What were the earliest anthropological theories made about the mounds?

Answer 1

About 1780 Thomas Jefferson began to excavate a mound near his Virginia estate, Montecello. Jefferson described his excavation in detail in his 1783 book, Notes on the State of Virginia:

There being one of these in my neighborhood, I wished to satisfy myself whether any, and which of these opinions were just. For this purpose I determined to open and examine it thoroughly. It was situated on the low grounds of the Rivanna, about two miles above its principal fork, and opposite to some hills, on which had been an Indian town. It was of a spheroidical[sic] form, of about 40 feet diameter at the base...

Thomas Jefferson may have been the first person to excavate an Indian mound

He attended to this task in an organized manner and observed stratified human remains. In his published conclusions he stated that this particular mound was an ancient Indian burial place. This was perhaps the first systematic archaeological excavation in North America and the first realization that mounds might serve different uses, which has been proven correct again and again.

While Jefferson found himself content with observations based on his excavation, the others proposed theories of the origin of these symbols of an early American Indian civilization with little fieldwork. Benjamin Franklin believed the mounds were leftovers built during the explorations of Hernando deSoto as deSoto and his entrada marched across the United States. Noah Webster extended this view. Stiles put forth his theory that the mounds were a remnant of a Canaanite culture (as were the advanced civilizations in Peru and Mexico) shortly after settlers discovered the mounds in Marietta, Ohio in 1787. Stiles was not the first to propose such a relationship; William Penn and Roger Williams believed the Aztec and Mayan cultures to be the Canaanites.

Benjamin Barton published the first work on the Moundbuilders in 1797, New Views on the Origin of Tribes in America. Barton believed the mounds indicted a higher "cultural level." Soon after Barton's work was published, Reverend T. M. Harris of Massachusetts expressed his belief that the Moundbuilders were a civilization, a word not commonly applied to any Indian tribe of the time. Until relatively recently, writers tended to believe that the Moundbuilder culture was distinct from the surrounding Woodlands or Archaic cultures and some went so far as to hypothesize that the Moundbuilders were a separate race. Others combined Moundbuilders and specific tribes because some American Indians would mound dirt as a defensive structure.

Dr. James H. McColloh began studying Moundbuilders about the time the United States entered the War of 1812. McColloh published Researches in America in 1816 and revised it a number of times over a 12 year period. One of the earliest to surmise that the Ohio Moundbuilders came from the South, McColloh also stated that Native Americans were the ones who created the mounds based on skull similarity but this work lacked scientific evidence. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and John Clifford proposed that the mounds were created by Hindus.

In early 1820 Circleville postmaster Caleb Atwater expanded on Rafinesque's earlier Hindu theory in "Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States." He believed that the Moundbuilders were a more stable population than the surrounding Woodlands Indians and that two migrations occurred from Asia to the Americas, one to North America and one to South America. Atwater's maps were helpful to modern archaeologists because they show mounds long since destroyed, but he was accused of plagiarism for not citing Rafinesque's earlier work.

William Henry Harrison, just before he ran for President of the United States in 1840, again offered the theory that the Aztec Civilization rose from the Midwestern Moundbuilders. He became interested in the mounds shortly after arriving at Fort Washington (Cincinnati) in 1792. Harrison hypothesized that because these Moundbuilders seemed to disappear in the early 700's A. D., and the Aztecs rose about that time, that the two civilizations were related. He believed that the Moundbuilders lost a tremendous battle along the Great Miami River.