irritated Peet weighed in even more pointedly. He was of the opinion that the French anthropologist and paleontologist Jean-FrançoisAlbert du Pouget, or the Marquis de Nadaillac, or the Finnish-Swedish explorer and writer Gustaf Nordenskiöld knew as much or more about North American archaeology than most American scholars did themselves—not excepting Thomas. It did not appear to Peet that Thomas was familiar with those authorities. Thomas, said Peet, had also made some grave blunders regarding the effigy mounds of Wisconsin. “He says that the Effigy Builders of Wisconsin were composed of hostile tribes—the stronger occupying the level and choice localities, 414

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while the weaker were forced to seek refuge in the rugged regions or amid the swamps and marshes. If the author had done any exploring in that state among the effigies he would have known better, for the effigies are the clan totems of a tribe of Indians which made their habitat in this state, and who constructed the long mounds for game traps, through which they would drive the large game.” Thomas may be excused for not adopting Peet’s “game trap” theory, but his criticism of Thomas for not mentioning that the effigy mounds were possible representations of clan totems was a fair one. Equally objectionable was Thomas’s discussion of the so-called altar mounds of Ohio. “These masses,” said Thomas, “are supposed by some leading authorities [i.e., Squier and Davis and their disciples] to have been altars on which sacrifices were made, or some religious act performed. There is no valid reason for this supposition or any evidence which seems to justify it.” Peet would have none of it. “Everyone knows that Prof. Putman, E. G. Squires [sic] and all who have explored the altar mounds of Ohio, discovered that the altars were, many of them, filled with relics of various kinds, and even human bones, which had been offered as sacrifices, (probably to the sun) and that the relics, in the mounds themselves were full of an elaborate symbolism.” Human remains most certainly were found on the clay basins of these mounds (Squier and Davis’s “altars”) but it was a leap of faith to interpret them as sacrifices both on the part of Squier and Davis and that of Peet. The custom of mound building and more broadly burial practices in general were doubtless connected with religious ideas and practices, as were the items interred with the dead. But the notion that the clay basins or “altars” were places of sacrifice is not warranted. Thomas may be excused again. It would have been preferable had Thomas been more generous in apportioning recognition to his colaborers and predecessors in the field of American archaeology. It is a very human propensity to ignore the opinions of those who differ from our own and Thomas was very human in that regard. Peet’s strictures on that score were at least Archaeology as Anthropology

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partially justified. Yet Peet’s own archaeology was often more imaginative than credible. It was doubtless for that reason that his writings and those of many other of Thomas’s contemporaries and predecessors did not find a place in his work. And it would, of course, be asking much of Peet to expect him to see it that way himself. He most certainly did not. “The fact is, that American Archaeology is in just that unsettled condition that no author who covers the whole ground, and advances his theories on all subjects as Dr. Thomas does, can be accepted as authority, and it is a great mistake that he should ignore the opinions of those who differ with him, and never mention their works. This mistake Dr. Thomas has made throughout his Introduction, otherwise than this the book furnishes a good summary of the subject.” Peet, who had mastered the art of damning with faint praise, commended Thomas’s book “as the best ‘Introduction’ to North American archaeology which has been written”—a decidedly backhanded compliment since it was the only introduction to the subject that had been written. Peet clearly wished that Thomas had written the book differently than he did, and much less from what Peet regarded as a one-sided perspective. “It is to be hoped that this Introduction to North American archaeology will open the way to others to enter the field and to solve the problems which are still unsettled. What is now needed is that some system should be adopted according to which the mass of facts which have already been gathered can be classified, and the relics and remains be arranged in such systematic order that one can see that archaeology is a science, and not a mass of unclassified facts.” Thomas could not have taken kindly to that appraisal, for in essence that was the mission of the Division of Mound Exploration within the Bureau under his charge, a task that Peet apparently found wanting or at least somehow incomplete. Such work by its very nature, however, was ongoing, collaborative, and arguably never finished. The mound explorations and surveys of the Bureau, the most comprehensive and systematic that had yet been attempted, was but a good beginning, as Thomas

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himself no doubt considered it to be. That much remained to be done he understood better than anyone. Peet had argued for years that European archaeologists were in advance of their American counterparts in classifying their materials and formulating mature and widely accepted conclusions. And while it was a matter of regret that American archaeology lagged behind the comparatively underdeveloped state of the discipline, at the same time that condition indicated great potential and promise. “There are advantages for the study of archaeology in America, the chief of which is that the geographical districts are so separate and distinct. This is a point which Prof. O. T. Mason has brought out very clearly. He calls them cultural areas. If his classification could have been adopted [by Thomas] it would certainly improve the book, but every author has his own plan.” If Thomas’s methodology disappointed Peet in that regard, it must be noted that the criticism yet again is not an altogether fair one. Thomas’s geographic and taxonomic designations of Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific regions were cultural areas for all intents and purposes, as were the “archaeological districts” or mound-building localities presented in his 1894 report on the Bureau’s mound explorations. They were not as detailed as those of Mason yet significant developments in archaeological thought in nonetheless. Jon Muller has spoken directly to this point. Muller noted that Thomas’s Introduction “shows the continuing development of a culture area concept” notwithstanding Peet’s critique. Yet Muller further notes that the work was less original than might have been expected. “At the same time, there is little in this synthesis that represents new materials or new assessments of the facts already presented elsewhere. It is symptomatic that its illustrations were largely drawn from earlier works, and, indeed, much of the text was also recycled.”75 The work was not flawless but neither did it lack merit. Once can perhaps give William Henry Holmes the last word on the value of Thomas work. Given the state of knowledge relating to North American archaeology

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at the time, it took an intrepid and somewhat audacious author to write an introduction to the subject. It is unlikely that any authority at that time could have produced a synthesis that satisfied everyone. Thomas writing throughout the 1880s and 1890s had replaced the old archaeological paradigm with a new one, albeit much to Peet’s dissatisfaction and that of like-minded antiquaries. Archaeologists were beginning to fit the venerable Mound Builders of North America with new cloths. The dénouement of Mound Builder paradigm among anthropologists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century did not satisfy everyone. There were those who steadfastly held to the old faith. The Reverend John Patterson MacLean (1848–1939) of Greenville, Ohio, was one such diehard. A Universalist clergyman, MacLean nurtured a serious interest in archaeology. He was president of the Butler County Geological and Archaeological Society at Hamilton, Ohio, in 1878, the author of The Mound Builders (1879), and the curator and librarian of the Western Reserve Historical Society at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1900. He continued to appeal to “the Lost Race of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys” in his popular lectures on the Mound Builders illustrated with stereopticon views, charts, and artifacts. MacLean was scornful of those who claimed to be presenting new evidence establishing that Indians were known to have built mounds. It was a fact, he wrote in January 1882, that probably no informed archaeologist ever denied. Nor was it news that there was a general correspondence between the implements made and used by the Indians and the Mound Builders. Similarities in implements and ornaments alone, MacLean argued, did not establish race or ethnic identity. Before it could be accepted that North American Indians were the descendants of the Mound Builders it first had to be shown that migratory Toltecs and Aztecs were not. The Mound Builders and Toltecs, whether considered separately or in connection with each other, assumed a cult-like status. Daniel Garrison Britton could well refer to the Mound Builders and

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Toltecs as “semi-mythical shapes in the culture-history of North America.” The Toltecan theory died a protracted death, MacLean being a prime witness.76 Mound Builder archaeology, if it may be so called, denotes a distinct regional tradition in the history of American archaeology and, more broadly, a literary tradition in American intellectual and culture history. Colonel L. J. Dupre of Austin Texas, a vice president of the first aaa and one of Peet’s correspondents in the American Antiquarian, worked within that genre. Dupre’s poem “The Silent Races,” written in 1879, captures the mood of awe and mystery brought forth in fertile imaginations such as his own. This western world her voice of might Lifts up amid her dreamless night, With weird and wondrous tone; For silent, vanished races sleep Beneath her tossing forests deep, Where hoary-headed ages sleep While restless murmurs round them creep . . . Whence came they? Wither did they go? What myriad tales of joy and woe Resound with mingled tone Above this consecrated ground That speaks with hollow ghastly sound, Its orator a nameless mound . . . No answer comes, no music rings, No Solon speaks, no Homer sings Where sleep and silence reign like kings!77 Romantic ideas regarding “vanished races” such as those bestowed on the ancient Mound Builders by Dupre did not survive the coming of the curators and professors—a more sober-minded lot by far. Such reveries, however pleasant or clever from a literary point of view, were

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a necessary casualty of placing American archaeology on a scientific footing. The professionalization and specialization of American archaeology were untidy processes and far from over. But the essential elements were discernible from the 1870s onward and synonymous with the coming of the curators and professors.

Fig. 28. (opposite) Reverend John Patterson MacLean (1848–1939). A Universalist clergyman, MacLean nurtured a serious interest in archaeology. He was president of the Butler County Geological and Archaeological Society at Hamilton, Ohio, in 1878; the author of The Mound Builders (1879); and the curator and librarian of the Western Reserve Historical Society at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1900. MacLean was scornful of those who presumably presented new evidence establishing that Indians were known to have built mounds. It was a fact, he wrote in January 1882, that probably no informed archaeologist ever denied. MacLean continued to appeal to “the Lost Race of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys” in his popular lectures on the Mound Builders illustrated with stereopticon views, charts, and artifacts. Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection.

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Notes

Prologue 1. See A. Paolucci, “Introduction,” 13–24; and Clark and H. Paolucci, “Review Article,” 180–230. 2. See Kehoe, “Paradigmatic Vision.” 3. Tax, “Development,” 1–2; Joyce, Shaping, 5; and Barnhart, Ephraim George Squier, 9–11. 4. See Lowenthal, Past, especially his discussions of reliving the past, motives for wanting to change the past and attendant problems, and antiquity and continuity as valued attributes of the past. See also Lowenthal, “Timeless Past.” 5. Dunnell, “Methodological Impacts,” 573; Trigger, “Past as Power,” 32–34; and Wilcox and Masse, “History,” 11–13. 6. Dunnell, “Methodological Impacts,” 573–74. 7. See, for example, the broad-ranging discussion of the social and political influences that impinge on archaeological science, past and present, in Pinsky and Wylie, Critical Traditions. See also the discussions of “the strong influence” of the historical, social, and political contexts as a theme in the history of American archaeology by Donald K. Grayson, Don D. Fowler, Jacob W. Gruber, Bruce G. Trigger, and Curtis M. Hinsley Jr. in Meltzer et al., American Archaeology. Although the focus of those essays centers on the history of the Society for American Archaeology between 1935 and 1985, those events are sometimes referenced relative to earlier concerns as historical prelude to later developments. See especially the first part of Trigger’s “Prehistoric Archaeology,” 187–95. As the editors of the volume appropriately note, archaeological research has a rather “extended pedigree” (p. 11). 8. Barton, “Observations,” 181; and Madison, “Letter.” 9. Barlow, The Columbiad, book 9, 113. The same publishers originally printed The Columbiad at Philadelphia and Baltimore in 1807. The Columbiad is an enlarged edition of Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus; A Poem in Nine Books (1787).

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10. Brackenridge, “Population and Tumuli,” 151 and 159. Brackenridge wrote Jefferson from Baton Rouge on July 25, 1813. The letter was read at the meeting of the American Philosophical Society held on October 1, 1813. Amos Stoddard’s commentary, sound and specious, appeared in his Sketches, 345–46. Stoddard, apart from advancing his Welsh theory in the absence of creditable proof, is also to be credited with the dubious statement that “many antiquities worthy of notice cannot be supposed to exist in Louisiana” (p. 345). The very opposite is true, as later investigations confirmed. Stoddard elaborates his views on the probable presence of a Welsh colony on the American continent on pp. 465–88. His conjectures on the presence of Welsh colonizers in North American are imaginative but unsubstantiated. Nor were they altogether original or unique to Stoddard. 11. See Butterfield, Whig Interpretation; and Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, 135. 12. Ferguson, Essay, 111; Robertson, History, vol. 1, 284; and Loewenberg, Decoding the Past, 12. On Robertson’s interpretation of non-Western cultures see Hoebel, “William Robertson.” 13. See Hallowell, “History.” Hallowell’s commentary is based upon a paper read at the Symposium on the History of Anthropology held during the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association at Chicago in November 1962. He also drew upon an earlier background paper entitled “Anthropology and the History of the Study of Man,” which he delivered before the Conference on the History of Anthropology sponsored by the Social Science Research Council of New York in April 1962. 14. Morton, “Some Observations,” 2. 15. W. Taylor, Study, 23. 16. Squier and Davis, “Ancient Monuments,” xxxiii–xxxiv. 17. The cult or pseudo-archaeology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had its counterpart in the nineteenth and elicited a comparable response from the scientific community. Many of the archaeological controversies of the nineteenth century have moved forward in time and are still with us today. Archaeologists continue to cope with them. See Feder, Encyclopedia, Frauds, “Cult Archaeology,” and “Irrationality.” Stephen Williams also thoroughly examines the subject in Fantastic Archaeology, “Fantastic Archaeology,” and “Cult Archaeology.” 18. Brinton, Anthropology, 8 and 13. 19. See Hymes, “On Studying”; Hallowell, “History”; and Darnell, Invisible Genealogies, xvii–xxvi and 1–30, and Readings, ix. See also Croissant, “Narrating Archaeology.” 20. Hymes, “On Studying.” 21. Brinton, “Nomenclature,” 263. Brinton is paraphrasing a statement about definitions of science made by the English scientist, theologian, and historian

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22.

23.

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24. 25.

26.

of science the Reverend William Whewell (1794–1866). His Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840) is the sequel to his threevolume History of the Inductive Sciences, From the Earliest to the Present Times (1837). Whewell’s pamphlet Aphorisms Concerning Ideas, Science and the Language of Science (1840) is a thirty-four page vade mecum of maxims further developed in Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Whewell’s views on the relationship between of the history and philosophy of science to scientific practice had great currency among his contemporaries and successors in both Europe and the United States. “Terminology,” said Whewell, “must be conventional, precise, constant; copious in words, and minute in distinctions, according to the needs of the science. The student must understand the terms, directly according to the convention, not through the medium of explanation or comparison” (Aphorisms, 16). Boas, “Anthropology,” 94. The best accounts of the revolution in anthropological thought occasioned by Boas’s ideas are Gilkeson, Anthropologists; and Darnell, And Along Came Boas. See also McVicker, “Matter of Saville.” The implications of Boas’s removal from the governing council of the American Anthropological Association and his forced resignation from the National Research Council in 1919 are taken up in Pinsky, “Archaeology.” Burke, “Outlines.” Burke’s Ethnological Journal, which appeared in two volumes (1848, 1854), is not to be confused with the contemporaneous Journal of the Ethnological Society of London that had a much longer run. Burke advanced the claims of ethnology as an all-inclusive science and took direct aim at the authority of Bible regarding the contested ground of human origins and antiquity. He was a strident polygenist who had this to say about his declaration of ethnological canons: “The extent and novelty of our views, and the controversies to which they are calculated to give rise, made us anxious to conceal rather than proclaim them, until an opportunity presented itself for fully stating and defending them.” A briefer statement of ethnology’s leading characteristics and claims to attention in the mid-nineteenth century, and one directly influenced by Burke, is set forth in Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon’s polemical Types of Mankind, 49. Bandelier, Romantic School, 10 and 11. A paper read before the New York Historical Society on February 3, 1885. Brinton, “Nomenclature,” abstract of an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of Washington on April, 5, 1892. Powell’s remarks appear on pp. 266–70 of Brinton’s “Nomenclature.” Brinton also drew attention to the problem of hazy nomenclature in Anthropology, 8. John Wesley Powell, comment on Brinton’s “Nomenclature and Teaching of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 5 (July 1892), 269 and 271 and Brinton, “Nomenclature,” 266.

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27. Willey and Phillips, Method and Theory, 2. The position of archaeology as a subfield of anthropology has been defined and affirmed many times over. The gradual integration of the former into the latter began toward the end of the nineteenth century yet problems of synthesis or fusion persist and will likely continue given the exigencies of specialization and self-identification among anthropologists. See Borofsky, “Four Subfields”; Cole, “NineteenthCentury Fieldwork”; and Bender, “Archaeology as Anthropology.” 28. See Trigger, “Coming of Age” and “Writing”; Christenson, Tracing Archaeology; Fahnestock, “History”; and Darnell, “Historiography.” 29. Willey and Sabloff, History, x. 30. Loewenberg, Decoding the Past, 12; and Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 5–6, 7, 9–10, 11, 12, 14, and 16. Geertz coined the phrase “thick description” to describe his own methods or interpretative approach to cultural anthropology, which describes not only human behavior but also explains the social and cultural contexts of the behavior being observed and described. Geertz decried attempts to reify or objectify the abstractions of cultural theory as if they were themselves tangible expressions of the cultures being studied. Cultures were too organic to have their essences and textures quantified and extracted with mathematical and logical precision through “ethnographic algorithm.” He could only repudiate those cultural theories by creating one of his own, but he did wrestle the inherent problems involved in the study of cultures to the ground, as it were, by providing useful principles of interpretation that owed far more to the ethnographer’s “thick description” of observable phenomena and less to formal paradigms or models of anthropology—what he referred to as “scholarly artifice.” 31. Loewenberg, Decoding the Past, 15. Leopold von Ranke made exactly the same point. “History will always be rewritten, as has often been remarked. Every age, with its main tendencies, makes history its own, and has its own ideas of it.” On the historicism of Ranke see Novick, That Noble Dream, 26–30 and 140–41. Novick’s analogy between objectivity and “nailing jelly to the wall” is discussed on pp. 1–18. See also Appleby et al., Telling the Truth. 32. Chazan, “Consequently”; Barnhart, “In His Own Right”; Hinsely Jr., “Collecting Cultures.” The “materiality” quote is from Chazan. See also Chazan’s interesting discussion of “The social life of archaeological objects.” 33. On the pervasive influence of Franz Boas and his students as a problem in the history of American anthropology see Darnell, Invisible Genealogies, 33–67; McVicker, “Prejudice and Context”; and Trigger, “Writing,” 225. 34. Trigger, History, 46. 35. See Kehoe, “Paradigmatic Vision”; Trigger, History, 46–48; Piggott, William Stukeley; Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape; and W. Taylor, “Study in Archaeology”

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36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

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43.

American Anthropologist 50, Part 2 (July 1948), 1–256. Kehoe argues for a less Whiggish, selective, and presentist interpretation of archaeology’s past particularly in reference to the 1840s. She does not disagree with the crucial importance of developments in that decade but does argue that giving such weight to their transformative nature tends to veil important continuities with earlier periods of enquiry. “What was born in the 1840s, in both Europe and the United States, was not so much a science of archaeology but the profession of archaeology in service of the modern state. Archaeological empiricism was not new, but it did take on the trappings of new respectability and legitimacy as a science given its instrumentality to the nation-state” (“Paradigmatic Vision,” 5). See also Fowler, “Uses of the Past.” Nietzsche, Complete Works, vol. 5, 27. Joyce, Shaping, 2; Griffin “Introduction,” viii–ix; Barnhart, Ephraim George Squier, 5, 65, 73, 78, 103, 179, 112–13, 190, 191–92, 207, and 340n12; and Willey and Sabloff, History, 1. Liebersohn, “Anthropology before Anthropology.” See also Hodgen, Early Anthropology; and J. S. Slotkin, Readings, vii. M. Harris, Rise, 29–31. See Browman and Williams, New Perspectives; Brew, One Hundred Years; and Hallowell, “Beginnings.” See Kuhn, Essential Tension and his earlier discussion of paradigmatic change in scientific enquiry and the role of history in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. See Oleson and Voss, Organization, especially Higham’s contribution “Matrix,” 3–18. See also Higham, From Boundlessness; Oleson and Brown, Pursuit; Daniels, “Process”; and Darnell, “Professionalization.” The Geertz quote is taken from Winkler, “Redefining Culture.” The plainspoken Geertz made that statement during the Ninety-Third Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association held at Atlanta, Georgia in 1994, where he participated in a session entitled “Rethinking the Cultural: Beyond the Intellectual Imperialisms and Parochialisms of the Past.” Geertz growled his displeasure: “I found the subtitle of this session to be peremptory, over-excited, and self-congratulatory. Our predecessors were not as blind as we sometimes portray them.” Geertz’s concern with the history of anthropology was peripheral to his other interests, yet he once gave a course on the subject during his years at the University of Chicago. He took his lead in developing the course from the historian George Stocking, a student of German historicism at a time when most American anthropologists focused almost exclusively on the genesis of their discipline from the philosophy of British utilitarianism. Geertz attacked two ideas in those lectures: 1) “the notion that anthropology comes mainly out of British utilitarianism”; and 2)

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the largely unexamined idea “that the only ancestors of anthropologists are other anthropologists.” Both assumptions, he said, needed to be cleared away. Another acknowledged influence on Geertz in teaching the history of anthropology was A. L. Kroeber, a former student of Boas, who shared Geertz’s interest in German historicism, idealism, and the neo-Kantian movement. Handler, “Interview with Clifford Geertz,” 609. 44. Davis to Squier, Chillicothe, June 12, 1847, Ephraim George Squier Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, dc . Cited hereafter as splc. 45. Lesley, “Early Records,” 677. 1. American Antiquities 1. Thwaites, “Marquette’s First Voyage,” 139 and 141. 2. See Reilly and Garber, Ancient Objects; Townsend, Hero; and Lepper and Frolking, “Alligator Mound.” A good general account for pictographs or rock-painting is Dewdney and Kidd, Indian Rock Paintings, and the second edition issued by the same publisher in 1967. 3. Stoddard, Sketches, 17; and Parkman, Discovery of the Great West, 59n1. 4. Mather, “Epistle Dedicatory,” which includes a rude sketch of the first line of characters on p. viii. 5. Mather, “Extract.” Mather’s description of the Dighton Rock is on pp. 70 and 71, and his drawings of two of the characters appear as fig. 8 on an unpaginated plate facing p. 61. He sent his communication to the society in November 1712. 6. See Swanton, Final Report. The Smithsonian Institution reprinted the report in 1985 as a volume in the Classics of Smithsonian Anthropology series with an introduction by Jeffrey P. Brain and a foreword by William C. Sturtevant. 7. Silverberg, Mound Builders, 7. 8. Shea, “Voyages,” 43–44. Marquette’s original journal of his expedition to the Mississippi is in the archives of St. Mary’s College, Montreal. 9. See for example Shaffer, Native Americans, 89, where she makes the impossible statement that they were “an Algonquian-speaking people closely related to the Cherokee and Iroquois [both of whom spoke different dialects of the Iroquoian-language family].” They either had to be Algonquian- or Iroquoianspeaking people (or perhaps a Siouan-speaking one?) but they could not be both Algonquian and closely related to the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee and Iroquois proper. On the depopulation of the Illinois Country and the Central Mississippi Valley between roughly 1500 and the arrival of Marquette and Jolliet in 1673 see Young and Fowler, Cahokia, 315; O’Brien and

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

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17.

18.

Dunnell, Changing Perspectives; Morse and Morse, Archaeology, 17, 316, and 320; and Blasingham, “ Depopulation . . . Part 1” and “Depopulation . . . Part 2.” Bakeless, Eyes of Discovery, 330 and 340. Bakeless at one place (p. 330) identifies the party as a band of one of the Algonquian-speaking Illinois tribes, which seems a more likely attribution than the distant Tuscarora given their location, but one that still gets no support from Marquette as the source. Yet at another place (p. 340), apparently based on the authority of Shea’s conjecture as to who those people were, he says that “presently the Frenchmen began to meet Indians who dressed and acted more or less like Iroquois. Though Father Marquette’s journal does not identify them they were, it is clear that they were Tuscarora [there is nothing clear about it at all], friends and close relatives of the Five Nations of New York, who about 150 years later, were to move to New York, join their kinsmen, and change the Five Nations into the Six Nations.” Why the Tuscarora? Louis Hennepin’s Nouvelle Découverte d’un très grand Pays, situé dans l’Amérique (1697) and his Nouveau Voyage d’un Pais plus grand que l’Europe (1698) were combined in an English translation published in a single volume in two parts. See Hennepin, New Discovery. Benjamin Smith Barton’s comments on Hennepin appear in his Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, 22–26. The extracts from Hennepin’s New Discovery preceding Atwater’s account of American antiquities are Hennepin, “Account of the Discovery” and “Account of La Salle’s Undertaking.” Willis, “Louis Hennepin.” See also Winsor, “Father Louis Hennepin.” Haven, “Archaeology,” 18–19; and Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 183. See Masthay, Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French Dictionary. Reviewed by Adelaar, “Review.” Shea, Early Voyages, 118. Shea, Early Voyages, 126 and 136. See especially the critical historical method applied to this issue by Delanglez in Some La Salle Journeys; and Shea, Bursting. Joseph-Gapard Chaussegros de Léry (1682–1756) is not to be confused with his son of the same name (1721–1797), who was also a military engineer. De Léry the younger undertook a reconnaissance expedition from Presqu’ Isle (Erie, Pennsylvania) to Detroit between July and August 1754, and from Detroit to Fort Duquesne in March 1755. The original journal recording Léry’s reconnaissance in 1754 and 1755 is at Laval University in Quebec. See de Léry, Journal. Bellin, Remarques, 120–21n85, “Je dois le detail Topograhique du cours de cette riviere a M. de Lery, Ingenieur, qui la releva a la Boussole lorqu’il la descenditun detachment de Troupes Françoises en 1729.”

