I don’t usually cover the same fringe theorist twice in the same week, but I am making an exception because of the shocking new release from L. A. Marzulli that the Nephilim theorist announced yesterday. It also happens to coincide with the subject of my (other) forthcoming new book, tentatively titled Monuments of an Unknown People, which will be published a little more than a year from now. I can’t give more details until the contract comes through, probably next week. Anyway, Marzulli announced his newest DVD, On the Trail of the Nephilim: The Mysterious Moundbuilders. Yes, those Mound Builders—the imaginary lost race of (a) Jews, (b) cannibal giants, (c) ancient Aryans, or (d) Solutreans who were alleged to have been the true builders of the Native American mounds of North America back in the days when white Americans were too racist to admit that Native Americans could make large earthworks out of piles of dirt, a skill they believed only the white race had mastered. ![]() In the new DVD, Marzulli explored American earthworks and alleges a biblical conspiracy to suppress the truth about the scriptural origin of the mounds—claims famously put forward by both early Mormons and Victorian racists. Let’s take a look at what Marzulli’s fans have to say about the resurrection of this nineteenth century pseudohistory: “If you at all wondered how the mounds found all over the world could have actually been built, who built them and even why this is the documentary to watch,” evangelical podcasters Brian and Audrey Vanderkley write. “Could our history be wrong? Why does there seem to be a managed narrative and bias by secular academia?” “Awesome! There is no way someone can watch that production and not realize secular history is fabricated,” Todd Reed said. Evangelicals hate any knowledge that exists independent of Bible stories, and thus the emphasis on the corruption of “secular” academics and historians in these twisted endorsements. It’s strange how much they resemble the apocryphal story told about the Caliph Umar and the burning of the Library of Alexandria: “If these books agree with the Koran, they are useless; if they disagree, they are pernicious: in either case, they ought to be destroyed.” The fascinating thing about the Mound Builder myth is how unnecessary it always was. During colonial times, it was utterly uncontroversial to assert that the ancestors of contemporary Native Americans had built the mounds, and it was indeed the standard explanation, at least among the educated, down to the founding of the Republic. For a time afterward, it still held pride of place, and when Thomas Jefferson famously excavated a mound near Monticello in the 1780s, he reported—correctly—that it showed every evidence of being the work of Native Americans. This view, however, faced a serious challenge when white Americans moved into the Ohio Valley and were forced to contend with evidence that the Native peoples they were actively attempting to displace had sophisticated cultures that marked them as something more than the “savages” that early American propaganda painted them to be. At the same time, the new Republic was casting about for a mythic history to rival the antiquities of the Old World and show that America was the equal of Britain or France. In this environment, it was no wonder that a generation of early American elites, including Noah Webster, members of Congress and state governments, and religious leaders, casts about for hypotheses that would active recreate the history ancient America in a way that would compete with European Antiquity and which would lay claim to the priority of white people in the newly settled lands. When you assemble the various ideas in chronological order, as I do in my book, it becomes easy to see how early European efforts in the colonial period to understand how the denizens of the New World fit into the Noachian history of humanity were twisted into a new narrative of a lost white race. Colonial Europeans tried to explain the existence of Native peoples as a lost tribe of Israel or some other offshoot of Noah’s progeny, but the ongoing hostility between Native groups and the white Americans trying to displace them made it difficult to image them as equals. The new narrative—one, weirdly, that was actually rooted in the correct and prescient deduction that Native Americans came to North America from northeast Asia—repurposed the old colonial claims by imagining an original group of white settlers who were killed off by bloodthirsty “Asiatics.” This, in a nutshell, became the Mound Builder myth, and it was in place by the early 1800s. It lasted for a century, until the weight of evidence for the Native American origins of the mounds—conveniently collected in the late 1800s by Cyrus Thomas of the Smithsonian in its Twelfth Annual Report—became so overwhelming that all but the most recalcitrant racists accepted it. The Mound Builder myth, however, didn’t die. Instead, it fell in with other discredited beliefs in the growing fissure between science and popular prejudice. Much the way evolutionary theory caused conservative Christians to embrace creationism, and critical evaluations of the Bible cause them to endorse fundamentalist readings of the Bible, the failure of archaeology to endorse the existence of Nephilim-giants and Lost Tribes of Israel in middle America created counterculture of anti-scientific belief in which the Mound Builders remain white and pure and holy now and forever. Anyone who plays in this sandbox needs to understand the history of the ideas he endorses before unleashing them again on the world. When L. A. Marzulli goes hunting for lost white giants among the Mound Builders, he repeats and endorses not just anti-scientific beliefs but also the long history of racism that has animated the Mound Builder myth since the beginning.
