'Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley' by E.G. Squier & E.H. Davis: the first classic of US archaeology.

'Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley' by E.G. Squier & E.H. Davis: the first classic of US archaeology. The two most important 19th-century books on archaeology in theUnited States United States,officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. both dealt with earthworks. The earlier of these two,Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (full title Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations by Ephraim G. Squier &Edwin H. Davis, was the first volume published by the fledglingSmithsonian Institution Smithsonian Institution,research and education center, at Washington, D.C.; founded 1846 under terms of the will of James Smithson of London, who in 1829 bequeathed his fortune to the United States to create an establishment for the "increase and diffusion of , and is 150 years old this year. It presented,with lavish illustrations, information about hundreds of earthworks. Itsprincipal argument was that the mounds had been built by an Americanrace distinct from the historically known indigenes, no less and perhapsconsiderably more than 1000 years ago. This volume in no small measurecatalysed the development of archaeology in the United States WithoutSquier & Davis' extensive documentation of the vast number,size, complexity and variety of earthworks, the later batik batik(bətēk`), method of decorating fabrics practiced for centuries by the natives of Indonesia. It consists of applying a design to the surface of the cloth by using melted wax. might fightnever have been commissioned or might have been conceived in far lessambitious terms. The later book, Cyrus Thomas' 1894 Report on themound explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology ethnology(ĕthnŏl`əjē), scientific study of the origin and functioning of human cultures. It is usually considered one of the major branches of cultural anthropology, the other two being anthropological archaeology and , was intended from theoutset to answer definitively the issue of who the builders of theearthworks had been. Also a Smithsonian publication, Thomas' reportarrived at the opposite conclusion, that the earthworks were built bythe Indians and their ancestors. It is the later volume'sconclusion that has stood the test of time, and consequently it is thelater volume that had the most profound impact on the subsequentdevelopment of archaeology in the United States. But there is no doubtthat before Thomas' Report there was no more important work onAmerican archaeology than Ancient monuments. Understanding the roleplayed by Squier & Davis' volume requires some familiarity withthe remarkably persistent and popular Moundbuilder issue, familiarground for American archaeologists but perhaps less so for most ofANTIQUITY's readers. Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley was issued at a timewhen archaeology in the US barely existed as a named field of study, yetparadoxically at the zenith of public interest in the prehistory prehistory,period of human evolution before writing was invented and records kept. The term was coined by Daniel Wilson in 1851. It is followed by protohistory, the period for which we have some records but must still rely largely on archaeological evidence to ofNorth America North America,third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. . In the US today, the image of archaeology is that it isdone mostly in distant, usually tropical, parts of the world andinvolves car-chases by villains a testament to the saliency sa��li��ence? also sa��li��en��cyn. pl. sa��li��en��ces also sa��li��en��cies1. The quality or condition of being salient.2. A pronounced feature or part; a highlight.Noun 1. of theIndiana Jones movie character. Many college students here are surprisedto learn that there are prehistoric sites in the eastern US, that manyof them are large and visually impressive and that thousands ofarchaeologists work here. Such widespread disregard of archaeologicalsites in the eastern US is a 20th-century phenomenon. Throughout theprevious century popular imagination in the US was very much caught bythe archaeological sites of the east, especially the thousands ofearthen mounds and embankments. Novels, epic poems, newspaper andmagazine articles and scientific treatises were published on thesubject. A lengthy account of the origin of the mounds appeared in thescriptures of a branch of Christianity established early in the century.Dozens of frauds and hoaxes were committed with the goal of advancingone or another interpretation of the mounds. Commercial enterprises wereformed to quarry the mounds for artefacts. During much of the 1800s,people from all walks of life talked, wrote, and wondered about who the'Moundbuilders' were. The issue of the Moundbuilders, usually thus capitalized, rose toprominence early in the 19th century as a result of Euro-Americansettlers moving across the Appalachian mountains into what was then the'West': the valleys of the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippirivers. During much of the 18th century British colonial policy hadforbidden settlement west of the mountains, to avoid antagonizingpowerful Native American nations Native American Nations (NAN) are the fictional collection of Nations in the Shadowrun universe founded by the Native Americans.These include: Salish-Shidhe Council Sioux Nation Pueblo Corporate Council Ute Nation Algonkian-Manitou Council who could tip the military balancebetween European powers striving for domination over North America. Andthose Native American nations occasionally attacked western settlements,expelling or exterminating them. With independence achieved, the USgovernment both permitted and actively sponsored settlement of the West(and diminution of the Native powers), taking such actions as grantinglands along the Ohio River to Revolutionary War veterans and buildingthe first federal highway (the 'National Road') to connect theeastern coast with the interior. As settlers entered the Ohio territory and cleared fields from theseemingly endless forests, they found mounds. Earthen mounds were knownin the old colonial territories east of the Appalachian mountains, too,and had been the subject of occasional inquiry for centuries. However,those eastern mounds tended to be small and widely scattered. In theOhio territory the mounds were so abundant that ordinary farms mighthave one or more mounds. And some of these mounds were far larger thanthose along the Atlantic seaboard, such as the 18-m high conical moundat Grave Creek, West Virginia, and the 10-ha, 30-m high, flat-topped,rectangular Monk's Mound at Cahokia, Illinois. Not only were thererectangular and conical mounds, but also there were linear embankmentsforming rectangles, octagons, ovals and circles as much as 300 m across,and parallel embankments running across the landscape for 10 km and more[ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1 & 2 OMITTED]. The vast number(thousands) of mounds, the staggering size of the larger ones and thestriking geometry of the embankments was quite unlike anythingpreviously known. Naturally, questions about the origin and antiquity of the moundsarose among the farmers whose fields they were in, citizens whose townswere built inside or atop the embankments, engineers who used the moundsas convenient sources of fill for road and canal construction,school-teachers faced with questions from curious students, militaryofficers charged with planning fortifications along the major rivers andclerics scandalized by the upstart Mormon church The Mormon Church is a religious body founded in 1830 in Fayette, New York, by Joseph Smith. It is also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS Church. There are 7.7 million Mormons worldwide. whose new scriptureproclaimed a history of the mounds. Historians and other scholars gotinvolved, too, as did individuals seeking fame and fortune. Almostanyone could, and hundreds or thousands did, publish opinions about whothe Moundbuilders were. Of course, one obvious possibility was that the mounds had beenbuilt by the Indians, or at least by the ancestors of the historicallyknown Indian groups. This possibility was widely disregarded, for acomplex of reasons including but not limited to racist suppositions,ignorance of early historical documents, hoaxes and the fact thatIndians living in the Ohio territory in the late 18th and early 19thcenturies denied any connection to the mounds. That most of thoseIndians had themselves moved to the Ohio territory from farther eastonly a few decades before, and thus should not have been expected tohave any connection to the mounds, was widely known and almost as widelyoverlooked. And after the US government forcibly 'removed'most of the remaining Indians from the east in the late 1820s and early1830s, there were few Indians around to correct the misunderstanding.The Moundbuilder question became one of the most popular puzzles of the19th century, as popular then as have been questions in recent decadesin the US about UFOs and who shot President Kennedy. In the first half of the 19th century, information about thenumbers and varieties of earthworks was available from a wide range ofsources. There were magazine and newspaper articles, accounts oftravellers, articles published in learned journals. Not surprisingly,the vast majority of these accounts were either sparse on details, oronly presented details on a few earthworks in a particular locality.There was no truly comprehensive catalogue of earthworks of themid-continent. In 1820 Caleb Atwater (1820) published 'Descriptionsof the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other WesternStates', but true to its title it focused on the mounds in Ohio.(Atwater's conclusion about the Moundbuilders was that they were'Hindoos' originally from India who moved to Mexico afteroccupying the Ohio valley, which gives you some idea of the tenor ofsober speculations on the Moundbuilder issue.) In their Preface, Squier& Davis (1848: xxxiii) acknowledged Atwater's work as'[t]he first attempt towards a general account of the ancientmonuments of the West. . . the pioneer in this department'. On thesame page, however, Squier & Davis asserted that Atwater's work'contains many errors' and they dismissed it and all otherextant compilations as loose compendia com��pen��di��a?n.A plural of compendium. of disconnected and casual'observations 'mixed up with the crudest speculations and wildestconjectures'. Squier & Davis set out to rectify this situation. At 300 