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Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Interesting questions continue to be unanswered. Who was to have profited from the fraud? Was it the workmen to get their 200 francs, Boucher de Perthes to obtain a crowning achievement and recognition, or Quatrefages (an opponent of Darwin), who could now demonstrate that from the time of earliest human occupation of the earth the physical form of human beings had hardly changed? Perhaps it was simply that both Boucher de Perthes and de Quatrefages seized an opportunity provided by the quarry workers, nothing more.
References
Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. 1993. Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moundville, a site comprising twenty large mounds distributed around a central plaza, is located in Alabama. Considered by many people to be among the largest of such sites in the Mississippian culture, Moundville has been explored by antiquarians and archaeologists since the late 1860s. The first extensive excavations, undertaken by U.S. archaeologist Clarence B. Moore, occurred in 1905 and 1906.
The Great Mound at Moundville in Alabama
(Hulton Getty)
The site has proved to be exceptionally rich in material culture and in food remains, and these have, in conjunction with evidence of house plans and site layout, allowed archaeologists to construct a viable site history. Moundville was first occupied around a.d. 1050 and gradually grew in size, complexity, and importance over the next 350 to 400 years. The site is thought to have been abandoned around a.d. 1550, and it is now interpreted as being the most important residential, religious, and political center of the surrounding region.
See also
Atwater, Caleb; United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology
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