For more than a century and a half, the imagination of American scientists and just inquisitive people - from ordinary citizens to heads of government - has been agitated by mysterious Mounds scattered in the Great Lakes region, in the Ohio and Mississippi river basins - in the states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, South Dakota, etc. …
But what are mounds? These are large, of various sizes, heights and shapes, filled hills made of earth, less often of stone, towering over flat terrain. Over the years, they managed to lose the severity of their outlines, partially collapsed, overgrown with grass, shrubs and trees, so that they can be taken for natural formations. However, the results of excavations and radiocarbon analysis showed that the mysterious Mounds are a man-made phenomenon.
One of the first to suspect that next to his estate in Virginia, not an ordinary hill, but a mound of artificial origin rises, was Thomas Jefferson. This conjecture intrigued him so much that he personally took part in the excavations he organized for several Mounds and began to collect information related to this phenomenon. Becoming the third president of the country in 1801, in the same year he published his views on American mounds, which he wrote down over the years, calling this very thorough work "Virginia Notes".
KVKeram, the famous German popularizer of archeology, begins his book “The First American. The Mystery of the Indians of the Pre-Columbian Era”from the story about Jefferson, placing him among the founders of North American archeology, who first applied and voiced the method of stratigraphy (this is when the chronology of their development is made up of the layers of the remains of ancient cultures).
Mysterious Mounds worried both George Washington and 9th President William Henry Harrison, who was trying to figure out who their creators were, where and why they disappeared without a trace. He also left behind an almost scientific work: "Discourse on the aborigines of the Ohio Valley."
Ephraim George Squier, an American diplomat, anthropologist and archaeologist, researcher of the pre-Columbian cultures of the New World, conducted a series of excavations and mapping of Mounds in Ohio State Park, so called: Mound City Group National Monument. In 1848 he published the book "Monuments of the Mississippi Valley", which was the first scientific study of the culture of the builders of mounds. With the publication of this work by the Smithsonian Institution, US archeology automatically acquired the status of a science. So it can be considered that it was the Mounds that served as an impetus and incentive for a closer study of the history of pre-Columbian and even “pre-Indian” North America by its new masters.
History knows many examples of the construction of burial grounds in the form of barrows, pyramids. The main difference between American Mounds is that their total number is huge, and their purpose is much wider. In particular, three types of mounds have been identified: burial mounds; “Temple” hills with flat tops, which served as base-pedestals for temples and dwellings of privileged members of the community (Tempel-Mounds); and the stand-alone Effigy Mounds, the purpose of which is unknown.
After they paid attention to the man-made mounds, they began to be found everywhere, including private plantations and farms, not by tens, not hundreds - thousands! There are 483 of them in Wisconsin alone. Moundam, as a rule, were named after the owner of the land or his possession. And the unknown culture as a whole was dubbed "Adenian".
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Why Aden? The name is absolutely arbitrary. A large landowner and governor of Ohio, T. Worthington, discovered on the territory of his new estate "Aden", near the town of Chilikote, another Mound - a strange symmetrical elevation, too symmetrical to be mistaken for just a hill. Today it is one of the most famous, oldest and largest grave mounds in North America. So the mound of the "Aden" estate, all the other mounds of the same period and the very period of their emergence began to be called the "Aden culture".
The culture that replaced the “Adena” culture and existed until the 10th century was named “Hopewell” - after the name of the farmer Hopewell, on whose lands archaeologists discovered a rich burial mound in his grave.
And the last one is the Mississippi culture. She adopted, continued and developed the traditions of her predecessors, adding to them the ritual burial rites performed at the top of the Mound, and, possibly, human sacrifice.
Let's start with Thomas Jefferson with Burial Mound. This is what this amazing man wrote down when he opened the hill closest to his house: “It had a domed shape and a base diameter of 13 m … At the bottom of the mound, I found bones, above them a couple of stones … Then there was a thick layer of earth, above it a layer of bones and so on - four layers of bones … According to my assumptions, there were up to a thousand skeletons in the mound … They lay in complete disarray, as if in a dump: vertically, obliquely, diagonally … Everything is mixed up and mixed and held together only by the earth … Apparently, people they collected the remains of dead relatives and took them to one place at a certain time. (How are the Parisian burials in the catacombs?)
It turns out that the grave mounds of North America are basically not mounds over the tomb of a noble nobleman of antiquity (although there are some) and not even a cemetery in our understanding, but a dump of human remains covered with earth. Scattered all over the place at great distances, they vary in size, but their distinctive feature is rounded or tapered tops.
Tempel-Mounds are even more numerous than Burials. In the same way as on the flat tops of the Mayan stone pyramids in Central America, temples were erected on the earthen mounds of the North, only not stone, but wooden, under a high thatched roof. Many "temple mounds" were discovered, in particular, in 1925 near the town of Etova, Georgia. And in the south of Illinois, near the city of St. Louis, on the flat banks of the Mississippi River, a truly grandiose cluster of Cahokia Mounds has survived. 120 artificial mounds on an area of 6.5 sq. km! This is the largest settlement of the pre-Columbian cultures of North America known today, the remains of the largest city-state of a very high level, the number of inhabitants of which was estimated at 20-30 thousand.
Mounds are similar here to the Mexican pyramids - truncated cones with a flat top and a square or rectangular base. Once upon a time, a staircase with high steps or an inclined road led to their upper platforms.