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19. Lambing, “Celoron’s Journal,” 349, 382n41, 385n48, and 386n48. The original journal of Céloron is in the Public Library of Paris. Mary Darlington published the journal based on a copy of the original made by Pierre Margy with explanatory notes by William M. Darlington. See Darlington, Fort Pitt, 9–62; and Marshall, “De Celoron’s Expedition.” 20. Evans, “General Map.” Evans published the engraved map on June 23, 1755, in accordance with an act of Parliament. R. Donsley sold the map in Pall Mall, London, and Evans sold copies in Philadelphia. See Gipson, Lewis Evans. 21. Stevens, Lewis Evans, 3. 22. Evans, Analysis, 31. 23. Pownall, Topographical Description. 24. Clarence Walworth Alvord and Clarence Edwin Carter reprinted Gordon’s journal of his trip down the Ohio in Alvord and Carter, New Regime. 25. Stevens, Lewis Evans, ix. 26. Evans, Analysis, 13. 27. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 45, 209. 28. Brose, “Later Prehistoric Societies,” 110–11; “Whittlesey Tradition,” 25–47; and “Introduction,” 1–23. Excellent discussions of the archaeological and historical evidence bearing on what is known and not known about the Erie and their settlements are Cardinal, “Elusive Erie Indians”; Cardinal and Cardinal, “Archaeology and History”; Brose, “History as Handmaiden”; and Bush and Callender, “Anybody but the Erie.” See also several works on Erie history and culture by Marian E. White: “Erie”; “Ethnic Identification”; and “Iroquois Culture.” 29. Kalm, Travels (1770–71) and Travels (1772). The pagination cited hereafter is from the second edition in two volumes published at London in 1772. 30. Kalm, Travels, vol. 1, 339–46. Based upon Kalm’s description of those artifacts Nels Christian Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History noted that some of the lithic material “hinted strongly of Quaternary age.” Nelson, “Antiquity of Man in America,” 90. The problem of antiquity in America or the time-depth of occupancy—how long had American Indians been present in the New World?—was a defining issue for American archaeology in the nineteenth century. But it was not an answerable question for Kalm and his contemporaries. There were no datable typologies of artifacts or baseline references of any kind available to them. Kalm said about as much about his artifact collection as an intelligent observer could then have said. 31. Kalm, Travels, vol. 2, 276–77. 32. This and the following paragraph relating to the La Vérendrye expedition is based on Kalm, Travels, vol. 2, 277–82.

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33. Dunbar, Essays, 119 and 134; Lort, “Account”; Vallancy, “Observations”; and Barton, Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, 7–10. 34. Forster’s explanatory note stating his Tartar theory appears in Kalm, Travels, vol. 2, 280n. It is clearly signed “F” for Forster in keeping with editorial convention. Both Panchanan Mitra and Stephen Williams have previously noted Haven’s error in crediting those opinions to Kalm instead of Forster. Mitra, History, 26; and Williams, Fantastic Archaeology, 288n6. Forster also related the hypothesis in his History of the Voyages and Discoveries Made in the North, 43n. 35. See Diaz- Granados and Duncan, Rock-Art; and the following works by Swauger: “Petroglyph”; Petroglyphs of Ohio; and “Petroglyphs.” 36. Dr. Thomas Walker, Journal of an Exploration in the Spring of Year 1750 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1888), 49. Entry for April 27, 1750. Microfilm of the original forty-page journal is in the Thomas Walker Papers, 1744–1835, Accession #9996, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville. 37. Adair, History (1775), 185n and 377–78. 38. Drake, Book, 9; and Powell, “Introductory,” xxxi. The letter of transmittal for the Second Annual Report from Powell to Spencer Fullerton Baird is dated September 9, 1882. 39. Carver, Travels, 56–59. 40. Barton, Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, 14–15 and 71n[H]; Tyler, Literary History, 149–50; and Bourne, “Travels.” 41. De Schwenitz, Life, 371–72, 433, and 436n. 42. Zeisberger, “David Zeisberger’s History,” 30–31. 43. Bartram, “Diary,” 45, and Account, 25. 44. A comprehensive account of Bartram’s archaeological and ethnological observations is Waselkov and Braund, William Bartram. 45. Bartram, Travels, 99–100. 46. Such “avenues” or “roads” were not unique to the American Southeast. Similar prehistoric constructions exist in the American Southwest, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the upper Mississippi Valley. See for example Lepper, “Tracking Ohio’s Great Hopewell Road.” Lepper’s account is based on aerial reconnaissance, infrared photography, and historic descriptions and surveys of a prehistoric Hopewell roadway that extends in parallel lines for nearly sixty miles from Newark, Ohio, to Chillicothe. 47. Squier and Davis, “Ancient Monuments”; and Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New-York,” 135–40; Serpent Symbol, chap. 3, 94–97nE; and “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians.” 48. A ninety-four-page manuscript copy of the Bartram manuscript, including five pen tracings, is in the National Anthropological Archives of the

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49. 50.

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53. 54.

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Smithsonian Institution. See William Bartram, “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” Philadelphia, December 15, 1789, United States National Museum Catalog Number 173,683, Accession Number 31,588. J. Woodbridge Davis, son of Edwin Hamilton Davis, made the copy sometime before its donation to the National Museum in 1898. It is based on yet another copy he found in his father’s papers. J. Woodbridge Davis to Thomas Wilson, New York, February 11, 1898, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. A second copy of the Bartram manuscript, the one Squier used in publishing Bartram’s account in the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society in 1853, is in the Charles Colcock Jones Jr. Family Papers ms 215, Series 5: Manuscripts, Box 13, bound copy, “Account of the Indians of the South with A Description of the Aboriginal Monuments of the Southern States,” by William Bartram, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries. See Williams, “E. G. Squier’s Manuscript Copy.” [Jones,] “Plan,” 29. Jones, Journal, 56–57. Isaac Collins originally printed and sold Jones’s account at Burlington, New Jersey, in 1774. [Jones,] “Plan,” 29. Gill and Curtis, Man Apart, 52. We know far too little about Cresswell (1750– 83) before his arrival in America. His motives for emigrating with the intention of becoming a permanent resident are not entirely clear, though his ambition to make something handsome for himself as speculator in western lands for the ill-fated Illinois Company and as an Indian trader is clear enough. He was an astute and often humorous observer whose journal is a remarkable source relating to the Revolutionary Era owing to its intimate details and candid commentary. Cresswell—a twenty-four-year-old gentleman farmer from Derbyshire, England—arrived in Virginia in May 1774 and initially tried his hand at farming in northwest Virginia. He next sought his fortune by surveying, buying, and selling western lands, and trading with the Indians in western Pennsylvania and the region immediately northwest of the Ohio River. The rising tide of revolutionary sentiment in Virginia and elsewhere foiled the plans of the Illinois Company to establish a new British colony at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Impassioned talk of liberty and political independence forced Cresswell to hide his loyalist sentiments and he withheld allegiance to both the patriot and loyalist causes, both of which threatened his business interests. As he observed, “I am obliged to act the Hypocrite” (Man Apart, 27). Quotes in this and the following paragraph are taken from McClure, Diary, 91–92 and 98. Wilson, “Evolution,” 112, 119, and 123; and Jefferson, Notes (1955), xi.

Notes to pages 73–79

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55. Charles Thomson to Jefferson, Philadelphia, March 9, 1782, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, 163–64. 56. See Bushnell, “Five Monacan Towns.” 57. Pellerin, “Righting History”; Bushnell, “Five Monacan,” 20; “ ‘Indian Grave,’ ” 107. See also Hantman and Dunham, “Enlightened Archaeologist”; and Hantman, “Ancient and Historic Archaeology,” 112–13. 58. Jefferson, Notes (1787), 97–98. All subsequent citations are from the 1787 edition. 59. Jefferson, Notes, 98–100; and Hantman and Dunham, “Enlightened Archaeologist,” 47. 60. Roger Kennedy advanced the hypothesis that Jefferson incorporated published plans of the circular and octagonal earthworks of Ohio into the architecture and landscape of his home at Popular Forest. The author’s thesis is original but far from compelling. See Kennedy, “Thomas Jefferson.” 61. Jefferson to Stiles, September 1, 1786, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10, 316. 62. Jefferson, Notes, 101–2. 63. Jefferson, Notes, 102. It was in pursuit of that question that Jefferson compiled lists of Native vocabularies, only to tragically lose them when his wagons were pilfered on his return to Monticello at the end of his presidency in 1809. 64. Pennell, “Benjamin Smith Barton,” 112. 65. Charles Thomson to Jefferson, New York, April 28, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11, 323–44 and 324n. The extract of the letter by John Cleves Symmes sent to Jefferson by Thomson dated Louisville, Kentucky, February 4, 1787. The entire Symmes to Thomson letter is reprinted in Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1878, 233–39. 66. Jefferson to Charles Thomson, Paris, September 20, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12, 159–61. 67. Lehmann-Hartleben, “Thomas Jefferson”; Wheeler, Archaeology, ii, and 41– 43; Willey and Sabloff, History, 33; and Taylor, Study, 22. See also Stiebing, “Who First Excavated Stratigraphically?”; and more generally Bedini, Jefferson and Science and Thomas Jefferson; Martin, Thomas Jefferson; and Hantman and Dunham, “Enlightened Archaeologist,” 49. 68. Filson, Discovery, 97–98; and Adair, History (1775), 424–25. 69. Daniels, Science, 145–46; “An Act to Incorporate and Establish a Society for the Cultivation and Promotion of Arts and Sciences,” in Manuel and Manuel, James Bowdoin, 5 and appendix 1, 257; and Bowdoin, “Philosophical Discourse,” 1–3, 4n, and 17. Benjamin Edes and Sons originally published Bowdoin’s presidential discourse at Boston in 1780 under a slightly different title. The pagination cited here is from the first volume of the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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70. Bowdoin, “Philosophical Discourse,” 5 and 6. 71. Bowdoin, “Philosophical Discourse,” 6–7. 2. Rediscovering the Mounds 1. Butler’s original pocket diaries, dating from November 1777 to March 1786, are in the Lyman Copeland Draper Manuscripts, Draper mss 3u 322, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Neville B. Craig edited and printed the diary relating to Butler’s trip down the Ohio River in the fall of 1785 as “Journal of General Butler,” Olden Time 2 (October 1847): 433–64. The quotes are taken from Craig, “Journal of General Butler,” 439. 2. Samuel Holden Parsons to Ezra Stiles, Middletown, Connecticut, April 27, 1786, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9, 478. “True Copy Ezra Stiles” appears at the close of the letter and on the verso in Stiles’s hand appears the statement: “General Parson’s Letter to President Stiles [in] 1786.” 3. Ezra Stiles to Thomas Jefferson, with enclosure, Yale College, May 8, 1786 in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9, 476. Stiles received Parsons’s plan of the Muskingum works in a letter dated May 5, 1786. It is reproduced in the same volume facing p. 419. The copy of Parsons’s drawing that Stiles sent to Jefferson is in the Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1. General Correspondence, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington dc . The plan is an enclosure that bears the date of May 3, 1786, which is apparently the date on which Stiles copied it. 4. Parsons, “Discoveries.” Parsons’s letter to Willard is reprinted in Hall, Life, 489–94. The pagination cited here is from the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 5. “Discoveries,” 119 and 121. 6. “Discoveries,” 122 and 124. 7. “Discoveries,” 125. 8. Winthrop Sargent to George Washington, Marietta, November 27, 1789, in Carter, Territorial Papers, 222–23; and Ebenezer Denny to Josiah Harmar, Pittsburgh, November 22, 1789, in Denny, Military Journal, 242. Parsons and an unidentified companion canoed to the salt springs on a branch of the Big Beaver River the morning of November 17, 1789. By about noon of the same day, a detachment of soldiers found what was left of the shattered canoe together with several articles of baggage known to belong to Parsons. Both the remains of the canoe and the bags were floating down stream. It is believed that the canoe capsized while trying to navigate the falls of the Beaver. A two-day search of the stream failed to find the bodies. 9. Butterfield, Journal, vii–xv; and Hall, Life, 493. 10. Josiah Harmar to Thomas Mifflin, Fort Pitt, March 17, 1787, in Denny, Military Journal, 217.

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11. Heart, “Account.” 12. Heart, “Account,” 427. 13. Heart, “Letter.” Barton read the communication before the American Philosophical Society on February 3, 1792. Gilbert Imlay reprinted Heart’s letter to Barton in his Topographical Description, 296–300. 14. Heart, “Letter,” 214. 15. Stiles, Literary Diary, 422, entry for July 14, 1791. 16. Heart, “Letter,” 216–17. 17. Romans, Concise Natural History, 58 and 71; Adair, History (1775), 195; Gregg, Commerce, 235; Brinton, Myths, 225–26, and “National Legend,” 118–26. Henry B. Dawson, editor and publisher of the Historical Magazine, reprinted Brinton’s account of the Chahta-Muskokee tradition as a pamphlet at Morrisania, New York, in April 1870. See also Gatschet, Migration. 18. Winthrop Sargent to James Bowdoin, Boston, March 27, 1787, published as Sargent, “Plan of an Ancient Fortification,” 25–28. Sargent’s engraved map is annexed to p. 28 and is unpaginated. The engraving or lithograph is by Tappan and Bradford lithographers of Boston, which dates the engraving based on Sargent’s manuscript drawing to the time of its publication in 1853 (Tappan and Bradford worked in Boston during the 1850s). The engraved map is further dated by the appearance of “Marietta, Ohio” in the title. Marietta had not yet been founded when Sargent submitted his original communication on March 24, 1787. Sargent’s letter enclosing the plan identifies it only as a drawing of the ruins of an ancient town or fortified camps near the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers per n13. 19. See Winthrop Sargent, Communication 57, Letter to James Bowdoin, “enclosing Plan of the ruins of an ancient town or fortified camp near the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers,” March 24, 1787, Series 1-c -2: Communications to the Academy (unbound), 1767–1932, Archives of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have not had the opportunity to compare Sargent’s manuscript drawing of the Muskingum works in the archives of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to the published lithograph by Tappan and Bradford that appeared in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1853. 20. Sargent, “Plan,” 27–28. 21. Winthrop Sargent to William Maxwell, Cincinnati, September 2, 1794, in the Centinel of the North-Western Territory, September 6, 1794, n.p. [p. 2, col. 3 to p. 3, col. 1.] 22. Jeremy Belknap to Winthrop Sargent, Boston, November 1, 1791, in the Centinel of the North-Western Territory, September 6, 1794, n.p. [p. 3 cols. 1 and 2.] 23. The original drawings of artifacts recovered during the excavation of the mound at Cincinnati on August 30, 1794, are in the Winthrop Sargent Papers

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24.

25. 26.

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27.

28.

29. 30.

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at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus. See mss 11, box 3, folder 11, Archives-Library Division, Ohio Historical Society. Also available as microfilm 96, series 11, reel 4. The drawings, or at least copies of them, appeared as an engraving in both the Massachusetts Magazine and the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. See Sargent, “American Antiquities”; the plate of engraved objects recovered in the excavation faces p. 195 and is unpaginated; Sargent, “Letter” and “Drawing.” Turner, “Remarks,” 76; written at Philadelphia on November 25, 1799, and read before the society on December 6, 1799; Little, “Enquiry”; and Heart, “Letter,” 221. Adair, History (1775), 218; Braund, “James Adair”; Hudson, “James Adair”; Washburn, “Clash of Morality” and “James Adair’s ‘Noble Savage.’ ” Hume, Philosophical Essays, 133–34; and “A Pennsylvanian” [Benjamin Rush], Address, 24–25. And more generally see Schneider, Scottish Moralists. “Donations received by the American Philosophical Society,” xxviii–xxx; and Phillips, “Early Proceedings.” The original manuscript minutes on which Phillips’s account is based are found in “Minutes and By-Laws of the American Philosophical Society,” Record Group 1, American Philosophical Society Archives. The Turner donation numbered twenty-five items, the bulk of which were ethnological materials. Since the materials from the Missouri and Tennessee Countries lay beyond the Northwest Territory it unclear whether Turner collected those articles himself during travels unrelated to his official duties as a judge or whether they were provided to him by traders and soldiers who knew his interest in the customs of American Indians. The archaeological items were a stone pestle and stone hatchet from unspecified locations, and marine shells and perforated bones removed from “an ancient Indian grave on the Great Kanawha River.” The donation also included “an Indian bowl taken out of the bed of the Tennessee” but does not say whether the bowl was fashioned from stone, pottery, or wood. Included among the ethnological items was a “specimen of Indian sculpture in wood, resembling the Beaver; from the Kaskaskia nation,” eight arrows used by the Miami Indians and neighboring tribes, and “various Indian arrows from the North Western Territory.” Jon. Williams, Chairman, printed circular, Philosophical Hall, Philadelphia, n.d. [1797], Broadside Collection, 973 c 683:106, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; Turner, “Memoir,” “Remarks,” and Traits. Turner’s interest in topography and natural history is further exemplified in his “Description.” A theme elaborated in Martinko, “So Majestic.” G. Turner to Winthrop Sargent, Philadelphia, June 15, 1787, box 1, folder 2, Winthrop Sargent Papers, mss 11, Archives-Library Division, Ohio

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32. 33.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. Also available on microfilm 96, series 2, roll 1. Barton, Observations on Some Parts of Natural History. No publication date appears on the title page of Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, but Barton himself gives the year of publication as 1787 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 178n. The publication date of 1787 is further confirmed by a notice of the work appearing in the Critical Review of London published in October 1787. Barton, Collections, v. Read before the Philadelphia Medical Society on February 21, 1798. “Obligation [Membership] Book,” Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh, December 2, 1785, Forty-Ninth Session. Barton’s name appears as the third junior president of the Royal Medical Society during the Fifty-First Session, 1787–88; Barton, “Essay” and “American Albinos.” Photocopies of both dissertations, sixteen pages each, are in the American Philosophical Society, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, 1668–1983, Mss. ms Coll. 200. The treatise on American albinos is unsigned but the two appendixes to the essay are signed by Barton, whose signature appears on p. 213. Neither essay is dated but the records of the Royal Medical Society and internal evidence suggest that they were both written in 1788 during his last year at Edinburgh. The author wishes to thank Ms. Elizabeth Singh, permanent secretary of the Royal Medical Society at Edinburgh, for providing him with copies of both of Barton’s handwritten dissertations and other information regarding his activities during his rather shadowy years as a medical student at Edinburgh. Barton, Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, 65–67. [Smollett,] “Observations,” 260 and 261. Barton, Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, iv and 66. Barton, “Observations and Conjectures,” 186n. Barton, Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, [i]. See Barton, “View,” frontispiece. Several other contributions to the Columbian Magazine were attributed to Barton followed between 1788 and 1790. See Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, appendix 1: “Bibliography of Barton’s Writings,” 877–78. Barton, “Notes on the Pennsylvania Western Boundary Survey, 1785,” Benjamin Smith Barton Papers, 0034, Box Number 3, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The author wishes to thank Ms. Sara A. Borden of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for locating these almost-forgotten notes and for providing me a copy of the original. Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 121. Barton occupied himself in October 1785 with surveying and sketching the drainages of the Big Beaver and the Little Beaver Creeks in western Pennsylvania. If he reconnoitered those creeks to their headwaters, which seems

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42.

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43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

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probable, that would have put him into what is today the state of Ohio (near present-day East Liverpool). But that still does not put him anywhere near the mouth of the Muskingum. Barton’s statement that he obtained the plan and description of the Muskingum works appearing in his Observations on Some Parts of Natural History from Tilton will have to do. Further speculation in the matter seems unwarranted. Jeffries, “Biographical Note.” Barton received an honorary medical degree from the University of Kiel, but there is no record of him receiving a degree from either the University of Göttingen or the University of Edinburgh. Unanswered questions concerning the shadowy history of Barton’s medical education are examined in Bell, “Benjamin Smith Barton.” Benjamin Smith Barton, “Proposals for Printing, by Subscription, an Historical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Original [i.e., Origin], Nature, and Design of Various Remains of Antiquity, Which Have Been Discovered in America,” Philadelphia, December 22, 1789, Broadside Collection, American Philosophical Society, mss b b 284.d. The printed prospectus was originally enclosed within a letter from Barton to Thomas Pennant dated August 30, 1790, soliciting a subscription for Barton’s proposed publication on American antiquities, which is in the Benjamin Smith Barton Papers at the American Philosophical Society. Barton, “Observations and Conjectures,” 186–87 and 186–87n. Barton, “Observations and Conjectures,” 187, 187n, and 188. Barton, “Observations and Conjectures,” 188 and 190. Brerewood, Enquiries, 96–97; and Gage, New Survey, 162. Originally published under the title of The English-American[,] His Travail by Sea and Land: Or, A New Survey of the West-India’s (London: Printed by R. Coates, 1648). Brerewood argued that the aboriginal peoples of America were the descendants of the Tartars, who migrated from northeastern Asia via “a narrow channell of the Ocean” where the two continents were the least disjoined by water. But Brerewood rejected the theory advanced by the accomplished French linguist Guillaume Postel, an authority on Hebrew and other Semitic languages, who argued in De originibus seu de hebraicae lingua (1538) that the Tartars were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. Brerewood, Enquiries 94–102. See Kidd, British Identities, 39; and Parfitt, Lost Tribes, 68. Barton, New Views, xcv–xcvi. Barton, “Observations and Conjectures,” 188–91; and Charlevoix, Journal, vol. 2, 273–74. See Brose et al., Societies. Accepting the conventional definition of “eclipse” as “a reduction or loss of splendor, status, reputation, etc.; any obscuring by overshadowing” (p. xiii) as an apt metaphor for changes afoot in the late prehistoric and early history periods, the editors and contributors to the

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51. 52. 53.

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volume analyze the cultural history of the Eastern Woodland from the close of the fifteenth century through the shadowy period of protohistory and contact in different regions of North America during the sixteenth century. Barton would not have dissented from their metaphor nor several of the their conclusions, even though the world described in Societies in Eclipse was, for all intents and purposes, a closed book for Barton and his generation. The following analysis is based on Webster, “Antiquity,” “Antiquity. Letter II,” and “Antiquity. Letter III”; Stiles, “Extract” and “Letter”; and Webster, “To the Revd. Ezra Stiles.” Webster, “Antiquity. Letter III,” 146–48. Webster, “Antiquity. Letter III,” 151–52. Stiles, “Letter,” 291, 292, and 293. Webster sent Stiles a copy of William Robert’s An Account of the First Discovery, and Natural History of Florida (1763) containing his account of the De Soto expedition, which Stiles received on February 20, 1788. Webster himself, however, was disappointed to discover that it lacked the necessary details as to distances and routes of travel. Stiles, Literary Diary, 306, entry for February 20, 1788. Stiles, “Letter,” 294. [Belknap,] “Columbian Magazine.” The author of the anonymous article was unquestionably Belknap. The introduction is almost word for word the same as the phrasing in parts of his Discourse. [Belknap,] “Columbian Magazine,” 488. Webster, “To the Editor,” written in response to Belknap’s observations on De Soto’s travels and in agreement with them; and Webster, Collection, 205. See essay 16, “Remarks on the Method of Burying the Dead among the Natives of this Country, Compared with that among the Ancient Britons. Being an Extract of a Letter to the Rev. Dr. Stiles, President of Yale College, dated New York, January 20, 1788,” 205–16. Webster, Collection, 152. Webster, Collection, 152–53 and 154–55. Mather, Way to Prosperity, 34, and Magnalia Christi Americana, 3. See Key, “The ‘Boast of Antiquity,’ ” which notes Mather’s rhetorical use of the Madoc legend to advance the interests and claims of New England by claiming a prior right of discovery. See Lauzon, “Welsh Indians and Savage Scots”; Deacon, Madoc; Williams, “Welsh Wizard”; and Williams, Madoc. Oxford University Press republished Williams’s Madoc in 1987. Stuart, “Narrative.” Stuart certified in a signed statement at New York dated June 2, 1783, that his narrative was “a just and true state[ment] of facts” but the authenticity of his fabulous tale has long been disputed. See Williams, “John Evans’ Strange Journey: Part I” and “John Evans’ Strange Journey: Part II”; and Smith, “Notes and Documents.”

