The Mound Builder Myth

At a glance

The myth is born

When the first Ohio Company of Associates settlers landed at the mouth of the Muskingum River in April 1788 and found an "extensive complex of earthworks" on the terrace above the bank, they did not credit them to the people living nearby. They gave the earthworks Latin names -- Quadranaou, Capitolium, Sacra Via, Conus -- likening them to Roman and Greek antiquities, and set the largest ones aside as protected town commons, in what one historian calls the first local historic-preservation ordinance in the United States (Wikipedia, Marietta Earthworks).

Ohio's first extended scholarly treatment of the earthworks, Caleb Atwater's "Description of Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio," appeared in Archaeologia Americana, volume 1, in 1820. Atwater, a Circleville lawyer and postmaster, split "our Antiquities" into three classes: those of "Indians of the present race," which he judged few and unremarkable; those of European origin; and the works of "that people who raised our ancient forts and tumuli," whom he called "a people far more civilized than our Indians, but far less so than Europeans" (Atwater 1820). He rejected one popular guess outright -- "It is absurd to suppose that they were Welsh" -- but argued instead for a lost people related to peoples of Asia. Atwater's mound-builders were explicitly not the ancestors of the Ohio nations he described elsewhere in the same book.

Thirteen years later, the myth reached its widest American audience through Josiah Priest's American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West (Albany, 1833). Its title page announced the thesis outright: evidence of "an ancient population of partially civilized nations, differing entirely from those of the present Indians," who peopled America centuries before Columbus (Priest 1833/34). The fifth edition's own title page advertised that "22,000 copies of this work have been published within thirty months, for subscribers only" -- a genuine bestseller by the standards of the day (Green 1934, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society); material from the book had reached some American schoolbooks by 1847 (summarized in a review of Colavito's The Mound Builder Myth). The same year, William Cullen Bryant put the myth into verse American schoolchildren would memorize for generations. His poem "The Prairies" has the narrator ask of the mounds, "Are they here -- the dead of other days?" and answer that "a disciplined and populous race" built them before "the red man came... and the mound-builders vanished from the earth" (Bryant, "The Prairies," Poetry Foundation). In twenty lines, Bryant told a national audience that living Native people were not the mound-builders' descendants but their killers.

Even scholars who did not endorse a "lost white race" hedged on Native authorship. Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis's Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), the Smithsonian Institution's first-ever publication, surveyed Ohio's earthworks in unmatched detail, but leaned on the racial "craniology" of Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton to place a skull recovered from a mound in a "Toltecan" family linked to Mexico and Peru, rather than with "our present race of Indians" (Squier and Davis 1848).

The myth as policy

The timing was not incidental. On December 6, 1830 -- the same year he signed the Indian Removal Act -- President Andrew Jackson told Congress, in his Second Annual Message: "In the monuments and fortifications of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated [or] has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes." He went on to call the extinction of "one generation to make room for another" a thing "true philanthropy reconciles the mind to" (Jackson, Second Annual Message, Miller Center). The myth's popularity tracked the same two decades in which forced removal pushed Ohio Valley nations toward the Gulf Coast, the same ground where the mounds stood thickest.

The myth's most thorough official rebuttal came from the Smithsonian's own Bureau of Ethnology. Cyrus Thomas's Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, the Bureau's Twelfth Annual Report, published in 1894 after a decade of federally funded excavation across the mound region, stated its conclusions bluntly: "the mound-builders of the area designated consisted of a number of tribes or peoples bearing about the same relations to one another and occupying about the same culture-status as did the Indian tribes inhabiting this country when first visited by Europeans," and "the links directly connecting the Indians and mound-builders are so numerous and well established that archeologists are justified in accepting the theory that they are one and the same people" (Cyrus Thomas, 1894). Thomas argued against a single "lost race" governing one unified nation across the mound region, concluding instead that "the mound-builders belonged to several different tribes or nations" -- crediting, among others, the Cherokee and the Shawnee with major works (same source). Thomas's report is generally credited as the turning point after which mainstream American archaeology treated the mound-builders as ancestral Native Americans, though, as the hoaxes below show, the myth did not die with the report.

Hoaxes: manufacturing evidence for a myth that had none

The Newark Holy Stones (1860). In June 1860, surveyor and lay archaeologist David Wyrick of Licking County found a small inscribed "Keystone" in a shallow dig near the Newark Earthworks, bearing Hebrew phrases translated as "Holy of Holies," "King of the Earth," "The Law of God" and "The Word of God." That November, a second find, the "Decalogue Stone" -- a sandstone box holding a carved Hebrew Ten Commandments text and a bearded, robed figure identified as Moses -- surfaced at a mound roughly ten miles south of Newark (Wikipedia, Newark Holy Stones). If genuine, the stones would have proven Old World, Hebrew-speaking people at Ohio's most important Hopewell site -- exactly what the era's Lost Tribes theories demanded. Archaeologist Charles Whittlesey identified the Hebrew lettering as modern within Wyrick's own lifetime; a Newark Freemason recognized the Keystone's shape and phrases as Masonic; and Ohio History Connection curator Brad Lepper later traced the Decalogue Stone's figure to an illustration in an available book on the ruins of Nineveh (asc.ohio-state.edu, "The Newark, Ohio Decalogue Stone and Keystone"). Both stones are still on public display today, at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Coshocton.

