Conscious Choice: The Life and Afterlife of Burial Mounds in Illinois

November 2000

The Life and Afterlife of Burial Mounds in Illinois

by Dave Aftandilian

...Are they here — The dead of other days? — and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds
Answer. A race, that long has passed away,
Built them....
— William Cullen Bryant, from "The Prairies," in Poems (1832)

Once upon a time in the Midwest there were mounds, lots of them: ten thousand in the valley of the Ohio River alone, and many more along the Illinois, the Mississippi, and their tributaries. They must have been quite a sight for the early European settlers to see, rising up out of the floodplains like silent sentinels, or crowning the blufftops with earthen marks of eternity. Some of them, known as effigy mounds, were fashioned into the shapes of animals such as birds, bears, lizards, or fish. Some, such as the flat-topped Monks Mound at Cahokia (near present-day Collinsville, Illinois), climbed up to a hundred feet, while others, such as the effigy mounds of Wisconsin, were only several feet high, but many feet long or wide.

It was clear enough that humans must have made them; their shapes and slopes were too regular (or irregular) for natural features. But what humans? There were very few native groups living in the area when European settlers arrived, and when asked, these peoples could tell the settlers little about the mounds or who built them. The inherent mysteries behind the mounds led archaeologists to study them, and visitors of all sorts marvel at the mounds preserved in national and state historic sites or on private land every year. All the while, some Native Americans have held them sacred. Some, however, have other uses in mind. For instance....

Joy riders in all-terrain vehicles have been ripping deep gullies in mounds on the thousand-year old United Nations World Heritage Site of Cahokia, to which the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency has responded with a publicity blitz to protect the mounds: "They have withstood a thousand years of the four seasons — but they can’t stand up to four-wheelin’."

And in Rockford, Illinois, Winnebago County is using a "Quick Take" provision in Illinois law — despite Governor George Ryan’s amendatory veto of the legislation, specifically mentioning this property — to seize 9.4 acres of land along Kent Creek from Tom and Jan Ditzler for an unnecessary road extension that will destroy a number of effigy mounds, as well as pristine wetlands.

Even as the mounds disappear before our eyes — and our heavy machinery — their mysteries remain. How did these mounds get here? Who built them, and what were they used for? What do they mean to us today?

Precolumbian Uses of the Mounds

As you might have gathered from the title of this article, one of the most important uses of Precolumbian mounds in Illinois was for burials. Peoples in Illinois began burying their dead on the blufftops six thousand years ago (during what is known archaeologically as the Middle Archaic period), often covering the cemeteries with a mound of earth visible from the floodplains below. In a recent paper on burial mounds in the Lower Illinois Valley, Jane E. Buikstra and Douglas K. Charles write, "Located adjacent to the community, in doubly liminal zones between the earth and sky, valley and uplands, these monuments were ideal platforms from which the ancestors might influence the world of the living. Thus began the mound-building tradition." Further research suggests that at least some of the mounds housed rituals and that others housed priests or other dignitaries.

Who, exactly, built the mounds? Opinions among the colonists were divided into two main camps. The first, and the one that turned out to be correct, held that ancestors of the American Indians had built the mounds. Thomas Jefferson, who conducted one of the first systematic excavations of a mound, wrote in 1785 that he believed the mounds to be mass graves constructed by the American Indians. And the New York ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft said in 1851 that "there is nothing, indeed, in the magnitude and structure of our western [meaning Midwestern] mounds which a semi-hunter and semi-agricultural population, like that which may be ascribed to the ancestors of Indian predecessors of the existing race, could not have executed."

The second camp ranged into far wilder territory, as Robert Silverberg explains in his excellent Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (1968). Stephen Williams also devotes a fair amount of text to the Moundbuilder myth in his survey of Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory (1991). He explains, "The major outline of the myth was that...the Moundbuilders were sedentary agriculturalists, who knew how to craft artifacts of copper and silver, and their art, particularly in sculpture of both stone and pottery, exceeded that of any known group of Indians. Certain inscriptions [later proven to be hoaxes], such as that from the Grave Creek Mound, gave evidence that they probably also had a written language, which was unknown to the native tribes."