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63. Williams, Enquiry and Farther Observations. See also Catlin, Letters, vol. 1, 206, and vol. 2, appendix A: “The Welsh Colony,” 259–61. Wiley and Putnam originally published Catlin’s Letters at New York in 1841. 64. Untitled and undated manuscript [ca. 1788] initialed “G. R. C.” in Schoolcraft, Historical, vol. 4, 133–36. Clark must have seen a notice or summary of that exchange in Cary’s American Museum, which prompted him to draft a letter to Cary in response. All of Webster’s letters appeared in the American Magazine between December 1787 and July 1788, hence the attributed date of circa 1788 for Clarke’s undated letter published by Schoolcraft in 1856. Cary continued to publish the American Museum until 1792, however, so Clark’s letter conceivably could have been drafted sometime between 1789 and 1792, but no later. Circa 1788 seems a more likely approximation of the year but is admittedly an uncertain date. 65. An excellent synopsis of the debate following the publication of Dobyns’s “Estimating” and Dobyns’s later work down to the time of publication is Roberts, “Disease and Death.” 66. Scholarship on the subject is ample. See Brose et al., Societies; Snow and Lanphear, “European Contact”; Ramenovsky, Vectors of Death; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust; Dobyns, Their Numbers; McNeil, Plagues; Denevan, Native Populations; and several works by Crosby: Columbian Exchange, Ecological Imperialism, and “Infectious Disease.” Robert C. Dunnell’s critique of the ahistorical nature of much of the archaeological debate on the topic in the 1980s and early 1990s appears in his “Methodological Impacts,” 561–80. 67. Manasseh Cutler to Putnam, December 3, 1787, in Cutler, Life, vol. 1, 374–76. The 1987 reissue of these two volumes is printed from the original edition and pagination published at Cincinnati by Robert Clarke and Company in 1888. Concerning the name Adelphi and Marietta, see “Extract of a letter from a gentleman at the Muskingum, to the printer of the Massachusetts Spy, written on the spot where the first city of that territory is to be built,” Adelphi, May 16, 1788, appendix 15 of Imlay, Topographical Description, 595– 98 (internal evidence suggests that the letter was probably written by Rufus Putnam); Morse, American Geography, 458n; and “resolved , That the City near the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum, be called marietta ,” Meeting of the Directors and Agents of the Ohio Company, Banks of the Muskingum, July 2, 1788, Hulbert, Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, vol. 1, 50. 68. See Rufus Putnam, “Plan of Part of Marietta, with Remains of Ancient Works,” n.d. [September 1788]; and “Copy of the References of the Plat of Marietta,” Rufus Putnam Papers, mss 002, box 3, folder 10, items 11 and 10 respectively, Special Collections, Marietta College Library. Also present in

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69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

box 10 of the Putnam Papers are Putnam’s minutes of the survey of the Quadranaou mound (item 9), notes concerning trees on or near the Sacra Via embankment (item 8), questions concerning the mounds at Marietta (item 6), and an undated draft letter from Putnam to “Dear Sir” regarding the ancient works at Marietta (item 5). All the contents of box 10 are undated, but the survey of the ancient works at the Muskingum made by Putnam in the company of Cutler occurred on September 6, 1788, which was no doubt the basis of his “Plan of Part of Marietta, with Remains of Ancient Works.” Putnam was a native of Massachusetts and a cousin of the revolutionary officer Israel Putnam. He learned surveying as a military engineer during the American Revolution and became a director of the Ohio Company of Associates. He led the first group of Ohio Company settlers that arrived at the mouth of the Muskingum on April 7, 1788. Putnam later became surveyor general of the United States from 1796 to 1803 and a delegate to the Ohio constitutional convention of 1802. Cutler, Life, vol. 1, 418–19 and 419n; and vol. 2, 16 and 254. Cutler gave a further account of his examination of the Marietta earthworks during the ordination of Daniel Story at Hamilton, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1798; see his Sermon, 34–36 and 35n. Cutler’s dimensions of the earthworks are based on the survey made by Rufus Putnam. His account of the opening of the large mound and the recovery of a human skeleton is taken from a letter he received from Winthrop Sargent. Cutler to Rufus Putnam, Hamilton, Massachusetts, October 31, 1798, in Cutler, Life, vol. 2, 9. Stiles, “Letter,” 294, and Cutler, Life, vol. 2, 248–49, 251–53, and 254–56. Cutler, Life, vol. 2, 1. Cutler, Life, vol. 2, 17. Kirkland, Journals, 141; and Lothrop, “Life,” 281 and 283–85. See Bell, Travels, 208–11. Cutler to Jeremy Belknap, Ipswich [Massachusetts], March 6, 1789, in Life, vol. 2, 249; and Belknap to Cutler, Boston, March 13, 1789, in Life, vol. 2, 251–52. Cutler to Jeremy Belknap, Ipswich [Massachusetts], March 19, 1789 in Life, vol. 2, 253. See Hulbert, Records, vol. 1, 51 and 208; and vol. 2, 80. Hildreth, “Ancient Mound,” 342. MacLean, “Ancient Works,” 38. Morse, American Geography, 463. Jefferson et al., “Circular Letter.” The circular is undated but addressed to certain individuals “during the last year”; that is, sometime in 1798.

3. Antiquaries, Ideas, and Institutions 1. Madison, “Letter,” 132–42. 2. Madison, “Letter,” 133.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

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21. 22.

23.

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Madison, “Letter,” 136–37. Madison, “Letter,” 137. Madison, “Letter,” 138. Madison, “Letter,” 141. Harris, Journal, 148. Harris, Journal, 158–59. A sharply argued nineteenth-century account of the identity and supposed migrations of the Toltecs as an anthropological problem is Brinton’s “Were the Toltecs an Historic Nationality?,” read before the American Philosophical Society on September 2, 1887. Brinton there argues that the traditional story of Tula and its inhabitants (the Toltecs) is a myth and not history, a position he earlier took in the first edition of his Myths of the New World, chap. 6. Brinton continued to make that argument in subsequent writings, especially in American Hero-Myths, 35 and 82– 91. Harris, Journal, 175–76. Haven, “Archaeology,” 31. Flint, Recollections, 164–66; Brown, Western Gazetteer, 305; and Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments, 6–7 and 7n. James, Account, vol. 1, 11. James, Account, vol. 1, 59–60. Keating, Narrative, vol. 1, 45. “Plan of an Ancient Fortification.” J. C. [Reverend John Poage Campbell], “Ruins.” Short, “Antiquities.” See also Short’s “Description.” The letters are signed only with the initial “C.,” but Clifford is identified as the author in the obituary published in the Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine 2 (June 1820): 309–10. See Boewe, John D. Clifford. See D. Shapiro, “Daniel Drake,” xi–xxii. Drake, Natural, 199 and 208; and Brown, Western Gazetteer, 282–83. Drake enumerates the articles that had been at various times removed from the mound at Third and Main Streets in Natural and Statistical View, 205–7. Greve, Centennial History, 538, 642, and 903. Slack et al., “Address”; “An Address to the People of the Western Country,” Liberty Hall & Cincinnati Gazette, September 15, 1818; “An Address to the People of the Western Country,” handbill bearing the signature of Daniel Drake as secretary of the Western Museum Society, Cincinnati, 1818, v p 393, Archives-Library Division, the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; and “Scientific Institution in Cincinnati.” By June 1820, Peyton S. Symmes had also become a manager of the Western Museum Society. Daniel Drake, “Medical Diary or Common Place Book,” Bound Manuscript, Philadelphia, 1806, 123–24 ms b 123, U.S. National Library of Medicine,

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24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

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32.

33. 34.

National Health Institutes, Bethesda, Maryland; and Benjamin Smith Barton to Rev. Joseph Priestly, Philadelphia, May 16th, 1796, published as Drake, “Observations and Conjectures,” 188. Drake, Natural, 218. [Wilson,] “Extract.” Wilson’s unsigned letter to the Port Folio is dated Lexington, April 4, 1810. Mansfield, Memoirs, 135. On the history of the Western Museum see Dunlop, “Curiosities”; Tucker, “ ‘Ohio Show- Shop’ ”; Hendrickson, “Western Museum Society”; Hendrickson, “Western Museum Society of Cincinnati,” and Kellogg, “Joseph Dorfeuille.” The accounts by Dunlop and Tucker are by far the most analytic and useful. Dorfeuille’s interests and activities as a naturalist and entomologist are somewhat sketchily attested in “To Correspondents,” “Entomology,” and “Natural History.” The March 25, 1819, agreement between the Western Museum and Cincinnati College is reproduced in Venable, Beginnings, 310–11. Drake, Anniversary. Drake dedicated the address to William Steele, who first proposed the establishment of “a permanent” museum in Cincinnati and who contributed more than any other person to its organization and support. Drake’s anniversary discourse is reprinted without the dedication and with different pagination in his Physician, 131–50. See Drake, “Introductory Lecture.” The Port Folio of Philadelphia also published the lecture under a slightly different title: “On the Utility and Pleasures of the Study of Mineralogy and Geology.” Drake also expatiated on the subjects of mineralogy and geology in his anniversary discourse at the opening of the Western Museum in 1820. Drake, Anniversary, 21. Drake’s remark regarding Clifford’s “bold” speculation prompted a defensive response from William Gibbs Hunt, editor of the Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine at Lexington, Kentucky. Hunt observed that Clifford’s conjecture was supported by other evidence besides the discovery of the shell described by Drake—an oblique reference to the triune vase that Clifford likewise accepted as evidence that the Mound Builders were Hindus. He agreed with Drake that such theories could not be received without caution and careful examination, but insisted that Clifford’s supposition was plausible and “entitled to much respect and consideration.” [Hunt,] “Review.” Drake’s regionalism was part of a larger literary movement that he himself defined and led. See Barnhart, “ ‘Common Feeling.’ ” Drake and Mansfield, Cincinnati, 44–46. The itemized list of holdings appears on p. 45. Several of the Egyptian antiquities appear to have been part of a

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

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traveling museum of curiosities maintained by Dorfeuille before his residence in Cincinnati. Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, March 18, 1823, n.p.; and Tucker, “Ohio Show-Shop,” 81. Drake and Mansfield, Cincinnati, 44. P., “Western Museum. A New Song.” P.’s poem contains ten stanzas in all. [Flint,] “Cincinnati Museums.” An Eye Witness, “A New Hell,” 148; Trollope, Domestic Manners, 89–90; “Western Artists: Hiram Powers,” 224; and Trollope, “Some Recollections.” Murray, Travels, 147; Hoffman, Winter, vol. 2, 135; and Martineau, Retrospect, vol. 2, 46. It has been well said that the “Infernal Regions” exhibit “wrapped him [Dorfeuille] permanently in the huckster’s mantle.” Dunlop, “Curiosities,” 538. “Died” [Joseph Dorfeuille Obituary], Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, July 24, 1840; “Antiquities of America,” Long Island Star, August 1, 1840; Janette Dorfeuille to Samuel George Morton, Brooklyn, September 19, 1840, Samuel George Morton Papers, mss b .m 843, American Philosophical Society; the letter from Janette Dorfeuille to Morton is reprinted in Kellogg, “Joseph Dorfeuille,” 17; E. G. Squier to John Russell, Chillicothe, February 20, 1847; and A. Randall to E. H. Davis, Prairie du Cross, June 9, 1847, Ephraim George Squier Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. It is sheer surmise on my part that the manuscript catalog of archaeological ornaments and implements mentioned in the letters of Squier and Davis in 1847 and Dorfeuille’s manuscript on American antiquities were one and the same, but it seems likely that they were. The following account of is based on Thomas, Account, 3, 8, 12. See also Joyce, “Antiquarians.” The place of the American Antiquarian Society in the intellectual and cultural history of the nation and the history of other learned societies in the colonial and early national periods are examined in Dupree, “National Pattern,” 21–32; Rosenkrantz, “Early American”; Daniels, American Science; and Whitehill, Independent. The American Antiquarian Society initially maintained both a library and a museum. The society’s cabinet included archaeological, ethnological, and natural history specimens. See Shipton, “Museum”; and the description of the society’s collections in “Cabinet,” 14–56. By the 1880s, however, the society was no longer a sponsor of archaeological investigations and began transferring its archaeological collections in 1885 to the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joyce, “Antiquarians,” 313.

Notes to pages 172–178

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45. Jenks, “Address,” 33 and 36. Jenks (1778–1866) graduated from Harvard in 1797. He served as corresponding secretary of the American Antiquarian Society for four years and as a vice president for thirteen. He was also a founder of the American Oriental Society and a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 46. AB, “Western Antiquities”; and Brown, “Harvard.” 47. Thomas, Account, 3, 8, 12; Jenks, “Address,” 25–38; and Thomas, “Diary,” vol. 1, entry for April 15, 1818, p. 385 and 385n. See also Joyce, “Antiquarians,” 301–17. 48. “Preface” (1820), 3. The members of the publication committee of the American Antiquarian Society were Reverend Aaron Bancroft, Reverend William Jenkins, Samuel M. Burnside, Edward D. Bangs, and Samuel Jennison. 49. “Preface” (1820), 4–5. 50. Atwater, “Description,” 109, 110, 110–11n, and 121. 51. Atwater, “Description,” 110, 111, 125, and on mound crania, 209–10. See also Atwater, “Ancient Human Bones” and “Caleb Atwater to Benjamin Silliman.” 52. Atwater, “Description,” 111–12. 53. Atwater, “Description,” 114–20. Caleb Atwater to Rejoice Newton, Circleville, August 21, 1818, Atwater Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Hereafter “Caleb Atwater to Rejoice Newton.” 54. Atwater, “Description,” 120 and 236. 55. Atwater, “Description,” 120. 56. Caleb Atwater to Rejoice Newton; and “Caleb Atwater” [obituary]. Atwater was prone to overstatement, which may well have been the case when he projected seven thousand dollars as the cost of publishing his findings. Francis P. Weisenburger was certain that he greatly exaggerated that figure “as was in keeping with Atwater’s character.” Weisenburger, “Caleb Atwater,” 20n12. Atwater’s concern over recouping the expenses connected with his researches was a recurring issue and one about which he easily became angered. At the conclusion of his investigations in March 1820, for example, he wrote a prickly letter to the editor of the Circleville Olive Branch in which he complained that an unnamed party sought to deprive him of all remuneration for the labor, time, and money he had invested in his investigations. Liberty and Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, March 17, 1820, n.p. Reprinted from the Circleville Olive Branch. 57. Atwater, “Description,” 190. 58. Atwater, “Description,” 248. 59. Atwater, “Description,” 205–6, 250–51, and Trigger, History, 70–72. 60. Jenks, “Address,” 27.

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61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

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78.

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Jenks, “Address,” 28. Jenks, “Address,” 28–29. Jenks, “Address,” 35. [Rafinesque,] “Archaeologia Americana.” [Rafinesque,] “Archaeologia Americana,” 89–90. A discussion of the investigation of the mounds and western history as expressions of regional identity are the relevant portions of Barnhart, “ ‘Common Feeling,’ ” 39–70. [Rafinesque,] “Archaeologia Americana,” 96–97. [Rafinesque,] “Archaeologia Americana,” 97–101. [Rafinesque,] “Archaeologia Americana,” 103–4. Atwater’s efforts at discrediting Rafinesque are noted in Boewe, Life, 178, and Boewe, “Fall from Grace.” Reprinted in Boewe, Profiles, 203–16. [Cass,] “Article XII.” The pagination in the original jumps from “232” to “243” and continues in sequence due to a printing error. [Cass,] “Article XII,” 225. [Cass,] “Article XII,” 243. Cass, “Discourse,” 9, 12. Assall, Nachrichten; and Foster, Atwater Family, 231. Bernhard, Travels, 148–49. Foster, Atwater Family, 47–48. Atwater’s daughter, Belinda Atwater Foster, does not say when Atwater sold his collection or when it presumably perished by fire. “The Cincinnati Museum” to which she refers was most likely the “Dorfeuille Museum” (formerly the Western Museum) operated on the public landing at Cincinnati by Joseph Dorfeuille. Howe, Historical, vol. 2, 417. [Flint,] “Review of American Antiquities,” Western Monthly Review 1 (March 1828): 660. Jennifer Kristene Sherer argues in “Mining America” that antiquarian discourse played a formative role in justifying the industrial and territorial expansion in early nineteenth-century America. She notes that antiquarian writers like Atwater and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft from the 1820s to the 1840s, while sincere in their efforts to preserve local antiquities, nonetheless wrote narratives that “intertwined commitments to antiquarian appropriation of Native American cultural artifacts to industrial expansion in western mining frontiers.” The close developmental relationship between geology and archaeology, especially archaeological surveys made as part of state geological surveys, clearly reflects that inherent tension noted by Sherer. Atwater was also interested in geology and possessed a mineralogical collection. The degree to which he was a cultural appropriator and exploiter of archaeological resources for other ideological and economic ends in open to interpretation, but Sherer’s thesis is not easily dismissed if, perhaps, at times overstated.

Notes to pages 191–199

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79. [Flint,] “Review of The General Character.” Atwater delivered the address in December 1826 at the United States’ Court House in Columbus, Ohio. 80. Caleb Atwater to Rejoice Newton; and Atwater, “Description,” 121. 81. [Cass,] “Article XII,” 246. 82. Clinton, “Discourse,” 92–93. James Eastburn originally published Clinton’s 1811 discourse as an eighty-one page pamphlet at New York in 1812. The pagination in the pamphlet differs from that in the second volume of the Collections of the New-York Historical Society, which is that cited here. 83. Mitchell, “Samuel L. Mitchell” and “Heads.” 84. Clinton, Memoir, 9–10. Clinton, president of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York at Albany, read his memoir before the said society on October 7, 1817. E. and E. Hosford also printed the address at Albany under the same title in 1820 as a fourteen-page pamphlet. 85. Mitchell, “Heads,” 342 and 343–44. The quote regarding the Scandinavians as the discoverers of America is from pp. 343–44. 86. Atwater, “Caleb Atwater to the President of the American Antiquarian Society [Isaiah Thomas].” 4. A Dialectical Discourse 1. See von Hagen, “Rafinesque.” 2. The most recent studies are Boewe, Life and his Profiles. Most of the attention has centered on Rafinesque’s numerous contributions as a naturalist, where he has been both hailed as a misunderstood genius and condemned as a charlatan. A sampling of reaction to Rafinesque by his contemporaries and later scholars is found in Boewe, Fitzpatrick’s Rafinesque, 263–323. See also the bibliographical references in Boewe’s Mantissa. 3. Haven, “Archaeology,” 39–41 and 41n; Brinton, Lenape, 150–51; Farquharson, “Phonetic Elements”; Winsor, Narrative, vol. 1, 424; Taylor, Study, 22. 4. Rafinesque, “Important Historical” and “Four Letters.” 5. Williams, Fantastic Archaeology, 98. 6. Boewe, John D. Clifford, 135–36, n15; Boewe, “Fall from Grace,” 39–53; and several accounts by Oestreicher: “Roots,” 60–86; “Anatomy”; and “Unmasking,” 1–44. 7. Rafinesque, Ancient History, appendix 1. Rafinesque’s Ancient History pamphlet originally appeared as the introduction to Marshall’s History of Kentucky, vol. 1, ix–xii, 13–47. Rafinesque’s appended enumeration of archaeological sites is given on pp. 41–45 of Marshall. See also Rafinesque’s “First Letter”; “Second Letter,” which contains his account mound groups and enclosures in Montgomery County, Kentucky, near Mount Sterling; and “Third Letter,” all sent to Thomas Jefferson in August–September, 1820.

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8. Boewe, John D. Clifford, 146n and 151n. The Rafinesque material appears in four appendices together with Boewe’s explanatory notes. See also Stout and Lewis, “Constantine Rafinesque and the Canton Site,” 83–90. Rafinesque made the plan and description of the site in 1833. Stout and Lewis have verified the accuracy of most of Rafinesque’s description and map. 9. Coe and Stuart, Royal Fifth, 16, 18, 19. 10. “Records of Men Enlisted in the U.S. Army, Prior to the Peace Establishment, May 17, 1815,” National Archives, Washington, dc , 264 and Heitman, ed., Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, 661. McCulloh’s official medical report as garrison surgeon concerning American dead and wounded on the North Point battleground, which he visited while it was still occupied by British troops, is in Jas. McCulloh Jr., Garrison Surgeon, U.S. Army, to Major-General Samuel Smith, Baltimore, Sept. 14, 1814, Samuel Smith Family Papers, MSS 40469, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Other details of McCulloh’s early life are taken from University of Pennsylvania, Society of the Alumni of the Medical Department, Catalogue of the Alumni of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, 1765–1877 (Philadelphia: Collins, Printer, 1877), 113; and General Catalogue of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, 63. 11. Joseph Hooper Nicolson to Thomas Jefferson, Baltimore, May 3, 1814, and James Madison to Jefferson, Washington dc , May 7, 1814, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, 343 and 351. 12. McCulloh, Researches on America (1816), [iii], “To the Reader,” Baltimore, May 22, 1816, and “Ed.,” (i.e., publisher’s note); and McCulloh, Researches on America (1817), v–vi. 13. McCulloh, Researches on America (1817), v–vi. 14. McCulloh, Researches on America (1817), xii–iii. 15. McCulloh authored two little-known works on theological subjects: An Impartial Exposition of the Evidences and Doctrines of the Christian Religion: Addressed to the Better Educated Classes of Society (1836) and On the Credibility of the Scriptures, A Recast [Version], with Enlarged Views, of a Former Work on the Subject, Together with a Copious Analysis of the Religious System Promulgated during the Patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian Dispensations, and of Human Development under Them (1867). Besides his cultivating a serious interest in medicine, ethnography, and theology, other aspects of McCulloh’s life are largely in shadow. He became curator of the Maryland Academy of Science and literature and vice president of the Baltimore Apprentice’s Library in 1822. McCulloh held the office of deputy collector of the port of Baltimore under father James H. McCulloh (1756– 1836) from about 1827 to 1835 and succeeded his father as the collector of the port of Baltimore in 1836. He next served as president of the National

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16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

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21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

Bank of Baltimore from December 1841 until December 1853 when he declined reelection. Matchett, Matchett’s Baltimore Directory for 1827, 177; Matchett, Matchett’s Baltimore Directory for 1835–36, 170; Quinan, Medical Annals, 32; “James Haines McCulloh,” 98; and Smith, “National Bank.” McCulloh, Researches on America (1817), xi–xii and xiv. McCulloh, Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, 501. Clark Wissler matter-of-factly states that McCulloh “saw service in the Ohio country during the War of 1812, which brought him into contact with Indians, earthworks and archaeological collections.” But Wissler provides no evidence in support of that statement. Robert Silverberg, apparently taking Wissler as his authority, also says that McCulloh saw military service in Ohio during the War of 1812, when he “took the occasion then to study the ancient earthworks.” Silverberg likewise provides no substantiation for that statement. David S. Brose affirms even more categorically than either Wissler or Sliverberg that “Dr. J. H. McCulloh in Ohio reported on his 1812 excavations of Ohio mounds and stated that the skeletons were no different than those of the Indians.” No such statements appear in any of McCulloh’s writings. Wissler, “American Indian,” 200; Silverberg, Mound Builders, 58; and Brose, “Northeastern United States,” 84. McCulloh, Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, 516; Atwater, “Description,” 208; and Drake, Natural, 207 and 208. The celebrated “mummies” discussed by McCulloh were an archeological curiosity and something of a popular sensation in the early nineteenth century. Several notices of the desiccated remains appear in Archaeologia Americana 1 (1820), 231, 318, and 362. The well-traveled body recovered from Mammoth Cave in Kentucky initially found its way into the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and is today at the Smithsonian Institution. Haven, “Archaeology of the United States,” 58; Thomas, “Report of the Mound Explorations,” 600; Silverberg, Mound Builders, 58; and Willey and Sabloff, History, 35. Willey and Sabloff, History, 34–35, 37n26. See Dunnell, “Methodological Impacts,” 561–80, a substantive offering that calls several aspects of received opinion regarding the Mound BuilderAmerican Indian debate into question. McCulloh, Researches on America (1817), 120 and 212. [Campbell,] “Of the Aborigines,” 457–63. McCulloh, Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, 501 and 522. McCulloh, Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, appendix 2: “On the Monuments, Fortifications, Mounds, etc. of North America,” 511, 514, 517, 519, and 520.

Notes to pages 212–219

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27. See “A Map of the Country of the Five Nations, Belonging to the Province of New York; and the Lakes Near which the Nations of Far Indians Live, with Part of Canada,” in Colden, History, facing p. 1. The original edition of Colden’s work appeared as The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America (1727). It is comprised of 119 pages while the London editions of 1747 and 1750 are both 283 pages. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft cites the map in his Notes on the Iroquois, 305. There he asks the question: “Who Were the Alleghans? This is an enquiry in our aboriginal archaeology, which assumes a deeper interest the more it is discussed.” Antiquaries desired to discover the “true etymology and history” of an ancient people known only by tradition, “and who have consecrated their name in American geography.” 28. Abraham Steiner subsequently became a Moravian missionary to the Cherokee in Georgia. 29. Heckewelder, Account, 29–31. 30. McCulloh, Researches Philosophical and Antiquarian, 521. 31. McCulloh, Researches Philosophical and Antiquarian, 69, 149, 151, 177n, and 271. 32. McCulloh, Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, 69, 149, and 151; see also chap. 3: “On the Barbarous Indian Tribes,” 64–148, and chap. 4: “On the Natchez, and other Indians of Florida,” 149–73. 33. McCulloh, Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, 271. 34. See Barnhart, “James McBride” and “Forgotten Archaeologist.” 35. Tappan, “Address.” 36. Nearly fifty years later McBride recalled his work in surveying the first country road in Oxford Township. See James McBride to unknown party, Hamilton, December 7, 1857, McBride Papers, vol. 15, mss qm 119l rfm , Library of the Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati Museum Center. 37. McBride, “Sketch,” 89. 38. McBride to Charles Whittlesey, Hamilton, December 9, 1840, James McBride Papers, Mss M119L RFM, vol. 9, Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. Cited hereafter as MPCMC . Howe, Historical Collections, vol. 1, 34; Everts, Combination Atlas Map, 27; and Locke, “Dr. Locke’s Report,” 216. 39. McBride’s fieldwork has rightly earned him recognition as a pioneer archaeologist. See Barnhart, “James McBride”; and Barnhart, “Forgotten Archaeologist.” See also Tax, “Development of American Archaeology,” 100, 104, and 108. The accuracy of at least one of McBride’s surveys, however, has been criticized. See McFarland, “Ancient Work near Oxford, Ohio.” 40. See McBride, “Survey and Description,” 104–11. McBride discusses the progress of his fieldwork in McBride to Charles Whittlesey, Hamilton, December 27,

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41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

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47. 48.

49.