pages, with 48 engraved plates and 207 woodcut woodcutDesign printed from a plank of wood incised parallel to the vertical axis of the wood's grain. One of the oldest methods of making prints, it was used in China to decorate textiles from the 5th century. figures,Ancient monuments presented a far more comprehensive overview of theearthworks of the east than had been available previously. Nonetheless,like Atwater before them, Squier & Davis focused on Ohio, presentinga far spottier picture of mounds elsewhere in the east. They did includesuch notable sites as Etowah, Georgia (which they incorrectly place inAlabama, a mistake repeated by Thomas in 1894), and the Seltzertown (nowknown as Emerald) site in Mississippi, yet they fail to mention suchnotable sites as Moundville in Alabama and Pinson in Tennessee. They donot even describe or illustrate the Cahokia site, though they twicedescribe Monk's Mound. Overall, though, the impact of thebook's copious illustrations was, and is, stunning. British readersfamiliar with the prehistoric earthworks and monuments around Aveburymay get an impression of this impact if you imagine learning suddenlythat your country has of dozens or hundreds of such landscapes strew strew?tr.v. strewed, strewn or strewed, strew��ing, strews1. To spread here and there; scatter: strewing flowers down the aisle.2. nabout. The book was all eye-opener. The text that accompanied the illustrations focused on theearthworks, their locations, sizes, layouts and methods of construction.The book grouped earthworks according to categories the authors deemedpatently obvious: defensive enclosures, sacred enclosures, mounds ofsacrifice, burial mounds, effigy EFFIGY, crim. law. The figure or representation of a person. 2. To make the effigy of a person with an intent to make him the object of ridicule, is a libel. (q.v.) Hawk. b. 1, c. 7 3, s. 2 14 East, 227; 2 Chit. Cr. Law, 866. 3. mounds, temple mounds and several minorand residual categories. Defensive enclosures were diagnosed as such bytheir placement atop sleep slopes, while sacred enclosures typicallydisregarded the tactical (dis)advantages of terrain. Effigy mounds wereshaped like animals. Burial and sacrificial mounds were distinguished bytheir contents: burials vs sacrificial altars or crematory cre��ma��to��ry?n. pl. cre��ma��to��riesA crematorium.adj.Of or relating to cremation.crematorium, crematorya place where cremations are done. basins.Temple mounds were defined as having neither sacrificial altars norburials, but as having level summits which were '"HighPlaces" for the performance of religious rites andceremonies'. In addition to functional differences, the authorsnoted regional differences. For example, effigy mounds were foundprimarily in what was then called the Northwest (Illinois andWisconsin), defensive enclosures were most common in northern Ohio andtemple mounds were more common in the South than in the Ohio territory.The most intriguing aspect of the text, however, is its attempt toderive chronological information for the mounds. Squier & Davis argued that the mounds were built upwards of athousand years ago. Their evidence was geological and botanical. Theprincipal geological evidence was the absence of mounds on the first, orlowest, terrace of rivers. Believing that this meant the lowest terracehad not yet existed at the time the mounds were built - rather than thatthe builders had simply avoided landforms that flood frequently - Squier& Davis argued that the extent of the low terraces implied aconsiderable lapse of time since the construction of the mounds. Theirbotanical argument was more perceptive. Trees growing on some mounds hadupwards of 600 annual growth rings, and equally large, fallen treetrunks were seen to be in the last stages of decay atop the mounds.Moreover, the species composition of the forest above, the mounds wasthat of a mature forest, not the composition expected of the firstgeneration of trees to colonize col��o��nize?v. col��o��nized, col��o��niz��ing, col��o��niz��esv.tr.1. To form or establish a colony or colonies in.2. To migrate to and settle in; occupy as a colony.3. open ground. Together with the deeplydeveloped humus humus(hy`məs), organic matter that has decayed to a relatively stable, amorphous state. It is an important biological constituent of fertile soil. layer, these facts argued an age for the mounds of noless than a millennium, and perhaps considerably more. As the late JamesB. Griffin (1973: viii) tartly observed, it was 'closer to beingcorrect than were some archaeologists in the 1930s'. Though loudly proclaiming an absence of speculation and a strictadherence to demonstrable facts, Squier & Davis also argued that thebuilders of the mounds were not related to the historically knownIndians of the east. Graves of such Indians were occasionally found inthe mounds, they argued, but such graves were recent and intrusive, andunlike the pottery of the Moundbuilders the pottery in the intrusivegraves was tempered with crushed shell. This attention to stratigraphic stra��tig��ra��phy?n.The study of rock strata, especially the distribution, deposition, and age of sedimentary rocks.strat detail was remarkable for its time, and for decades thereafter. Thoughnoting similarities in stone tools between Indians and Moundbuilders,the authors