Table Of ContentACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book at the specific behest of elders of the Native American com-
munity of Ohio. Many of them have been engaged for decades in the preser-
vation of the Ohio valley mounds, as well as in the effort to repatriate and
rebury the human remains and grave goods seized from the earthwork ceme-
teries of their ancestors. Countless hours and selfless dedication have marked
their labor, which has often been lonely, unrewarded, and even unremarked by
the larger Euroamerican culture, which, until quite recently, has lain unaware
of the pain that the desecration of sacred sites causes Native Americans. In the
process of writing Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds, I have
been a guest in the homes of these elders and a companion in their rambles
through mound country, showered alternately with information and kindness.
I am honored to be one of their company.
Most particularly and gratefully, I thank Grandmother Barbara Crandell,
Head Mother of the Ohio Cherokee and founder of the Native American
Alliance of Ohio (NAAO), whose open door and even more open heart have
made this work a joy. Especially, I appredicate her permission to quote.
Likewise, I fondly thank Jean McCoard, an elder of the Tallige Fire and a
member of NAAO, whose farmfiil of dogs, hogs, and llamas always gladdens
my heart. In addition, as one crazed researcher to another, I take my hat off to
Gail Zion, who, although not Native herself, has been a careful, even driven,
researcher for NAAO and who generously shared her knowledge with me.
A very hearty thank you goes to Ward Churchill, who doggedly read every
page of this work in manuscript (not an easy task!) and who provided construc-
tive feedback along with specific articles and invaluable citations. Ward, I
appreciate the thoroughness of your readings and the fearlessness of your
viii NATIVE AMERICANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, AND THE MOUNDS
analyses. I look forward to being able to return the favor.
I also thank Marilou Awiakta, whose own struggles to preserve her Chero-
kee ancestors' mounds in Tennessee gave her sound appreciation of the issue
in the Ohio Valley. She graciously read the galleys of this book, offering her
observations and encouragement.
It is always a pleasure to communicate with Thomas McElwain, who
continually delights and surprises me with, not only his insights and linguistic
information, but also the zany humor with which he handles western insouci-
ance. I thank him for granting me permission to cite his infonnation in these
pages. In addition, I thank linguist Jordan Lachler, who supplied me with infor-
mation and graciously granted me permission to quote him.
Even in the best planned books, there are always some unexpected questions
that arise, which leave one looking, fiat-footed, for pertinent infonnation. In
this instance, it was DNA science. I heartily acknowledge the pointers given me
in this area by Dr. Alan Goodman, who quickly and cordially responded to my
inquiries to him following his testimony before the 17 November 2001,
hearings of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
(NAGPRA) Review Committee. I greatly appreciate his leads on sources and
the articles he sent my way.
As any researcher who has used them knows, trails through government
documents can be fraught with rue, dead-ending here, doubling back there, and
everywhere, raining confusion. The difficulty of locating the right document is
only exacerbated when that document was indicted in the nineteenth century.
Without a Sherpa guide, climbing over the mountains of jumbled, yellowing
paper is nearly impossible. It was my luck to find such an able guide in George
Kline, the Documents Specialist for the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library,
which, although a local library, contains a superb collection of nineteenth-
century government documents.
I also thank the Buckeye Lake Beacon and, especially, its editor and
publisher, Charles Prince, who graciously granted me permission to use a
Buckeye Lake Beacon photograph for my frontispiece and who, moreoever,
hung in there with me when production specs looked to overturn the entire
enterprise.
Finally, as always, I am indebted to my excellent editor, Heidi Bums, whose
eagle-eyed editing helps me produce consistently fine books.
FIGURES
Figure 1.1. The Linnaean Chart of Humanity 22
Figure 1.2. The Blumenbachian Order of Human Degeneracy 24
Figure 2.1. Engraving by De Bry after a painting by Jacques Le Moyne 57
Figure 2.2. The Grave Creek Stone 82
Figure 2.3. Erasmus Gest's Rendering of the Cincinnati Tablet 84
Figure 2.4. The Great Serpent Mound 94
Figure 2.5. The Alligator Mound 95
Figure 2.6. Mound City 97
Figure 2.7. The Newark Earthworks 100
Figure 3.1. Detail of a Map of Extant Mound Sites in 1891 138
Figure 4.1. The Two-by-Four Logic of Humanity 177
Figure 4.2. The Earthworks at Seal Township, in Pike County, Ohio 198
Figure 4.3. Circle Motifs of Sky and Earth 206
xii NATIVE AMERICANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, AND THE MOUNDS
Figure 4.4. Semicircle Motif in the Blackwater Group in Ross
County, Ohio 210
Figure 4.5. Concentric Circle Motif in the Portsmouth Group in
Kentucky 211
Figure 4.6. The U-Mediated Circle Square Motif, Paint Creek
Earthwork, near Chillicothe, Ohio 213
Figure 4.7. The Two-by-Four of Sky-Earth/Fire-Water 214
Figure 4.8. The So-called "Eagle Mound," Detail of the Great Circle
at Newark, Ohio 229
Figure 5.1. Sales Receipt from the Do Drop Inn Antique Store 242
Figure 5.2. Lancaster City Police Property Tag 243
FOREWORD:
iNDiGENiST SCHOLARSHIP AT ITS FINEST
The deepest racist avatar is to think that an error about earlier societies is politically or
theoretically less serious than a misinterpretation of our own world. Just as a people
that oppresses another cannot be free, so a culture that is mistaken about another must
also be mistaken about itself.
