Jason Colavito
The SAA Archaeological Record 19, no. 5
November 2019
Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock (2019) are devoted to the mounds constructed by various Native American groups across the eastern two-thirds of the United States between roughly 2700 BC and European contact, such as Poverty Point (Louisiana), Serpent Mound (Ohio), and Cahokia (Illinois), and the mounds and geoglyphs in the Amazon basin at an uncertain date probably between the early centuries AD and the contact period (Colavito 2019). Hancock suggests that the mounds, particularly those laid out in geometric or zoomorphic patterns, encode astronomical data that connect them to a lost Atlantis-like civilization once located in northern Canada whose evangelizing representatives taught Native Americans the mathematical and astronomical skills needed to lay out and design the earthworks.
Although Hancock is careful to attribute his proposed lost civilization to a Native American origin, the thematic origins of his claim are transparently derived from nineteenth-century Mound Builder myths. As I show in my forthcoming book The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and America’s Hunt for a “Lost White Race” (Colavito 2020), these served both political and social purposes associated with white supremacy, shaped public perceptions of Native American cultural achievements for more than a century, and still hold sway among some groups, in particular white nationalists. By building on a scaffolding of discredited nineteenth-century views like those I examine in my book, Hancock serves to perpetuate Victorian assumptions about the limits of Native potential, despite his own stated respect for indigenous peoples the world over.
The most obvious source for Hancock’s ideas about North American mounds are the works of nineteenth-century congressman and popular writer Ignatius Donnelly, whose books Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883) contain uncanny similarities to Hancock’s own. Atlantis lays out a case for a lost global civilization whose evangelizing representatives were responsible for the construction of these mounds, as Hancock writes in Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (1995), while Ragnarok attempts to prove that this civilization was destroyed by a comet’s collision with Earth at the end of the Ice Age, which Hancock also argues in his previous book Magicians of the Gods (2015). The connections are not merely coincidental; in Fingerprints, Hancock announces, “I want to pay tribute to Ignatius Donnelly,” whose works he consulted and drew upon in writing his own.
While Donnelly’s views are not the only influence on Hancock, they illustrate the direct connection between Mound Builder mythology and Hancock’s so-called alternative history. When Donnelly wrote his books, the United States was in the midst of the Indian Wars, and American Indians were demonized as bloodthirsty, brutish, and barbaric. Scholars as well as lay authors like Josiah Priest, of American Antiquities fame, argued that Native peoples were a separate subspecies or that they had degenerated from a more perfect Old World stock (Priest 1835). Government officials called openly for the destruction of indigenous culture, and a series of policies, from Indian Removal in the 1830s to the Dawes Act in the 1880s, had devastating effects on Native American populations. The consequences were essentially a slow-moving policy of genocide designed to rupture political, social, economic, and cultural ties within American Indian communities.
Donnelly was more sympathetic to Native peoples than many of his countrymen, but he nevertheless concluded that they were not among the peoples listed as descendants of Noah in the Bible. Therefore, he considered Native Americans to be inferior to white Europeans, and consequently he believed their cultural achievements were gifts bestowed by the (white) rulers of Atlantis. In America Before, Hancock repeats the idea that the rulers of his quasi-Atlantis taught specific skills to their chosen disciples, though he substitutes Native peoples for whites as representatives of the lost civilization, reversing his earlier claims in Fingerprints in which he describes the refugees from the lost civilization 12 times as “white.”
Donnelly’s attribution of the mounds in the United States to colonists from Atlantis was the culmination of a long series of attempts to revise American history to better conform to a white nationalist narrative. During the colonial period, it was uncontroversial to recognize the mounds as the work of American Indians. Several colonial worthies said as much, and early European explorers had even seen some mounds being built. In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson excavated a mound near his home at Monticello in Virginia and reported in his 1795 Notes on the State of Virginia that the artifacts and remains found within confirmed that Native Americans had built the mound. So convincing was his scientific evidence that the Encyclopædia Britannica used Jefferson’s description of the mounds wholesale in every edition from 1797 to 1854.