Benjamin Franklin thought Hernando de Soto and his men might have built the mounds during their wanderings in North America in the 1500s. Caleb Atwater, who published the first systematic survey of the Ohio mounds in 1820, thought that they had been built by "Hindoos and southern Tartars," in part because he believed a ceramic vessel known as the "Triune idol" represented "the three chief gods of India, Brahma, Vishnoo and Siva." One of the most persistent beliefs was that the Moundbuilders had been members of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Silverberg notes that many "wrote vociferously about the Hebrew migration to the Americas, giving the dates of arrival, the routes taken by specific tribes, and the mounds erected by each."

The Moundbuilder myth was born out of a twofold desire. First, a nationalistic, "deeply felt need to prove the quality of America, to defend it from rather scurrilous attacks from abroad," as Williams put it. Evidence for an ancient lost civilization in the Midwest would show that the United States had a deep and honorable heritage, that it was not just an upstart nation founded on nothing but Enlightenment ideals and bountiful natural resources.

The other desire was a darker one, born of greed and virulent racism. Plainly put, it was a lust for land, and a genocidal hatred for the Native Americans who were so inconveniently occupying it. As Randall H. McGuire writes in Archeology and the First Americans (1992), "The people that promoted the myth of the mound builders were...by and large frontiersmen, who were active in the removal of Indian people and who stood to profit from the economic growth of the region." The myth of the Moundbuilders conveniently invented an ancient civilization in the Midwest, probably founded by whites, that had been brought down by "red savages."

Consider this from Ephraim G. Squier, coauthor of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), widely considered to be one of the founders of American archaeology: "the Indians were hunters averse to labor, and not known to have constructed any works approaching in skillfulness of design or in magnitude those under notice [the mounds]." Or, more chilling, this from J. W. Foster in 1873, who was then president of the Chicago Academy of Sciences and former head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

"The Indian possesses a conformation of skull which clearly separates him from the pre-historic Mound Builder, and such a conformation must give rise to different mental traits.... His character, since first known to the white man has been signalized by treachery and cruelty. He repels all efforts to raise him from his degraded position: and whilst he has not the moral nature to adopt the virtues of civilization, his brutal instincts lead him to welcome its vices.... To suppose that such a race threw up the strong lines of circumvallation and the symmetrical mounds which crown so many of our river-terraces, is as preposterous, almost, as to suppose that they built the pyramids of Egypt."

After that racist diatribe, it comes as a relief to say that the myth of the Moundbuilder did come to an official end with the publication in 1894 of Cyrus Thomas and William H. Holmes’s masterful debunking of the myth for the Bureau of American Ethnology. They found that several tribes in the southeast, such as the Creeks, still built mounds, and furthermore that the chroniclers of de Soto’s expeditions had observed Native Americans building mounds in the 1540s, as had William Bartram in Florida in the 1770s and various French explorers among the Natchez in the early 1700s. They compared artifacts from the mounds with objects made by contemporary Native Americans, and found them quite similar. They also proved that many Native American groups had and still did practice corn agriculture, though some had abandoned it after white settlers or soldiers had burned their lands or forced them onto reservations.

But officially proving something and convincing the general populace of it are two different matters entirely. What really did the myth of the Moundbuilders in, according to McGuire, was the slaughter of over 250 Native American men, women, and children by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which effectively ended the Indian Wars in the West. With their last military resistance defeated, all the Native Americans could easily be forced onto reservations, and their land could be seized by white settlers. There was, therefore, no longer any need of a Moundbuilder myth to justify the genocide and land dispossession of Native Americans that had already occurred.

Repatriation and the Mounds

The debate today has shifted from who built the mounds to who has the rights to the skeletal remains and grave goods that were buried in them. Should these remains be excavated by archaeologists for curation and display in museums and university collections, or should they be left to rest in peace? And what should be done with the thousands of Native American skeletons already excavated and stored in museums?

With the rise to political prominence of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and other Native American Civil Rights groups in the 1960s and 1970s, the debate over repatriation and reburial of Native American remains became a national issue, and resulted in the passage of many state laws in the 1980s banning excavation of Native American sacred sites. In 1989, President Bush signed the National Museum of the American Indian Act, which required the Smithsonian Institution to inventory its collections, determine which remains might be ancestral to living tribes, notify those tribes of the remains, and follow their wishes regarding the final disposition of the remains. A similar law was passed in 1990 entitled the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which extended these requirements to all museums, universities, or other institutions that receive federal funding.