The entire territory of Cahokia was surrounded by a 5-meter high wooden palisade. The largest mound with a sanctuary, Monks mound, towered over the city-settlement. It had the shape of a rectangular four-step pyramid, 30 m high and a base size of 350 x 210 (only two steps have survived to date). Scientists believe that Cahokia and the dominant Monks mound over it are the most grandiose - in terms of scale - creation of antiquity in the world. Having shown condescension and understanding to the American mania of self-aggrandizement, one cannot at least partially agree with this.
For the construction of Monks mound, about 25 million cubic meters of land was used, which the builders carried in wicker baskets. During excavations, archaeologists found a large layer of stones at its base. Note that the mounds were erected on an absolutely flat plain. The closest place to collect the stone is 12 km from Cahokia. That long wooden staircase, which tourists climb to the top today, was built today.
Around the main one there were smaller and lower munds, on them were the houses of privileged citizens. In one of the hills of Cahokia, the remains of a local "nobleman" were found, resting on a bed of 12,000 pearls and shells. Seeing him off on his last journey, his relatives put innumerable gifts in the mound: perfectly polished stones, copper memorial plaques, gold jewelry, crudely made ceramic figures, arrowheads, stone axes. And at the same time six male "fellow travelers", most likely servants. Not far from the main grave, in a common pit, the skeletons of 53 women with severed heads and hands were laid, possibly the owner's harem, who forcibly or voluntarily followed him into another world.
The entire territory of Cahokia, together with the museum, where items obtained during the excavations are collected, is now a National Historical Park. In 2008, UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage Site.
Newark, Ohio, is famous for its very unusual golf course. Not only is she nestled in the midst of wide flat-topped mounds, but she sits at the top of a thousand-year-old octagonal podium. There is no need to be surprised. Mounds are not uncommon for Ohio residents: they live among them, and some farmers have built their homes right on the hills. (It's creepy to imagine that under someone's house there might be a mound full of bones.)
And, finally, curly mounds, absolutely incredible structures that have no analogues in the world. They reproduce the outlines of various animals - eagles, turtles, bears, foxes, elks, bison and even people, spread out on the ground. A total of 24 bird-shaped mounds, 11 deer-shaped, 16 rabbit-shaped, 20 bear-shaped, etc. were found in the United States.
One such group of figured hills is Laver Dells, located in Wisconsin, Sauk City. The wingspan of the lower of the three earthen birds is 73 m. “The imagination of the creators of these structures amazes,” notes K. V. Keram, - because they can only be viewed from a bird's eye view."
For example, in Adams County, on the high bank of the small Ohio Brush Creek river, there is a giant snake snake 440 m long. Great Serpent Mound). The entire plateau on which it was discovered was named the Serpent Mound Crater Plateau. Radiocarbon analysis determined that the "serpent" was built around 1050 AD. e. “This is probably the most extraordinary structure of earth discovered so far in the West,” Squier wrote.
Figured Mound of Wisconsin, near the village of Liking, has the shape of a crocodile 60 m long - "Crocodile Mound". In the same state, near the town of Crawford, a group of 6 mounds depicting giant birds with outstretched wings. South Dakota has its own "Big Mound" in the shape of a turtle.
What is the purpose of these mounds, no one really knows. It seems that the answer on the surface is religious-ritual, what else. But by analogy, other giant images of animals, birds, insects, lines and geometric figures on the Peruvian Nazca plateau come to mind - many kilometers of geoglyphs. Two interconnected continents. Two unknown peoples, possibly living at the same time. At least in their mentality, there was probably something in common, a craving for gigantism, for example. But the purpose of hard work is not clear.
Mound Enshent, or Ancient Fort, in Ohio, is a rampart about 5.5 km long and 2 to 6 m high. It cannot be a burial ground. Obviously not suitable for the ritual. Defensive shaft? We can only look at them and reason. But unknown builders worked in the sweat of their brow, it is not known how to loosen the earth (they did not have an excavator, or a cart, or even an elementary shovel). It is known for certain that the land on the embankment was carried in baskets - day and night, by thousands of people. For what?
The main thing remains unclear - who these people were. On the one hand, the builders of the mounds came too close to the traditions of the Maya and Aztec peoples. Truncated stepped pyramids, temples on their flat tops, and even sacrifices. At least, after much thought and debate, some scholars are more and more inclined to believe that North American Mounds were built by people who came from the south. The first person who came up with this idea was William Henry Harrison.
On the other hand, it is appropriate to recall that the most skillful basket weavers were cliff dwellers - rock people, Anasazi-Pueblo-highlanders, who left behind multi-storey structures in the rocks of North America, they even went down in history as “basket-makers”. But their habitat was cave niches, they did not build cities with temples on the hills, and they certainly did not build figured embankments on the plains. In addition, this people appeared in North America in the VI, and disappeared without a trace in the XIII century, while other Mounds are up to 3 thousand years old.
About the creators of the hills and even more so about their culture, modern man has only assumptions, indirect conclusions on the remains and objects extracted from some burial mounds. Archaeologists try to avoid the term "builders of mounds", not excluding the version that such a people did not exist in ancient times, that earthen barrows were created at different times by different tribes.
Eleanor Mandalyan