"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.

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Iowa has more than eighteen thousand archaeological sites, and research in the past few decades has transformed our knowledge of the state's human past. Drawing on the discoveries of many avocational and professional scientists, Lynn Alex describes Iowa's unique archaeological record as well as the challenges faced by today's researchers, armed with innovative techniques for the discovery and recovery of archaeological remains and increasingly refined frameworks for interpretation. The core of this book--which includes many historic photographs and maps as well as numerous new maps and drawings and a generous selection of color photos--explores in detail what archaeologists have learned from studying the state's material remains and their contexts. Examining the projectile points, potsherds, and patterns that make up the archaeological record, Alex describes the nature of the earliest settlements in Iowa, the development of farming cultures, the role of the environment and environmental change, geomorphology and the burial of sites, interaction among native societies, tribal affiliation of early historic groups, and the arrival and impact of Euro-Americans. In a final chapter, she examines the question of stewardship and the protection of Iowa's many archaeological resources.

The formative years of American anthropology were characterized by intellectual energy and excitement, the identification of key interpretive issues, and the beginnings of a prodigious amount of fieldwork and recording. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) was born as anthropology emerged as a formal discipline with specialized subfields; fieldwork among Native communities proliferated across North America, yielding a wealth of ethnographic information that began to surface in the flagship journal, the American Anthropologist; and researchers increasingly debated and probed deeper into the roots and significance of ritual, myth, language, social organization, and the physical make-up and prehistory of Native Americans. The fifty-five selections in this volume represent the interests of and accomplishments in American anthropology from the establishment of the American Anthropologist through World War I. The articles in their entirety showcase the state of the subfields of anthropology?archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology?as they were imagined and practiced at the dawn of the twentieth century. Examples of important ethnographic accounts and interpretive debates are also included. Introducing this collection is a historical overview of the beginnings of American anthropology by A. Irving Hallowell, a former president of the AAA.

Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Two centuries of academic scholarship regarding mounds have examined who, what, where, when, and how, but no serious investigations have addressed the basic question, why? Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns. Native peoples continue to build and refurbish mounds each summer as part of their New Year’s celebrations to honor and give thanks for ripening maize and other crops and to offer public atonement. The mound is the heart of the Native community, which is sustained by song, dance, labor, and prayer. The basic purpose of mounds across North America is the same: to serve as a locus where community effort can be engaged in creating a monument of vitality and a safe haven in the volatile world.

Fourteen experts examine the current state of Central Valley prehistoric research and provide an important touchstone for future archaeological study of the region The Mississippi Valley region has long played a critical role in the development of American archaeology and continues to be widely known for the major research of the early 1950s. To bring the archaeological record up to date, fourteen Central Valley experts address diverse topics including the distribution of artifacts across the landscape, internal configurations of large fortified settlements, human-bone chemistry, and ceramic technology. The authors demonstrate that much is to be learned from the rich and varied archaeological record of the region and that the methods and techniques used to study the record have changed dramatically over the past half century. Operating at the cutting edge of current research strategies, these archaeologists provide a fresh look at old problems in central Mississippi Valley research.

This book presents a temporally and geographically broad yet detailed history of an important form of Native American architecture, the platform mound. While the variation in these earthen monuments across the eastern United States has sparked much debate among archaeologists, this landmark study reveals unexpected continuities in moundbuilding over many thousands of years. In A History of Platform Mound Ceremonialism, Megan Kassabaum synthesizes an exceptionally wide dataset of 149 platform mound sites from the earliest iterations of the structure 7,500 years ago to its latest manifestations. Kassabaum discusses Archaic period sites from Florida and the Lower Mississippi Valley, as well as Woodland period sites across the Midwest and Southeast, to revisit traditional perspectives on later, more well-known Mississippian-era mounds. Kassabaum’s chronological approach corrects major flaws in the ways these constructions have been interpreted in the past. This comprehensive history exposes nonlinear shifts in mound function, use, and meaning across space and time and suggests a dynamic view of the vitality and creativity of their builders. Ending with a discussion of Native American beliefs about and uses of earthen mounds today, Kassabaum reminds us that this history will continue to be written for many generations to come. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series