The reactions to NAGPRA within much of the scientific community have been less than welcoming, to say the least. Archaeologists argue that unrelated Native American tribes are claiming remains that are not ancestral to them, that no other religious groups receive this sort of protective legislation for their sacred sites, that the effort devoted to inventorying remains diverts scarce time and effort from research, and that precious data are being lost forever. As Clement W. Meighan put it in Archaeology magazine in 1994, "reburying bones and artifacts is the equivalent of the historian burning documents after he has studied them. Thus, repatriation is not merely an inconvenience but makes it impossible for scientists to carry out a genuinely scientific study of American Indian prehistory.... An entire field of academic study may be put out of business."

To which many Native Americans might reply, who cares? What right do white archaeologists have to tell stories about the past of Native Americans, anyway? As Larry J. Zimmerman wrote in his counterpoint to Meighan’s article in Archaeology in 1994, "for the Indian interested in traditional practice and belief, the past lives in the present. Indians know the past because it is spiritually and ritually a part of daily existence and is relevant only as it exists in the present. In fact, Indians object to heavy reliance on artifacts, preferring instead to focus on people and how they experienced their lives." Because most archaeologists have never bothered to explain the relevance of their findings to the peoples whose ancestors they were studying, simply plundering artifacts from their graves and trucking them back to distant museums, why should Native Americans care about archaeology?

Also, from the Native American perspective, NAGPRA and repatriation are about much more than stones and bones. As Steve Russell, Assistant Professor of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, said in an interview in 1997, "The repatriation movement is an attempt to start at the bottom towards the goal of being recognized as living human beings, who have children and relatives — and ancestors. One way you distinguish human beings from other animals is that the former care for their dead. The political aspect of repatriation is quite simple: until our demand to be recognized as human beings is met, none of the other crimes and indignities we suffer can be addressed."

The repatriation debate stormed into Illinois with a vengeance in 1989, when the World Archaeological Congress condemned the Dickson Mounds Museum’s open display of Mississippian burials near Lewiston. The 200-some burials had been left mostly as Dr. Don Dickson had excavated them beginning in 1927, complete with pottery and other grave goods, and had been a popular tourist destination for many years. They also became an increasingly popular target of Native American protests, especially after other similar open burial displays had shut down. Museum Director Judith Franke and other anthropologists in the Illinois state museum system recommended to then-Governor Jim Thompson that the open burial exhibit be closed.

Governor Thompson agreed, but when his decision hit the newspapers, a firestorm of protest rained down from local residents who felt the exhibit was an important part of their history that should not be closed. The dispute intensified during the 1990 gubernatorial campaign; on one occasion several Native American protesters jumped into the exhibit and covered some of the skeletons with blankets, and later a group of more than fifty activists, some from as far away as Oklahoma, marched into the exhibit area with shovels and began reburying the remains.

A compromise was finally reached whereby some additional time was allowed for final, noninvasive study of the remains (a study in which the present author participated), after which the burials were entombed under a concrete slab; Governor Jim Edgar officially closed the exhibit in April of 1992. The museum was given funds to develop new exhibits, which were unveiled to the public in September, 1994, and were "greeted enthusiastically by visitors and critics alike," according to the museum’s Web site.

It’s too early to draw a moral from the repatriation story; it’s still being written in Illinois and across the country. Russell said in 1997 that "the best possible outcomes [of the repatriation movement] would be that archaeologists recognize the rights of Indians to tell their own stories in their own ways, that Indian dead are treated with the same respect as Invader dead, and Indians understand the necessity for and usefulness of the scientific method."

The burial mounds of Illinois still have plenty of tales to tell to all who would listen — if we but have the ears to hear, and the heart to understand.

Resources

Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, 618-346-5160, cahokiamounds@ezl.com

Dickson Mounds Museum, 309-547-3721, info-dmm@museum.state.il.us

Midwest Save Our Ancestors’ Remains & Resources Indigenous Network Group, 630-961-9323, soarring@juno.com

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