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The Builders of the Mounds
The Mound Builders and the Myth - download a video of my presentation on this subject The Mound Builders story is actually an interesting mystery of it's own, this is because the story is usually referred to by the latest researchers that I am aware of as "the Mound Builder Myth." This is because for hundreds of years archaeologists and historians alike made claims that the mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi Valley (and elsewhere) were made by some "lost civilization" and not the Native Americans that the first explorers and settlers met when they first were finding the mounds. Click here to read page one of the "History of Waverly, New York" (Albertson) to see a reference to the Mound Builders and reference to them being the "lost race."
I have redone this page so that I can share my latest research and theories as to who those "Mound Builders were, and why it is relative to our region...
One Theory of what happened to the "Mound Builders" I find it easiest to explain what I have come to understand by referring to the 14th century in Europe, and about something that I am sure many of you have learned about at some point of your life...It was referred to as the "Black Plague."
The ?Black Death? (Bubonic Plague) of 1347-51 alone may have killed as many as one-third of the population in Europe at that time. The disease was spread rapidly by fleas on the brown rats that carried the infectious disease off ships and into ports and into cities. In very little time, huge heaps of bodies with few left healthy enough or willing to take care of them. Time only seemed to make things worse, and there a came a time when families had to decide whether or not to stay or to try to seek shelter elsewhere. It is said that if any family member was known to have gotten it, the whole family was locked up in their living space with them for a length of time to ensure none for the rest of them had it as well.
While some stayed in the cities, MANY tried to escape and dispersed into the undeveloped areas, forests and rural hamlets. You can imagine what all if this turmoil would have done to s thriving civilization. In the end, whole political, social, and religious structures imploded due to the horrible (and at that time unexplainable) events and incredible population changes.
If you could have traveled back in time and came acrossed a small hamlets filled with small groups of these poor wretched souls who had survived the plague's wrath, but were left alone in a place where they had no doctors, or the lifestyle they were used to. These people who were used to living in a city had to learn how to fend for themselves in a new living space. They had to restructure their ways of life without stores, without the bakers, or the artisans who made the tools, without the social structure that had farmers and butchers, and others who produced the food for them.
The bottom line that am trying to make is this: if you could go back and had seen these people, you might very well have considered these people "savages."
Think about it, in these times when our own societies are considering the possibility of a new horrific pandemic, and the sci-fi - or futuristic movies of the dreadful doom of our civilizations as we know them at most movie theaters several times a year it seems, THAT is what I am talking about. I believe those NORTH AMERICAN survivors, who were in scraps of clothes on their backs and using stone tools and weaponry that the early settlers met in our area had a past much like those who survived the plague in Europe a couple of hundred years before.
Sadly, this actually happened when the English, Dutch, and French explorers first came into view of these empty cities and huge mounds. They looked at these incredible structures and looked at the miserable living conditions of the Indians they saw here then in that state I have described above, and these Europeans could not even imagine that they had the ability, intelligence, or ingenuity to have created them.
And whether it was a pandemic or a great draught or other drastic weather change which would have undermined the ability to support large cities or some other social/political/religious unraveling that caused the great migration out of these cities, we know it indeed happened.
I find it really strange that we like South America had such great civilizations and structures like the Mayans and the Incas and so on, yet we for hundreds of years claimed they were created by someone other than the Native Indians that they found here...And just like the South Americans, there were many groups who practiced making mounds and mound structures and they were not all the same people that could ever be characterized as one group called the "Mound Builders."
Some of the actual yet today laughable scientific explanations for who the Mound Builders REALLY were were:
Did you notice these were all "White People"?
Anyway - the good news is that it is commonly accepted now that the ancestors of the Native Indians now known as "Iroquois" and "Cherokee" and even "Winnebagos" were some of the descendants of the people who once built mounds to facilitate their religious, political, and social structures and way of life.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1969/4/1969_4_60.shtml
To learn more use the following links:
Please use the following links to learn more about what we know about the hill today: Spanish Hill is currently private property - no trespassing is advised. |