The Grave Creek Stone (1838). A small sandstone disk bearing roughly 25 unknown characters was reportedly found in 1838 inside the Grave Creek Mound at Moundsville, present West Virginia, across the Ohio River. At a 2008 meeting of the West Virginia Archaeological Society, anthropologist David Oestreicher traced the inscription's characters to a 1752 Spanish book on ancient alphabets by Velázquez de Velasco, making the stone a forgery created decades after the mound was built (Wikipedia, Grave Creek Stone).

The Bat Creek Stone (published 1894). An inscribed stone said to have been excavated from a Tennessee burial mound was published inside Cyrus Thomas's own report -- inside the very document that debunked the broader myth. Thomas read the marks as Cherokee syllabary; in the 1970s a classicist reinterpreted them as Paleo-Hebrew, reviving Lost Tribes speculation, until a 2004 study showed the inscription was copied from an illustration in an 1870 Masonic reference book, meaning it could only have been added to the site by a 19th-century hand (Wikipedia, Bat Creek Stone).

The Michigan Relics (1890-1920s). Starting in October 1890, sign painter James Scotford began "finding" inscribed clay and slate tablets in mounds across Michigan. By 1911, he and two partners had opened more than 500 mounds; the tablets, carrying modern saw marks and depicting Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel, were marketed as the work of the Lost Ten Tribes (Wikipedia, Michigan relics).

Giant skeletons. Nineteenth- and early-20th-century newspapers regularly reported giant human skeletons, sometimes ten feet tall, dug from mounds and attributed to a "lost race of giants." No such skeleton has ever been produced for scientific examination (Wikipedia, Giant human skeletons). The belief was mainstream enough to appear in a private 1848 writing fragment by Abraham Lincoln, who mused about "the eyes of that species of extinct giants, whose bones fill the mounds of America" gazing on Niagara Falls -- thirteen years before he became president (quoted in Wikipedia, Mound Builders). A modern offshoot claims the Smithsonian secretly destroyed thousands of giant skeletons to protect an official history; that specific viral claim began circulating online around 2014 and was debunked as fabricated by wire-service fact-checkers (Snopes).

What Ohio lost

The best-sourced statewide count of Ohio's earthworks comes from the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society's own 1914 Archaeological Atlas of Ohio, compiled county by county by William C. Mills: 3,513 burial mounds, 587 enclosures, 354 village sites and 5,396 earthwork-type sites of every kind recorded as of 1914, with Ross County alone holding 370 recorded mounds and Licking County 225 (Mills 1914). Mills himself cautioned the count was incomplete, since "many monuments have been destroyed by a century or more of cultivation" before he ever counted them -- so 3,513 is a floor on the 1800 total, not a ceiling, and the popular round figure of "10,000 mounds" statewide has no known primary source. A 2024 University of Cincinnati exhibition describes "thousands" once dotting the Ohio Valley and "fewer than 1,000" surviving today (University of Cincinnati DAAP, "What Remains").

Circleville, in Pickaway County, is Ohio's most literal example of a town swallowing a mound: platted in 1810 directly atop a circle-and-square Hopewell earthwork, with the original county courthouse built at the circle's exact center. By the 1830s residents disliked the resulting radial street grid; the General Assembly chartered the Circleville Squaring Company in 1837, and the work proceeded quarter by quarter -- southeast first in 1837, then northwest and northeast, with the southwest finished last in 1856 -- erasing essentially all surface trace of the earthwork (Wikipedia, Circleville, Ohio).

Cincinnati's downtown once held a large elliptical earthwork plus at least three mounds, first plotted by Dr. Daniel Drake in 1815. The largest, near the later intersection of Fifth and Mound Streets, stood 35 feet high; General "Mad" Anthony Wayne had eight feet cut from its top in 1794 to build a sentry post, leaving it 27 feet by Drake's 1815 measurement. In 1841 the city graded Mound Street, cutting the mound away almost entirely; workers recovered the carved "Cincinnati Tablet" from inside it during the grading (Pre-historic Remains... Cincinnati, 1879 reprint).

Columbus lost a roughly 40-foot mound at what became the corner of Mound and High Streets -- the street took its name from the landmark when surveyor Joel Wright platted the town in 1812. By the 1830s, traffic through the growing capital made the detour around it intolerable, and the mound was removed; its clay reportedly went into bricks for some of the city's earliest buildings, including the original Statehouse. Shrum Mound, further west on the Scioto, survives today as one of the few visible reminders of Columbus's Adena mounds (WOSU, "How Mound Street Got Its Name").