However, as the United States expanded its borders westward, first into the Northwest Territory, which included Ohio, and the Louisiana Territory, which included the Mississippi Valley, white settlers came into increasing conflict with Natives. As the settlers pushed into these areas, a new history of America before European contact began to emerge that would be ideologically more favorable to the view that white Americans had a legitimate claim to lands currently occupied by Natives. Settlers noticed tens of thousands of mounds across the new territories, and they took advantage of some Natives’ ignorance of their origins. The upheavals caused by the contact period had caused Native populations to fall precipitously (by some counts, as much as 90% between Columbus and the nineteenth century) and displaced remaining populations. As a result, many groups had no historical tradition of building the mounds since they were not the population that had constructed them.
American scholars concluded, therefore, that Native peoples had not built the mounds. A series of hypothetical “true” and largely white Mound Builders found popularity at varying times. These included Aryans, Egyptians (imagined as white), Toltecs (then wrongly assumed to be white), Jews, the antediluvian giants from the Bible, Phoenicians, Vikings, Romans, the Spanish, and, most prominent of all, a primeval lost white civilization of that had been killed off when savage Native hordes invaded their all-white paradise only a few centuries before the contact period. While many of these hypotheses originated among provincial gentry, they found their way to the highest levels of American society. William Henry Harrison (1838) was a believer in the Mound Builder myth, particularly in its potential to justify evicting Native peoples from their land, and delivered a speech on the subject that was published as a book. Andrew Jackson (1830) cited the lost race of Mound Builders in his 1829 State of the Union Address, setting out the policy that would become the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Abraham Lincoln (1853) even wondered in awe at the mounds because he thought them filled with the bones of a race of giant humans that had been mentioned in the Bible.
Officials in every walk of American life, from small-town mayors to governors, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and even presidents all saw proof in the mounds that white men were the first to colonize America, which therefore belonged then and forever to the white race. In this, they were aided and abetted by scholars, laymen, and clergy, all of whom joined in an informal project to remake America’s prehistory into something they believed would rival the long, imperial tradition of Europe and thus put America on equal footing with the Old World.
The desire to imagine America’s mounds as the work of a lost civilization was not confined to politicians. Popular entertainment was filled with Mound Builder stories, including novels, plays, and poems. Eminent scholars who ought to have known better rejected the evidence of their own eyes and ascribed mounds to various non-Native cultures. The great ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft believed Celts had colonized early America. Wills DeHaas, the first head of the Smithsonian’s mound survey, believed in the lost race theory. The Smithsonian’s first publication was a book that heavily implied that the mounds were the work of a lost race (Squier and Davis 1848). The symbolism could not have been more stark when the famed “scholar’s edition” of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the ninth edition of 1875–1889, rejected Thomas Jefferson’s conclusions and instead claimed that American mounds were historically connected to ancient European barrows, a comparison found today in Hancock. The encyclopedia stated that the imagined lost race of Mound Builders had been culturally and aesthetically superior to every Native culture (Anderson 1875).
From our vantage point today, it is easy to see how these pseudohistorical claims represented the political, military, and cultural expedience of white Americans (and their Canadian cousins), for whom these ideas served as a justification for political policies designed to achieve and maintain white hegemony. However, in the heat of the moment, many believers were blind to the utility of the story and believed they were pursuing historical truths. Even in archaeological field reports, scholars like Manitoba Historical and Scientific Society president George Bryce could not help but shudder at the “well-known thirst for blood” of Natives and “lament the destruction of so vast and civilized a race” as the (white) Mound Builders (Bryce 1885:19, 20). The Victorians’ popular (but overstated) reputation as serious and sober scholars has masked much that is unsavory in their work, and as a result we find many of their disturbing ideas repeated, intentionally or not, down to the present.