—Jean Bauddllard
The Mirror of Production
BARBARA MANN'S DECOLONIZATION
OF NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY
From the onset of Europe's invasion of America during the early sixteenth
century, the invaders and their posterity have assigned themselves the monopo-
listic prerogative of describing, and thus defining, both the hemisphere and the
peoples indigenous to it. Although this inequitable and imbalanced process of
"representing Others" has all along been justified by the presumptively all-
encompassing superiority of European intellectual tradition in understanding
the true nature and meaning of things,' one need only consider the implications
of Juan Ponce de Leon's leading a military expedition into the swamps of" La
Florida" in 1513, looking in all seriousness for a mythical "fountain of youth"
—or Francisco Vazquez de Coronado's repeated forays into what became New
Mexico of subsequent decades, searching for the equally mythic Seven Cities
of Antilia—to appreciate how very far such eurosupremacist self-assessments
have often been from reality.^
In this sense, it is essential to remember that Christopher Columbus, the
"Great Navigator" himself, was half the globe away from where he thought he
was when he first washed up on a New World beach in 1492 and that, until the
late seventeenth century, perhaps later, much of the territory the Columbian
xiv NATIVE AMERICANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, AND THE MOUNDS
"discovery" had opened up to the ravages of European conquest was depicted
by prominent cartographers, among other Old World scholars, as being infested
with all manner of fabulous monsters.' Human residents of the invaded
geography fared no better than the flora, the fauna, or the geography itself.
Beginning with Columbus' s D/ano, European "documents" are sprinkled with
allusions to peoples with one eye, bald heads, or dog faces, and to an island
inhabited only by women, referred to as "Amazons.""
All pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding, Europeans "brought to the
New World overheated imaginations, fired by the popular literature of their
day—romantic novels posing as history. Literate and illiterate alike knew the
stories contained in these widely circulated romances Manifestly works of
fiction, these [fantasies had come] to be regarded as fact by their ordinary read-
ers or listeners."' In effect, Europe was a culture immersed in "an epistemology
where the fantastic and the real [could] not be isolated, [there being] no grounds
for discriminating between the real and the fantastic. Fables (made up stories)
are ostensibly opposed to history (real events), but the same fantastic entities
appear in both genres," a cross-pollination rendering Europe's canons of
science in many respects indistinguishable from some of its more imaginative
modes of fiction.*
Ultimately, the vaunted empiricism purportedly divorcing fact from phan-
tasm, and thus elevating European perceptions above all others, was consis-
tently inverted by the extent to which "skepticism remained subordinate to the
will to believe" in convenient untruth, manifested by even the most leamed
proponents of what came shortly to be known as "the scientific method."'
Indeed, it would soon be routinely asserted that employment of The Method
had "scientifically proven" many of Europe's more ridiculous characterizations
of Others to be "in truth" correct. Witness, by way of illustration, the extraor-
dinary persistence as an "established fact" of the notion that cannibalism pro-
vided a regular source of protein in the diets of many native societies.* Similar
situations prevail with regard to such commonplaces as the idea that scalping
was a practice invented by Native Americans and that Mesoamerican peoples
like the Aztecs engaged in wholesale human sacrifice.'
