Mound Builders - Once believed to have been an ancient and mysterious people whose mounds, fortifications, and monumental structures are to be found in the northern lake section of Wisconsin, the Ohio Valley, and the Gulf region.

Skeletons of the Mound Builders show that they did not differ from those of the modern Indian, and articles of European manufacture found in mounds indicate that many mounds were built after the arrival of Columbus.

Modern archeological work has demonstrated that there were a number of types of mounds built by many different groups of Indians over a period of two thousand years.

The earliest Mound Builders are known as the Burial Mound People.  Their mounds were evidently an aspect of a Cult of the Dead which moved into the Ohio Valley.  Much later another mound building culture came into the area and their mounds were known as Temple Mounds.  These mounds in general are larger than those of the Burial Mound People and were erected as substructures for their wooden temples.  Such mounds continued to be built until the beginning of the seventeenth century.  Many of the tribes visited by DeSoto were Mound Builders.

The largest mound in the United States is the Cahokia mound in Madison County, Illinois.  It is 100 feet high and the base covers 16 acres.  Emerald Mound in Mississippi is another large mound.

The great Serpent Mound in Adams County , Ohio, is 500 feet in length.  There is a "platform mound" in Missouri 150 feet long and 25 feet high.  Two "bird mounds," said to represent birds, are in Georgia, and a mound with a moat and encircling wall and another fashioned in the form of an oblong enclosure are in West Virginia.

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