The Mound Builder myth only began to fade when the Indian Wars had started to wind down and the more socially conscious among the Victorians had begun to recognize the terrible devastation that U.S. policies toward Native peoples had wrought. More than a dozen prominent nineteenth-century scholars had correctly identified the mounds as Native American constructions in the 1870s and 1880s, but their views did not penetrate the mainstream so long as the Mound Builder myth was ascendant. In 1881, the incoming Speaker of the House directed that $5,000 of the Smithsonian Institution’s budget be spent on Mound Builder research in pursuit of a lost race. John Wesley Powell, head of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, subverted the Speaker’s Mound Builder beliefs by launching a mound survey under the leadership of Cyrus Thomas that systematically laid out the evidence for Native American construction of these earthworks. By the time the report was complete (Powell 1894), the Indian Wars had largely ended, and following the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, the frontier was largely closed and the ideological impetus to believe in a lost race had lost its immediacy. Scholars across the United States accepted the conclusions so quickly that just 20 years later scholars already spoke of the Mound Builder myth as a forgotten fantasy.
The Mound Builder myth was no longer scholarly, but it was also not dead. It lingered on in popular culture, first among popular history writers who lacked access to academic scholarship and then among novelists and entertainers who spun stories—often quite racist—from the old, fake histories. A 1920 novel adapted the myth for modern racism, making black people the enemies of tall, white mound builders (Marple and Dennis 1920). More importantly, the Mound Builder legends remained current in occult literature, particularly the fantastical histories produced by the Theosophical Society, which drew on Donnelly’s Atlantis, Eastern mysticism, and Hermetic lore (see Hoopes, this issue). Some Theosophical texts attributed the mounds to Aryans who had learned civilization from Venusians (Scott-Elliot 1925). As ludicrous as the claims seemed to scholars, they continued to hold great power outside of the academic mainstream and heavily influenced the “ancient mysteries” genre of popular literature on the middle twentieth century, in which Aryan ancestors and white-skinned “gods” still jostled with giants and Mound Builders in a parody of Victorian scholarship.
Twentieth-century writers on the Mound Builder myth like Robert Silverberg (1968) and Stephen Williams (1991) treated the subject with bemusement, certain that contemporary scholarship had at last triumphed over myth. However, that victory was incomplete. Popular current writers like Hancock and the endless morass of cable TV “history” shows about aliens, giants, and conspiracy theories have ensured that the disingenuous Mound Builder myth continues to spread its poisonous message even though its architects are a century dead and the specific goals of dispossessing and oppressing indigenous people are long forgotten. By reviving antiquated Victorian ideas in our time, they give aid and succor to Eurocentrists and white nationalists. Even if authors and television writers do not support these goals, they still bear responsibility for the broader effects of this ideology. “The evil that men do lives after them,” in books, online, and on cable television.
References Cited
Anderson, Joseph.
1875 Barrows. Encyclopædia Britannica. 9th ed., vol. III. Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh.
Bryce, George
1885 The Mound Builders. Historical Society Transaction No. 18, 1884–1885 Season. Manitoba Free Press, Winnipeg, Canada.
Colavito, Jason
2019 American Atlantis. Skeptic 24(2):55–63.
2020 The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and America’s Hunt for a “Lost White Race.” University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Donnelly, Ignatius
1882 Atlantis: The Antedilivian World. Harper & Brothers, New York.
1887 Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel. D. Appleton, New York.
Hancock, Graham
1995 Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization. Crown Publishing, New York.
2015 Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization. Thomas Dunn: New York.
2019 America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization. St. Martin’s Press, New York.
Harrison, William Henry
1838 A Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio. Published by author, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jackson, Andrew
1830 First Annual Message, December 8, 1829. In Register of Debates in Congress, Vol. 6, Appendix, p. 15. Washington, D.C.
Lincoln, Abraham
1953 Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Marple, J. Clarence, and Albert Nelson Dennis
1920 Anona of the Moundbuilders: A Story of Many Thousands of Years Ago. Progressive Publishers, Wheeling, West Virginia.
Powell, John Wesley (editor)
1894 Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Priest, Josiah
1835 American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, 5th ed. Author, Albany.
Scott-Elliot, W.
