In his important book American Holocaust, which documents the genocide, David Stannard, professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii, reminds us that scholarly estimates of the size of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas have changed radically in recent decades:
In the 1940s and 1950s conventional wisdom held that the population of the entire hemisphere in 1492 was little more than 8 million—with fewer than 1 million people living in the region north of present-day Mexico. Today few serious students of the subject would put the hemispheric figure at less than 75 million to 100 million (with approximately 8 million to 12 million north of Mexico), while one of the most well-regarded specialists in the field recently has suggested that a more accurate estimate would be around 145 million for the hemisphere as a whole and about 18 million for the area north of Mexico.25
Gone forever—and good riddance—is the long-held myth of North America as a pristine wilderness inhabited by a handful of “savages” when the first settlers from Europe arrived.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The new picture, derived from a combination of archaeology, ethnography, genetics, and the reports of early travelers, is of a busy and boisterous continent with a growing population, widespread trade networks, and abundant resources.
Like the Inca, though lacking their centralized, structured state, the Native North Americans were people of the spoken word who carried their wisdom and their records not in documents but in oral traditions carefully nurtured, memorized, and passed on from generation to generation. Today we grope in the dark when we try to discover what they knew, what they taught, and what they had preserved from primeval times because the genocide inflicted upon them radically disrupted and in many cases completely destroyed the normal intergenerational processes of transmission.
The accounts of the genocide are repulsive; reading the details today leaves one stunned, nauseated, and horrified. Professor Stannard holds nothing back in American Holocaust, a comprehensive record of European wickedness in the Americas, but it’s not my purpose here to zoom in on the many massacres and betrayals he describes, or to dwell on the horrific symptoms of the imported infectious diseases that killed indigenous people by the millions.
The point I wish to make is simply that this happened, that it was both physical and cultural genocide, and that its long-term effect on the descendants of those who survived was to sever their connections to the traditions, wisdom, memories, and even the languages of their ancestors.
Lest there be any doubt that cultural annihilation was always the purpose, hand in hand with the continent-wide theft of land, we need only consider the shameful history of the so-called Indian boarding schools. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition sets out the bare facts:
Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1926, the Indian Office estimated that nearly 83% of Indian children were attending boarding schools. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture.26
A founder and advocate of the boarding schools movement, US army captain Richard Henry Pratt, summarized the spirit of the whole enterprise in a speech in 1892:
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.27
This, then, was an ethnically targeted brainwashing exercise on a gigantic scale—an exercise deliberately designed to make Native Americans forget their ancient heritage. For the purposes of our inquiry here, if it were indeed from North America that a lost civilization vanished, then not only has the crime scene been thoroughly wiped down but also—to extend the analogy—the principal witnesses have been badly beaten about the head and are suffering from amnesia.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: LAND GRABS
EVEN AS THE GENOCIDE AND imposed “unremembering” gathered pace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a parallel force was also active removing many prominent physical traces—notably the great mounds and earthworks—that Native Americans of former ages had left. This parallel force was primarily greed for land, where the fate of the monuments was either to be plowed down for agriculture or demolished to make way for industry, housing, or commerce. Among the unknown unknowns of North American prehistory, therefore, is how many of the mounds and earthworks were already gone—plowed under, demolished, ransacked—before responsible and thorough surveyors began to investigate them from about the mid-nineteenth century onward.
Renowned among these early surveyors were Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, whose classic Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first-ever publication of the Smithsonian Institution, appeared in print in 1848. In their preface they note of the mounds and earthworks that:
The importance of a complete and speedy examination of the whole field cannot be over-estimated. The operations of the elements, the shifting channels of the streams, the levelling hand of public improvement, and most efficient of all the slow but constant encroachments of agriculture, are fast destroying these monuments of ancient labor, breaking in upon their symmetry and obliterating their outlines. Thousands have already disappeared, or retain but slight and doubtful traces of their former proportions.”28
One of the reasons that Ancient Monuments is still useful today is that it provides the locations of many important mounds and earthworks that no longer exist. In 2011, in a paper published in American Antiquity, Jarrod Burks and Robert Cooke looked into the specific case of Ohio, where Squier and Davis had reported “approximately 88 earthwork sites” in 1848. Perhaps because of the fame brought to them by Ancient Monuments, 16 of these sites—18 percent of the total—are “now preserved whole or in part within parks.” Another 18 sites (20 percent) “are mostly or completely destroyed, with urban development and gravel mining being the primary destructive processes.” The remaining 54 sites (62 percent) are “now invisible at the surface.”29
So, to summarize, out of 88 Ohio sites put on record in 1848 by Squier and Davis, 54 are now “invisible,” 18 more are “destroyed,” and only 16 (just 18 percent of the total) are still in place–implying an effective loss of 82 percent or, in plain English, 82 out of every 100 sites.
