Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds

Ever since European settlers stumbled upon the eighteenth-century mounds, explanations and interpretations of them – often ridiculous and seldom Native American – have appeared as sober scholarship. Today, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) has intensified the debate over who «owns» the mounds – modern descendants of the Mound builders or Western archaeologists. Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds is the first cogent look at all the issues surrounding the mounds, their history, their preservation, and their interpretation. Using the traditions of those Natives descended from the Mound Builders as well as historical and archaeological evidence, Barbara Alice Mann placed the mounds in their native cultural context as she examines the fraught issues enveloping them in the twenty-first century.