Happy Birthday, America! I know very few will be reading this over the Fourth of July holiday, but I had a half hour to write so I took advantage of it! I’ve written before of my trip to Moundsville (named, of course, for the mounds the Adena/Allegheny left behind) and, specifically, of the Grave Creek Mound. Seriously, if you have a chance to be in that area — about two hours from Columbus, Ohio and less from Pittsburgh — Moundsville is worth a visit. The Grave Creek Mound is amazing and the museum is fair in its depiction of the different theories concerning the mound, artifacts found in it, etc. Also, across the street is the amazing, imposing, and frankly scary West Virginia Penitentiary. It is now a tourist destination and it ranks right alongside San Quentin for creepiness and cool combined. Search the blog for “Grave Creek” and you’ll find that post.

Miamisburg, Ohio has the largest mound of its type and the locals think it is as dramatic as Grave Creek. Just outside of Dayton, very near the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum (another “must see”), this mound is perched on a 100 foot tall cliff. It is an amazing mound — nearly 70 feet tall with a base circumference of 877 feet. Two burial vaults are in the mound, one on top of the other. Well over 50,000 cubic yards of earth were used to build this mound. These people were not savages — they were artisans, well organized into teams and trades. Under the top 24 feet of soil, archaeologists found that the burial vaults were entirely faced with stone. In other words, a stone pyramid was built first and then covered with 24 feet of soil.

Back in West Virginia, within sight of the gold dome of the capitol building in Charleston, is the smaller town of South Charleston (which really lies west of Charleston, but since it is south of the river…). There once was an impressive city here with mounds extending in a line eight miles along the Kanawha River. The Criel Mound has been saved from agriculture and road building.

Once upon a time, 50+ mounds dotted that line. Some were minor mounds but others rose 35 feet high. The mounds were joined by circular earthworks making it a very impressive — and very large — city. We have a good idea of what it would look like today had we been able to fly over it. Sadly, most of it has been lost — some recently — and drivers along the West Virginia Turnpike or the other interstates that intersect Charleston have no idea that they are driving through a city that was larger, more impressive, cleaner, and more civilized than London when the Romans ruled Britain. Criel Mound remains but even it didn’t escape unscathed: the top was removed to make a judge’s stand so that he could umpire horse races around its base in 1840. Oh. My. Goodness. Still, the Smithsonian actually got off its rear and excavated this mound so we know that it was full of human remains laid out in wheel patterns around the skeleton of a very large man (the Smithsonian no longer publishes his height but it was once recorded as seven feet tall).

Every Native American tribe contacted by the earliest recorded explorers told the same tale about these scores of abandoned cities: someone else built them, from a different tribe. They were tall, strong, and numerous but they moved on. The “who” and “where” are mysteries to this day but we need not resort to fanciful stories of spaceships or Atlanteans. The builders were Asian, by and large. There were some Caucasian bones and artifacts in some mounds but it cannot be denied that the ancestors of the Native American tribes built these mounds. How, then, did the tribes devolve from such organized, cultured levels to the hunter-gatherer tribes found by early Europeans? There are lots of ideas about that and we will get to some of them but, remember, this is not unusual or unheard of. The natives of Tasmania, a large island south of the Australian mainland, were illiterate and barely functioning at the Stone Age level when Europeans found them. However, a quick look around shows that they once wrote extensively, understood mathematics, and lived in organized towns. What happened to them to make their culture devolve is unknown but it is thought to be a combination of warfare, disease, and famine. That’s probably a good guess.

As you go south of the Miamisburg Mound you find the State Park where Fort Ancient is located. It was once part of a string of mound cities and circular moundworks that went 500 miles (you read that right) along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Church of Christ kids in the Midwest know Fort Hill well for at its base is a Christian youth camp that has been used for generations. And every week, we make the kids climb that hill!

But why should Ohio and West Virginia have all the fun? Next time, an impressive moundwork from the far flung reaches of the Adena empire… in Tennessee.