1839, and McBride to Wills De Hass, Columbus, October 18, 1845, vol. 9, MPCMC . John R. Bartlett to McBride, New York, July 5, 1846, and McBride to Bartlett, Columbus, July 16, 1846, vol. 9, MPCMC . Further evidence of McBride’s reputation as an archaeologist among his contemporaries is found in [Wills De] Hass to McBride, Wellsburg, Virginia, September 12, 1845; McBride to De Hass, Columbus, October 18, 1845; and De Hass to McBride, Wellsburg, October 25, 1845, vol. 9, MPCMC . McBride to Erwin and Whiteman, February 12, 1826, n.p., vol. 5, MPCMC , and McBride to William Thorton, Hamilton, December 28, 1825, October 2, 1826, and August 25, 1828, vol. 9, MPCMC . McBride’s efforts at obtaining “Indian curiosities” for his cabinet can be traced in McBride to M. P. White, Carthage, March 2, 1827; McBride to Col. Nicks, Cincinnati, March 5, 1827, vol. 5, MPCMC ; A. P. Chouteau to McBride, Arkansas, February 23, 1830 and Creek Agency, April 11, 1830, vol. 6, MPCMC ; and McBride to A. P. Chouteau, Hamilton, January 8, 1832, vol. 6, MPCMC . [Peck,] Catalogue; and Biographical Cyclopaedia, vol. 3, 782. Despite the title of the catalog of the McBride library and cabinet it relates to McBride’s library only. Howe, Historical Collections, vol. 1, 356. Will of James McBride, May 27, 1859, “Will Record,” Volume 1, 336–41, Office of the Probate, Butler County Courthouse, Hamilton, Ohio. The McBride will is also annexed to [Peck,] Catalogue. McBride’s bound volumes of surveys, field notes, and watercolor drawings of his archaeological collection are on permanent loan to the Ohio Historical Society from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. See James McBride Papers, circa 1828–58 ms 24, Archives-Library Division, Ohio Historical Society. The original archaeological artifacts on which the drawings were based are part of that loan, but the ethnological items in the collection from Arkansas remained at the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia. Locke, “Dr. Locke’s Report,” 274. [McBride,] Symmes’s Theory; and Cole, “James McBride.” The “aberration or eccentricity” quote is from Cole. An account of the Symmes-McBride connection is Peck, “Symmes’ Theory.” Regarding McBride’s wooden model of the globe, see James McBride Papers, Collection 390, Library and Archives of the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia. The collection consists of four items only relating to Symmes’s lectures on his theory. McBride’s model is today in the academy’s Wolf Rare Books Room. See Tribble, “Living in the Past,” 16–31.

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50. See Waite, “Jared Potter Kirtland.” 51. See the respectful recollections of the individual members comprising the geological corps in Whittlesey, “Personnel.” The quote concerning their “talents and acquirements” appears on p. 73. Correspondence, field notes, and scrapbooks relating to Whittlesey’s survey work on the First Geological Survey of Ohio of 1837–38; his work on mineralogical surveys in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, 1848–50; as mining engineer in Lake Superior, 1853–56; and on the Geological Survey of Wisconsin, 1858–60 are in the Charles Whittlesey Papers ms 2872, Archives-Library, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. Various papers and notes relating to archaeology, ethnography, history, geology, astronomy, and meteorology are also present in the collection. James L. Murphy compiled a fifty-eight page register of the Charles Whittlesey Papers in 1976, a typescript of which is in the Whittlesey Papers at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland. 52. See Hendrickson, “Nineteenth-Century State Geological Surveys,” 357–71. 53. Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis published the survey in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), where they incorrectly attributed it to Charles Whittlesey instead of Samuel R. Curtis. See Murphy, “Authorship.” 54. Whittlesey, “Report,” 22 and 104–6. 55. Whittlesey, “Report,” 105–6. 56. Whittlesey, “Report,” 43. The Second Annual Report is bound with in the same volume with the First Annual Report. 57. Whittlesey, “Report of Mr. Whittlesey,” 105; “Mr. Whittlesey’s Report,” 43; Whittlesey to McBride, Hamilton, December 4, 1839, vol. 9, MPCMC ; Whittlesey, “Descriptions of Ancient Works in Ohio,” 5; and “Ancient Earth Forts of the Cuyahoga Valley, Ohio,” 4. Whittlesey’s archaeological field notes and sketches are in the Charles Whittlesey Papers at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Like virtually all nineteenth-century surveys the accuracy of some of Whittlesey’s plans and notes has been questioned. See McPherson, “Warren County Serpent Mound”; and McPherson, “Committee.” It is not a criticism that Whittlesey would have taken lightly, nor is it one that vitiates the overall value of his archaeological fieldwork. If his surveys not absolutely accurate, they most certainly were relatively so. The same must be said of the archaeology of many of his contemporaries as well. 58. Harrison, “Discourse,” 217–67. 59. Harrison, “Discourse,” 222–23. 60. Harrison, “Discourse,” 223 and 265. 61. Harrison, “Discourse,” 224; and Madison, “Letter,” 136–37 and 141. 62. Harrison, “Discourse,” 225.

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Harrison, “Discourse,” 225, 226 and 260–61nB. Harrison, “Discourse,” 247–49. Hildreth, “Pyramids at Marietta,” 244. Townsend, “Grave Creek Mound”; Schoolcraft, “Observations Respecting the Grave Creek Mound in Western Virginia”; and Squier, “Observations on the Aboriginal Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.” A full account of the controversy over the authenticity and meaning of the Grave Creek inscription is Barnhart, “Curious Antiquity?” Priest, American Antiquities, title page and iii–iv. Haven, “Archaeology,” 41; and Winsor, “Progress of Opinion,” 399. John Delafield Jr.’s An Enquiry into the Origin of the Antiquities of America (1839) and Alexander W. Bradford’s American Antiquities and Researches into the Origin and History of the Red Race (1841), in contrast with the work of Priest, were more scholarly productions. But each in its own way was equally problematic. Neither of the authors based their works on original fieldwork and both indulged themselves in groundless speculations. Neither treatise, moreover, did anything to promote the study of the mounds as a field of scientific enquiry. Priest reached a much larger audience and consequently did far more mischief than either Delafield or Bradford. See Pidgeon, Traditions, 16–20. Lewis, “Monumental Tortoise Mounds”; and Silverberg, Mound Builders, 135 and 150. Jackson, “Message,” appendix, x. Bryant, Poems, 40–41. According to Curtis Dahl, Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis” also makes an oblique reference to the Mound Builders. It is a reasonable conclusion, although is questionable how many of Bryant’s readers understood the allusion to the “millions” of dead tribes who slept in their last sleep in the lonely bosom of the globe as compared to the explicit language used in “The Prairies.” See Dahl, “Mound-Builders.” Silverberg, Mound Builders, 2. Others have made the same point before and after Silverberg, most notably Carpenter, “Role of Archaeology”; Dahl, “MoundBuilders”; Pearce, Savagism; Fowler, “Conserving American Archaeological Resources”; Meltzer, “North American Archaeology”; and several contributions by Bruce G. Trigger: “Prehistoric Archaeology,” “Anglo-American Archaeology,” and “Archaeology.” Kehoe, “Paradigmatic Vision,” 6–7, and more generally her “ ‘Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two.’ ” See also Wolf, Europe, which argues against the idea that non-European cultures and peoples were isolated and static entities before the advent of European colonialism. Native Americans under that European conception were “the people without History,” whose long occupancy of the American continent was either unknown or unappreciated. The

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University of California Press reissued the work with a new preface in 1997 and again with a new foreword by Thomas Hylland Eriksen in 2010.

1. 2. 3. 4.

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5. American Archaeology Frémont, Report, 7–693. Goetzmann, Exploration, 329. See also Goetzmann’s Army Exploration. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 17. The most important account of the American Southwest for the history of American anthropology is Fowler’s A Laboratory for Anthropology. See also Wilcox and Fowler, “Beginnings.” Events leading to the Antiquities Act of 1906 are analyzed in Rothman’s Preserving Different Pasts and Bandelier National Monument. Several other works further contextualize the significance of the corps’s activities as scientific explorers and engineers. See Goetzmann, Exploration and Army Exploration; and Bartlett, Great Surveys. Wilkes, Narrative; and Pickering, Races of Man (1848). On the work of the United Exploring Expedition see Joyce, Shaping, especially chap. 6: “Ethnography and the Legacy of the Expedition,” 144–61; Stanton, Great United States; and Tyler, Wilkes Expedition. Morton, “Some Observations,” 1; “Preface” (1845): ix–x; “Preface” (1848): viii; Bartlett, “Progress of Ethnology,” appendix, 3–8; and Squier, “American Ethnology,” 385 and 386. “Preface” (1845), iii and ix. “Meeting for Business, October 27, 1846, Election,” 115; “Corresponding Members,” iv; “Members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,” 147; Simpson, Lives, 756–57; William T. W. Dickeson, “Dr. Montroville Wilson Dickeson,” an eight-page, untitled, and undated manuscriptbiography, circa 1899, pp. 1–3, Administrative Records, American Section, Collectors & Collections, Dickeson, M. W. (1882), box 22, folder 6, Penn Museum Archives, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia; and Culin, “Dickeson Collection,” 113n–14n. Dickeson, “Catalogue of the Stone and Terra Cotta Implements and Ornaments of the North American Mound Builders Collected by Prof. M. W. Dickeson M. D. from 1838 to 1848,” p. 4, bound volume, Dickeson Collection, Penn Museum Archives, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia. Dickeson as cited in Culin, “Dickeson Collection,” 122–23. “Stated Meeting, October 20, 1846,” 109–10; “Stated Meeting, November 10, 1846,” 119; Leidy, “Report”; and Culin, “Dickeson Collection,” 113. Dickeson, “Dr. Montroville Wilson Dickeson”; and Montroville Wilson Dickeson, Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley! (Newark nj: Printed

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at the Mercury Office, n.d., ca. 1851), Broadsides Collection, 973 c 6 83, American Philosophical Society. Montroville Wilson Dickeson, Panorama! Will Be Exhibited at the Eagle Hotel (n.d., ca. 1855), Broadsides Collection, 973 c 6 83, American Philosophical Society. Dickeson, Indian Antiquities. A Course of Popular and Highly Interesting Lectures on American Archaeology (Philadelphia: Jefferson Institute, Committee on Lectures; Harris, Printer, n.d., ca. 1851), Broadsides Collection, 973 c 6 83, American Philosophical Society. City Museum. Callowell Street, Below Fifth. Another Great Bill. Ashton and Company Proprietors; M. W. Dickeson, Professor of Natural Sciences; William T. W. Dickeson, curator; John E. McDonough, Stage Manager; and J. J. Egan, Scenic Artists. . . . An Indian Cabinet! (Philadelphia: City Museum, Brown’s Steam-Power Job Printing Establishment, 1854), Broadsides Collection, 973 c 6 83, American Philosophical Society; Catalogue of a Highly Interesting Collection of Books and Pamphlets on Early American History Peale’s Museum Relics; Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum, 320; and Culin, “Dickeson Collection,” 114. Dickeson, “An Account of Researches and Discoveries amongst the Tumuli and Earthworks of the Mississippi and Louisiana,” ix and “A Catalogue of Antiquities in the Collection of M. W. Dickeson,” ix. Bartlett, “Progress of Ethnology,” iv, ix, 9, and 10. The quote concerning a circle intersecting the center of mound groups, attributed to Dickeson by Bartlett, appears on p. 10. Bartlett, “Progress of Ethnology,” 11–13. Dickeson, “American Antiquities No. 2,” 114, and Dickeson as cited in Culin, “Dickeson Collection,” 121. Dickeson’s series on American antiquities appeared in the Lotus between May and September 1848. See Dickeson, “American Antiquities,” nos. 2–7 . See also Dickeson, American Numismatical Manual, 36–45. Veit, “Mastodons,” 29–30, and Brown, Archaeology, 43. Culin, “Dickeson Collection,” 113–68; the quote regarding the scientific value of the Dickeson collection is taken from p. 114 of Culin; Veit, “Mastodons” and “Case of Archaeological Amnesia”; Williams, Fantastic Archaeology, 43–44; and Silverberg, Mound Builders, 98–99. The influence of the concurrent traditions of romanticism and empiricism on the archaeological thought of the early and mid-nineteenth century was profound. That juxtaposition stands in even bolder relief in the writings of Dickeson’s contemporary and rival Ephraim George Squier. Barnhart, Ephraim George Squier, 207. Henry, “Programme,” 946 and 955. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), vol. 1, xxxiii–xxxiv.

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25. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), vol. 1, xxxix. 26. Hitchcock, Report, 168–69, and [Russell,] “Western Antiquities,” 252. 27. Squier to parents, Chillicothe, July 20, 1845 and Columbus, November 26, 1845, sfpnyhs , and Benjamin Silliman to Dr. G. A. Mantell, London, “On the Mounds and Relics of the Ancient Nations of America,” 284, 285, and 286. Squier made his presentation before the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences on July 7, 1846. 28. Davis to James McCormick, New York, November 20, 1853, Cincinnati Historical Society. 29. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 57. Plate 20 faces p. 56 and the explanatory note showing the flag stations used in the survey is on p. 57. 30. Rau, “Archaeological Collections,” 45n30. 31. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 48–49. 32. Whittlesey, “Metrical Standard”; Romain, “Evidence”; and Romain, “Hopewellian Concepts.” Romain’s writings on the subject are extensive: “1. Newark Earthwork Cosmology”; “2. Design and Layout”; Mysteries of the Hopewell; “Possible Astronomical Alignments”; “Hopewell Inter-Site Relationships,” which plots lunar azimuths in ad 250 along major Hopewell sites in Ross County, Ohio; “More Astronomical Alignments”; “Azimuths to the Otherworld”; “Hopewell Ceremonial Centers”; and “Further Notes.” See also Lepper, “Newark Earthworks”; and the following works by Hively and Horn, “New and Extended Case,” “Geometry and Astronomy,” and “Hopewellian Geometry.” 33. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 7, 139, 142, and Squier, Observations on the Uses of the Mounds of the West, 3–4. 34. Atwater, “Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States,” Archaeologia Americana, 125. 35. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 145–46, 166; Squier, Observations on the Uses of the Mounds of the West, 7 and 8; and Squier, “On the Discoidal Stones,” 216. 36. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 188, 242. 37. Rau, “Indian Pottery,” 349. Both Rau and Davis were members of the American Ethnological Society’s Standing Committee on Stone, Earthen, and Metallic Relics in the late 1860s. Davis also knew of Rau’s interest in lithic materials and sent him a number of flint discs, either as part of an artifact exchange or as a gift. He and Squier recovered the discs from “Clarks Work” on the North Fork of Paint Creek in Ross County, Ohio. See Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), p. 158, for the circumstance surrounding the recovery of the discs and p. 214 for an illustration. Davis appears to have held a high opinion of Rau’s work as an archaeologist. Rau, “Deposit,” 404, and “Drilling,” 397n.

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38. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 153, 246–47. 39. Davis to Squier, Chillicothe, June 9, 1846, splc , and Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 242, 251–52, 254, 260. 40. See Henshaw, “Animal Carvings,” 123–66. 41. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments, 301. 42. Davis to Squier, Chillicothe, December 24 and 29, 1846, Squier Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Davis discusses his interview with Dickeson in Davis to Squier, Chillicothe, January 7, 1847, Squier Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. 43. Squier to Morton, Columbus, January 4, 1847, Samuel Morton Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia. 44. Squier to Bartlett, [New York?], September 21, 1846, John Russell Bartlett Papers, John Carter Brown Library. 45. John Russell Bartlett to Squier, New York, September 10, 1846, Squier Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Samuel George Morton to Squier, Philadelphia, December 8, 1846, Morton Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia; Dickeson, “Account,” ix; and Bartlett, “Progress of Ethnology,” 8–13. 46. Squier to Morton, New York, September 27, 1848, Samuel George Morton Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia. 47. Squier to Morton, New York, December 28, 1848, Samuel George Morton Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia. 48. Few if any geologists were more respected at the time than Joshua Dwight Whitney, who in the 1850s participated in the geological surveys of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. His knowledge of the lead mining region of Lake Superior was probably unsurpassed among his contemporaries. See Foster and Whitney, Report; and Whitney, Metallic Wealth. Whitney later headed the California Geological Survey (1860–74) and became professor of geology at Harvard in 1865. Whitney first met Lapham in November 1852 during his reconnaissance of the lead district of Wisconsin and Iowa. He traveled to Milwaukee and briefly stayed with Lapham at his home, where they “oxed” together (worked as a team) on the geology of Milwaukee and its vicinity. “Lapham,” said Whitney, “is a brick [i.e., a solid, dependable, and supportive individual as opposed to obtuse], and he treated me in the handsomest manner possible.” Lapham was the just the right sort. He accompanied Dwight on his tour through the lead district of southeastern Wisconsin, which took them to Madison, the Blue Mounds, and Mineral Point. Whitney to William Dwight Whitney, St. Louis, Missouri, November 2, 1852, in Brewster, Life, 126. When the Wisconsin legislature reorganized the geological survey in March 1857 it placed Whitney in charge of completing the survey of the state’s lead district. He traveled from Mineral Point, Wisconsin, to Madison in May

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50. 51. 52.

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1859. He was with Lapham the following month when they excavated the dividing ridge mound located on Delaplaine’s property. Edwin Hamilton Davis as quoted in “American Ethnological Society” (December 1859). Lapham, Whitney, Delaplaine, and group of friends opened the mound on June 4, 1859. At the center of the mound and ten feet below the surface they found a human skeleton nearly entire and in an excellent state of preservation. Nearer the surface of the mound they found other human remains believed to be of later date. “American Ethnological Society,” (August 1859). The report on the excavation prepared by Lapham for the American Ethnological Society appeared in the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel for January 2, 1860. The Wisconsin Archaeological Society reprinted the account in the Wisconsin Archaeologist. See Lapham, “Opening,” 85–87. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 153, 246–47. Pickering, Races of Man (1850), 37–38. “Calumet Idols” and “Mound Pipes” in Davis, “Catalogue of American Antiquities,” British Museum; Entries 613 and 617 of “Catalogue of American Antiquities,” and Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), fig. 145, p. 245. Davis to Samuel George Morton, Chillicothe, May 18, 1846, Morton Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia. Davis’s observation regarding the resemblance between the terracotta figure and the “Asiatic types” appears in a letter to the Recording Secretary of the American Ethnological Society, who read the communication in Davis’s absence at a meeting of the Society in on November 4, 1860. See “Societies and Their Proceedings.” Squier, “On Discoidal Stones,” 216–18, and his “Pipestone,” 287. See for example E. H. D., “Runic Hoax”; and Squier, “Observations on the Memoir of Dr. Zestermann,” 20–32. Accounts of Squier and Davis’s contributions to American archaeology are the following works by Barnhart: Ephraim George Squier; “In His Own Right”; “American Menagerie”; and “Question of Authorship.” See also Meltzer, “Introduction” to Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1998), 1–95. The Squier-Davis archaeological collection is also featured in McGuire, “Squier & Davis Reconsidered,” 18–22. The original manuscript materials upon which the McBride-Erwin site plans appearing in Ancient Monuments are based form part of the James McBride Papers, circa 1828–48, mss 24, Archives-Library Division, Ohio Historical Society. Several surveys of works by Whittlesey that were not published by Squier and Davis appear in Whittlesey, “Description of Ancient Works in Ohio,” 5–20, plus seven appended plates. Whittlesey regarded the surveys published in that work as being supplementary to the descriptive part of Ancient Monuments. See also Squier, “Monograph.” Squier’s account is based

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59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

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on the “confused notes” of Rafinesque, who devoted considerable attention to the subject of American antiquities before his death in 1840. McBride to John W. Erwin, Columbus, June 14, 1846, and McBride to Davis, Columbus, June 30 and September 30, 1846, vol. 12, McBride Papers Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati Museum Center. These are copies of outgoing letters. McBride to Squier, Hamilton, Ohio, December 1, 1847, splc . McBride to Squier, Hamilton, Ohio, December 22, 1847, splc . See Squier, Observations on the Aboriginal Monuments of the Mississippi Valley,” plate 2, facing p. 18: “Fortified Hill, Butler, County, Ohio, J mc bride 1836.” Bartlett and Welford published the article as a pamphlet in November 1847 before it appeared in the second volume of the Transactions the following year, in which plate 2 faced p. 146. It was the pamphlet edition to which Erwin responded and not the appearance of the same account in the Transactions. J.W.E. [John W. Erwin] to the Editor. McBride to Squier, Hamilton, January 25 and 27, 1848, and Marsh to Squier, Washington, January 7, 1848, splc . McBride informed Squier after the publication of Ancient Monuments that he was completely satisfied with the credit he received for his contributions to the work. Only then did he request the return his surveys, drawings, and field notes. McBride to Squier, Hamilton, Ohio, March 19, 1849, splc . Squier to Whittlesey, New York, October 9, 1847, Ephraim George Squier, Miscellaneous Letter, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. Whittlesey to Squier, Clinton, Summit County, December 6 and 20, 1847, splc , and Whittlesey to Squier, December 11, 1848, splc , regarding his acknowledgment of having received “full justice” for his contributions. See Rafinesque, Ancient History, appendix 1: “Enumeration of the Sites of Ancient Towns and Monuments of Kentucky, etc.,” 33–37. Rafinesque’s Ancient History pamphlet originally appeared as the introduction to Marshall’s History of Kentucky, vol. 1, ix–xii, 13–47. Rafinesque’s appended enumeration of archaeological sites is given on pp. 41–45 of Marshall. An account of Rafinesque’s contributions to American archaeology, and a severe censure of the manner in which Squier used his manuscript is in Boewe, John D. Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities.” The Rafinesque material appears in four appendices together with Boewe’s explanatory notes. Bowe’s work goes a long way toward granting Rafinesque his due as an early investigator of archaeological sites in the American southeast. Mr. Boewe and the author of the present volume, however, respectfully disagree as to whether Squier and Davis gave sufficient acknowledgment to Rafinesque in publishing his

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archaeological manuscript materials. He argues in the negative and I the affirmative. See Barnhart, Review of Charles Boewe, ed., John D. Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities,” 141–142; Boewe, Letter to the Editor Regarding Terry A. Barnhart’s Review of John D. Clifford’s Indian Antiquities, 455; and Barnhart’s reply, Review of Charles Boewe, ed., John D. Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities,” 445. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), xxxvi; plate 9, no. 3, facing p. 24; plate 12, facing p. 31; plate 13, facing p. 35; plate 14, nos. 3 and 4, facing p. 36; plate 32, no. 6, facing p. 91; plate 33, facing p. 93; plate 38, no. 1, facing p. 108, and Squier, “Monograph of the Ancient Monuments of the State of Kentucky.” Barnhart, “Early Efforts”; Stout and Lewis, “Constantine Rafinesque”; and Boewe, John D. Clifford, 146n and 151n. Rafinesque made the plan and description of the Canton site in 1833. Stout and Lewis verified the accuracy of most of Rafinesque’s description and map. See Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), xxxiii, xxxvi, 26, 31n, 35–36, 77, 93, 108n, 117n, and 175n and 176n relating to Rafinesque’s descriptions and engraved site plans. The book jacket of Boewe’s John D. Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities” states even more strongly (and even more incorrectly) that “Rafinesque’s contribution [to archaeology] has also been neglected because it was pillaged by another well-known scholar, E. G. Squier, who gave no credit to his source.” It seems difficult to argue that Rafinesque is somehow more of a neglected or forgotten archaeologist because Squier published his original materials. Most certainly the contrary is true. Rafinesque’s contributions to American archaeology became better known precisely because they appeared in Ancient Monuments, where they are consistently credited to Rafinesque. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 194. Nothing further is said regarding the source of the engraving, which appears on a very crowded page of woodcut engravings. Squier and Davis in that particular instance did not, in fact, acknowledge that the engraving was based on a Rafinesque drawing, but they were otherwise consistent in acknowledging his descriptions and plans of archaeological sites. That single omission of Rafinesque’s name does not negate the numerous credits he receives elsewhere in Ancient Monuments. Boewe says that “Squier had silently lifted this drawing, probably from an unpublished Rafinesque manuscript (‘Ancient Monuments of North and South America’) then in his possession.” Boewe, “Walam Olum,” 351 n21. Davis to Squier, Chillicothe, September 22, 1847, Ephraim George Squier Papers, Library of Congress; and “American Archaeology,” 158. Squier to Davis, New York, September 30, 1847, copy of outgoing letter, Ephraim Squier Papers, Library of Congress and Henry to Squier, Washington, n.d.,

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79.

Joseph Henry Papers, Smithsonian Institution; and Squier, Observations on the Aboriginal Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Not to be confused with the New York Medical College founded in 1860, which is still in existence. Smith, History, 56; and “New-York City. Dr. E. H. Davis,” New-York Daily Times, March 24, 1854, 3, col. 6. Davis’s collecting interests and activities as a resident member of the American Ethnological Society from the late 1850s and through the late 1860s can be traced through the brief notices of the society’s proceedings appearing in the Historical Record and in the Bulletin of the American Ethnological Society 1 (September 1860–January 1861), published by C. B. Richardson of New York and Boston. The society printed part of a second number of the Bulletin for the years of 1861 and 1862 and for January, February, and March of 1863, but it appears that the printed minutes of those proceedings were only distributed among its members and never actually published. An unbound copy of the printed Bulletin for 1861 to 1863 is in the archival collections of the JohnsonHumrickhouse Memorial Museum at Coshocton, Ohio, in the museum’s Newark “Holy Stones” file. It is almost a certainty that other unbound or bound copies are also extant. I am indebted to Dr. Bradley T. Lepper of the Ohio Historical Society for providing me with a copy of the printed but apparently unpublished Bulletin of the American Ethnological for 1861 to 1863, which he found as part of his own research into the history of the Newark Holy Stones. Brayer, William Blackmore, 22 and 40. Brayer’s biography mentions Blackmore’s interest in ethnology in passing, but is mostly concerned with his business dealings in the American southwest. Blackmore systematically collected ethnographic photographs and made a significant contribution toward photographing American Indian delegations to Washington dc . His ethnographic photographic collection came to the British Museum at different times between 1931 and 1975. King, Smoking Pipes, 151n50. Blackmore’s interest in photographing American Indians is discussed in Fleming and Luskey, North American Indians, 20–24; and in Taylor, “William Blackmore.” E. H. Davis and William Blackmore, “Memorandum of Agreement,” January 26, 1864, Museum of Mankind, the Ethnography Department of the British Museum, London and Davis to Joseph Henry, New York, December 14, 1863, Joseph Henry Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives. Davis to Messrs. Geo. Folsom, Fred DuPeyster, and George H. Moore, New York, February 2, 1864, Edwin Hamilton Davis Collection, Ross County Historical Society, Chillicothe, Ohio.

