What is the Myth?
When Europeans settled in America and finally began to take stock of their surroundings, they soon began noticing fantastic monuments, earthmounds of varying sizes and shapes, filled with artifacts and bodies. Some of these mounds had hundreds of bodies, others mainly artifacts, and all were an insight into the cultures they had come from. Due to facts such as the sheer size of the mounds, the well developed artworks contained herein, the intricacies of the mound structures, and the apparently sedentary lifestyle rather than a roaming people, the early colonial and American people decided these mounds could not have been built by what they considered to be the barbaric, uncivilized Indians of whom they had slaughtered so many. These mounds would have taken a massive amount of labor to build, as well as intensive calculations in order to construct them properly. The Indians were judged to be lazy and unintelligent by many of the settlers, incapable of producing anything on such a grand scale. Clearly, then, the moundbuilders had been of a superior race, one wiped completely out by the country’s current Indian inhabitants.
