Shell Gorgets: Tennessee. (After Holmes.)
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 [pg 107] 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.