64 Comments
Machala
12/8/2018 08:55:37 am
I hope that your upcoming work on the Mound Builders will explain why you think the ancestors of the Indigenous People built these mounds. What if anything, do they contain ?
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An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 09:45:51 am
[why you think the ancestors of the Indigenous People built these mounds]
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gdave
12/8/2018 10:24:43 am
The Ohio Serpent Mound, probably the most famous, almost certainly is not a burial mound. It doesn't appear to contain anything. This has made it very difficult to date. Both the Adena and the Fort Ancient cultures did build burial mounds nearby. Radiocarbon dating on organic materials in the mound have given conflicting dates, so it's not at all clear which, if either, of those cultures created it.
E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 11:10:57 am
GDave -
E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 11:52:41 am
For serpents, see my video:
An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 12:36:14 pm
[The Ohio Serpent Mound, probably the most famous, almost certainly is not a burial mound. ]
gdave
12/8/2018 01:12:55 pm
[Radiocarbon dating gives is a date at around the time of the European Middle Ages.
E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 03:02:54 pm
GDave -
gdave
12/8/2018 04:22:06 pm
@E.P. Grondine,
E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 06:09:34 pm
DDave -
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/8/2018 06:32:49 pm
Photographs? Was it misplaced? Buried with the Sinclair journals?
gdave
12/8/2018 11:29:06 pm
@E.P. Grondine:
E.P. Grondine
12/9/2018 12:09:37 am
GDave -
History buff
9/18/2019 10:44:55 am
Many native tribes have outright denied building the mounds. Saying they were there when they got there. Plus, the giants aren't a fabrication. Not only have hundreds of skeletons been found but native people talk about how their ancestors feared them, why, and how they killed some groups of them. Many of those giant skeletons have red hair still attached to the skulls. I resent the fact that people want to blame everything on racism when it just isn't true now or then. There are racist people but by and large people really don't care what color someone is. It's the inside that counts. The ever expanding country pushed people out of the way. It wasn't right to keep making deals then breaking them but much like culture clashes of today they occurred then and alot less people spoke the many native tongues found in America. The Louisiana Purchase changed everything and brought about so called "manifest destiny". All of a sudden there was more land and greed and exploration kicked in. Every step of the way it made European sense but that was never the same as native sense. Like we deal with countries that have different cultures today that don't match the general beliefs of the majority. Sometimes even though everything changes, absolutely nothing changes. Ignorance is rampant in our education system. It's taught with religious fervor! God forbid anyone find out the truth about anything. Let's throw some more books on the pyre. I know you're thinking about carbon dating but even there you must realize that anything that didn't or doesn't fit in the current paradigm is immediately tossed out. Some have gone so far as to turn that land into parking lots. Wake up to reality. Not science. They aren't synonymous.
Scott Hamilton
12/8/2018 10:04:32 am
Some of them are burial mounds, and therefore contain burial goods and remains. Others don't "contain" anything, anymore than a highway or the Eiffel Tower "contain" anything. Many mounds were built to place some other building or ritual site up high, or to mark another location. I did some excavating in Pinellas County, Florida, and there were bunch of mounds there (long since destroyed to be used for road fill) that seem to have acted as path markers, leading to mounds that have survived today at the southern tip of the peninsula. Those were parts of village complexes, and it's possible that some of the mounds were for protection against the weather and erosion, just as we now build concrete seawalls in the same places.
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Priceless Defender
12/8/2018 11:55:22 am
I want to hear their explanations for the Menorah Mound and Aladdin's Lamp.
