ARCHEOLOGY. 29 



Travelers report them in nearly every portion of the globe, among races 

 who are ignorant of their meaning. 



In our own country the expression "Mound Builder" has been ap- 

 propriated as a distinctive term for a people supposed to have preceded 

 the modern Indians, and to have differed from them in almost every 

 respect; and was made to emDrace the authors of not only the remains 

 in the Ohio Valley, but all cognate works in the United States. Method- 

 ical investigation has broken up this mythical "nation" into separate 

 tribes whose relationship to one another, if, indeed, there be any, is very 

 obscure. Most, if not all, of the southern Indians built and used mounds 

 subsequent to the advent of the French and Spaniards; around the lower 

 lakes are the small mounds and burial pits of the Hurons and Six Na- 

 tions; east of the Blue Ridge are the ossuaries and communal graves, 

 some of them more than ten feet high, of the Massawomees who were 

 probably consanguineous with the last; in the upper L,ake region are 

 similar sepulchres, known to contain the dead of the Iroquois, Sioux, 

 and Chippewas; through Wisconsin and adjacent portions of Minnesota 

 are hundreds of mounds, some intended as tombs, others the covering 

 and banking of huts erected by the "Ground House Indians," who were 

 exterminated by the Sioux a little more than two centuries ago; there 

 are reasons for believing that the numerous effigies of Wisconsin and 

 Iowa, with their attendant tumuli, dome-shaped mounds, and long em- 

 bankments were constructed by the Saks, Foxes, or Winnebagoes; most 

 of the stone graves of Tennessee, with the mounds belonging to them, 

 are thought to be the work of the Shawnees; in the Shenandoah and par- 

 allel valleys are the cairns and burial mounds of the Mingoes, Delawares, 

 and Catawbas; the Cherokees of East Tennessee and North Carolina 

 used mounds for burial and for house-sites; Osages, Blackfeet, and other 

 Indians west of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers made tumuli. The 

 Mandans, Iroquois, and some southern tribes protected their towns with 

 embankments, ditches, and palisades. 



These were all builders of mounds; but none of their remains can 

 be compared with those of Ohio, although many efforts have been made 

 to prove that to the ancestors of some or other of these tribes the latter 

 works are to be ascribed. Various fugitive clews have been followed, but 

 all, have, literally, terminated in the wilderness. 



It is very desirable that the name of "Mound Builders" instead of 

 x ts being used in its present vague and discursive meaning should be re- 

 stricted solely to the unknown race which constructed the enclosures, 

 hill-top fortifications^ and large mounds of the upper Ohio Valley (in 

 which sense it is used in this article); adopting some other appellation 

 for the equally unknown — if different — people whose traces are found 

 lower down in the same valley and in the contiguous territory along the 

 Mississippi — and, for the present, assigning remains in other localities to 

 such stocks as probably made them. These distinctions would be only 