It is not that indigenous people did not have better and more accurate
understandings of themselves and the world around them than those embodied
in the bilge so often peddled by Europe, nor that they did not attempt to impart
what they knew. In situations where Native interpretations of reality confiicted
with those embraced by Europeans, however, the former were invariably and
quite arbitrarily discounted as views holding sway only in "primitive," "igno-
FOREWORD XV
rant," and "superstitious" societies, worthy of neither currency nor considera-
tion in the vastly more "enlightened" west.'" Descriptions of the Native charac-
ter such as that offered by Samuel Purchas in 1625 had become standard fare
long before he permed his opinion that Natives were
a bad people, having little of humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of
Religion; more brutish than the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanley then that
unmanned countrey, which they range rather then inhabite; captivated also to Santans
tyranny in foolish pieties, made impieties, wicked idlenesse, busie and bloudy wicked-
nesse [spellings and punctuation as in the original]. "
Thus were "aborigines" definitionally consigned to a realm not only beyond
the boundaries of such eurocentric niceties as "science" and "civilization," but
also outside the domain even of history.'^ Having thereby released itself from
the obligation of acknowledging the least prospect of validity attending any
world view but its own and unfettered by anything resembling bona fide epis-
temological constraints in large sectors of its intellectual endeavor, the Euro-
pean academy was free to "explain" Native peoples in whatever manner it
desired (i.e., in ways best serving the perceived interests of its sponsors at any
given moment).'' Whatever image was concocted in accordance with this
recipe, moreover, was meant not only for dissemination among Europeans for
purposes of legitimating their drive to subordinate and dispossess Others, but
also to be imposed as a self-concept upon the dispossessed and subordinated
—that is to say, colonized—Others themselves.'"• As Albert Memmi has
observed, "The history which is taught [the colonized] is not his own.""
In order for the colonizer to be a complete master, it is not enough for him to be so in
actual fact, but he must also believe in its legitimacy. In order for this legitimacy to be
complete, it is not enough for the colonized to be a slave, he must [be indoctrinated to]
accept his role."
Through such conditioning, an appearance of "confirmation of native
sources" was constructed vis-a-vis a range of eurosupremacist contentions
otherwise xinsupported by a shred of evidence (or contradicted by such evidence
as existed)." Plainly, we are confronted here with an aspect of what Antonio
Gramsci termed "hegemony" (i.e., a unified description, either overtly or
covertly political, of events and phenomena designed to rationalize the subjuga-
tion by one group of others, ultimately making the relationship seem right,
natural, and, most of all, inevitable).'* Alternately, to put a more recent termino-
logical gloss on the matter, one can readily discern the crafting of a Lyotardian
"grand" or "master" narrative of a sort devolving upon the imagined virtue and
xvi NATIVE AMERICANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, AND THE MOUNDS
necessity of "human progress."" Irrespective of the semantics involved, genu-
ine scientific inquiry and discourse have had precious little to do with the
formation of European/euroderivative Truth where Others are concerned. Still
less has the project of building such an interpretive edifice been harnessed to
the hallowed ideal of achieving "justice" in any discemable
The More Things "Change" ...
It would be at best an error to suggest that the kinds of egregious nonsense
remarked above have abated since the days of Columbus and Coronado. True,
the sorts of willful fallacy by which the Other is rendered by "responsible"
scholars have become somewhat more sophisticated—an entire discipline,
anthropology (the term encompasses subsets like archaeology and paleontol-
ogy), emerged during the nineteenth century to accommodate precisely this
task—in keeping with the evolution of both the technologies and the vernacu-
lars of science,^' as well as the shift in rhetorical emphasis needed by a culture
making the transition from a prolonged period of conquest and expansion into
one in which consolidation and attempts to perfect an already existing structure
of oppression were/are the order of the day.^^ Fundamentally, however, things
have remained far more the same than not over the past 500 years, at least in the
connections at issue.
As Robert Berkhofer has shown in his insightful study. The White Man's
Indian, the fictions through which Europeans originally misrepresented Native
Americans had coagulated into coherent tropes and stereotypes long before
anthropology made its formal appearance." For their part, those devoted to
pursuing the "science of man" have been corroborating those misrepresenta-
tions ever since, regularly informing all who will listen that their proof is now
"conclusive." Here, it should be remembered that among the "truths" thus
posited during the 1800s were that human intelligence is determined by "cranial
capacity," and that Caucasians are innately smarter than Indians and other non-
Europeans because they are endowed with larger cranial cavities than other
"races," a sorry subject examined here in lethal detail by Barbara Mann in
chapter 1 }^ It was of course later shown that Samuel Morton, the researcher
with whom this orthodoxy is most closely associated, faked his results to obtain
the desired outcomes,^' but no matter: the handy theory of a racially defined
"hierarchy of intellect" continues to be accorded credibility, forming the core
of Richard Hermstein and Charles Murray's immensely popular tome, The Bell
Curve, as recently as 1994.^*
Along the same line, which Mann likewise dissects, it was considered an
FOREWORD xvii
established anthropological fact during the early twentieth century that, in keep-
ing with biblical chronologies, the Americas "could not" have been inhabited
by humans for more than 3,000 years." William Henry Holmes and his protege.