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80. The records of the British Museum clearly indicate that the “Salisbury Purchase” occurred in 1931, but one account suggests that the sale actually took place in 1930. Stevens, Salisbury Museums, 13. 81. See Barnhart, “In His Own Right,” 59–87, and “American Menagerie,” 2–17. 82. Catalogue of American Antiquities Collected by Dr. Edwin H. Davis Purchased by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 1874, Department of Anthropology, Accession No. 1869–1890/15, American Museum of Natural History. A catalog of 562 objects, many from Ohio, listed and described on the front of leaves of a notebook. Printed illustrations are mounted on some of the facing pages of the catalog and the introductory comments are signed “E. H. D” and dated March 1874. Also included in this document is a separate catalog of casts representing 103 objects found in the mounds. “Catalogue of Casts of American Antiquities.” The casts are of unique specimens of aboriginal art collected by Davis and sold to the Blackmore Museum, Salisbury, England in 1864. The first 47 items in the catalog are casts of “calumets” and mound pipes, and the remainder are of objects from Mexico, Central America, and Peru. The entries in the catalog of casts are numbered 563–665 in pencil in continuation of Davis’s “Catalogue.” 83. Neil M. Judd says that the Smithsonian released the work in December 1848 but it was reviewed in the Literary World in September 1848. The review may well have been based on an advanced copy but it seems that September is the more likely month of publication. Judd, Bureau of American Ethnology, 8. 84. Henry, “Programme,” 88; Henry, “Explanations”; Rhees, Smithsonian Institution, 966 and 971; “Great American Work,” 680; and “Literary News,” 456. 85. Henry to Squier, Princeton, June 28, 1848, splc . 86. Nathaniel F. Moore to Joseph Henry, Columbia College, New York, November 24, 1848; Francis Wayland to Henry, Brown University, Providence, ri, December 19, 1848; and A. S. Packard, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, December 28, 1848, in Rhees, Smithsonian Institution, 971, 978, and 980. 87. See Jomard, “Decouvertes,” “Sur Les Antiquities Americaines,” “Lettre,” and “Description.” 88. Humboldt as quoted in Seitz, Letters; Morlot, General Views, 6n2; and Morlot “On the Date,” 111. 89. See Henshaw, “Animal Carvings,” 123–66. 90. See Thomas, Circular, 21, and “Report,” 27 and 604–10. On the correction of the Squier-Davis surveys see pp. 454–68 and 472–93. A defense of the surveys of Squier and Davis and a criticism of the “minimizing tendencies” of Thomas appears in Peet, “Ancient Monuments.” See also various criticisms of Squier and Davis in Fowke, Archaeological History of Ohio, 55–186. Fowke’s detractions of Squier and Davis and other early writers of note produced a negative

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reaction. See Peet, “Criticism”; MacLean, “Fowke’s Book”; and Randal, “Archaeological Agitation.” 91. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1998). 6. Origin, Era, and Region 1. Squier to John Russell Bartlett, New York, February 1, 1848, John Russell Bartlett Papers, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Cited hereafter as the bpjcbl . Henry to Squier, Princeton, September 30, 1848; Henry to Squier, Washington, December 16, 1848; George Henry Moore to Squier, New York, October 20, 1848, splc ; and Fourth Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1849, 11. Squier received an additional fifty dollars from the Smithsonian for superintending the publication of the resulting manuscript. Squier to Henry, letter draft, December 23, 1848, and Squier to Henry, letter draft, January 1, 1849 [misdated “1848”], splc . 2. Earlier accounts of those investigations are Barnhart, Ephraim George Squier, chap. 5: “Revisiting the Mounds: The Iroquois and the Archaeology of Western New York,” 102–17, and his “Iroquois.” 3. James B. Griffin noted this feature of Squier’s archaeology in regard to his investigations with Davis in Ohio, but the extent to which Squier continued this methodology in his investigations in New York has not been fully appreciated. See Griffin’s “Introduction” to Ancient Monuments (1973), vii–ix. 4. Schoolcraft, Notes, 305–6. See also the earlier descriptions and speculations in Clinton, Memoir on the Antiquities, which Clinton read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York on November 13, 1817; Yates and Moulton, History, vol. 1, part ; and Macauley, Natural, vol. 2. 5. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), xxii, 1n, 42, 44 and 46. 6. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 11. 7. C. F. Hoffman to [Peter?] Wilson, New York, October 12, 1848, spihs ; Edward Robinson to Moses Bristole, New York, October 17, 1848; Frederick De Peyster to Charles G. Myers, New York, October 18, 1848; and Luther Brandish to Squier, New York, October 23, 1848, splc . 8. Thomas T. Davis to Selah Matthews, Syracuse, November 6, 1848; Orsamus H. Marshall to August Porter, n.p., November 14, 1848; Moses Long to E. P. Smith, Rochester, November 16, 1848; August Porter to Squier, Niagara Falls, November 18, 1848; Janus Clark to [W. W.?] Turner, Lancaster, November 21, 1848; Turner to Squier, Buffalo, December 17, 1848; W. [Mc?]Bride to Squier, Black Rock, December 22, 1848; J. H. Clark to Squier, Manilus, January 23, 1849; and Justice Eddy to Squier, Jefferson County, New York, February 28, 1849, splc . 9. Lewis Henry Morgan to the Board of Regents, November 13, 1848, in Second Annual Report of the Regents of the State University of New York, 90–91; Squier

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11.

12.

13. 14.

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17.

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to Morgan, New York, December 14, 1848, Lewis Henry Morgan Papers, University of Rochester Library; Morgan to Squier, Rochester, December 22, 1848. Discussion of the map appears in Morgan to Squier, Rochester, December 22, 1848; Morgan to Squier, Rochester, January 18, 1849; Henry to Squier, Smithsonian Institution, February 20, 1849; Morgan to Squier, Rochester, March 5, 1849, splc; Squier to Morgan, New York, March 20, 1849, Morgan Papers, University of Rochester Library; Thomas H. Bond et al., March 27, 1849, Albany, March 27, 1849, bpjcbl ; and “The American Ethnological Society,” 317. Parkman to Squier, Boston, May 13 and November 18, 1849, in Seitz, Letters, 22 and 27. Parkman initially confused Morgan with Orsamus Holmes Marshall (1813–84) in regard to the proposed publication of a map of the Iroquois Country. Marshall shared Morgan’s interest in documenting Iroquois place names and would have been equally up to the task of making such a map. Parkman later reviewed Squier’s “Aboriginal Monuments” and Morgan’s League together. See Parkman, “Indian Antiquities in North America.” See Morgan, League, vol. 1, 46, and vol. 2, appendix A, no. 1: “Schedule Explanatory of the Indian Map,” 127–39. Morgan had been at work on this map for several years. It gives the aboriginal names of villages, natural features, the “ancient localities” of the Iroquois, and the routes of their principal trails. Sage and Brother published the original edition of League at Rochester in 1851. Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution valued Morgan’s opinion regarding ethnological mapping and published his recommendations in the Smithsonian Annual Report for 1861. See Morgan, “Suggestions Relative,” 397–98. Squier to Bartlett, Buffalo, November 12, 1848, bpjcbl . Squier, “Report Upon the Aboriginal Monuments of Western New York.” Squier gave his report before the society on January 2, 1849. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments.” The work numbers 188 pages with 14 lithographic plates of survey maps. There has been much confusion about the year in which the Smithsonian Institution actually published this work. The Smithsonian accepted the manuscript for publication on October 20, 1849, and it was printed, or at least authorized to be printed, in July 1850. The actual year of publication appearing on the title-page, however, is 1851. Squier, Antiquities. The pagination and sometimes the text in this edition differ from that found in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. The privately printed edition is cited here only where revisions further elucidate important points of enquiry. Squier to Bartlett, Buffalo, November 12, 1848, bpjcbl .

Notes to pages 316–318

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18. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 10–12; Squier to Bartlett Syracuse, October 26, 1848 and November 7, 1848, bpjcbl ; and Squier to parents, New York, December 8, 1848, sfpnyhs . 19. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 12–13, 18, 75–80. 20. Squier to Bartlett, Syracuse, November 7, 1848, bpjcbl . 21. This citation is taken from Squier, Antiquities, 125. Squier’s comments on implements and ornaments are greatly expanded in the privately printed edition over what appears in the Smithsonian monograph. 22. Second Annual Report of the Regents of the University of the State of New York, 10–11 and Third Annual Report of the Regents of the University of the State of New York, 10, 15, 55–56. 23. Catalogue, 20–21. 24. The source for this and the following two paragraphs is Catalogue, 82–84. 25. See Schoolcraft, Notes, 442; Morgan, League, vol. 1 (1901), 305–6; Marshall, “Champlain’s Expedition”; and Francis Parkman to Squier, Boston, November 18, 1849, in Seitz, Letters, 27. 26. Whether the name “Gah-kwas” or “Kahkwas” refers to the Erie or to the Neutral Indians has been a source of controversy. The designation is problematic since both the French and the Huron sometimes applied the name of a particular village to an entire tribe. The Erie resided on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie west of the Seneca and the Neutral peoples on the northern shore. Little is known of these seventeenth-century groups other than their affinity with northern Iroquoian cultural patterns. White, “Neutral and Wenro,” 411, and “Erie,” 412. 27. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 83. 28. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 83–85. 29. Charles Whittlesey to Squier, [Cleveland, Ohio], February 27, 1849, splc . 30. Whittlesey, “Evidences,” 279. 31. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 81. 32. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 99. 33. Bishop William Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses, vol. 3 (London: T. Tegg, 1741), 991, as cited by Squier, Serpent Symbol, 17–18, and Squier, “American Ethnology,” 390n. 34. Squier, “American Ethnology,” 394. 35. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 67–74. 36. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 107. 37. Squier, “Historical,” 273 and 292. 38. Morgan to Squier, Rochester, March 5, 1849, splc . 39. Morgan to the Board of Regents, November 13, 1848, Second Annual Report of the Regents of the State University of New York, 90–91.

Notes to pages 319–329

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40. Morgan, League, vol. 2, 5 and 5n1, 8–9, and 12. 41. Morgan to Squier, Rochester, March 5, 1849, splc . 42. Morgan, League, vol. 1, 46 and 161. Morgan recorded a Seneca and Onondaga tradition connected with a burial mound near Geneva (p. 90n). 43. Marshall, “Niagara Frontier,” 277–78. Marshall read this account before the Buffalo Historical Society on February 27, 1865. 44. Ritchie, Pre-Iroquoian Occupations, 2. Ritchie seems confused on what to make of Squier’s findings on this point. Elsewhere he states that Squier “correctly related them [mound structures] to the ‘Mound Builders’ of Ohio,” thus contradicting both himself and Squier. Ritchie, Archaeology, 213. See also Scardera, “Predictive Model.” 45. Another early account of works in western New York is Cheney, “Ancient Monuments in Western New York.” Cheney’s account gives the results of the explorations he conducted in 1859 at previously unexplored sites in Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties bordering Lake Erie. He concluded that the earthworks in this section corresponded with those found elsewhere in the state and in northern Ohio. He thought the greater regularity of their outlines, however, more nearly resembled those found in the Mississippi Valley. Squier thought otherwise. 46. Squier, “Aboriginal Monuments,” 57, and Squier, Antiquities, 81. Morgan and Schoolcraft were among those who supported the Tonawanda Seneca in their resistance to the efforts made by the Ogden Land Company to remove them from their land in western New York. See Hauptman Tonawanda Senecas and “On Our Terms.” 47. Speaking of Lapham’s sundry attainments as a self-taught scholar, historian Milo Milton Quaife bestowed high praise. When future historians examined the first half century of Wisconsin’s history as a territory and state, said Quaife, they “will affirm that no man brought greater honor to her or performed more valuable services in her behalf than did the modest scholar, Increase Allen Lapham.” Quaife, “Increase Allen Lapham.” Cyrus Thomas, a critical commentator not given to flattery, paid similar tribute to Lapham’s surveys and descriptions of effigy mounds. Thomas observed in 1894 that “the various forms which these works were made to assume have been displayed so graphically and, for the greater part, so correctly by Dr. Lapham in his justly celebrated work, ‘The Antiquities of Wisconsin,’ that but little is left for the archaeologist of the present day to do in this direction, except to multiply examples of the forms given.” Thomas, “Report,” 532. 48. Lapham, Geographical, iii, 14–16, and 180–81. The quote is taken from p. iii. 49. [Lapham,] “Antiquities of Wisconsin” (1836). 50. Hyer, “Ruins”; and Delafield, Inquiry, 16, 18, and appendix, nA, 107.

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51. Lapham, “Antiquities of Wisconsin” (1855), 42; and Keating, Narrative, 239–41. 52. R. Taylor, “Notes”; S. Taylor, “Description”; Locke, “Earthwork Antiquities”; and Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments (1848), 124–38. On the effigy-mound culture of Wisconsin see Theler and Boszhardt, Twelve Millennia; and Birmingham and. Eisenberg, Indian Mounds. 53. “Report of the Council,” May 29, 1850, 5–6 and “Report of the Council,” October 23, 1850, 17–18. 54. Lapham to Carl Christian Rafn, Milwaukee, October 16, 1846, Lapham Papers, Wis mss db , Wisconsin Historical Society; and Lapham to the Secretary of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, November 26, 1849, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection. Correspondence, manuscripts, and research files relating to Lapham’s archaeological fieldwork in Wisconsin form part of the Increase A. Lapham Papers in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Wis mss db . The manuscript material includes drawings of effigy mounds. See the relevant folders in the correspondence series boxes 7 and 8, which contain letters written to Samuel Foster Haven during Lapham’s fieldwork for the American Antiquarian Society, and to Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution regarding publication of Lapham’s findings. See also the writing and research files series box 12, folders 6–12, “Archaeology.” The University of Wisconsin acquired Lapham’s library in 1876. The greater part of Lapham’s archaeological collection perished during the fire that consumed the Science Hall at the University of Wisconsin on December 1, 1884. 55. Lapham to dear wife [Ann M. Lapham], Aztalan, June 28, 1850, and July 3, 1850, Lapham Papers, Wis mss db , Wisconsin Historical Society. 56. Lapham, “I. A. Lapham to S. F. Haven.” 57. Joseph Henry, “Notice,” Smithsonian Institution, June 1, 1855,” in Lapham, “Antiquities of Wisconsin, as Surveyed and Described,” [p. iii]; and Lapham, “Antiquities of Wisconsin,” [p. v]. See also Lapham, “Man-Shaped Mounds.” By far the best account of Lapham’s archaeology is Robert P. Nurre’s introduction to the 2001 facsimile reprint of Lapham’s Smithsonian monograph. See also Nurre’s “Increase A. Lapham” and “Increase A. Lapham’s Legacy.” The estimate that as many as two-thirds of the mounds in Wisconsin have been destroyed since Lapham surveyed and mapped them is from Nurre, “Increase A. Lapham,” 14. 58. Spurzheim was at the peak of his popularity in the United States at the time of his death at Boston in 1832. The Boston publishing house of Marsh, Capen, and Lyon brought forward American editions of several of his works the following year. See Spurzheim, Phrenology ; Phrenology, in Connection with the Study of Physiognomy; Phrenology, in Connection with the Study of

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59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Physiognomy, To Which Is Prefixed a Biography of the author by Nahum Capen; and Outlines of Phrenology. See also Spurzheim, Examination. Lapham is far from being an obscure figure in the history of American archaeology. Even so, he still deserves more attention that he has received. Apart from the appreciative assessments of his contributions to American archaeology by Robert P. Nurre cited above see also Hawks, “Increase A. Lapham”; “The Wisconsin Natural History Association,” 168–77; Mary J. Lapham, “Dr. Increase A. Lapham”; Quaife, “Increase Allen Lapham”; and Hoy, “Increase A. Lapham.” Darnell, Daniel Garrison Brinton, 2. Brinton, Notes, 167 and 170. Brinton, Notes, 176, 176n, and Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information, vol. 3, 77. Bradford, American Antiquities, 31; and Brinton, Notes, 197. Brinton, “Mound-Builders,” 37. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 354–55; and Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Varieties of Languages and Nations,” as cited in Cosmos, vol. 1, 355. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 2, 114. Brinton, “Mound-Builders,” 37. The uncertainties attending the late prehistoric and contact periods have received a considerable amount of scholarly attention. See Genheimer, Cultures; Grumet, Historic Contact; Buikstra, “Diseases”; Ramenofsky, “Diseases” and Vectors of Death; Shaffer, Native Americans; Fitzhugh, Cultures; and Dobyns and Swagerty, Their Numbers. See Finch, “Celtic Antiquities of America.” Whittlesey, “Descriptions,” 1–20, and seven appended plates of survey maps. Whittlesey, “Descriptions,” 6. Whittlesey, “Descriptions,” 6, 8, 10, 13, and 17. Bowditch, “Plan.” Winthrop Sargent’s letter to Bowdoin enclosing the plan of the ancient remains at the Muskingum is dated Boston, March 27, 1787, but the communication is noted as being received at the meeting of the academy on May 29 of that year. Bowditch reported the rediscovery of the map on February 13, 1850.

7. Archaeology as Anthropology 1. Mark, Four Anthropologists, 5–13; Kohlstedt, Formation, x; Oleson and Voss, Organization; Oleson and Brown, Pursuit; Higham, “Matrix” and From Boundlessness. 2. A more comprehensive account of the activities of the State Archaeological Association, including its enquiry to the authenticity of the Grave Creek

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

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10. 11.

12.

stone and the supposed meaning of its inscription, is Barnhart, “In Search of the Mound Builders.” Barnhart, “Stephen Denison Peet”; Moorhead, “Stephen Denison Peet”; Utley, “Stephen Denison Peet”; and Peet, “Reminiscences.” Regarding Peet’s interest in local archaeology see Peet, “Double-Walled Earthwork,” 443–44; and Peet, “Mound Builders.” Brinkerhoff, Recollections, 230–31; Benton, “Roeliff Brinkerhoff ”; Baughman, “General Roeliff Brinkerhoff ”; and Graham, History, [i–iii]. Peet to [Brinkerhoff ], Ashtabula, July 29, 1875, Norton Strange Townsend Papers, vfm 2168, Archives-Library Division, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. Whittlesey, “Descriptions,” 5. Minutes of the Ohio State Archaeological Convention, 30; and Peet to Dear Madame, Ashtabula, Ohio, n.d. [1875], Peet Papers, Beloit College Archives, Beloit, Wisconsin. Cited hereafter as ppbca . “Archaeological Convention, 1776–1876,” printed circular, n.d., Roeliff Brinkerhoff Papers, ms 31, Archives-Library Division, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. Cited hereafter as bpohs; “To the Archaeologists, Ethnologists, and Philologists of American, printed circular, n.p., n.d., bpohs; and “The Future of Archaeology,” unidentified press clipping, [1876], Peet Papers, ppbca ; and “Scientific News.” Stephen D. Peet, William B. Sloan, N. S. Townsend, A. A. E. Taylor, and M. C. Read, untitled printed circular, Ashtabula, Ohio, May 10, 1876, Committee of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio, ppbca . “Archaeological Convention, 1776–1876,” printed circular, n.d., bpohs . Peet had previously read his paper on the “The Archaeology of Europe and America Compared” before the Permanent Subsection of Anthropology within the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Buffalo, New York, August 23–30, 1876. “Titles of Other Papers Read in the Subsection of Anthropology,” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 340. Peet later published the paper under a slightly different title. See Peet, “Comparison between the Archaeology of Europe and America.” Peet read the paper on “Sources Concerning the Pre-Historic Races of America” under a slightly different title before the State Archaeological Association of Ohio at Newark, Ohio, in September 1876, which he also published. See Peet, “Sources of Information.” Stephen D. Peet, “American Anthropological Association, printed circular, Ashtabula, Ohio, October 1, 1876, Roeliff Brinkerhoff Papers, Archives-Library Division, Ohio Historical Society. The same circular is present in the ppbca . Printed “Admission Ticket” to the “Convention at [the] Ohio Building,

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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23. 24. 25.

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International Exhibition, Thursday, September 7th, at 8 O’Clock, Entrance at Gate 55,” ppbca ; Stephen D. Peet, “American Antiquities,” printed circular, Ashtabula, Ohio, November 2, 1876, ppbca ; and Mason, “Anthropology” (1876), 750; and “Proceedings of Societies.” Previous notices of the first American Anthropological Association appear in Barnhart, “In Search of the Mound Builders”; Loveland, “Stephen Denison Peet”; Lyon, “Anthropological Activity”; and Stocking, “First American Anthropological Association.” Loveland’s paper on Peet and the first American Anthropological Association does not appear to have been published. A typescript of the paper is among the Peet Papers in the Beloit College Archives. The author wishes to thank Fred Burwell, archivist at Beloit College, for kindly providing him with a copy. Lewis Henry Morgan et al., “To the Ethnologists, Archaeologists, and Philologists of America,” printed circular, n.p., n.d. [1876], bpohs; Charles Whittlesey and Norton Strange Townsend were among those whose names appeared on the circular; “Notes” (June 1875): 380; “Notes” (September 1875); and Mason, “Anthropology” (1876), 694. “American Anthropology.” “Centennial Prizes.” “Centennial Prizes.” “Archaeological.” “Archaeological.” Peet to Brinkerhoff, n.p., June 29, [1877], bpohs . “The Antiquaries. Who Built the Mounds, and What Did They Build Them For?,” 2; “Archaeological. Meeting of the Archaeological Society of Ohio, and the American Anthropological Association,” 8; “Anthropological. Visit to Fort Ancient,” 8; “Archaeological Association of Ohio,” 3; “Ohio Archaeological Society,” 8; and “National Anthropological Association,” 8. Peet, “Collections and Collectors” and “Serpent Symbols at Fort Ancient”; Matthew Canfield Read to Peet, Hudson, Ohio, n.d., as cited in American Antiquarian, 1, 53; and “Anthropological. Visit,” 8. Peet, like other observers before and after him, thought the extensive earthworks at Portsmouth, Ohio, were also representations of serpents. Fowke’s criticism of Peet’s general theory of parallel walls among the earthen enclosures of Ohio, and his tendency to explain site features “which do not exist,” appeared in his Archaeological History, 158–59. Peet to Brinkerhoff, Ashtabula, Ohio, January 1, 1878, and Unionville, Ohio, August 13, 1879, bpohs . Mason, “Anthropology” (1878), 696. Mason, “Anthropology” (1882), 917.

Notes to pages 372–378

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26. Darnell, Daniel Garrison Brinton, 41. 27. [Peet,] “To the Contributors.” Most of the editing fell to Peet, but his initial corps of associate editors were E. A. Barber of Philadelphia, R. B. Anderson, of Madison, Wisconsin, and A. T. Gatschet of Washington dc . “The American Antiquarian,” American Antiquarian, 1, [276, back matter]. The editors announced the union of the two journals in the first number of volume 3: “We would call attention to the fact that the American Antiquarian and the Oriental and Biblical Journal are hereafter to be combined.” Peet, “For Oriental.” 28. Stephen D. Peet, “Archaeological Exchange Club,” printed circular, Ashtabula, October 5, 1877, bpohs; “The American Antiquarian,” printed circular, Ashtabula, Ohio, February 22, 1878, published by the Archaeological Exchange Club, ppbca ; Barber, “Anthropology”; and Matthew Canfield Read to Albert Adams Graham, Hudson, Ohio, October 6 and 8, 1887, Officer and Administrative Offices Records, Secretary-Editor Correspondence, series 4005, box 1254, folder 1, Archives-Library Division, the Ohio Historical Society. 29. Peet to unknown party, letter draft, Ashtabula, Ohio, December 22, 1876, ppbca . 30. [Peet,] “To the Contributors.” 31. Peet to Brinkerhoff, Ashtabula, Ohio, July 15, 1877, bpohs. 32. Peet to “Dear Bro.” [John Thomas Short], Unionville, Ohio, June 20[?], 1879, Townsend Papers, ohs . 33. Brinkerhoff, “Address of Welcome,” Minutes of the Ohio State Archaeological Convention, 11. Additional statements of Brinkerhoff ’s views on religion and science are found in Brinkerhoff, Recollections, 15, 19, 85, 87, 342, and 425. He earlier gave his “philosophic convictions” on the origin of life in an essay prepared for the Mansfield Lyceum in May 1866. See “Law of Biogenesis in Its Application to Man,” in Recollections, 342–48. 34. Read’s credentials as a geologist and archaeologist were impressive. He was the assistant secretary and a trustee of the State Archaeological Association of Ohio and Read and Whittlesey were in charge of arranging the Ohio archaeological exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Read was also an assistant commissioner at the Cotton States Exposition held at New Orleans in 1884–85, where he in effect duplicated the earlier Ohio archaeological exhibit at Philadelphia. He was a member of the Ohio geological corps during the 1870s. Read was a good field man. His knowledge of lithic materials was probably only equaled by Charles Whittlesey, an archaeologist-geologist very much cast in the same mold as Read. Whittlesey and Read shared many intellectual attributes. See Read, “Ancient Mound Near Chattanooga,” Geology of Knox County, Geological Report, Archaeology of Ohio; Andrews and Read, Report; Read and Whittlesey, Final Report.