What, then, are we to make of David J. Meltzer’s presumably authoritative introduction to the 150th anniversary reissue of Ancient Monuments, which informs us that Ohio’s Ross County alone was estimated by Squier and Davis in 1848 to contain “one hundred enclosures and five hundred mounds”?30
If that’s the correct figure, then all the other numbers change. Sixteen sites remaining out of 600 is quite a different matter from 16 out of 88 and amounts to a 97 percent loss.
On July 23, 2018, wanting to get to the bottom of this, I emailed Jarrod Burks, coauthor of the 2011 Antiquity paper.
His first point was to remind me that the focus in his paper was not on earthworks in Ohio in general but only on those “depicted in Squier and Davis—88 sites. There are many hundreds of earthwork sites (those with enclosures) in Ohio … and we keep finding more.”
As to the specific issue of the discrepancy between Meltzer’s figures and his own, Burks explained:
I was counting actually sites with enclosures depicted in maps in Squier and Davis. This comes from individual maps of sites, like the map of High Bank Works, and from unique sites depicted on their composite maps of select areas—like the area around Chillicothe. Fo
r example, they show the Steel Group site on that map but they do not have a separate, more detailed map of Steel.
So, when I say “enclosure site” I am referring to places with one through X enclosures. Hopewell Mound Group is one site though it has several enclosures. Cedar Bank is one site that has only one enclosure. Following this approach, Squier and Davis depict 88 sites with enclosures in their maps. There is no way there are 100 enclosure sites in Ross County, but there may be 100 enclosures. So far I have only found solid evidence for 37–38 enclosure sites in Ross County, and this includes some previously undocumented ones we have found in aerial photos and subsequently surveyed with geophysics. In fact, most of the 37–38 have been surveyed. … Still working on getting access to a few of them.
The Archaeological Atlas of Ohio (William C. Mills 1914) reports 586 enclosure sites in Ohio. Many of these are unconfirmed and/or lost since 1914, but we are working to find many of them. We have also found more not recorded in 1914. So, the total number of enclosure sites once in Ohio conservatively is 500–1000. It could be double or more.
I had also asked Burks if he knew where I might find estimates of the sort that he had made in Ohio for the Mississippi Valley as a whole—that is, how many mounds and earthworks remain and how many have been destroyed since the mid-nineteenth century.
“Getting numbers for all of the Mississippi Valley is a daunting task,” he replied, “especially if you include mounds. There are/were many tens of thousands of mounds in the eastern US. You might start by contacting the state historic preservation office in each state.”
I was surprised that no archaeologist had yet done this basic legwork and that there was no authoritative volume or paper I could immediately be referred to—since presumably at least some measure of what has been lost must be fundamental to the correct assessment of what remains. I therefore asked for confirmation that I would be representing the facts correctly if I were to “tell my readers that reliable figures simply don’t exist for the whole Mississippi Valley and that no archaeologist or other researcher has ever attempted to estimate what has been lost across the whole region as a result of agricultural, industrial and other encroachments since the mid-19th century.”
Burks replied immediately:
That’s a pretty broad statement. I don’t know that “no archaeologist or other researcher” has done that. George Milner produced a book on mounds 10–15 years ago. Perhaps he makes a statement like that? But I doubt it given how nearly impossible it is to track that. For example, in Ohio we say there once were 10,000+ mounds (a 19th century estimate). The state has only about 2000 that have been recorded in the modern list. Many have been destroyed but we are constantly recording new ones, many of which likely were known in the 19th century. So, hard to put numbers to it, but it’s true that many, many mounds have been destroyed.31
George R. Milner’s book The Moundbuilders arrived on my desk the following morning, but contains no information that adds significantly to what we already know about the loss of mound sites since the nineteenth century. Nor was David Meltzer able to come up with a figure, observing in reply to my query that “200+ years ago there was no systematic count of these earthworks, so we have no idea what the denominator should be for the equation of sites still extant / sites once present.”32
The good news is that sites are still being discovered (or probably more often rediscovered). The bad news is that it may be “nearly impossible” to track the “many, many” that have been destroyed.
All estimates are guesswork, but I suspect that Gregory Little’s diligent and thoroughly researched Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Mounds and Earthworks, though not a mainstream source, is close to the truth when it calculates that 90 percent of all the Mississippi Valley sites have been destroyed and that only 10 percent remain.33
And lest such a ballpark figure sound too extreme let us remember, despite the conservationist rhetoric of our supposedly more enlightened age, that mounds and earthworks are still being destroyed in the twenty-first century.
