"With westward expansion in the United States beyond the Appalachian wall in the late eighteenth century, settlers increasingly encountered the mysterious earthen mounds of the interior eastern woodlands. These mounds, and the identity of the mound builders, would remain at the center of archaeological interest and debate through much of the succeeding nineteenth century. The Division of Mound Exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, was established in 1881 to resolve the issue of the identity of the builders of the mounds. Published in 1894 as the accompanying paper of the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, the final research report of the Division rejected the various speculative scenarios of vanished races and convincingly demonstrated that the forebearers of American Indian groups were the builders of the mounds. This final report is generally recognized as marking the beginning of modern archaeology in the Americas."--Page 5.

Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history—and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people. Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history—but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this “ancient” myth has clear echoes in today’s arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, “alternative facts,” and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.

This work offers an analysis of the way in which the phenomenon of not in my backyard operates in the United States. The author takes the situation further by offering hope for a heightened public engagement with the pressing environmental issues of the day.

A classic resource on early knowledge of prehistoric mounds and the peoples who constructed them in the eastern United States