Notes to pages 378–384

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35. Read, “Evolution,” and “Symbolism.” 36. Brinton, “Current Notes.” Topinard’s earlier Éléments d’Anthropologie Générale ran to nearly twelve-hundred pages. 37. Smyth, “Memorial Address,” 27–28. 38. Nor was that predisposition or tendency only true of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth century. Unease over the imposition of human values and proclivities on evolutionary thought continues. See for example Ruse, “Teleology in Biology,” and Hanke, “Teleology.” “Bizarrely,” says Hanke, “evolutionists lead the world at substituting teleology for objectivity” (p. 147). Natural selection under that view takes the place of the Creator; the “Natural Selector” displaces the “Great Designer.” Evolutionists anthropomorphize nature by investing it with assumptions of purpose and ultimate causes (basic human preoccupations and anxieties), whereas Nature itself may be unconscious of the organic principles upon which it operates. 39. Metz, “Prehistoric Monuments”; Low, “Archaeological Explorations,” 40–68, 128–39, 203–20; and Langdon, “Skeletal Materials.” 40. See Metz and Putnam, “Explorations in Ohio”; and Dexter, “Putnam-Metz Correspondence.” 41. Andrews, “Report on Exploration of Ash Cave” and “Report on Explorations of Mounds in Southeastern Ohio”; Putnam, “Report of the Curator” and “Additions to the Museum and Library,” 743. 42. Putnam, “Serpent Mound,” 871. 43. Judd, Bureau, 4 and 7. 44. Powell, “Introductory.” 45. Worster, River, 442–45 and 451–56; and Haller, Outcasts, 108. 46. Powell, “Limitations,” 73–74. The block quote is taken from p. 74. Powell read this essay as his annual presidential address before the Anthropological Society of Washington dc in February 1881. See Powell, “Annual Address of the President.” 47. Powell, “Indians.” 48. Powell, “Discussion,” 15. 49. The archaeological, geographical, and historical bearings of the problem have attracted a considerable amount of learned attention. See Eggan, “Ethnological Cultures”; and Griffin, “Association.” The respective enquiries of Eggan and Griffin are models of critical analysis. There are more recent writings on the subject but arguably none more thorough. Research into the subject should at least begin with Eggan and Griffin. 50. Powell, “Report” and “Discussion.” A representation of the copper eagle recovered by Powell from a mound near Peoria, Illinois, appears as fig. 192 on p. 309 of Cyrus Thomas’s report on the bureau’s mound explorations published in 1894. It is there compared with the bird figures found in the

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

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57. 58.

59. 60.

Etowah mound in Georgia. So far as Thomas was aware, such figured copper “plates” had only been found in northern Georgia and in northern and southern Illinois. Powell’s earlier suspicion that the eagle effigy from Peoria was likely to be of European manufacture instead of Native American is not mentioned per se but strongly suggested by Thomas nonetheless. “That these [copper] plates are not wholly the work of Indians inhabiting the southern sections of the United States, or of their direct ancestors, is admitted.” And again, “The fact that some of them were found in connection with articles of European manufacture in unquestionable. The indications of European workmanship are too evident to be overlooked.” Thomas, “Report,” 308–9. Powell, “Report,” xl; and Powell, “Discussion.” Powell, “Introduction.” Rhees, Smithsonian Institution, 863; Powell, “Report,” xl–xli; and Jeter, Edward Palmer, 19, 23, 25, and 28. See Tribble, “Mounds”; and Barnhart, “Curious Antiquity?” De Hass, American Archaeology; Folsom et al., American Antiquities; “Historical and Literary Intelligence. The American Ethnological Society,” 66; De Hass, Mercantile, “Archaeology,” and “Report”; and “Notes” (July 1877): 384. De Hass, Syllabus; and Mason, “Anthropology” (1877), 626. See also “Wills De Hass Scrapbook, 1876–1891,” mmc -3863, Library of Congress, Washington dc. The De Hass scrapbook contains correspondence, writings, a course syllabus [the Syracuse lectures], newspaper clippings, printed matter, photographs, and other material relating to De Hass’s interest in archaeology, the history of North American Indians, and the history of West Virginia. Correspondence (ca. 90 items) and clippings pertain primarily to Indian mounds in the Upper Ohio Valley and their contents. Powell, “Limitations,” 86. See Wills De Hass, “The Mound Builders, their Monumental and Art Remains,” n.d. [1881–82], Manuscript 2430, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington dc . Jon Muller has noted that De Hass’s manuscript was “apparently mined by Thomas for the 5th annual report summary.” Muller, “Cyrus Thomas.” David L. Browman and Stephen Williams have similarly observed that part of De Hass’s legacy as an archaeological investigator was that Thomas incorporated material from the De Hass manuscript into the bureau’s definitive report on mound explorations in the Twelfth Annual Report published in 1894. Browman and Williams, “Antiquities Act.” Thomas, “Report,” 19. See Carr, Mounds and “Observations”; and Force, Some Early Notices. “Some Early Notices of the Indians of Ohio” (Some Early Notices, pp. 3–40) is a paper read before the Historical and Philosophical Society Ohio at Cincinnati and

Notes to pages 398–403

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61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

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“To what Race Did the Mound Builders Belong?” (Some Early Notices, pp. 41–75) is a paper written for the Congrès International des Américanistes and read before the Congrès at the Luxembourg session held in September 1877. Thomas, “Report,” 601. Thomas, Introduction (1973). Willey and Sabloff, History, 48. Hallowell, “Beginnings,” 84; and Jennings, Prehistory, 33. Browman, “Peabody Museum.” See also Dexter, “Putnam’s Problems.” Thomas, “Report,” 601. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841–1906) of Harvard University is a lesser-known figure in the history of American archaeology buy no stranger to students of American paleontology and geology. A native of Newport, Kentucky, he studied under Louis Agassiz at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University. Shaler later became professor of paleontology at Harvard from 1869 to 1888, professor of geology from 1888 to 1906, and directed the Kentucky Geological Survey from 1873 to 1880. His commentary on the mounds in Shaler, Kentucky, 45–47, is brief but incisive. See also Carr and Shaler, “Prehistoric Remains,” which contains seven heliotype plates (photomechanical prints) of Native American artifacts collected during the survey. Hoy, “Who Built the Mounds?,” 100, and “Who Made the Ancient Copper Implements?,” 106. Dr. Philo Romayne Hoy (1816–92) of Racine, Wisconsin, was a physician and surgeon who nurtured a serious interest in natural history and the Indian mounds of Wisconsin. Hoy and Increase A. Lapham surveyed the large mound group near Racine in September 1850 and by December 1882 Hoy said he had excavated fifty of the 138 mounds that he and Lapham surveyed in 1850. Thomas, “Work,” 8–9; and Noelke, “Origin,” 112. ms 2400 at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives contains ten boxes of records relating the activities of the Division of Mound Exploration from 1881–89. Three scrapbooks of clippings pertaining to the subject of the Mound Builders and the work of the Division of Mound Exploration are also in the National Anthropological Archives. See series X: Clippings, Subseries: Scrapbooks, boxes 322 and 323. Accession records for the artifacts and specimens collected by the Bureau of Ethnology are located in the registrars’ office of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Thomas, “Report,” xlv. See also Thomas’s Circular. Thomas, Introduction (1898). Holmes, “Review.” Holmes, “Review,” 178. [Peet,] “Review.”

Notes to pages 404–414

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75. Muller, “Cyrus Thomas.” 76. John Patterson MacLean, “Lecture on the Mound Builders,” broadside, ovs 1154, box 15, Archives Library Division, the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; “Sixteenth Annual Report of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society,” 399; and MacLean, “Were the Mound Builders Indians?” See also MacLean, Mound Builders and “Who Were the Mound Builders?,” 19. On supposed Nahua migrations to the American Southwest and to the Mississippi Valley, see Short, North Americans, vii–viii, 100, 253–54, and 518. See also Becker, “Migration.” Another statement of the southern migration theory appears in Robert S. Anderson, “The Mound Builders of America,” 39–50. 77. Du Pre, “Silent Races.”

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Bibliography

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The following bibliography is organized under three heads: Unpublished Archival Sources (listed by repository), Primary Sources (books and articles published during the period of this study), and Secondary Sources (books and articles published after the fact that represent the historiography on the subject). Archival Materials American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Communications to the Academy (Unbound), 1767–1932, Series i -c -2. Communications to the Academy (Bound) 1780–1810, Series i -c -1. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Caleb Atwater, Letters and Drawings, 1818–35. Ephraim George Squier-Edwin Hamilton Davis Papers, 1847–48. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, 1668–1983. Mss. ms Coll. 200. Samuel George Morton Papers. mss .b .m 843. The Violetta Delafield-Benjamin Smith Barton Collection. mss .b .b 284d. Beloit College Archives, Beloit, Wisconsin. Stephen Denison Peet Papers. Abbreviated herein as ppbca . Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. James McBride Papers. Mss. M 119L RFM . Abbreviated herein as jmpcmc . George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University. De Hass, Wills. Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on American Pre-historic Archaeology before the College of Fine Arts, Syracuse University—Spring Term, 1877. Printed Syllabus. Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia. Charles Colcock Jr. Family Papers. ms 215.

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Harvard University Libraries, Boston, Massachusetts. Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Jeffries Wyman Papers. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Benjamin Smith Barton Papers, 0034. Box Number 3. “Notes on the Pennsylvania Western Boundary Survey, 1785.” Samuel George Morton Papers. Library Company of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Housed and administered by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. “Autobiography” of John Russell Bartlett. Manuscript, n.d. The John Russell Bartlett Papers. Abbreviated herein as the bpjcbl. Library of the Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, Ohio. James McBride Papers. Library of Congress, Washington dc . Ephraim George Squier Papers. Manuscripts Division. MSS 41087. Abbreviated herein as splc . “Wills De Hass Scrapbook, 1876–1891.” mmc -3863. Marietta College Library, Marietta, Ohio. Rufus Putnam Papers. mss 002. Special Collections. Samuel P. Hildreth Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts. Carl Christian Rafn Letters, 1833–43. ms n -767. Jeremy Belknap Papers. ms n -1827. Winthrop Sargent Papers. ms n -877. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington dc . Davis, Edwin Hamilton. “Sketches of Monuments and Antiques; Found in the Mounds, Tombs, and Ancient Cities of America. Arranged, Classified and Described by Edwin Hamilton Davis, A. M.[,] M. D. New York, 1858.” Manuscript 3146-a. De Hass, Wills. “The Mound Builders, Their Monumental and Art Remains.” n.d. [1881–82]. Manuscript 2430. 256 pp. Records of the American Ethnological Society. New-York Historical Society. Squier Family Papers. Abbreviated herein as sfpnyhs . Squier, Ephraim George. “Two Lectures on the Origin and Progress of Modern Civilization.” Albany, New York, 1841–42. Ohio Historical Society. Columbus, Ohio. James McBride Papers. mss 24. Archives-Library Division. Includes McBride’s “Plats and Surveys of Ancient Works in the Miami Valley, State of Ohio.”

478

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The James McBride Papers at the Ohio Historical Society are on indefinite loan from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The Norton Strange Townshend Papers. vfm 2168. Archives-Library Division. Roeliff Brinkeroff Papers. ms 31. Archives-Library Division. Warren King Moorehead Papers. mss 106. Archives-Library Division. Winthrop Sargent Papers. mss 11. Archives-Library Division. Penn Museum Archives. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The Montroville Wilson Dickeson Collection. ms 1080. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Washington dc . The Joseph Henry Papers. University of Rochester Library. Lewis Henry Morgan Papers. Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. Sargent, Winthrop. Ephraim George Squier Papers ms 2446. Charles Whittlesey Papers. ms 2872. Archives-Library. Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison, Wisconsin. Lyman Copeland Draper Manuscripts. Draper mss 3u 322. Richard Butler, Pocket Diaries, November 1777 to March 1786. The Increase A. Lapham Papers, 1825–1930. Wis mss db . “Untitled Lecture on Indian Mounds in Wisconsin, Delivered January 16, 1851, Before the Young Men’s Association and Citizens at Free Congregation Church, Milwaukee.” Manuscript. Wisconsin Archaeological Society Records, 1857–1943. Wis mss ab , box 1, folder 1. Printed Sources “A Map of the Country of the Five Nations, Belonging to the Province of New York; and the Lakes Near which the Nations of Far Indians Live, with Part of Canada.” In Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, facing p. 1. London: Printed for John Whiston, Lockyer Davis, and John Ward, 1750. “A Pennsylvanian” [Benjamin Rush]. An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, on the slavery of the Negroes in America, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Printed and Sold by John Dunlap, 1773. AB. “Western Antiquities.” North-American Review 1 (May 1815): 21–22. Abbott, Charles Conrad. “Archaeological Frauds.” Popular Science Monthly 27 (July 1885): 308–10. Adair, James. The History of the American Indians. Edited with an introduction and annotations by Kathryn E. Holland Braund. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

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———. A History of the American Indians; Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775. “An Address to the People of the Western Country.” Liberty Hall & Cincinnati Gazette, September 15, 1818. An Eye Witness. “A New Hell.” Trumpet and Universalist Magazine 1 (March 14, 1829): 148. “American Anthropology.” Philadelphia Enquirer, September 8, 1876, 2. “American Antiquities.” North American Review 12 (April 1821): 235–46. Corrected pagination of a typographical error in the original. “American Antiquities.” Knickerbocker 8, no. 2 (August 1836): 132–33. “American Archaeological Researches.” Literary World 8 (May 3, 1851): 553–54. An anonymous review of Ephraim George Squier’s The Serpent Symbol, and the Worship of the Reciprocal Principles of Nature in America. “American Archaeology.” Literary World 2, no. 33 (September 18, 1847): 157–58. “American Ethnological Society.” Historical Magazine 3 (August 1859): 230–40. “American Ethnological Society.” Historical Magazine 3 (December 1859): 364. “American Ethnological Society.” Historical Magazine 5, no. 8 (1861): 240–41. “American Ethnological Society.” Historical Magazine 6, no. 4 (1862): 119–21. Andrews, E. B. “Report on Exploration of Ash Cave in Bention Township, Hocking County, Ohio.” Tenth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 2 (1880): 48–50. Andrews, E. B., and M. C. Read. Reports of Profs. E. B. Andrews and M. C. Read (of the Ohio Geological Corp) to J. B. Crosby on the Coal, Iron, Salt, and Limestone Parts of Dover and Trimble Townships, Ohio. New York: Tompkins, 1873. “Anthropological. Visit to Fort Ancient.” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 7, 1877, 8. “Antiquities of America” [Joseph Dorfeuille Obituary]. Long Island Star, August 1, 1840. “Archaeological.” Philadelphia Enquirer, September 5, 1876, 2. “Archaeological Association of Ohio.” Cincinnati Commercial, September 5, 1877, 3. “Archaeological. Meeting of the Archaeological Society of Ohio, and the American Anthropological Association.” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 7, 1877, 8. Assall, Friedrich Wilhelm, Nachrichten über die früheren einwohner von Nordamerika und ihre denkmäler von Friedrich Wilhelm Assall. Heidelberg: August Oswald, 1827. Atwater, Caleb. “Aboriginal Antiquities in the West.—Addressed to his Excellency James Monroe, President of the United States. Circleville, Pickaway County, Ohio, Jan. 1, 1818.” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 2 (March 1818): 333–36.

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———. “Caleb Atwater to Benjamin Silliman, Circleville, May 22, 1820.” American Journal of Science and Arts 2 (November 1820): 244. ———. “Caleb Atwater to the President of the American Antiquarian Society [Isaiah Thomas], Circleville, Ohio, January, 1820.” Archaeologia Americana 1 (1820): 107. ———. “Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States.” Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 1 (1820): 105–267. ———. “Observations on the Remains of Civilization and Population, Extant on the Vast Plains Situated South of the North-American Lakes.” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 2 (March 1818): 332–33. ———. “On Some Ancient Human Bones etc. With a Notice of the Bones of the Mastodon or Mammoth, and of Various Shell Found in Ohio and the West.” Atwater to Benjamin Silliman, Circleville, Ohio, May 22, 1820. American Journal of Science and Arts 2 (November 1820): 242–46. Reprinted as a pamphlet at New Haven by S. Converse that same year. Bailey, Rev. Jacob. “Observations and Conjectures on the Antiquities of America.” In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, for the Year 1795. Vol. 4, 100–5. Boston: Printed by Samuel Hall, 1795. Baily, Francis. Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 & 1797, edited by A. De Morgan. London: Baily Brothers, 1856. “With a Memoir of the Author by Sir John Hershel,” 1–74. Baldwin, Charles Candee. “Early Indian Migration in Ohio.” Read before the State Archaeological Association of Ohio, September 1878. American Antiquarian 1 (April 1879): 227–39. ———. “Early Maps of Ohio and the West.” Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society 25 (April 1875): 1–25. ———. “The Iroquois in Ohio.” Read Before the Society, December 28, 1868. Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society 40 (1878): 25–32. ———. “The Geographical History of Ohio.” Magazine of Western History 1 (November 1884): 16–25. Reprinted in Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society 63 (November 1884): 3–14. ———. “History of Man in Ohio: A Panorama. An Address Delivered at Norwalk, Ohio, before the Firelands Historical Society, on the 25th of June, 1890.” Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society 80 (1892): 257–81. ———. “The [Pierre] Margry Papers. Volume 1.” Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society 34 (November 1876): 3–7. ———. “Memorial of Colonel Charles Whittlesey, Late President of the Western Reserve Historical Society.” Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society 68 (1887): 402–34. Baldwin includes bibliographical references for Whittlesey’s writings on pp. 428–34.

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———. “Relics of the Mound Builders. An Address Delivered at the Annual Reunion of the Pioneers of the Mahoning Valley at Youngstown, Ohio. September 10, 1880.” Tracts of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society 23 (October 1874): 1–3. Bandelier, Adolphe Francis. The Romantic School in American Archaeology. New York: Trow’s Printing and Bookbinding Company, 1885. A paper read before the New York Historical Society on February 3, 1885. Barber, E. A. “Anthropology. Archaeological Exchange Club,” American Naturalist 11 (March 1877): 180. Barlow, Joel. The Columbiad: A Poem. Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad, 1809. The same publishers originally printed The Columbiad at Philadelphia and Baltimore in 1807. ———. The Vision of Columbus; A Poem in Nine Books. Hartford: Printed by Hudson and Goodwin, 1787. Bartlett, John Russell. “Observations on the Progress of Geography and Ethnology, with the Historical Facts Deduced Therefrom.” Proceedings of the New-York Historical Society (1846): 149–210. ———. “The Progress of Ethnology.” Niles’ National Register 15 (November 4, 1843): 156–59. A paper read at the meeting of the New York Historical Society on October 2, 1843. ———. “Progress of Ethnology, an Account of Recent Geographical, Archaeological, and Philological Researches, Tending to Illustrate the Physical History of Man.” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society 2 (1848): appendix, 3–151. The appendix containing Bartlett’s 148-page article has its own internal and separate pagination. ———. “Report of Hon. John R. Bartlett,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (April 29, 1868): 51–79. Barton, Benjamin Smith. “An Essay Towards a Natural History of the North American Indians. Being an Attempt to Describe and to Investigate the Causes of Some of the Varieties in Figure, in Complexion, etc. Among Mankind.” Dissertations of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh 23 (1788–89). ———. Collections for an Essay Towards a Materia Medica of the United States. Philadelphia: Printed for the Author by Way and Groff, 1798. Read before the Philadelphia Medical Society on February 21, 1798. ———. “Hints on the Etymology of Certain English Words, and on Their Affinity to Words in the Languages of Different European, Asiatic, and American (Indian) Nations, in a Letter from Dr. Barton to Dr. Thomas Beddoes.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 6 (1809): 145–58. ———. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. 2nd enlarged ed. Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1798. John Bioren published the original edition at Philadelphia in 1797.

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———. “Observations and Conjectures Concerning Certain Articles Which Were Taken Out of an Ancient Tumulus, or Grave, at Cincinnati, in the County of Hamilton, and Territory of the United-States, North-West of the River Ohio: in a Letter from Benjamin Smith Barton, M. D. to the Reverend Joseph Priestly, L.L.D.F.R.S &c.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 181–215. ———. Observations on Some Parts of Natural History: To Which is Prefixed an Account of Several Remarkable Vestiges of an Ancient Date, Which Have Been Discovered in Different Parts of North America, part 1. London: Printed for the Author and Sold by C. Dilly [1787]. ———. “View of Ohiopyle Falls in Pennsylvania.” Columbian Magazine (February 1787): 284. Bartram, John. An Account of East-Florida, With a Journal Kept by John Bartram. London: W. Nicoll, 1766. ———. “Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida from July 1, 1765 to April 10, 1766,” annotated by Francis Harper. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 33, part 1 (December 1942): 45. Bartram, William. Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, The Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws  .  .  . . Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791. J. Johnson published a London edition of Bartram’s Travels in 1792 and J. Moore, W. Jones, R. M’Allister, and J. Rice an edition at Dublin in 1793. Becker, John M. “On the Migration of the Nahuas.” In Congres international des Americanistes, compte-rendu de las seconde session, Luxembourg—1877. Vol. 1. Luxembourg, 1878, 345–46. Belknap, Jeremy. “Circular Letter, of the Historical Society, Respectfully Addressed to Every Gentleman of Science in the Continent and Islands of America.” Boston, November 1, 1791. In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, for the Year 1793. Vol. 2, 1–2. Boston: Printed at the Apollo Press, in Boston, by Belknap and Hall, 1792. ———. A Discourse Intended to Commemorate the Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus; Delivered at the Request of the Historical Society in Massachusetts, on the 23d Day of October, 1792, . . . To Which Are Added Four Dissertations, Connected With Various Parts of the Discourse . . . Dissertation IV. On the Colour of the Native Americans, and the Recent Population of this Continent. Boston: Printed at the Apollo Press, in Boston, by Belknap and Hall, State Street, 1792. [Belknap, Jeremy] “For the Columbian Magazine. Observations on the Travels and Transactions of Ferdinando De Soto, in Florida; Intended to Prove that the Ancient Fortifications, Discovered on the Banks of the Ohio, and other

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Inland Parts of America, Were Not Constructed by Him.” Columbian Magazine 2 (September 1788): 477–89. Bell, John. Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia. Vol. 1. Glasgow: Printed for the Author by Robert and Andrew Foulis, Printers to the University, 1763. Bellin, Jacques Nicolas. Remarques sur la Carte de l’Amérique Septentrionale, comprise entre le 28e et le 72e dégré de latitude, avec une description geographique de ces parties. Paris: de l’imprimerie de Didot, 1755. Bernhard, Karl, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenack. Travels Through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828. The Biographical Cyclopaedia and Portrait Gallery with an Historical Sketch of the State of Ohio. Vol. 3. Cincinnati: Western Biographical Publishing, 1884. Bowditch, Henry I. “Plan of an Ancient Fortification at Marietta, Ohio.” Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Science n.s. 5, part 1 (1853–55): 26. Bowdoin, James. “A Philosophical Discourse, Publickly Addressed to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in Boston, on the Eighth of November, 1780, When the President was Inducted into Office.” Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1, part 1 (1783): 1–20. Benjamin Edes and Sons originally published Bowdoin’s presidential discourse at Boston in 1780 under a slightly different title. Brackenridge, Henry Marie. “On the Population and Tumuli of the Aborigines of North America. In a Letter from Henry Marie Brackenridge, Esq., to Thomas Jefferson.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 1 (1818): 151–59. ———. Views of Louisiana; Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River in 1811. Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear and Eichbaum, 1814. Bradford, Alexander W. American Antiquities and Researches into the Origin and History of the Red Race. New York: Dayton and Saxton, 1841. Brerewood, Edward. Enquiries Touching the Diversities of Languages and Religions through the Chief Parts of the World. London: Printed for John Bell, 1614. Brinkerhoff, Roeliff. “Address of Welcome.” Minutes of the Ohio State Archaeological Convention, Held in Mansfield, O., September 1st & 2nd, 1875. Columbus: Printed for the Society by Paul & Thrall, 1875. ———. Recollections of a Lifetime. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1900. Brinton, Daniel Garrison. “The Aims of Anthropology.” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Forty-Fourth Meeting Held at Springfield, Mass., August–September 1895, 1–17. Salem ma : Published by the Permanent Secretary, May 1896. Also published in Science n.s 2, 35 (August 30, 1895): 241–52. ———. American Hero-Myths. A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent. Philadelphia: H. C. Watts, 1882.

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———. The American Race: A Linguistic Classification and Ethnographic Description of the Native Tribes of North and South America. New York: N. D. C. Hodges, 1891. ———. Anthropology: As a Science and a Branch of University Education in the United States. Philadelphia, 1892. ———. “Anthropology and Ethnology.” The Iconographic Encyclopaedia of the Arts and Sciences. Vol. 1, “Anthropology,” 17–56; “Ethnology,” 57–184. Philadelphia: Iconographic Publishing, 1886. ———. “The Culture Status of the American Indian at the Time of His Discovery.” American Archaeologist 2 (February 1898): 29–31, and discussion by Joseph D. McGuire, William M. Beauchamp, and Charles C. Abbott, and William H. Holmes, 32–34. ———. “Current Notes on Anthropology—IV.” Science 19 (April 22, 1892): 231. ———. An Ethnologists View of History. An Address before the Annual Meeting of the New Jersey Historical Society, at Trenton, New Jersey, January 28, 1896. Philadelphia, 1896. ———. Essays of an Americanist. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1890. ———. “Impression of the Figures on a ‘Meday Stick.’ ” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 36 (1884): 278. ———. The Lenape and Their Legends; With the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum, A New Translation, and an Inquiry into Its Authenticity. Library of Aboriginal Literature 5. Philadelphia: D. G. Brinton, 1885. ———. The Mound-Builders of the Mississippi Valley. Historical Magazine 10 (February 1866): 33–37. ———. The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Mythology and Symbolism of the Red Race of America. New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1868. Henry Holt and Company published the second revised edition at New York in 1876 and David McKay the third revised edition at Philadelphia in 1896. ———. “The National Legend of the Chahta-Muskokee Tribes.” Historical Magazine 2nd ser. 7 (February 1870): 118–26. Reprinted as a pamphlet at Morrisania, New York by Henry B. Dawson in April 1870. ———. “The Nomenclature and Teaching of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 5 (July 1892): 263–71. ———. Notes on the Floridian Peninsula: Its Literary History, Indians Tribes, and Antiquities. Philadelphia: Joseph Sabin, 1859. ———. “On the Cuspidiform Petroglyphs, or So- Called Bird-Track RockSculptures, of Ohio.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 36 (1884): 275–77. ———. “Prehistoric Archaeology.” In The Iconographic Encyclopaedia. Vol. 2, 13–116. Philadelphia: Iconographic Publishing, 1886.