1925 The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. Theosophical Publishing, London.
Silverberg, Robert
1968 Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Connecticut.
Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis
1848 Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge 1. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Williams, Stephen
1991 Fantastic Archaeology: A Walk on the Wild Side of North American Prehistory. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Although Hancock is careful to attribute his proposed lost civilization to a Native American origin, the thematic origins of his claim are transparently derived from nineteenth-century Mound Builder myths. As I show in my forthcoming book The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and America’s Hunt for a “Lost White Race” (Colavito 2020), these served both political and social purposes associated with white supremacy, shaped public perceptions of Native American cultural achievements for more than a century, and still hold sway among some groups, in particular white nationalists. By building on a scaffolding of discredited nineteenth-century views like those I examine in my book, Hancock serves to perpetuate Victorian assumptions about the limits of Native potential, despite his own stated respect for indigenous peoples the world over.
The most obvious source for Hancock’s ideas about North American mounds are the works of nineteenth-century congressman and popular writer Ignatius Donnelly, whose books Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883) contain uncanny similarities to Hancock’s own. Atlantis lays out a case for a lost global civilization whose evangelizing representatives were responsible for the construction of these mounds, as Hancock writes in Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (1995), while Ragnarok attempts to prove that this civilization was destroyed by a comet’s collision with Earth at the end of the Ice Age, which Hancock also argues in his previous book Magicians of the Gods (2015). The connections are not merely coincidental; in Fingerprints, Hancock announces, “I want to pay tribute to Ignatius Donnelly,” whose works he consulted and drew upon in writing his own.
While Donnelly’s views are not the only influence on Hancock, they illustrate the direct connection between Mound Builder mythology and Hancock’s so-called alternative history. When Donnelly wrote his books, the United States was in the midst of the Indian Wars, and American Indians were demonized as bloodthirsty, brutish, and barbaric. Scholars as well as lay authors like Josiah Priest, of American Antiquities fame, argued that Native peoples were a separate subspecies or that they had degenerated from a more perfect Old World stock (Priest 1835). Government officials called openly for the destruction of indigenous culture, and a series of policies, from Indian Removal in the 1830s to the Dawes Act in the 1880s, had devastating effects on Native American populations. The consequences were essentially a slow-moving policy of genocide designed to rupture political, social, economic, and cultural ties within American Indian communities.
Donnelly was more sympathetic to Native peoples than many of his countrymen, but he nevertheless concluded that they were not among the peoples listed as descendants of Noah in the Bible. Therefore, he considered Native Americans to be inferior to white Europeans, and consequently he believed their cultural achievements were gifts bestowed by the (white) rulers of Atlantis. In America Before, Hancock repeats the idea that the rulers of his quasi-Atlantis taught specific skills to their chosen disciples, though he substitutes Native peoples for whites as representatives of the lost civilization, reversing his earlier claims in Fingerprints in which he describes the refugees from the lost civilization 12 times as “white.”
Donnelly’s attribution of the mounds in the United States to colonists from Atlantis was the culmination of a long series of attempts to revise American history to better conform to a white nationalist narrative. During the colonial period, it was uncontroversial to recognize the mounds as the work of American Indians. Several colonial worthies said as much, and early European explorers had even seen some mounds being built. In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson excavated a mound near his home at Monticello in Virginia and reported in his 1795 Notes on the State of Virginia that the artifacts and remains found within confirmed that Native Americans had built the mound. So convincing was his scientific evidence that the Encyclopædia Britannica used Jefferson’s description of the mounds wholesale in every edition from 1797 to 1854.
However, as the United States expanded its borders westward, first into the Northwest Territory, which included Ohio, and the Louisiana Territory, which included the Mississippi Valley, white settlers came into increasing conflict with Natives. As the settlers pushed into these areas, a new history of America before European contact began to emerge that would be ideologically more favorable to the view that white Americans had a legitimate claim to lands currently occupied by Natives. Settlers noticed tens of thousands of mounds across the new territories, and they took advantage of some Natives’ ignorance of their origins. The upheavals caused by the contact period had caused Native populations to fall precipitously (by some counts, as much as 90% between Columbus and the nineteenth century) and displaced remaining populations. As a result, many groups had no historical tradition of building the mounds since they were not the population that had constructed them.