Mound City, near Chillicothe in Ross County, offers the counterexample most complicated by wartime necessity. Squier and Davis mapped 24 mounds inside a low square enclosure here in 1848. In June 1917, the Army began building Camp Sherman directly over the earthworks, a roughly 2,000-acre World War I training camp covering several mounds with barracks; the camp went on to record the highest influenza death toll of any U.S. military installation during the 1918 pandemic, about 5,686 documented cases and 1,777 deaths (NPS, "Influenza at Camp Sherman"). Ohio's state historical society excavated what it could reach starting in 1920. Camp Sherman's buildings were cleared from October 1925, and the mounds and walls were rebuilt from the original Squier and Davis map by spring 1926 -- meaning most of what visitors see at today's Mound City Group, part of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park and UNESCO-inscribed in 2023, is a reconstruction on the original footprint (Cockrell, Amidst Ancient Monuments, NPS administrative history).

Marietta is the exception that proves the rule. Because the Ohio Company's 1788 settlers set the Quadranaou, Capitolium, Conus and the Sacra Via avenue aside as protected commons at the moment of founding, these are among the best-preserved Hopewell-era works in the state. The large conical mound, Conus, is the only element that survives fully intact, sitting inside Mound Cemetery with steps allowing visitors to climb it (Wikipedia, Marietta Earthworks).

Newark, already the subject of its own earthworks page, lost most of its roughly four square miles of geometric enclosures to canal-building, the railroad and town growth during the 1800s, leaving less than 10 percent standing today in three separated pieces.

Repatriation: NAGPRA and today

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990, requires museums and agencies receiving federal funding to inventory Native American human remains and funerary objects and work with culturally affiliated tribes toward their return. Ohio History Connection, the institution that grew out of the state historical society that excavated Mound City, Serpent Mound's surrounding burials and hundreds of other Ohio sites, has held one of the largest unrepatriated collections of Native American remains of any institution in the country. ProPublica's NAGPRA database, compiled from institutions' own federal reporting, recorded Ohio History Connection as holding at least 8,100-plus individuals, of whom only about 175 -- roughly 2 percent -- had been made available for return, alongside more than 112,000 associated funerary objects, fewer than 1 percent of them made available (ProPublica Repatriation Database).

In January 2024 the U.S. Department of the Interior tightened NAGPRA's regulations, setting institutions a five-year deadline to complete tribal consultation and repatriation planning. Ohio History Connection responded by holding an Ohio Tribal Nations Conference that October and beginning active consultation with the 45 tribal nations connected to the Ohio River Valley -- a notable circumstance, since no federally recognized tribe is headquartered in Ohio today; all were forced out of the state by the early 1800s. By early 2025, reporting put the institution's holdings at roughly 6,500 to 7,000 ancestral remains still awaiting return (NPR, March 26, 2025; The Ohio Newsroom, January 21, 2025).

The work is described by everyone involved as under-resourced: Ohio History Connection has only three staff members assigned to NAGPRA compliance, and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma's historic preservation officer, Logan York, said four of the tribe's five people doing this work are unpaid. Eastern Shawnee Chief Glenna Wallace has pressed the urgency in spiritual terms of her own nation's understanding: "There is an urgency about it. It has been on the back burner for far too long... We need to unite those human remains with Mother Earth... that spirit is not at rest... until it goes back to Mother Earth" (WYSO, March 26, 2025). Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes, whose nation is consulting on remains scattered across 26 states, has only two staff handling the equivalent work.

This history sits directly against the myth this account opened with: the same 19th-century framework that denied the mounds to living Native nations also authorized excavating tens of thousands of their ancestors' graves as scientific curiosities, on the premise that the buried dead belonged to no present-day people. NAGPRA, and Ohio History Connection's still-unfinished work under it, is the project of undoing that premise one named nation and one set of remains at a time.

Sources

• Caleb Atwater, "Description of Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio," Archaeologia Americana vol. 1 (1820)
• Josiah Priest, American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West (1833/34 ed.)
• E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848)
• Cyrus Thomas, Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894)
• William Cullen Bryant, "The Prairies"
• Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 6, 1830
• The Pre-historic Remains Which Were Found on the Site of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio (1879 reprint)
• Wikipedia, Newark Holy Stones
• asc.ohio-state.edu, The Newark, Ohio Decalogue Stone and Keystone
• Wikipedia, Grave Creek Stone
• Wikipedia, Bat Creek Stone
• Wikipedia, Michigan relics
• Wikipedia, Giant human skeletons
• Snopes, "Did the Smithsonian Destroy Thousands of Giant Human Skeletons?"
• Wikipedia, Circleville, Ohio
• Wikipedia, Marietta Earthworks
• WOSU, "Curious Cbus: How Mound Street Got Its Name"
• University of Cincinnati DAAP, "What Remains" exhibition
• William C. Mills, Archaeological Atlas of Ohio (1914)
• Ron Cockrell, Amidst Ancient Monuments (NPS administrative history)
• NPS, "Influenza at Camp Sherman"
• ProPublica, NAGPRA Repatriation Database, Ohio History Connection
• NPR, "Ohio museum collaborates with Native American tribes to repatriate human remains" (2025)
• The Ohio Newsroom, "Removed tribes, Ohio History Connection working together to return 7,000 ancestral remains" (2025)
• WYSO, "An Ohio nonprofit holds 6,500 Indigenous remains" (2025)