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Burnside, Samuel M. “A Memoir of Isaiah Thomas.” Archaeologia Americana 2 (1836): xviii–xxx. Butler, J. D. “Copper Tools Found in the State of Wisconsin.” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 3 (1875–76): 99–104. Butterfield, Consul Willshire, ed. Journal of Captain Jonathan Heart. Albany ny: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1885. “C.” “The Unity of the Human Race. Rejoinder to the Reply of Dr. Nott.” Southern Quarterly Review 9 (April 1846): 372–91. “Cabinet.” In Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (April 1873): 14–56. ——— . “Unity of the Races.” Southern Quarterly Review 9 (April 1845): 372–448. “Caleb Atwater” [obituary]. Report of Council. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (October 1867): 24. [Campbell, Reverend John Poage] “Of the Aborigines of the Western Country.” Port Folio 4th ser., 1 (June 1816): 457–63. ———. “Ruins of an Ancient Work on the Sciota.” Port Folio n.s. 2 (November 1809): 419. Carr, Lucien. The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley, Historically Considered. Kentucky Geological Survey. Frankfort ky: Stereotyped for the Survey by Major, Johnston, and Barrett, Yeoman Press, 1883. ———. “Observations on the Crania from the Stone Graves in Tennessee.” In Eleventh Annual Report of the Trustees of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 361–84. Cambridge ma : The Trustees, 1878. ———. On the Prehistoric Remains of Kentucky. Cambridge ky: University Press, 1876. Carr, Lucien, and N. S. Shaler, “On the Prehistoric Remains of Kentucky.” In Memoires of the Geological Survey of Kentucky. Vol. 1, part 4, 1–31. Cambridge ky: University Press, 1876. Carter, Clarence Edwin, ed. Territorial Papers of the United States. Vol. 1. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1934. Carver, Jonathan. Travels through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years, 1766, 1767, and 1768. London: Printed for the Author and Sold by J. Walter and S. Crowder, 1778. [Cass, Lewis] “Article XII.—Archaeologia Americana. Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society.” North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal 12 (April 1821): 225–32, 243–446. The break in pagination is a typographical error in the original. ———. “Discourse Delivered before the Historical Society of Michigan.” In Historical and Scientific Sketches of Michigan: Comprising a Series of Discourses

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———. A Second Visit to the United States of North America. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1849. ———. Travels in North America; with Geological Observations on the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1845. Macauley, James. The Natural, Statistical and Civil History of the State of NewYork. 2 vols. New York: Gould and Banks, 1829. MacLean, John Patterson. “Ancient Works at Marietta.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 12 (1903): 37–66. ———. “Fowke’s Book Reviewed.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 11, no. 1 (July 1902): 143–48. ———. The Mound Builders. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1879. ———. “Were the Mound Builders Indians?” American Antiquarian 4 (January 1882): 131–33 and 136. ———. “Who Were the Mound Builders?” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 13 (January 1904): 91–96. Madison, Bishop James. “A Letter on the Supposed Fortifications of the Western Country, from Bishop Madison of Virginia to Dr. Barton.” Read December 16, 1803. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 6, part 1 (1804): 132–42. Mallory, Garrick. “Pictographs of the North American Indians. A Preliminary Paper.” In Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1882–’83, 1–256. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1886. Mansfield, Edward D. Memoirs of the Life and Services of Daniel Drake, m. d. Cincinnati: Applegate, 1855. Marsh, Othniel Charles. “Description of an Ancient Sepulchral Mound Near Newark, Ohio.” American Journal of Science and Arts 2nd ser. 42 (July 1866): 1–11. Marshall, Humphrey. History of Kentucky. 2nd rev. ed. 2 vols. Frankfort ky: George S. Robinson, 1824. Marshall, O. H. “Champlain’s Expedition of 1615 Against the Onondagas.” Magazine of American History 1, no. 1 (January 1877): 1–13. ———. “The Niagara Frontier.” In The Historical Writings of the Late Orsamus H. Marshall Relating to the Early History of the West, 275–320. Albany ny: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1887. Martineau, Harriet. Retrospect of Western Travel. 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1838. Martius, C. F. Ph. Von. [Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius]. “On the State of Civil and Natural Rights among the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Brazil.” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 2 (1832): 191–227. The essay is a translated abstract of Von Martius’s Von dem Rechtszustande unter der

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Ureinwohnern Brasiliens. Eine Abhandlung, Von Dr. C. F. Ph. Von Martius (Munich: F. Fleischer, 1832). Mason, O. T. “Anthropology.” American Naturalist 10 (December 1876): 750. ———. “Anthropology.” American Naturalist 11 (October 1877): 626. ———. “Anthropology.” American Naturalist 12 (October 1878): 696. ———. “Anthropology.” American Naturalist 16 (November 1882): 917. ———. Ethnologicalory Directions Relative to the Indian Tribes of the United States. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1875. ———. “The Leipzig Museum of Ethnology.” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1873, 390–409. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1874. ———. “Proceedings of Societies—The American Association for the Advancement of Science—Anthropology.” American Naturalist 10 (October 1876): 639. ———, trans. “International Code of Symbols for Charts of Pre-Historic Archaeology.” In Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1875, 221–23. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1876. Matchett, Richard J. Matchett’s Baltimore Directory for 1827. Baltimore: R. J. Matchett, 1827. ———. Matchett’s Baltimore Directory for 1835–36: Corrected Up to September, 1835. Baltimore: R. J. Matchett, 1835. Mather, Cotton. “The Epistle Dedicatory.” In The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated, [vii–viii]. Boston: Printed by S. Green, 1690. ———. “An Extract of Several Letters from Cotton Mather, D. D. to John Woodward, M. D. and Richard Waller, Esq; S. R. Secr.” Philosophical Transactions [of the Royal Society of London] 29, no. 339 (1714–16): 62–71. ———. Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from the First Planting in 1620 unto the Year of Our Lord 1698. Bk. 3. London: Printed for Thomas Parkhurst, 1720. ———. The Way to Prosperity, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Convention of the Governour, Council, and Representatives of the Massachuset-Colony in New-England; on May 23, 1689. Boston: R. Pierce, 1690. Maximilian, Prince of Wied. Travels in the Interior of North America. Vol. 24 of Early Western Travels, 1748–1846. Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clarke, 1906. McAdams, W. Records of Ancient Races of the Mississippi Valley. St. Louis: C. R. Barnes, 1887. McBride, James. “A Sketch of the Topography, Statistics, and History of Oxford, and the Miami University.” Journal of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 1, no. 1 (1838): 89.

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———. Pioneer Biography. Sketches of the Lives of Some of the Early Settlers of Butler County, Ohio. 2 vols. Cincinnati: R. Clarke & Company, 1869–1871. ———. “Survey and Description of Ancient Fortifications Situated in Butler County, Ohio.” Journal of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 1, no. 1 (1838): 104–11. [McBride, James] Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres; Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open About The Poles. Cincinnati: Morgan, Lodge, and Fisher, 1826. McClure, David. Diary of David McClure, Doctor of Divinity, 1748–1820. Edited by Franklin B. Dexter. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1899. McCulloh, James Haines, Jr. Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, Concerning the Aboriginal History of America. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jr., 1829. ———. Researches on America; Being an Attempt to Settle Some Points Relative to the Aborigines of America, etc. Baltimore: Coale and Maxwell, 1816. ———. Researches on America; Being an Attempt to Settle Some Points Relative to the Aborigines of America, etc. 2nd rev ed. Baltimore: Joseph Robinson, 1817. McGee, W. J., and C. C. Baldwin Review Extraordinary of “Man in the Glacial Period.” Cleveland, 1893. Review of G. Frederick Wright, Man and the Glacial Period. [McWhorter, A.] “Tammuz and the Mound-Builders.” Galaxy 15, no. 1 (July 1872): 83–100. “Meeting for Business, October 27, 1846, Election.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 3 (September–October 1846), 115. Meigs, James Aitken, md. “Catalogue of Human Crania, in the Collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; Based upon the Third Edition of Dr. Morton’s ‘Catalogue of Skulls, &c.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Vol. 8 (1856): 1–112. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857. ———. “The Cranial Characteristics of the Races of Men.” In Josiah Nott and George Robins Gliddon, Indigenous Races of the Earth; Or, New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry, 203–352. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857. ———. “Observations upon the Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines, Based upon Specimens Contained in the Collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 18 (1866): 197–235. “Members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.” Proceedings of the American Association for Advancement of Science, First Meeting, Held at Philadelphia, September 1848. Philadelphia: John C. Clark, Printer, 1849, 144–56.

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Metz, Charles. L. “The Prehistoric Monuments of the Little Miami Valley.” Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History 1, no. 3 (1878): 119–28. Metz, Charles L., and Frederic W. Putnam. “Explorations in Ohio: The Marriott Mound, No. 1, and its Contents.” Nineteenth Annual Report of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Annual Reports of the Peabody Museum 3 (1886): 449–66. Minor, Benjamin Blake. “A Sketch of the Progress of Archaeological Science in America.” Southern Literary Messenger 11 (July 1845): 420–33. Signed “By the Editor.” Minutes of the Ohio State Archaeological Convention, Held in Mansfield, O., September 1st & 2nd, 1875. Columbus oh : Printed for the Society by Paul & Thrall, 1875. Mitchell, Samuel Latham. “Heads of That Part of the Introductory Discourse Delivered November 7, 1816, by Dr. Mitchell, in the College of Physicians at New York, Which Relates to the Migration of Malays, Tartars, and Scandinavians to America.” Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 1 (1820): 338–44. ———. “No. II. A Letter from Dr. Mitchell, of New York, to Samuel M. Burside, Esq., Secretary of the American Antiquarian Society, on North American Antiquities. Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 1 (1820): 318–21. Originally published as “North-American Antiquities.” Samuel L. Mitchell to S. M. Burnside, [New York], August 24, 1815. Analectic Magazine n.s. 6 (September 1815): 260–61. ———. “The Original Inhabitants of America Shown to be of the Same Family and Linage with Those of Asia, by a Process of Reasoning not Hitherto Advanced.” Mitchell to DeWitt Clinton, New York, March 31, 1816. Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 1 (1820): 325–32. Also appeared in the Monthly Magazine 42 (January 1817): 525–28, published in London. ———. “Samuel L. Mitchell to De Witt Clinton, New York, March 31, 1816,” in Archaeologia Americana 1 (1820): 325. Moorehead, Warren King. “The Hopewell Group.” Antiquarian 1 (May 1897): 113–20; (June 1897): 153–58; (July 1897): 178–84; (August 1897): 208–13; (September 1897): 236–44; (October 1897): 254–64; (November 1897): 291–95; and (December 1897): 312–16. The final installment in the series appeared in the American Archaeologist for January 1898, the renamed successor of the Antiquarian. Moorehead, “The Hopewell Group.” American Archaeologist 2 (January 1894): 6–11. ———. Prehistoric Implements: A Reference Book. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1900.

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Morgan, Lewis H. Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization. New York: Henry Hold, 1877. ———. “Communication of October 31, 1848.” In 2nd Annual Report of the Regents of the State University of New York, 81–83. Albany NY: C. Van Benthuysen, Printer, 1848. ———. “Communication of November 13, 1848.” In 2nd Annual Report of the Regents of the State University of New York, 814–91. Albany NY: C. Van Benthuysen, Printer, 1848. ———. Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rock Mountain Region, J. W. Powell in Charge. Contributions to North American Ethnology. Vol. 4. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1881. ———. “Houses of the Mound-Builders.” North American Review 123 (July 1876): 60–85. ———. League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois. 2 vols. Herbert M. Lloyd, ed. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1901. Originally published at Rochester ny by Sage and Brother, 1851. ———. Lewis Henry Morgan to the Board of Regents, November 13, 1848. In Second Annual Report of the Regents of the State University of New York, on the Condition of the State Cabinet, 90–91. Albany ny: Weed, Parsons, 1849. ———. “Suggestions Relative to an Ethnological Map of North America.” In Annual Report of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1861, 397–98. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1862. Morlot, A. General Views on Archaeology. Translated by Philip Harry for the Smithsonian Institution. Washington dc : Printed at the Congressional Globe Office, 1861. Also published in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1860, 284–343 (Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1861). ———. “On the Date of the Copper Age in the United States.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 9 (June–December 1862): 111–14. Morse, Jedidiah. The American Geography; or, A View of the Present Situation of the United States of America. Elizabethtown nj: Shepard Kollock, 1789. Morton, J. “Notice of an Ancient Mound, near Wheeling, Virginia.” American Journal of Science and Arts 6 (1823): 166–68. Misprinted as “S. Morton” in the title but signed J. Morton. Morton, Samuel George. “Account of a Craniological Collection; with Remarks on the Classification of Some Families of the Human Race.” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society 2 (1848): 217–22. ———. Additional Observations on Hybridity in Animals, and on Some Collateral Subjects; Being a Reply to the Objections of the Rev. John Bachman. Charleston sc : Steam-Power Press of Walker and James, 1850. From the Charleston Medical Journal and Review.

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———. Catalogue of Skulls of Man, and the Inferior Animals, in the Collection of Samuel George Morton. Philadelphia: Turner and Fisher, 1840. ———. Catalogue of Skulls of Man, and the Inferior Animals, in the Collection of Samuel George Morton. 3rd. ed. Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1849. ———. Crania Aegyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy, History, and the Monuments. Philadelphia: John Penington, 1844. ———. Crania Americana: Or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America. Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839. ———. “Hybridity in Animals, Considered in Reference to the Question of the Unity of the Human Species: Part I.” American Journal of Science and Arts 3 (January 1847): 39–50. Part II: (March 1847): 203–12. ———. An Inquiry Into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America. Boston: Tuttle and Dennett, 1842. A second edition appeared at Philadelphia in 1844. ———. “Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy, History, and the Monuments.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 9 (1846): 93–159. ———. “On an Aboriginal Cranium Obtained by Dr. Davis and Mr. Squier.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 3 (May–June 1847): 212–13. ———. Letter to the Rev. John Bachman, D. D., On the Question of Hybridity in Animals, Considered in Reference of to Unity of the Human Species. Charleston sc : Steam-Power Press of Walker and James, 1850. ———. “Some Observations on the Ethnology and Archaeology of the American Aborigines.” American Journal of Science and Arts n.s. 2 (July 1846): 1–17. Murray, Charles Augustus. Travels in North America During the Years 1834, 1835, & 1836. Vol. 1 New York: Harper and Brothers, 1839. “National Anthropological Association.” Cincinnati Commercial, September 6, 1877, 8. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. 5, Thoughts Out of Season Part Two, The Use and Abuse of History. Edited by Oscar Levy and translated by Adrian Collins. Edinburg: T. N. Foulis, 1909. “Notes.” American Naturalist 9 (June 1875): 380. “Notes.” American Naturalist 9 (September 1875): 525. “Notes.” Popular Science Monthly 11 (July 1877): 384. Nott, Josiah Clark. “An Issue with the Reviewer of Nott’s ‘Caucasian and Negro Races.’ Dr. Nott’s Reply to ‘C.’—Southern Quarterly Review, April, 1845, on the ‘Unity of the Races.’ ” Southern Quarterly Review 8 (July 1845): 149–90.

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———. Two Lectures on the Connection Between the Biblical and Physical History of Man. New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1849. ———. “Unity of the Human Race.” Southern Quarterly Review 9 (January 1846): 1–57. Nott, Josiah Clark, and George Robins Gliddon. Indigenous Races of the Earth. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857. ———. Types of Mankind. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854. “Obligation [Membership] Book.” Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh, December 2, 1785, Forty-Ninth Session. “Ohio Archaeological Society.” Cincinnati Commercial, September 6, 1877, 8. “On the Aborigines of the Western Country.” Port Folio 1 (June 1816): 457–63. “Our Foreign Relations: Mr. E. G. Squier, Charge d’Affaires, Central America.” American Review n.s. 6 (October 1850): 345–52. Owen, David Dale. “Regarding Human Foot-Prints in Solid Limestone.” American Journal of Science and Arts 43 (July 1842): 14–32. ———, ed. Report of a Geological Expedition of Part of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. 18th Cong., 1st Sess.; Sen. Misc. Doc. 407. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1844. P. “Western Museum. A New Song.” Cincinnati Literary Gazette 1 (March 13, 1824): 88. Parkman, Francis, Jr. The Discovery of the Great West. Boston: Little, Brown, 1869. ———. “Indian Antiquities in North America.” Christian Examiner 50 (May 1851): 417–28 Parsons, Samuel Holden. “Discoveries Made in the Western Country.” Samuel Holden Parsons to President Willard, Middletown, Connecticut, October 2, 1786. Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Science 2, no. 1 (1793): 119–27. Peale, Titian R. “The Ancient Mounds at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1819.” In Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1861, 386–91. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1862. Peale’s Museum Relics: Catalog of a Highly Interesting Collection of Aboriginal and Other Relics Illustrating American History, 262 of Which Are from the Celebrated Peale’s Museum of Philadelphia Being a Portion of the Collection of Montroville Wilson Dickeson . . . to be sold at auction by Thomas Birch & Son . . . October 13th & 14th, 1869. Philadelphia: Thomas Birch’s Sons; E. C. Markley and Son, Printers, 1869. [Peck, James P. P.] Catalogue of the M’Bride Library and Cabinet. Hamilton oh : Telegraphy Office Print, 1860. Peck, John Mason. A Gazetteer of Illinois. Jacksonville il : R. Goudy, 1834.

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———. A Gazetteer of Illinois. 2nd rev., corrected, and enlarged ed. Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliott, 1837. Peet, Stephen Denison. “The Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.” American Antiquarian 12, no. 2 (1890): 116–17. ———. “Ancient Villages among Emblematic Mounds.” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 6 (1881–83): 154–76. ———. “Collections and Collectors in Ohio and Vicinity.” American Antiquarian 1 (April 1878): 49–50. ———. “A Comparison between the Archaeology of Europe and America.” American Antiquarian 1 (April 1879): 211–24. Read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at the Session Held at Buffalo, August 22, 1879. ———. “Criticism of Fowke’s Book.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 11, no. 1 (July 1902): 139–43. ———. “A Double-Walled Earthwork in Ashtabula County, Ohio.” Smithsonian Annual Report, 1876, 443–44. Washington dc : Smithsonian Institution, 1877. ———. “For Oriental, Biblical, and Classical Scholars. The American Antiquarian.” American Antiquarian 3 (April 1881), frontmatter [176]. ———. “The Mound Builders.” In William W. Williams, History of Ashtabula County, 16–20. Philadelphia: Williams Brothers, 1878. ———. “Reminiscences of Early Green Bay, Wisconsin.” Old Northwest Genealogical Quarterly 7 (July 1904): 160–64. [Peet, Stephen Denison] “Review of ‘Introduction to the Study of North American Archaeology by Prof. Cyrus Thomas,’ ” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 20 (November–December 1898): 373–74. ———. “The Serpent Symbols at Fort Ancient.” American Antiquarian 1 (April 1878): 52–53. ———. “The Sources of Information as to the Prehistoric Condition of America.” American Antiquarian 2 (July–September 1879): 33–48. Read before the State Archaeological Association of Ohio at Newark, Ohio, September 1876. [Peet, Stephen Denison] To the Contributors to The American Antiquarian.” American Antiquarian 1 (April 1879): [275, back matter]. Pennant, Thomas. Arctic Zoology. 2 vols. London: Printed by H. Hughs, 1784–85. Phillips, Henry Jr. “Early Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, Compiled by One of the Secretaries, from the Manuscript Minutes of its Meetings from 1744–1838.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 22, no. 3 (July 1885): 248–49 and 251–52. Pickering, Charles. The Races of Man, and Their Geographical Distribution. Vol. 9 of the Reports of the United States Exploring Expedition. Philadelphia: Printed by C. Sherman, 1848.

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———. The Races of Man; And their Geographical Distribution, New Edition. To Which Is Prefixed, An Analytical Synopsis of the Natural History of Man. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850. Henry G. Bohn reprinted the “new edition” at London in 1851 and again in 1854. ———. The Gliddon Mummy- Case in the Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.” Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Publication 208. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution, 1867). Reprinted as Article 4 in Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Vol. 16. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution. Pidgeon, William. Traditions of De-coo-dah and Antiquarian Researches. New York: Horace Thayer, 1858. “Plan of an Ancient Fortification on the East Bank of the Little Miami River . . . ,” Port Folio 3rd ser., 3 (November 1809): 485–86. Pouchet, Georges. The Plurality of the Human Race. 2nd ed. Translated and edited by J. C. Beavan. London: Published for the Anthropological Society by Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1864. Powell, John Wesley. “Discussion,” December 19, 1883, Transactions of the Anthropological Society of Washington. Vol. 3 (November 6, 1883–May 19, 1885), 15. Washington dc : Printed for the Society, 1885. ———. “The Indians Are The Mound Builders.” Science 5 (April 3, 1885): 267. ———. “Introduction.” In Twelfth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology to the Smithsonian Institution, 1890–’91, xli–xlii. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1894. ———. “Introductory.” In Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880–1881, xxxi. Washington dc : Government Printing Office, 1883. ———. “On Limitations to the Use of Some Anthropological Data.” In First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1879–’80, 73–86. Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1881. Same paper published as “Annual Address of the President, 1881. On Limitations to the Use of Some Anthropologic[al] Data.” In Abstract of Transactions of the Anthropological Society of Washington, D. C., With the Annual Address of the President, For the First Year, Ending January 20, 1880, and For the Second Year, Ending January 18, 1881, edited by John Wesley Powell. Thirty-Third Regular Meeting, February 1, 1881. Article 4 of Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. Vol. 25, 113–36. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution, 1883. ———. “Report of the Director,” in Twelfth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology to the Smithsonian Institution, 1890–’91 (1894): xxxix–xl. Pownall, Thomas. A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North American As Are Contained in the Annexed Map of the Middle Colonies. London, 1776.

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———. Ancient History, or Annals of Kentucky; With a Survey of the Ancient Monuments of North America. Frankfort ky: Privately Printed for the Author, 1824. Appendix I, “Enumeration of the Sites of Ancient Towns and Monuments of Kentucky, etc.,” was reprinted as “Ancient Annals of Kentucky,” an introduction to the second revised edition of Humphrey Marshall, The History of Kentucky (Frankfort ky: Geo. S. Robinson, 1824). ———. The Ancient Monuments of North and South America. 2nd ed. corrected and enlarged. Philadelphia: Printed for the Author, 1838. Originally appeared in the American Museum of Science, Literature, and the Arts 1 (September 1838): 10–23. ———. “The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, Compared with Those of the Eastern Continent.” American Museum of Science, Literature, and the Arts 1 (September 1838): 10–23. The author printed a second and enlarged pamphlet edition of twenty-eight pages at Philadelphia the same year. ———. “Anthropology. The Fundamental Base of the Philosophy of Human Speech, or Philology and Ethnology.” Atlantic Journal, and Friend of Knowledge 1 (Summer 1832): 48–54. ———. “Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society . . . Volume 1.” Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine 3 (September 1820): 89–112. ———. “Clio No. 1. Ancient History of North America.” Cincinnati Literary Gazette 1, no. 8 (February 21, 1824): 59–60. ———. “Four Letters on American History, Of Professor Rafinesque to Dr. J. M’Culloh of Baltimore, Second Letter.” Saturday Evening Post 7, June 21, 1828, 1. ———. The Good Book,—Number I: Amenities of Nature or Annals of Historical and Natural Sciences. Philadelphia: Printed for the Eleutherium of Knowledge, 1840. ———. “Important Historical and Philological Discovery.” Rafinesque to Peter Du Ponceau, January 1, 1827. Saturday Evening Post 6, January 13, 1827, 2. ———. “Second Letter [to Thomas Jefferson]. Description of the Alleghawian Monuments,” Kentucky Reporter, August 23, 1820. ———. “Third Letter [to Thomas Jefferson]. On Some Alleghawian Implements, &c.” Kentucky Reporter, September 6, 1820. ———. “Three Letters on American Antiquities, Directed to the Honorable Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States. First Letter. On the Alleghawian Records.” Kentucky Reporter, August 16, 1820. Randal, E. O. “Archaeological Agitation.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 11, no. 1 (July 1902): 160–61.

