They would show that the builders of the mounds, while they made many
beautiful things of stone, shell, bone, beaten metals, could not smelt
ores. They were Stone Age men, not civilized men. The objects from
different areas differ so much in kind, pattern, and material as to
suggest that their makers were not one people. Study of skulls from mounds
in one district—as Ohio or Iowa—show that different types of men built the
mounds even of one area.
So neither the mounds, the relics, nor the remains prove that there was
one people, the “mound-builders,” but rather that the mounds were built by
many different tribes. These tribes were not of civilized, but of
barbarous, Stone Age men. It is likely that some of the tribes that built
the mounds still live in the United States. Thus the Shawnees may be the
descendants of the stone-grave people, the Winnebagoes may have come from
the effigy-builders of Wisconsin, and the Cherokees may be the old Ohio
“mound-builders.”
E. G. SQUIER and E. H. DAVIS.—Authors of _Ancient Monuments of the
Mississippi Valley_, published in 1847. It was the _first_ great
work on American Archæology.
INCREASE ALLEN LAPHAM.—Civil engineer, scientist. His _Antiquities
of Wisconsin_ was published in 1855.
STEPHEN D. PEET.—Minister, antiquarian, editor. Established _The
American Antiquarian_, which he still conducts. Wrote _Emblematic
Mounds_.
CYRUS THOMAS.—Minister, entomologist, archæologist. In charge of
the mound exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology. Wrote _Burial
Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States_ and _Report
of the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology_.
FREDERIC WARD PUTNAM.—Ichthyologist, archæologist, teacher. For
many years Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology, at
Cambridge, Mass. Has organized much field work upon mounds of Ohio
and Tennessee. Also Curator in Anthropology at the American Museum
of Natural History in New York.