American scholars concluded, therefore, that Native peoples had not built the mounds. A series of hypothetical “true” and largely white Mound Builders found popularity at varying times. These included Aryans, Egyptians (imagined as white), Toltecs (then wrongly assumed to be white), Jews, the antediluvian giants from the Bible, Phoenicians, Vikings, Romans, the Spanish, and, most prominent of all, a primeval lost white civilization of that had been killed off when savage Native hordes invaded their all-white paradise only a few centuries before the contact period. While many of these hypotheses originated among provincial gentry, they found their way to the highest levels of American society. William Henry Harrison (1838) was a believer in the Mound Builder myth, particularly in its potential to justify evicting Native peoples from their land, and delivered a speech on the subject that was published as a book. Andrew Jackson (1830) cited the lost race of Mound Builders in his 1829 State of the Union Address, setting out the policy that would become the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Abraham Lincoln (1853) even wondered in awe at the mounds because he thought them filled with the bones of a race of giant humans that had been mentioned in the Bible.
Officials in every walk of American life, from small-town mayors to governors, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and even presidents all saw proof in the mounds that white men were the first to colonize America, which therefore belonged then and forever to the white race. In this, they were aided and abetted by scholars, laymen, and clergy, all of whom joined in an informal project to remake America’s prehistory into something they believed would rival the long, imperial tradition of Europe and thus put America on equal footing with the Old World.
The desire to imagine America’s mounds as the work of a lost civilization was not confined to politicians. Popular entertainment was filled with Mound Builder stories, including novels, plays, and poems. Eminent scholars who ought to have known better rejected the evidence of their own eyes and ascribed mounds to various non-Native cultures. The great ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft believed Celts had colonized early America. Wills DeHaas, the first head of the Smithsonian’s mound survey, believed in the lost race theory. The Smithsonian’s first publication was a book that heavily implied that the mounds were the work of a lost race (Squier and Davis 1848). The symbolism could not have been more stark when the famed “scholar’s edition” of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the ninth edition of 1875–1889, rejected Thomas Jefferson’s conclusions and instead claimed that American mounds were historically connected to ancient European barrows, a comparison found today in Hancock. The encyclopedia stated that the imagined lost race of Mound Builders had been culturally and aesthetically superior to every Native culture (Anderson 1875).
From our vantage point today, it is easy to see how these pseudohistorical claims represented the political, military, and cultural expedience of white Americans (and their Canadian cousins), for whom these ideas served as a justification for political policies designed to achieve and maintain white hegemony. However, in the heat of the moment, many believers were blind to the utility of the story and believed they were pursuing historical truths. Even in archaeological field reports, scholars like Manitoba Historical and Scientific Society president George Bryce could not help but shudder at the “well-known thirst for blood” of Natives and “lament the destruction of so vast and civilized a race” as the (white) Mound Builders (Bryce 1885:19, 20). The Victorians’ popular (but overstated) reputation as serious and sober scholars has masked much that is unsavory in their work, and as a result we find many of their disturbing ideas repeated, intentionally or not, down to the present.
The Mound Builder myth only began to fade when the Indian Wars had started to wind down and the more socially conscious among the Victorians had begun to recognize the terrible devastation that U.S. policies toward Native peoples had wrought. More than a dozen prominent nineteenth-century scholars had correctly identified the mounds as Native American constructions in the 1870s and 1880s, but their views did not penetrate the mainstream so long as the Mound Builder myth was ascendant. In 1881, the incoming Speaker of the House directed that $5,000 of the Smithsonian Institution’s budget be spent on Mound Builder research in pursuit of a lost race. John Wesley Powell, head of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, subverted the Speaker’s Mound Builder beliefs by launching a mound survey under the leadership of Cyrus Thomas that systematically laid out the evidence for Native American construction of these earthworks. By the time the report was complete (Powell 1894), the Indian Wars had largely ended, and following the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, the frontier was largely closed and the ideological impetus to believe in a lost race had lost its immediacy. Scholars across the United States accepted the conclusions so quickly that just 20 years later scholars already spoke of the Mound Builder myth as a forgotten fantasy.