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Page references in italics indicate illustrations. Abbott, Charles Conrad, 371, 372 Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York (1851), 71, 313, 318, 325, 327, 408 Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 86, 231, 257, 261, 451n46 Adair, James, 64–65, 67, 89, 106, 107, 111, 113, 126 Adelphi, 142, 440n67 aesthetics and aboriginal art, the argument from, 282, 319, 328, 394 Agassiz, Louis, 474n67 Alleghans or Alleghens, 220, 450n27 Alligewi or (Talligewi), 219, 220, 221 “altar” mounds, 278, 281, 309, 320, 415 American aborigines, origins of, 16, 64, 85–86, 124, 145, 211, 212 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 90–91, 99, 107–8, 110 American Anthropological Society (the first), founded at Philadelphia in 1876, difficulties encountered, 361–78

American Antiquarian, 379–82, 384 American Antiquarian Society, 176–80, 187, 189, 192, 204, 338–40, 444nn43–44, 449n19 American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West (1833), 244 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 257, 280; Subsection on Anthropology, 361, 362, 371, 372, 375, 376–78 American Ethnological Society, 230, 253, 256–57, 265, 288, 291, 294, 296, 298, 299, 302, 303, 304, 305, 315, 317, 400, 456n37, 458n53, 461n76 American exceptionalism, xii–xiii “American family” and “American race,” use of phrases as a racial classification of American aborigines, 283, 291 American Indian languages, the study of, 85–87, 124, 433n63 American Philosophical Society, 10, 37, 109, 110, 111, 114–15, 122, 143, 150, 153, 206, 386

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“American race” use of term in regard to the origin of the mounds, 16, 255, 268, 271, 283, 284, 291, 294, 295 American regional identity and the mounds, xi, 90, 116, 193, 446n65 American School of Ethnology, 20 Anahuac, 156, 157, 223, 241, 295 analogies, use of in interpreting archaeological evidence, 14, 30, 31–32, 110, 133, 134, 157–58, 207, 247, 295, 313, 325–27, 347 Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), xi, 16, 71, 216, 278, 279–80, 282, 283, 285, 293, 295, 296, 300, 301, 304; publication of, 306–7; reception and assessments of, 307–10 Annual Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, 402, 412 Anthropological Society of Washington dc , 19, 22, 23, 362, 398, 400, 401 anthropology, an applied science, 257; definitions of, 19–24; need for a more integrated and systematic approach in the study of, 15, 16, 39, 271, 388, 402, 416 antiquarianism, the intellectual tradition of, 29–31; The Antiquary (1815), 31 “Antiquities of Wisconsin as Surveyed and Described” (1855), 311 Appleby, Joyce, 27 Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (1820–1885), 48, 152, 174, 182, 185, 192

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archaeology: amateur (avocational) vs. professional, xiii, 362–63, 374, 377; as a subfield of anthropology, 23, 426n27; critical historiography, the need for, 24–25, 27; and nationalism, 29–30; historiographical problems in the, 4–7, 14–15; history of anthropology, the value of, 17–18 Atwater, Caleb, 48, 152, 160, 163, 174, 176; investigates Ohio mounds, 179–88; earthworks on Paint Creek, 182; reviews of conclusions, 192–200, 445n56, 446nn75–78 “avenues” or “roads,” aboriginal, 431n46 Aztalan, 335, 336, 338, 340, 341; collections and collectors, xii, 27–28; Historical and Antiquarian Collection (Albany), 320, 329 Aztecs, theories concerning, 156, 240, 241–42, 336, 399, 418 Bakeless, John, 429n9 Bandelier, Adolphe F., on the need for a critical reading of the early archaeological literature, 20–21 Barbé-Marbois, François, 79–80 Barlow, Joel, 9 Bartlett, John Russell, 256, 265, 266–67, 268, 288, 297, 312 Barton, Benjamin Smith, 8, 9, 34, 47, 61, 66, 71–72, 86–87, 102, 105, 106, 117–27, 140–42, 143, 153, 165–66, 178, 192, 223 Bartram, John, 69–70 Bartram, William, v; archaeological and ethnographic significance of his account of the Creek Indians, 70–72 Behring Straits, 77–78, 85

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Belknap, Jeremy, 62–63 Bellin, Nicolas, 51 Blackmore Museum, 28, 306, 462n82 Blackmore, William, purchases the Davis Collection of American Antiquities, 28; interest in ethnology and ethnographic photographs of North American Indians, 461n77 Boas, Franz, 19, 29, 284 Boewe, Charles, 195, 206, 208, 209, 301, 447n2, 459–60n67, 460nn70–71 Bonnecamp, R. P., 51 Bourne, Edward Gaylord, 67 Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll, 107, 357–58 Bowdoin, James, 90–91 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 9–10, 48–49, 165, 424n10 Bradford, Alexander H., 349–50, 453n68 Brerewood, Edward, 125, 438n46 Brinkeroff, Roeliff, 363, 365, 367, 369, 371, 372, 373–74, 376, 377, 378, 382, 383–84, 385; on religion and science, 383–84, 471n33 Brinton, Daniel Garrison, 17–18, 19, 22–23, 106–7, 206, 311, 350–51, 352–54, 371, 385–86, 405, 408; explores mounds in Florida, 345–48; identifies Mound Builders as the ancestors of North American Indians, 403, 409; on “Mummies of the Mississippi Valley,” 348–50; the place of anthropology in universities and the training of anthropologists, 17–18, 19, 22; supposed migrations of the semi-mythical Toltecs in

North American prehistory, 442n8 British Museum, 28; the “Salisbury Purchase,” 462n80 Brose, David S., 56, 438–39n49, 449n18 Browman, David L., xvi, 407; and Stephen Williams on De Hass material in Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894), 473n58 Brûlé, Étienne, 43 Bryant, Jacob, 191, 192 Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 49, 214, 278, 362, 390, 391, 402, 412 Burke, Luke, editor of the Ethnological Journal of London, on ethnology, 19–20, 23, 425n23 Butler, General Richard, 95–96, 99, 155 Butterfield, Herbert, 11 Byrant, William Cullen, 249–50, 353; “Thanatopsis,” 453n72; “The Prairies,” 453n72 Cahokia Creek, pottery from, 282–83 Cahokia Mound (“Monks Mounds”), 45, 49, 139, 161 Cahokia tribe, 49 Campbell, John Pough, 162, 217–18 Carr, Lucien, 403, 409 Carver, Jonathan, 65–67 Cass, Lewis, reviews Atwater, 195–97, 200 Catlin, George, identifies the Mandan as a Welsh-speaking people, 137–38; his romanticized but significant contributions to American ethnology in Letters and Notes on the Manners,

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Catlin, George (cont.) Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, 253 cave “mummies” of Kentucky and Tennessee, 214, 345, 348–50, 449n19 Céloron, Pierre-Joseph de Blainville, 52–53 Centinel [sic] of the North-Western Territory, 109 Champlain, Samuel de, 42 Charlevoix, Pierre François-Xavier de, 51 Chazan, Michael, 27 Cheney, Theseus Apoleon, 466n45 Cherokee, 44, 64, 70, 72, 75, 89, 126; as Mound Builders, 396, 404, 412 Chickasaw, 44, 64, 89, 103, 105, 106, 107, 126 Choctaw, 44, 64, 65, 126; recorded tradition of concerning the origin of a mound, 105–7 Circleville Mound, 72, 74, 180 “civilization,” eighteenth and nineteenth conceptions relating to the Mound Builder-Indian debate, 5, 11, 33, 77, 91–92, 114, 116–17, 124, 219, 222, 223, 248, 263, 271, 328, 330, 336, 348, 350, 352–53, 391, 395 Clark, George Rogers, 138–40, 141, 142, 440n64 Clifford, John D., 160, 162–63, 170, 171, 174, 188, 193, 442n18, 443n32 Clinton, De Witt, v, 200, 201–3, 314 Columbiad (1807), 9 continuity and change in the archaeological and historical records, 6–7 Crania Americana (1839), 291 Creek occupancy of mounds, 72

564

Cresswell, Nicholas, 76–77, 79, 432n52 cult archaeology. See pseudo-archaeology Cutler, Manasseh, 142; examines mounds at the Muskingum (Marietta, Ohio), 143; opinions on, 143–46, 148–49 Dahl, Curtis, 453n72 Danforth, John, 41–42 Daniels, George, 90 Darnell, Regna, xvi, 18, 347, 378 Darwin Charles, 33 Davis, Dr. Edwin Hamilton, xi, xvi, 16, 28, 31, 36, 71, 271, 274, 282–83, 285, 286–87, 291, 293–94, 296–97, 302–4, 305–6, 308, 312; “Catalogue of American Antiquities,” 462n82; collecting activities and interests, 456n37, 461n76; mound surveys and explorations in Ohio with Ephraim George Squier, 272–75, 276, 276, 277–82, 290, 292 passim; on “Asiatic Types” exhibited by human-effigy pipes, 458n53 De Hass, Wills, 229, 400–402; De Hass Scrapbook, Library of Congress, 473n56 De la Vega, Garcilaso, 44 Delafield, John, 336, 453n68 De Léry, Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros, 51–52, 429n17 De Mortillet, Gabriel, 28 depopulation of the Illinois Country, 428–29n9 “Description of the Antiquities of Ohio” (1820), 152 De Soto, Hernando, expedition of, 44, 92 developmentalism, 32–33

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Dickeson, Dr. Montroville Wilson, vi, xvii, 28, 257, 258, 259, 277, 282, 286–89, 372; assessments of, 259–70; fieldwork in Mississippi and Louisiana, 259–61, 265–68; lecturer on American archeology, 262–65, 264 diffusionism, cultural, 17 Dighton Rock, conjectures concerning, 17, 41–42 Dorfeuille, Joseph, 167, 171–73, 174–75, 176, 443–44n34 Drake, Daniel, 152, 160, 163–72, 176, 179, 183, 199, 200, 214, 355 Drake, Samuel Gardiner, 65 Dunbar, James, 33–34, 61 Dunnell, Robert C., 7, 141, 216, 440n66, 449n22 Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen, 206 effigy-mound cultures of Wisconsin, 340 Eggan, Fred R., on the problem of making ethnic affiliations between certain prehistoric and historic Native American cultures, 472n49 Enquiry Into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America (1842), 291 epistemology, historical, 34 Erie Indians, “N. du Chat” (the Cat Nation), also known as the “Erigas” and correctly or incorrectly as “Gah-kwas” or the “Kahkwas,” 42, 43, 55–56, 465n26 Erwin, John W., assists James McBride in surveying mounds, 229–30, 232, 295, 296–99, 304 Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), 11, 33

Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Uncultivated Ages (1780), 33, 61 ethnocentrism, 10–12, 183 Ethnological Journal: A Magazine of Ethnology, Phrenology, and Archaeology (London), 19–20, 308, 425n23 Evans, Lewis, locates petroglyphs on the upper Ohio River, 53–54; mislocates Erie Indians, 55–56 evolution, dogmatic adherence to, 385–86, 472n38 Ferguson, Adam, 11, 12, 33 Filson, John, 89 Fisher, David Hackett, 11 “Florida tribes,” 43–44 Force, Manning Ferguson, 369, 403, 408, 409 Forster, John Reinhold, 61–63 Fort Harmar, 94, 96, 99, 101, 102, 106, 108, 120 Fowke, Gerard, 309, 376, 411, 462–63n90, 470n22 Fowler, Don D., 423n7, 426–27n35, 454n4 Franklin, Benjamin, speculations on the origin of the mounds, 100, 105, 128 French exploration, records of, 45 uncertainties attending, 42–51 Gallatin, Albert, 215, 256 Gatschet, Albert S., 106 Geertz, Clifford, 26, 36, 426n30, 427–28n42 “General Map of the British Middle Colonies in America” (1755), 53 Gentleman of Elvas, 44

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565

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Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays, the First, Containing An Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America (1755), 53, 55 Gliddon, George Robins, 20, 224, 308, 425n23 Gordon, Harry, 54 Grave Creek mound, 95, 99, 121, 243, 245 Grave Creek mound group, 76 Grave Creek stone and inscription, 17, 244, 363, 369, 400, 401 Gravier, Jacques, 49 Grayson, Donald K., 423n7 Griffin, James B., 31, 463n3; on the problem of making ethnic affiliations between certain prehistoric and historic cultures, 472n49 Gruber, Jacob W., 423n7 Hallowell, Alfred Irving, 12, 13, 18 Harmar, Colonel Josiah, 94, 101 Harris, Reverend Thaddeus Mason, 152, 155–58, 183, 196, 241 Harrison, William Henry, 162, 223, 237, 239–42 Hartley, L. P., 6 Haven, Samuel Foster, 2, 48, 60, 62, 155, 158, 206, 214, 246, 278, 339, 341, 409, 431n34, 467n54 Heart, Captain Jonathan, 100–103, 103, 104, 105–6, 108, 111, 113, 114, 119–20, 129, 132, 134, 155 Heckewelder, John (Johann Ernestus Gottlieb), 193, 219–21 Hennipin, Louis, 47–48 Henry, Joseph, 270, 296, 303–4, 305, 307, 312–13, 326, 339, 340, 355

566

Hildreth, Samuel P., 149, 160, 179, 235, 243, 295, 359 Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr., 423n7 History of America (1777), 12, 33, 87 History of the American Indians (1775), 64, 113, 126 History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), 19 Hitchcock, Edward, 275, 277 Hodgen, Margaret T., 32 Hoy, Dr. Philo Romayne: Mound Builders “the immediate ancestors of the present tribes,” 409–10; restores and measures mound cranium from Racine, Wisconsin, 343, 344; surveys mounds near Racine with Lapham and excavates nearby mounds, 474n68 human origins, the debate over and the mounds, xiii, 78 Humboldt, Alexander von, on human consanguinity, 308, 336, 351 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 351, 352 Hunt, Lynn, 27 Hunt, William Gibbs, 443n32 Hymes, Dell H., 18 Indian Tribes of the United States vol. 4 (1856), 138 invention, independent or parallel development, 111, 326, 351 Irwine, John, 73–78 Jacob, Margaret, 27 James, Edwin, 160, 161 Jefferson, Thomas, 79–86, 88, 433n63 Jenks, Reverend William, 178, 189–92, 445n45

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Jesuit Relations, 49, 55 Jolliet, Louis, 40, 43, 45–46, 51 Jomard, Edme-François, 308 Jones, Reverend David, gives an account of the Circleville earthworks, 72–76 Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Allegheny Mountains (1805), 152, 155 Joyce, Barry Alan, 4, 31

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Kalm, Peter, observations of, 57–63 Kamchatka, 77, 85 Keating, William H., 161, 337 Kehoe, Alice B., 4, 29, 251, 427n35, 453n74 Kennedy, Roger, 433n60 Kirkland, Reverend Samuel, 146–47 Kroeber, A. L., 427–28n43 Kublai Khan’s “Lost Fleet,” 62 Kuhn, Thomas S., 13, 34–35 Lambing, Andrew Arnold, 53 Lapham Increase Allen, 289, 291, 311, 333–35, 338, 346; appraisals of, 466n47; fieldwork in Wisconsin, 339–43; on phrenology, 343–45; manuscript materials of, 467n54 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de, 43, 50–51 La Vérendrye, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de, 59–61 Lenape or Delaware Indians, 57, 67, 77 Lepper, Bradley T., xvi, 281, 431n46, 461n76 Lesley, John Peter, 37 Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841), 138, 243 Liebershohn, Harry, 32

Loewenberg, Peter, 12, 26 Long, Major Stephen H., 337 Lost Tribes of Israel, 65, 284, 295, 326, 403, 438n46 Lowenthal, David, 6, 423n4 MacLean, John Patterson, among the last of the diehards, 418–19, 420 Madison, Bishop James, 9; examines earthworks in the Kanawha River Valley, 153; assigns an Indian origin to, 155 Madoc (Madog ab Owain Gwynedd), the legendary Welsh prince, 133–37, 153, 201, 284, 325, 327, 439n61 Manifest Destiny: Indian Removal and, xii, 6, 248; Andrew Jackson’s Annual Message to Congress (1830) an expression of, 248–49; Indian Removal Act (1830) as actualization of, 251; the myth of the Mound Builders and, 251; and scientific exploration in the trans-Mississippian West and, 254 Margry, Pierre, 50 Marietta, Ohio, earthworks at, 102, 142, 143–44, 149, 155, 179, 236, 357–58, 440n67 Marquette, Father Jacques, 40–41, 45–46, 51, 428–29n9 Marshall, James A., writings on the geometry of Hopewell earthworks, 546 Marshall, Orasmus Holmes, 316, 323, 331, 464n11 “materiality” of archaeology, 27 Mather, Cotton: on the Dighton Rock, 42; on the “English” colonization of the New World before Spain (i.e., the Welsh tradition of Madoc), 136–37, 439n61

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

567

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Maxwell, William, 109 McBride, James, archaeological collection, 28, 224–25, 226, 227, 229–32, 278, 295–99, 300, 304, 357, 450n39, 451nn46,48, 458n57; McBride-Erwin surveys in the Miami Valley, 228, 229–30 McClure, Reverend David, 77–79 McCulloh, James H., Jr., 209–19, 221–24, 409, 448n10, 448–49n15, 449n19 Meltzer, David J., 310, 423n7 Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 90, 99, 107 Mitchell, Samuel Latham, 193, 200–203 Mitra, Panchanan, 431n34 monogenists, xii, 14, 199, 212, 351 Moorehead, Warren King, 372 Moravian missionaries, 67, 219, 221, 450n28 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 33, 316–17, 323, 329–30, 331, 372, 377, 392, 401, 464n12, 466nn42,46 Morton, Samuel George, v, 14, 71, 222, 223–24, 255, 257, 261, 267–68, 278, 284, 285, 288, 291, 293, 294, 308 Mound Builders (1879), 418 Mound Builder vs. American Indian debate, 2–3, 16; false Mound Builder-American Indian dichotomy, 76, 158, 165, 186–87, 331, 356, 407 Mound City, 277, 282, 283, 285, 288, 291, 293, 304, 306, 309 Muller, Jon, on Cyrus Thomas, 405, 417; on De Hass material in Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1888) and Twelfth Annual Report (1894), 402, 473n58 Murphy, James L., 452n51

568

Nahua migration theories, northern and southern hypotheses, 475n76 Natchez, as descendants of Mound Builders, 216, 219, 222–23, 224, 268, 288, 328; Nott and Gliddon’s supposedly Toltecan-cranial type of the Natchez, 224 nationalism, American cultural, 30, 90, 171, 307 Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country (1815), 152, 163 Newark earthworks, 194, 241, 278, 431n46 Newark “Holy” stones, 17, 461n76 New Views on the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797, 1798), 86, 123, 124, 192 New York Medical College, 461n74 Nietzche, Friedrich William, 30 Nomenclature, problems of, 8, 20–24 Norse sagas, 85 Notes on the Floridian Peninsula; Its Literary History, Indian Tribes and Antiquities (1859), 311, 345 Notes on the Iroquois, 314 Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), 79 Nott, Josiah Clark, 20, 224, 425n23 Novick, Peter, 27 Nurre, Robert P., on Lapham, 467n57, 468n59 Observations on Some Parts of Natural History (1787), 61, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123

Index

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

“Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” 70–71 Ogden Land Company and the Tonawanda Seneca, 466n46 Ohio Historical Society, 231, 370, 390, 451n46; Ohio History Connection since May 2014, 113 Ohio-Pennsylvania Survey (1785), 120, 121; Barton’s notes on, 437–38n40 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 370 Ohio State Archaeological Association, 363 Ohio State Archaeological Convention (Mansfield), 365, 369–70, 383 Old Buck, Jonathan, 30–31 Parkman, Francis, 41, 48, 317, 323, 464n11 Parsons, Major General Samuel Holden, 96–97, 98, 99–100, 101, 120, 142, 434n8 Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, xvi, 15, 28, 306, 310, 371, 386, 387–88, 405, 406 Peden, William, 79 Peet, Stephen Denison, 363–65, 367, 369, 370, 371, 372, 374, 375–76, 377, 378–83, 384, 385, 409, 410, 413–16, 417, 418, 419; conflict between religion and science, 380–84; his interpretation of serpent symbolism at Fort Ancient and Fowke’s criticism of, 470n22 peopling the American Continent, theories concerning, 77–78 Petroglyphs (rock carvings), 40–41, 52–53, 63, 263

Phillips, Philip and Gordon R. Willey, 23–24, 32, 426n27 Phoenicians, 246, 247, 295 Pickering, Charles, 31, 255, 291, 293 pictographs (rock paintings), 40–41, 263 Pidgeon, William, 246–48 Piggott, Stuart, 29 Pinsky, Valerie and Alison Wylie, 423n7 polygenists, xii, 14, 425n23 Powell, John Wesley, 16, 22–23, 65, 472–73n50 Pownall, Thomas, 54 presentism, the historical fallacy of, 10–11 Priest, Josiah, 244–46, 248, 251, 453n68 Priestly, Joseph, 8 Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 376 Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 308 professionalization and specialization, 35–36 pseudo-archaeology, 17, 247, 424n17 Putnam, Frederic Ward, 371, 372, 373, 375, 377, 386–88, 389–90, 406–7 Putnam, Rufus, 142, 143, 155, 440–41n68 Races of Man (1848), 255, 291 Rafinesque, Samuel Constantine, 160, 163, 192–95, 198, 206–9, 246, 296, 300–302, 458–59n57 Ranke, Leopold von, 26–27, 426n31 Rau, Charles, 282–83, 371, 456n37 Read, Matthew Canfield, 363, 364, 365, 366, 368, 371, 372, 380, 382, 384,

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Read, Matthew Canfield (cont.) 385, 388; as “theistic evolutionist,” 384; credentials as geologist and archaeologist, 471n34 relativism, historical, 25–26 Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, Concerning the Aboriginal History of America (1829), 209, 213; 1816 and 1817 editions of, 209, 211, 217 revisionism, historical, 36 Roberston, William, 12, 33–34, 87, 123, 182–83 Romain, William F., writings on the geometry of Hopewell earthworks, 280–81, 552 romanticism and empiricism, concurrent traditions in early archaeological thought, 5, 205, 270, 455n22 Royal American Magazine (1775), 72 Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, 437n33 Russell, John, 275, 277 Sanson, Nicolas, 42 Sargent, Winthrop, 107–10, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 127, 142, 357, 435n18 “Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization,” Morgan’s “trisection” of, 33 Say, Thomas, 160, 337 “scale of civilization,” 5 Schaffer, Lynda Norene, 428n9 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 138, 314, 323, 348, 409, 466n46 Scott, Sir Walter, 30 Scythians. 92, 157, 196 Serpent Mound, 388–90

570

Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, his commentary on the mounds of Kentucky, 474n67 Shea, John Gilmary, 46–47, 428–29n9 Sherer, Jennifer Kristene, 446n78 Short, Charles Wilkes, 162 Short, John Thomas, 382, 388, 414 Silverberg, Robert, 44–45, 215, 248, 252, 449n18 Slotkin, James Sydney, 32 Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, xi, 271, 307, 311, 312, 317, 340, 355, 358 Smithsonian Institution, xi, 15, 71, 81, 214, 253, 270, 296, 305, 306, 307, 312, 317, 339, 345, 357, 362, 371, 373, 390 Society of Antiquaries of London, 61 Spanish entrada and encounters with Native peoples in “La Florida,” 43–45 Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, writings on phrenology, 343–44, 467–68n58 Squier, Ephraim George, vi, xi, 16, 20, 31, 36, 71, 176, 207, 224, 255, 267, 271, 273, 276, 288–89, 291, 293; mound surveys and explorations in Ohio with Edwin Hamilton Davis, 272–82, 290, 292 passim; fieldwork in western New York, 317–25 state of society, the argument from the, 217, 219, 224, 284, 293, 328, 408 Steele, William, 443n30 Steiner, Abraham, 221, 450n28 Stiles, Ezra, Webster-Stiles correspondence, 128–32, 133, 138 Stocking, George, 427–28n43 Stoddard, Amos, 10, 41, 424n10 Stout, Charles and R. Barry Lewis, 448n8, 460n69

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2015. Nebraska. All rights reserved.

Swanton, John R., 387 Symmes, John Cleves, 87–8 Symmes Peyton, S., 442n22 “Talligewi.” See Alligewi Tappan and Bradford, lithographers, 108, 435nn18–19 “Tartarian characters” 60–61 Tartars, 61, 62, 92, 148, 157, 196, 203, 438n46 Tartary, 77, 326 Tax, Thomas Gilbert, 4 Taylor, Richard C., 337 Taylor, Stephen, 337–38 Taylor, Walter W., 15, 29, 88–89, 207 Thomas, Cyrus, 16, 49, 214, 224, 309, 379, 381, 412–18; directs mound survey of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 396, 402–10, 411 Thomson, Charles, 80, 87 time-depth (antiquity) in American prehistory, need for a greater appreciation of, 430n30 time-space relationships in archaeological reporting, importance of, xiii, 39–40, 72; in cultural differentiation, 155 Toltecs, theories regarding, 92, 156–57, 188, 223–24, 240, 242, 295, 310, 399, 406, 418–19, 442n8 Tonawanda Seneca, 333, 466n46 Traditions of De-coo-dah and Antiquarian Researches (1852, 1853, and 1858), 247 Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, 71, 256, 265, 268, 297 Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 71, 102, 110, 115, 240

trans-Atlantic thought, 34 Trigger, Bruce G., 6, 7, 29, 189, 423n7 truth and objectivity, the question of, 27 Turner, George, 111, 113, 114–17, 151, 436n27 Tuscarora, 429n9 Tyler, Edward B., 33 Tyler, Moses Coit, 66–67 Types of Mankind (1854), 425n23 United States Exploring Expedition, 31, 255 United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 362, 410 Vaux, William Sansom, 28, 231 Walker, Thomas, 63 Webster, Noah, 128; Webster-Stiles correspondence, 128–32, 133, 138 Welsh hypothesis, 136–37, 424n10; “Welsh” Indians, 10; Welshspeaking Indians, 137–38, 403 Western Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, 165, 167, 169, 171–72, 174, 175–76; Western Museum Society, 164, 166, 167, 170, 172 Wharton, James E., 369 Whewell, Reverend William, 19, 424–25n21 Whitney, Joshua Dwight, 457–58n48 Whittlesey, Charles, 56, 229, 232–33, 234, 235–37, 238, 278, 280, 295, 296, 299, 300, 304, 311, 324, 354–57, 363, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 452n57, 458n57

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

571

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Whittlesey tradition or focus, 55 Wilcox, David R. and W. Bruce Masse, 7 Wilkes, Charles, 255 Willey, Gordon R. and Jeremy A. Sabloff, 88–89 Willey, Gordon R. and Philip Phillips, 23–24, 32, 426n27 Williams, Stephen, xvi, 208, 270, 424n17, 431n34; and David L. Browman on De Hass material in

572

Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894), 473n58 Williamson, Hugh, 165 Wilson, Daniel, 216 Wilson, Douglas R., 79 Winsor, Justin, 2 Wissler, Clark, 449n18 Wolf, Eric R., 251, 453–54n74 Zeisberger, David, 67–69

Index

Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Barnhart, Terry A.. American Antiquities : Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology, Nebraska, 2015. ProQuest Ebook