Current purchase price:
£25.00
When American settlers first crossed the Appalachian Mountains they were amazed to discover that the wilderness beyond contained ancient ruins—large man-made mounds and enclosures, and impressive earthen sculptures, such as a gigantic serpent. Reports trickled back to the eager ears of President Thomas Jefferson and others. However, most did not believe these earthworks had anything to do with Native Americans; rather, given the intense interest in the history of Western Civilization at the time, it became popular to speculate that the ruins had been built by refugees from Greece, Rome, Egypt—or even the lost continent of Atlantis. Since their discovery, the mounds have attracted both scholars and quacks, from the early investigations sponsored by the then new Smithsonian Institution to the visions of the American psychic Edgar Cayce.
As Lorett Treese explains in her fascinating history A Serpent’s Tale: Discovering America’s Ancient Mound Builders, the enigmatic nature of these antiquities fueled both fanciful claims and scientific inquiry. Early on, the earthworks began to fall to agricultural and urban development. Realizing that only careful on-site investigation could reveal the mysteries of the mounds, scholars hastened to document and classify them, giving rise to American archaeology as a discipline. Research made it possible to separate theMound Builders into three distinct pre-contact Native American cultures. More recently, Mound Builder remains have attracted the practitioners of new disciplines like archaeoastronomy who suggest they may have functioned as calendars. There is no doubt that the abandoned monuments that made the Midwest’s Ohio Valley the birthplace of merican archaeology have yet to reveal all the knowledge they contain on the daily lives and world views of persons of North American prehistory.
![]() The Adventures and Inventions of Stewart Blacker Edited by: Barnaby Blacker | ![]() Opposition to the Second World War By: John Broom | ![]() The History of Toy Soldiers By: Luigi Toiati Preface by: James Opie |
![]() Heavy Cruisers of the Admiral Hipper Class By: Gerhard Koop, Klaus- Peter Schmolke | ![]() British Warship Recognition: The Perkins Identification Albums, Volume V By: Richard Perkins | ![]() Hitler's Heavy Panzers 1943-45 By: Ian Baxter |
![]() Wolf Pack: The U-Boats at War By: Bob Carruthers | ![]() Knights of the Battle of Britain By: Chris Goss | ![]() British Expeditionary Force - Somme Offensive By: Andrew Rawson |