with Jefferson and shared his understanding of stratification and its significance in the mounds he saw there ([1811] 1848). Indeed, Brakenridge, probably because of his broader field experience, had already come to appreciate that there were different kinds of mounds—some for burial, some for building foundations. He was not alone in noticing this distinction (e.g., Fiske [1815] 1820); such knowledge was clearly predicated on excavations into these structures, though we lack descriptions of those undertakings. Some accounts were entirely secondhand (e.g., Haywood 1823).

Brakenridge also appreciated the authorship of these structures as Indian. Not everyone shared that view, however. caleb atwater (1820), in describing the mounds and earthworks of the “Northwest” (now mostly Ohio) in the early years of the nineteenth century, recognized different kinds of structures as Brakenridge did, but he attributed them to Mound Builders, an extinct, non-Indian race. Others (e.g., Preist 1834) attributed them to known peoples of antiquity (Phoencians, Irish, etc.). However concocted, the Mound Builder as a distinct non-Indian race that created the most impressive American aboriginal monuments is often seen as having played a major role in the development of North American archaeology (e.g., Silverberg 1968; Willey and Sabloff 1974, 1980). The truth is more complex. Popular opinion was, as it still is, the principal repository of the Mound Builder idea. Though such accounts may rank with the alien origins of New World civilizations today (Williams 1991), a variety of evidences could be cited in support of the notion in the nineteenth century. There were certainly political reasons to downplay the accomplishments of Indians (e.g., Schwartz 1967; Silverberg 1968), especially early on when they still constituted a threat in living memory. Political motives, however, explain neither the persistence of the Mound Builder idea nor the broad audience it found. Rather more important was the apparent insufficiency of historically documented Indian population size to account for what seemed to be nearly limitless numbers of mounds (under the common assumption that Indians were recent migrants to the New World) and the denial by Indians themselves that they were the creators of these structures (e.g., Atwater 1820, 220–221; Bartram 1791; Fiske [1815] 1820). Brakenridge was again ahead of his time in clearly stating that depopulation, the cause of which he remained ignorant, had clearly befallen the Indians. He reported Indians using mounds as well. The role of epidemic disease in shaping this gross underestimate of aboriginal population at contact and the cultural complexity achieved would not be appreciated until the 1960s and then only very grudgingly (Dobyns 1966; Dunnell 1991; Ramenofsky 1987; contra Fiske [1815] 1820). In short there simply was no compelling evidence in the nineteenth-century public lore that the people who inhabited North America at the time of European contact were the builders of the mounds.

From William Bartram and Jefferson on, educated people—the emerging scientific scholars of the time—never really doubted that, at least in a general way, Indians were responsible for the American archaeological record. Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana (1839) went well beyond simple plausible assumption and placed the connection on firm anthropometric grounds (again contra Fiske [1815] 1820). Indeed, it seems unlikely that we would talk about a Mound Builder myth today had not Ephraim Squier and e. h. davis adopted this view in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1847). That they did so may be attributed to a hazy distinction between professional and amateur in the period—“archaeologists” were lawyers, doctors, and engineers (a doctor and a surveyor, in the case of Bartram and Jefferson) without special credentials in archaeology or even scientific training. But because Ancient Monuments appeared as the first of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, the public view was set back a generation. In the latter nineteenth century numerous often cited but more or less popular accounts of U.S. archaeology (e.g., Foster 1873; Nadaillac 1884) continued the Mound Builders as a distinct non-Indian race concept. It was really against this target that Cyrus Thomas’s famous Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894), assigning