American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Nothing so well illustrates differences between Native and European views of the world as mounded up earth. Endlessly fascinating, mounds, mound building, and mound builders have been “weighty issues” at the core of the Americanist tradition of scholarship because they are simultaneously civil, cultural, ecological, and mythological statements of both skillful engineering and complex symbolism. After reviewing familiar mound expressions and their explanations from the southeastern United States-and less known examples from the Northeast, California, Northwest, and Midwest-comparison of ethnologic, archaeologic, and linguistic evidence, especially as it relates to esoteric aspects of tribal knowledge, leads to the conclusion that, far from being lumps on a solid landscape, the thoroughly Native understanding of the world as characterized by flux and flow indicates that mounds are a haven of stability by virtue of their broad-based weight in a fraught and uncertain world of floods, earthquakes, attacks, and oppressive disdain, if not hostility. In large part, such misunderstanding of mounds is based in differences of language and perception. Since Native American languages rely on verbs and process, while English emphasizes nouns and product, this heavy solidity of mounds has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. Such earthworks, large and small, dot much of the East, with strong clusterings in the Southeast. After the Archaic Period, conical mounds for the dead filled Ohio River tributaries as manifestations of what archaeologists have called the Adena, followed by varieties of Hopewell earthen expressions.