Excerpt from The Mound Builders, Vol. 1: Their Works and Relics
The four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America will make a work on Prehistoric America very opportune. The author has spent twelve or fourteen years in preparing such a work, and now takes pleasure in presenting it to the public.
During this time there have been many discoveries; consequently many changes of thought. These discoveries and changes have had regard first to the Mound-builders' problem.
Some forty years ago it was held that the Mississippi valley must have been settled by a civilized people who had migrated from some historic country. Silver sword scabbards, iron knives, Hebrew inscriptions, triune vases, and other curious relics, were dwelt upon as proving this. The Mormon delusion grew out of an erroneous theory as to the "lost tribes."
Latterly the opinion has gone to the other extreme. The Mound-builders were savages, and differed from the modern Indians only in that they used stone and pottery instead of iron and tin for their weapons and utensils. This opinion, however, is as far out of the way as the previous one. This people inhabited the Mississippi valley during the same time that the Cliff-dwellers and Pueblos did the great plateaux, and the civilized races did the central provinces, and constituted a cultus which differed essentially from any other now known to history. This is the position which the author has sought to establish in the first volume of the series. By taking this as the true position, we work both ways, carry the Mound-building period back into antiquity and bring it down near to historic time.
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