The Fallacy About Ohio Valley Mound Building – Part III

Great Lakes Theorists like to point out the mounds found in the area, beginning with those in West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, with the unsupportable claim they were the construction of the Nephites. By 100 B.C., these mounds were found all over the eastern states, from Florida to Louisiana in the south, to Wisconsin, New York and Canada in the north. Certainly the dates coincide with the Nephite nation; however, when Nephi taught his people to build “buildings and to work in all manner of wood, and of iron, and of copper, and of brass, and of steel, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious ores” (2 Nephi 5:15), where are the ancient buildings? Where are the highways that were cast up? Where are the temples, like unto Solomon’s temple? Where, in fact, were anything of impressive structures and abilities the Nephites had ever found in the eastern United States? Mounds, after all, though impressive in their labor, were nothing more than the movement of earth into shapes and piles—hardly a fulfilment of the above description.

The excavation shown in this 348-foot-long muslin panorama painting of a Mississippi Valley Mound was the work of Dr. Montroville Dickeson in the Louisiana countryside strewn with tumuli. This detail is from “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley,” a painting by John J. Egan in 1850. Dickson commissioned the work and toured the nation with it as he lecutred on the mound and mound builders of early America. As can be seen, there were no buildings, or massive or impressive structures buried within the mound—only skeletons and artifacts buried with them.

In 1881 Congress appropriated funds to the newly founded Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institute for an investigation to determine the identity of the Mound Builders, under the direction of the entomologist, Cyrus Thomas. For more than a decade Thomas’ group criss-crossed much of the eastern half of the United States, surveying and excavating some 2,000 sites and preserving and cataloging thousand fof artifacts. Two years before Thomas’ results were published, a major find was made on a farm belonging to a Captain M.C. Hopewell in southern Ohio. The earthworks there, close by the Scioto River in Ross County, included more than 30 mounds, the largest of which rose 23 feet in the midst of a rectangular enclosure of 110 acres. Excavating the great mound, the researchers uncovered about 150 burials accompanied by distinctive and superbly crafted grave goods. Fifty years later an equally important find, on a country estate known as Adena, yielded log tombs containing skeletons and quanities of grave goods, though different enough to be considered those of another culture. Thus, over the years, the different mound building cultures were discovered that became known as the Hopewell, Adena, and Mississippian.

The mounds found in the United States, and those around the world, are considered burial tumuli as excavations have shown. A tumulus is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds, Hügelgrab or kurgans, and can be found throughout much of the world. A tumulus composed largely or entirely of stones is usually referred to as a cairn. A long barrow is a long tumulus, usually for numbers of burials. And these, as has been pointed out, were not unique to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys of antiquity.

Hallstatt culture-era Mound in Styria, Austria

The Hallstatt culture was the predominant Central European culture from the 8th to 6th centuries B.C. By the 6th century B.C, the Halstatt culture extended for some 621 miles, from the Champagne-Ardenne in the west, through the Upper Rhine and the upper Danube, as far as the Vienna Basin and the Danubian Lowland in the east, from the Main, Bohemia and the Little Carpathians in the north, to the Swiss plateau, the Salzkammergut and to Lower Styria.

Burgstallkogel, Lavamünd, Koralpe Mts, Carinthia, Austria

The Burgstallkogel (also known as Grillkogel) is a hill situated near the confluence of the Sulm and the Saggau river valleys in Southern Styria in Austria, about 18 miles south of Graz between Gleinstätten and Kleinklein. The hill hosted a significant settlement of trans-regional importance from 800 B.C to about 600 B.C. Surrounding the hill is one of the largest iron age hill grave necropolises, originally composed of at least 2,000 tumuli, that exists in continental Europe. Other locations where numerous mounds have been found are:

Famous tumulii in Korea, dating around 300 AD, are clustered around ancient cities in modern-day Pyongyang, Seoul, Ji’an, and Gwangiu.

Noge-Ōtsuka Kofun, Tokyo, Japan, where powerful leaders built tumuli known as kofun, a period of Japanese history taking its name from these burial mounds. The largest is over 400 meters in length, and in addition to other shapes, kofun include a keyhole shape.

Located between Randers and Viborg, one of about 26,000 conserved tumuli in Denmark

To try and palm off the Mounds in the United States as peculiarly Nephite is nothing short of disingenuous, and lends no support to the Great Lakes or Heartland theories.