The Mound Builder myth was no longer scholarly, but it was also not dead. It lingered on in popular culture, first among popular history writers who lacked access to academic scholarship and then among novelists and entertainers who spun stories—often quite racist—from the old, fake histories. A 1920 novel adapted the myth for modern racism, making black people the enemies of tall, white mound builders (Marple and Dennis 1920). More importantly, the Mound Builder legends remained current in occult literature, particularly the fantastical histories produced by the Theosophical Society, which drew on Donnelly’s Atlantis, Eastern mysticism, and Hermetic lore (see Hoopes, this issue). Some Theosophical texts attributed the mounds to Aryans who had learned civilization from Venusians (Scott-Elliot 1925). As ludicrous as the claims seemed to scholars, they continued to hold great power outside of the academic mainstream and heavily influenced the “ancient mysteries” genre of popular literature on the middle twentieth century, in which Aryan ancestors and white-skinned “gods” still jostled with giants and Mound Builders in a parody of Victorian scholarship.
Twentieth-century writers on the Mound Builder myth like Robert Silverberg (1968) and Stephen Williams (1991) treated the subject with bemusement, certain that contemporary scholarship had at last triumphed over myth. However, that victory was incomplete. Popular current writers like Hancock and the endless morass of cable TV “history” shows about aliens, giants, and conspiracy theories have ensured that the disingenuous Mound Builder myth continues to spread its poisonous message even though its architects are a century dead and the specific goals of dispossessing and oppressing indigenous people are long forgotten. By reviving antiquated Victorian ideas in our time, they give aid and succor to Eurocentrists and white nationalists. Even if authors and television writers do not support these goals, they still bear responsibility for the broader effects of this ideology. “The evil that men do lives after them,” in books, online, and on cable television.
References Cited
Anderson, Joseph.
1875 Barrows. Encyclopædia Britannica. 9th ed., vol. III. Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh.
Bryce, George
1885 The Mound Builders. Historical Society Transaction No. 18, 1884–1885 Season. Manitoba Free Press, Winnipeg, Canada.
Colavito, Jason
2019 American Atlantis. Skeptic 24(2):55–63.
2020 The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and America’s Hunt for a “Lost White Race.” University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Donnelly, Ignatius
1882 Atlantis: The Antedilivian World. Harper & Brothers, New York.
1887 Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel. D. Appleton, New York.
Hancock, Graham
1995 Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization. Crown Publishing, New York.
2015 Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization. Thomas Dunn: New York.
2019 America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization. St. Martin’s Press, New York.
Harrison, William Henry
1838 A Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio. Published by author, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jackson, Andrew
1830 First Annual Message, December 8, 1829. In Register of Debates in Congress, Vol. 6, Appendix, p. 15. Washington, D.C.
Lincoln, Abraham
1953 Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Marple, J. Clarence, and Albert Nelson Dennis
1920 Anona of the Moundbuilders: A Story of Many Thousands of Years Ago. Progressive Publishers, Wheeling, West Virginia.
Powell, John Wesley (editor)
1894 Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Priest, Josiah
1835 American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, 5th ed. Author, Albany.
Scott-Elliot, W.
1925 The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. Theosophical Publishing, London.
Silverberg, Robert
1968 Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Connecticut.
Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis
1848 Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge 1. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Williams, Stephen
1991 Fantastic Archaeology: A Walk on the Wild Side of North American Prehistory. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
This article originally appeared as Jason Colavito, "Whitewashing American Prehistory," The SAA Archaeological Record 19, no. 5 (Nov. 2019), 17-20. This article is reprinted by permission of the Society for American Archaeology and is copyright © 2019 Society for American Archaeology.