Walmart seems to have a penchant for this. In 2001, for example, the Fenton Mounds, a pair of Native American burial mounds in Fenton, Missouri, dated between AD 600 and 1400, were leveled to make way for a Walmart Supercenter.34 A few years later, in August 2009, city leaders in Oxford, Alabama, approved the destruction of a 1,500-year-old Native American ceremonial mound because, once again, Walmart wanted the location.35 The developers began work, removing a substantial section of the mound, but a month later, following a public outcry, the media reported a change of heart:
A re-consecration ceremony was held this past weekend at a damaged Indian mound in Oxford, Alabama. … The 1,500-year-old sacred and archaeologically significant site was partially demolished during a taxpayer-funded economic development project, with the excavated dirt to be used as fill for construction of a Sam’s Club, a retail warehouse store owned by Walmart.36
What’s indicated here is a state of mind across a segment of the American population that sees no inherent cultural value in antiquities and believes firmly that the past has nothing to teach us that outweighs our need for yet another large store. I don’t mean to pick on Americans. Exactly the same state of mind exists in Britain, France, China, and virtually every other country in the world.
By encouraging disdain for the past, however, the cost of such an outlook in fast-growing America since the nineteenth century has been the mass destruction of ancient sites, notably including the loss of many thousands of the mounds and earthworks of the Mississippi Valley. Exactly how many thousands will probably remain a “known unknown” forever. But whatever the true number, it represents yet another level at which the “crime scene” of ancient America has been wiped down.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: BAD ARCHAEOLOGY
THOSE OF US WHO EXPLORE alternative approaches to prehistory are frequently accused by archaeologists and their friends in the media of being “pseudoscientists.” What, however, could provide a better example of truly damaging and misleading pseudoscience than the “Clovis First” paradigm that ruled American archaeology for more than 40 years with a wholly false doctrine taught to generations of students as fact? We saw in part 2 how this pseudoscientific theory of the peopling of the Americas, based on wildly irresponsible extrapolations from tiny data sets yet promoted by a powerful lobby of leading archaeologists, was, for a very long while, held to be so right, so correct, and so self-evidently true that any researchers who questioned it faced ridicule, ostracism by their colleagues, withdrawal of research grants, and ruined careers.
This kind of behavior in scholarship not only fails to serve the truth but actively undermines the search for it and, as such, has also played a significant part in wiping down the ancient American “crime scene.” How much was missed, and has since been built over or plowed under during those 40-plus years when it was considered heresy to investigate deposits older than Clovis for signs of a human presence? And how much wide-ranging and open-minded investigation into the true age and origins of the First Americans was postponed or entirely nipped in the bud at the same time? How many unexplored avenues do we owe to the absurd Clovis First dogma? How many doors did it close on how many promising initiatives? And how much public interest and curiosity in other possibilities did the pat answer “Clovis First” snuff out?
It’s been the same problem with another archaeological theory—the so-called Pleistocene Overkill theory whereby all the megafauna were supposedly slaughtered by those same ruthlessly efficient Clovis hunters (who nevertheless proved insufficiently ruthless and efficient to survive the Younger Dryas onset). I’ve not gone into the details here—just too much academic bickering to impose upon the reader—but this theory, also, though not yet quite as dead as “Clovis First” (since it still has some advocates), has been “conclusively rejected” by increasing numbers of scholars in recent years.37
Although he lists archaeology and North American prehistory among his fields of st
udy, Terry Jones, professor and department chair of social sciences at California Polytechnic State University, brings the benefit of an outsider’s perspective when he observes:
The Paleoindian Period (often defined as anything pre-dating 10,000 cal BP [i.e., 10,000 years ago]) is basically the domain of a small number of specialists who interpret it for everyone else. For the last 40 years these researchers have focused their interpretations on two closely related and intricately inter-connected theories: Clovis First and Pleistocene Overkill. During this time, Paleoindian research has also deteriorated into an intense if not hostile debate over these two competing but not mutually exclusive ideas. Much of the energy in this protracted dialog has been devoted to debunking or nullifying alternative hypotheses associated with these two theories. While this is standard practice in science, the degree to which the Paleoindian debate has been focused on deconstruction of opposing ideas rather than development of empirically solid, new ones has been extreme.38
This, too, is part of the wiping down of the North American “crime-scene.” Some limited but perhaps case-breaking clues to what really happened here around 12,800 years ago may remain. To the extent that the “detectives” involved in this paleo-CSI are more interested in ego contests than the truth, however, the truth may take a very long time to emerge.
Besides, there’s another aspect to the problem in the visceral resistance shown by a number of influential scholars to any suggestion that a cataclysm of any kind ushered in the onset of the Younger Dryas. These scholars themselves apparently believe, and so far as possible would like us to believe, that nothing really bad happened at the Younger Dryas Boundary—that, yes, there were extinctions, and yes, Clovis abruptly disappeared, but there is no mystery here, just a fairly routine and predictable combination of overkill and climate change. Terry Jones, a member of the Comet Research Group, refutes such reasoning at length in a paper in the Journal of Cosmology39 and strongly advocates the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which, he points out:
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