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An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 12:46:27 pm
[Menorah Mound]
Priceless Defender
12/8/2018 02:01:43 pm
Feel free to show your displeasure with the Holy Roman Empire all you want. Doesn't change the fact these mounds were not unique. There were more examples in other areas. Including elephants, and equilateral triangle circumscribed by circles.
An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 03:11:10 pm
Your replies are taking on an increasingly-random character.
Priceless Defender
12/8/2018 03:48:45 pm
Your cut and paste replies are unnecessarily prolonging the scroll down time.
American Cool Disco Dan
12/8/2018 06:27:25 pm
[You mentioned your "extened middle finger"...AKA the bird. AKA the eagle. AKA Showing your displeasure to the Holy Roman Empire. Read some more before you try to insult. It's also best you do that middle finger pointing online. Here in the real world that usually doesn't work out too well for most people.
An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 07:08:43 pm
[Your cut and paste replies are unnecessarily prolonging the scroll down time.]
Priceless Defender
12/9/2018 09:36:32 am
Zzzzzzz...zzzz....zzzz...
V
12/9/2018 02:14:25 pm
*sighs* Priceless, you are a piece of work, you know that? Instead of answering someone's points, you descend into mockery and ad hominem attacks. I think we all know who is really a Wolter clone, and it's not Nerd. You have your own viewpoint and you are just bound and determined to die on that hill, apparently, and anyone who tries to point out that it's not a hill, it's a valley is attacked, mocked, belittled, and dismissed.
Priceless Defender
12/9/2018 03:43:25 pm
V,
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/9/2018 04:07:43 pm
Wow, I was about to post "Who wants what date in the pool?" but this might be record. He stayed away a whole six hours.
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/9/2018 04:15:30 pm
[Aladdin's Lamp is a symbol used within the initiation process of my fraternity.]
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/9/2018 08:21:18 pm
Turns out he IS/WAS (who knows?) unable to use Google because he didn't find "the Mount Vernon archaeological site in Black Township, Posey County, Indiana."
Priceless Defender
12/9/2018 08:50:26 pm
Nice try ACDD. I do appreciate the link, however, the Mt. Vernon in question is in Virginia. Wrong state. I do really appreciate the link though. A very interesting story, I knew nothing about.
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/9/2018 09:43:04 pm
Internet herpes says what?
An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 10:01:36 am
It appears as though he's appropriated a real academic: Rick Woodward, Instructor of Anthropology and Geography at Bossier Parish Community College.
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E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 11:15:58 am
AN -
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Jim
12/8/2018 12:37:34 pm
"It appears as though he's appropriated a real academic: Rick Woodward,"
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An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 03:39:29 pm
["It appears as though he's appropriated a real academic: Rick Woodward,"
E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 10:48:48 am
Well, f**k, Jason. I could write a book about the colonists' theories, but it would be a bit different.
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Jim
12/8/2018 12:42:49 pm
" read Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer's book I should mention here that undeniable evidence of their stature is forthcoming, in press."
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E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 03:07:54 pm
@Jim -
Jim
12/8/2018 03:37:54 pm
E P Grondine:
E.P. Grondine
12/8/2018 06:27:17 pm
Jim -
Jim
12/8/2018 08:23:49 pm
Oh please, just stop already:
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/8/2018 08:35:18 pm
I'd like to hear more about his career as a "satellite engineer".
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/8/2018 08:56:54 pm
"But I do know that they know the local sites well enough to have the respect of the local professional archaeologists."
E.P. Grondine
12/9/2018 12:25:40 am
Jim, I simply point you to Dragoo and Neuman, "Mounds for the Dead" and Alsop's account linked to above. Both are very legitimate sources.
Jim
12/9/2018 09:42:43 am
Jeff Wilson's fake annual ritual on Serpent Mound gets shut down due to inauthenticity and complaints from Native Americans.
E.P. Grondine
12/9/2018 02:58:31 pm
Jim, you can not believe everything you read.
American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/9/2018 04:53:08 pm
SMFH
Andy White
12/8/2018 12:54:34 pm
Marzulli offered me a couple of hundred bucks in May to appear in a "film about the Moundbuilders." I declined.
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An Anonymous Nerd
12/8/2018 07:11:27 pm
Seems a wise move. It doesn't even seem like enough money to even be worth considering.