insisted that Indians of the east were 'hunters'rather than farmers, and thus could have had neither the leisure timenor the impetus to devote so much labour to the calculation of geometryand piling of dirt. It was a common misperception mis��per��ceive?tr.v. mis��per��ceived, mis��per��ceiv��ing, mis��per��ceivesTo perceive incorrectly; misunderstand.mis - that Eastern Indianshad not been farmers - and when Squier & Davis combined it withtheir observation that 'defensive enclosures' were most commonalong the northern edge of the distribution of mounds, they derived theconclusion that Indians had attacked the Moundbuilders persistently fromthe north. It was hardly a novel interpretation that savage Indians hadattacked semi-civilized Moundbuilders, and they were not the lastauthors to espouse it. Readers interested in learning more about suchspeculations should consult Robert Silverberg's 1968 Moundbuildersof ancient America: the archaeology of a myth, which remains the mostextensive and amusing source on 19th-century Moundbuilder literature.More recent, briefer reviews can be found in Kenneth Feder's (1999:133-58) Frauds, myths, and mysteries and Stephen Williams' (1991)Fantastic archaeology: the wild side of North American North Americannamed after North America.North American blastomycosissee North American blastomycosis.North American cattle ticksee boophilusannulatus. prehistory. Asthese books show, the conclusions of Squier & Davis did not settlethe Moundbuilder issue. In 1881, Congress appropriated funds for theSmithsonian Institution to investigate prehistoric mounds and theirbuilders. This led to creation of the Division of Mound Explorationwithin the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian, charged to determinewhether the mounds were built by the Indians. In 1894 the publication ofCyrus Thomas' 730-page Report on the mound explorations of theBureau of Ethnology (republished in 1985) did in fact achieve that goal:its conclusion that the Moundbuilders were the historically knownIndians and their direct ancestors was presented with such overwhelmingdetail and clarity that it ended the debate among serious scholars (butsee Williams 1991 for some 20th-century attempts to re-open the issue). Publication of Thomas' 1894 Report eclipsed Squier &Davis' Ancient monuments. With government funding that kept a smallstable of field investigators at work mapping and excavating sites foreight years, it is no wonder that the Division of Mound Explorationcould finally achieve what Squier & Davis had set out to compile intheir spare time: a systematic catalogue (in addition to Thomas 1985 seeThomas 1891) of the earthworks and excavation of enough of them toanswer the question about who made them. That Squier & Davis arrivedat an incorrect answer to that question hardly detracts from theimportance of their work. Until the last decade of the 19th century,Ancient monuments was the most comprehensive, detailed, perceptive andone of the most cogently argued works on the subject. It was a landmarkpublication, not only for its intrinsic qualities but also for thecircumstance that it was the first publication of the fledglingSmithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian Institution was created by Congress in 1846 inresponse to the bequest of the estate of James Smithson, an Englishchemist and mineralogist. James Henry, an eminent physical scientist,was selected as the first Secretary (i.e. director) of the Institution,and in early 1847 he was looking for a book-length manuscript to publishas the first issue of the Institution's 'Contributions toKnowledge'. Henry wanted this first publication to establish asound scholarly reputation for the Institution and its publications. Atthe same time, Squier & Davis were looking for a publisher for theirwork, the text of which was mostly complete. Intermediaries brought thetwo sides together, and after a surprisingly tangled, difficult,expensive and frequently acrimonious process, Ancient monuments wasissued in late September 1848. To commemorate the sesquicentennial ses��qui��cen��ten��ni��al?adj.Of or relating to a period of 150 years.n.A 150th anniversary or its celebration.Noun 1. of this event, the SmithsonianInstitution Press is republishing Ancient monuments late in 1998 orearly in 1999. The new edition comes with a lengthy Introduction byDavid Meltzer (in press), in which he details the lives of Squier &Davis, the circumstances of their work, the upheavals involved in thepublication process, the intellectual currents which the book stirredand the book's critical reception. Meltzer's essay isengrossing reading, chock-full of details culled from archives ofpersonal papers and institutional records, newspapers, magazines anddozens of other sources. He details, for instance, how Squier &Davis came to loathe each other, to the extent that disputes betweenthem almost prevented publication of the book. We also learn how most oftheir artefact See artifact. collection was sold and is now owned by the BritishMuseum, how Squier eventually went insane and how both died in New YorkCity New York City:see New York, city. New York CityCity (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. in 1888, 27 days apart. Meltzer's work is so impressivelyresearched and so entertaining that I have steered away from coveringhis ground in this essay. Anyone with the least interest in the historyof American archaeology ought to read Meltzer's introduction,though it will help if you have at least as much familiarity with theMoundbuilder and other 19th-century issues in American archaeology asthis essay provides (see Willey & Subloff 1980 for furtherbackground). In re-issuing Ancient monuments, the Smithsonian is avoiding themistake made in 1973 when the volume was republished under theimprimatur of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. In the original editionmost of the illustrations lacked scale-bars, but instead were givenscales such as 'one mile to the inch' or '500 feet to theinch'. The 1973 edition preserved the pagination (1) Page numbering.