Ales Hrdlicka, successive heads of the Smithsonian Institution's American
Bureau of Ethnology, presided over enforcement of this "scientific" orthodoxy,
ridiculing and often using their influence to "block publication of opposing
viewpoints," marginalizing those who differed from
The question of early man in America became virtually taboo, and no anthropologist, or
for that matter geologist or paleontologist, desirous of a successful career would tempt the
fate of ostracism by intimating that he had discovered indications of a respectable antiqui-
ty for the Indian."
It was not until the mid-1930s, after successive discoveries at sites near the
New Mexico towns of Folsom and Clovis had left the sheer falsity of sanc-
tioned "scientific truth" exposed for all to see, that the official "threshold for
the arrival of man in this hemisphere" was finally rolled back to the 12,000 to
15,000-year range.^" And there it has stayed. While current linguistic and
genetic data—as well as the discovery of truly ancient sites such as those as the
Old Crow/Bluefish Cave Complex, in the Yukon; Monte Verde, in Chile; and
Valsequillo, in Mexico—indicate, rather conclusively that people have resided
throughout the "New World" for at least forty millennia,'' anthropological
orthodoxy, enforced by a "Clovis Mafia" exhibiting much the same behavior
that once marked the Holmes/HrdliSka Smithsonian regime, continues to decree
a "maximum" of fifteen.'^
The reason for this latest round of recalcitrance is not especially mysterious.
To admit that the western hemisphere was endowed with a human population
at least 40,000 years ago would be to obliterate the most central and cherished
of all the tenets giving shape to Americanist anthropology: the Truth that
American Indians arrived here by traversing a "land bridge" believed to have
joined Siberia and Alaska during the last ice.age." The problem is that the
conditions under which such a "Bering Strait migration" might have been pos-
sible did not exist much further back in time than 15,000 years.'"* Since conced-
ing older site datings would require a whole new explanation of how people
came to be here, scholars, in order to be considered "reputable," simply deny
the validity—sometimes, the very existence—of inconvenient evidence, purg-
ing heretics when- and wherever necessary to protect the interpretive status
quo."
Like Holmes's and Hrdli6ka's insistence upon the "shallow dating" of
human occupancy in America, the origins of the Beringian migration hypothe-
xviii NATIVE AMERICANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, AND THE MOUNDS
sis are telling. As Barbara Mann documents, it was conceived in 1590 by a
Franciscan priest named Acosta who was endeavoring to reconcile Christian-
ity's Old World origin story with the existence of a huge and unaccoimted for
population in the New.'* Two centuries later, Thomas Jefferson secularized
Acosta's theological musings in a transparently political effort to undermine the
aboriginal title to their homelands, acknowledged by the Law of Nations as
vested in America's indigenous peoples." As Vine Deloria, Jr., has put it, the
idea was to show not only that Native Americans, like the European invaders
and their descendants, come from somewhere else, but also that "they'd barely
unpacked before Columbus came knocking on the door."'* With things framed
in this fashion, of course, it would be difficult to argue that Euroamericans are
appreciably less entitled to territories possessed by Natives than the Natives,
themselves.
Prompted by this decidedly unscientific incentive, the "detached, neutral,
and objective scientists" of America's anthropological establishment have for
nearly two hundred years done quite literally everything in their power to con-
cretize the popular illusion that the Jeffersonian hypothesis has been confirmed.
Not only has countervailing evidence been consistently discounted and sup-
pressed, its proponents treated like modem-day Galileos, but all manner of
spurious material has been deployed in bolstering the case. Although examples
are legion, among the most blatant was the reliance by "experts" for more than
a century upon the so-called Walam Olum, a rather flagrant hoax (examined in
detail by Mann) perpetrated in 1836 by a would-be celebrity named
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, merely because it met the evidentiary needs
of orthodoxy."
The "Red Score," as the forgery is also called, purports to be "an ancient
hieroglyphic document, painted and engraved on wooden tablets ... by early
Lenape (Delaware) Indians" and chronicling, among other things, that people's
passage across the Bering Strait land bridge at a point somewhere around 1500
B.C.E."*" Despite the fact that questions had been raised from the outset by
Rafinesque's "translation" of the record's Lenape, a team of eminent archae-
ologists, ethnologists, linguists, and historians pronounced the fraud "authentic"
in 1954."' As recently as 1987, C. A. Weslager, a reputed specialist on the
Lenape, went on record asserting the tract's legitimacy and reeled off a list of
distinguished colleagues who agreed with him."^ Unsurprisingly, given these
circumstances, a new edition of this "oldest Native American history" was
released in 1989.'" As Barbara Mann concludes in her chapter 3 dissection of
the Walam Olum, the hoax succeeded for so long because it played so entirely
into Euroamerican preconceptions of Native "prehistory."