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Priceless Defender
12/8/2018 01:07:25 pm
Racism is institutionalized. If, I may, I would like to take you all to my first day of college football practices.
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American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/9/2018 09:52:30 pm
Wow, you're a real white Doctor King!
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Doc Rock
12/8/2018 05:53:59 pm
I think that there were still some Chiefdoms operating in the southeast US when the De Soto expedition arrived. The Natchez were still building and using mounds when the French arrived circa-1700.
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Doc Rock
12/8/2018 05:57:56 pm
In the course of the survey we frequently did surface collections. Never did find anything other than what would be associated with Indians of the time.
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E.P. Grondine
12/9/2018 12:16:00 am
@Doc -
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titus pullo
12/9/2018 05:32:09 pm
Noah Webster I suppose didn't know Europe is based on history...American was and will always be based on philosophy.
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American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/9/2018 07:33:12 pm
When the Jamestown colonists escaped their servitude to live with Indians by necessity NOT to "genocide" them, their leaders were less than competent; problems had to be solved, so "democracy emerged".
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Dan
12/9/2018 11:09:13 pm
I love this blog forever.
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Brady Yoon
12/9/2018 11:56:36 pm
Just because a claim is racially motivated or put forth by racists doesn't mean that it can't be true...the idea that Mound builders were from a lost white race may be neither necessary, desirable, or likely, but it still may nevertheless be true.
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Doc Rock
12/10/2018 12:24:13 pm
People were building different types of mounds throughout much of the present day US going back to roughly the time when the Egyptians were planting their Pharohs in the valley of the kings and some were still doing it in the early 18th century. Never heard of any credible evidence that had anyone other than Indians doing it. This no longer even falls into the realm of a possibility from the perspective of professional scholars.
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American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/10/2018 08:26:03 pm
And because lost white people were super clever they took all the evidence with them.
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American Cool "Disco" Dan
12/10/2018 08:27:41 pm
Directed at BY, not the Cap'n.
Theoxenos
12/13/2018 04:47:07 am
I have always used Moundbuilders to refer to the native culture(s) that built the mounds thousands of years ago, but I recognise the term has been co-opted by those who believe the mounds were built by non-natives.
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Accumulated Wisdom
12/13/2018 04:09:32 pm
Astronomer Priesthood
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American cool "disco" Dan
12/13/2018 05:47:24 pm
"Moundbuilders" is fine. They built mounds. They're apparently not imaginary like Chief's imaginary herds of 7 foot tall Injuns, none of whom have a name.
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manofthehour
12/23/2020 12:52:16 am
Jeffrey Wilson is a new age scammer who give 'talks' about lots of woo-woo subjects and many false claims meant mostly to infer infer infer. He is not a 'satellite engineer' and did not work for NASA, and whatever his book is going to be cannot be declared definitive as nobody's read the freaking thing. The new age activities that take place at the serpent mound can only be described as a collection of egomaniacs attempting all sorts of weird, wacked and bizarre hokey rituals, delusional misinformed nuts who have been trying to connect crop circles, bigfoot, giants, and folklore and mythology to crystal new age nonsense for years now. It's all pretty passe now, the 90s have been over for decades, and these kooks are all still trying to form weird little cults but continue to fail miserably. So all they can do is sell crystals, silly ideas, and quasi-'native' philosophies because they believe their grandmas said they were part Cherokee. Nothing but wack comes from these groups, and they've been doing it for years. Graham Hancock at least comes up with a few interesting things based on... something. Random collections of 'research' which lead nowhere and can't even come up with any kind of narrative only exists to sell these weird momentary delusions which these people have. They sell magical new age retreats, tours, and 'talks' and candles, crystals, rocks and bullshit. You can't find a more useless bunch of empty people with nothing much important to say. They basically mine this mystical nonsense out of archaeology, folklore and ufology and whatever they come up with at their whims. They have no idea what the hell they're even really researching because they have no idea from one day to the next what their lives are about. They're constantly 'organizing' these empty 'events' at places such as Serpent Mound because their lives are devoid of meaning and their egos are all they have.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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