(2) Laying out printed pages, which includes setting up and printing columns, rules and borders. Although pagination is used synonymously with page makeup, the term often refers to the printing of long manuscripts rather than ads and brochures. of the original,but used a smaller format that did not preserve the size of theillustrations and thereby rendered their scales incorrect. Thoseillustrations are in many instances the best, sometimes the only,illustrations of major earthwork earth��work?n.1. An earthen embankment, especially one used as a fortification. See Synonyms at bulwark.2. Engineering Excavation and embankment of earth.3. complexes, and having accurate scalesis essential to modern researchers. For just one of many possibleexamples of research that relies on Squier & Davis's maps, andthat is internationally accessible, see DeBoer (1997). The opportunityto obtain a full-scale copy of Ancient monuments, without the outlay ofthe many hundreds of dollars that an original copy commands, will bewelcomed by generations of archaeologists. What Henry C. Shetrone (1930:23) wrote remains as true today as it was in 1930, and when Griffin(1973: ix) repeated it at the conclusion of his introduction to the 1973re-issue: 'Ancient monuments is now a rare and highly soughtliterary and scientific treasure, the pride of any student of AmericanArchaeology who is so fortunate as to possess a copy of the book'. Acknowledgments I thank Caroline Malone and Simon Stoddart for theopportunity to explain to an international audience what makes Ancientmonuments of the Mississippi Valley special. I also thank David Meltzerfor graciously sending me an advance copy of his introductory essay,which is dauntingly daunt?tr.v. daunt��ed, daunt��ing, dauntsTo abate the courage of; discourage. See Synonyms at dismay.[Middle English daunten, from Old French danter, from Latin thorough and fascinating. References ATWATER, C. 1820. Descriptions of the Antiquities Discovered in theState of Ohio and other Western States, Archaeologia Americana 1:105-267. DEBOER, W.R. 1997. Ceremonial Centres from the Cayapas (Esmeraldas,Ecuador) to Chillicothe (Ohio, USA), Cambridge Archaeological Journal 7:225-53. FEDER FEDER Fundo Europeu De Desenvolvimento Regional (Portugal)FEDER Federaci��n Espa?ola de Asociaciones de Enfermedades Raras , K.L. 1999. Frauds, myths, and mysteries: science andpseudoscience pseu��do��sci��ence?n.A theory, methodology, or practice that is considered to be without scientific foundation.pseu in archaeology. 3rd edition. Mountain View (CA): MayfieldPublishing. GRIFFIN, J.B. 1973. Introduction, in E.G. Squier & E.H. Davis,Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley, comprising the results ofextensive original surveys and explorations: vii-ix. New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of (NY): AMS AMS - Andrew Message System Press. MELTZER, D.J. In press. Ephraim Squier, Edwin Davis, and the makingof an American archaeological classic, in E.G. Squier & E.H. Davis,Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington (DC):Smithsonian Institution Press. SHETRONE, H.C. 1930. The Mound-builders: a reconstruction of thelife of a prehistoric American race. New York (NY): D. Appleton. SILVERBERG, R. 1968. Moundbuilders of ancient America: thearchaeology of a myth. Greenwich (CT): New York Graphic The New York Graphic (also called the New York Evening Graphic, and is not to be confused with The Daily Graphic) was a tabloid published from 1924 to 1932 by physical culture promoter and publishing mogul Bernarr Macfadden. Society. SMITH, B.D. 1985. Introduction to the 1985 edition, in Thomas (1894[1985]): 5-19. SQUIER, E.G. & E.H. DAVIS. 1848. Ancient monuments of theMississippi Valley. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution. THOMAS, C. 1891. Catalogue of prehistoric works east of the RockyMountains. Washington (DC): Bureau of Ethnology, SmithsonianInstitution. Bulletin 12. 1894 (1985). Report on the mound explorations of the Bureau ofEthnology. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution Press. WILLEY, G.R. & J.A. SABLOFF. 1980. A history of Americanarchaeology. 2nd edition. San Francisco (CA): W. H. Freeman. WILLIAMS, S. 1991. Fantastic archaeology. Philadelphia (PA):University of Pennsylvania Press The University of Pennsylvania Press (or Penn Press) was originally incorporated with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on 26 March 1890, and the imprint of the University of Pennsylvania Press first appeared on publications in the closing decade of the nineteenth .