I’m fascinated by ancient America and visit archaeological sites everywhere I go. I scooted off as soon as we moved to Missouri in 2000 to see Cahokia, the mother of all Mississippian cities. My fascination began in the late 90s when I visited Etowah Indian Mounds, off I-75 north of Atlanta. I was amazed: huge, flat-top pyramids nearly as big as those in Mexico. A large plaza, probably used for ceremonies and ball games. An excellent museum with jewelry, bodily adornments, figurines, and sculptures from as far away as the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Illinois. Who were these people? What kind of city was this? No one told me about any of this!
I had no idea there were so many, and such vast, ancient structures throughout mid-America. It showed me how very little I knew about America, and how very wrong the standard American pre-Columbian narrative was.
What's truly sad is that the vast majority of these ancient monuments have been deliberately destroyed. They were an inconvenient truth: that this was not a virgin continent ripe for exploitation but a thoroughly settled land inhabited for thousands of years. We were lied to!
Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley: Volume II
Recent archive discoveries of many of the original draft surveys and field notes of Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis (and others) reveal previously unseen details of many of the earthwork sites depicted in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), as well as material that was edited out of the original publication. This new multi-volume Expanded Edition created for the 175th anniversary of its 1848 publication date, includes a facsimile of the classic original 360-page book, now intercut with original, previously-unpublished site survey maps from the original surveyors, additional original artifact and mound illustrations, and rare earlier published…
I devoured this book—startling insights and descriptions of pre-Columbian societies.
I study this stuff, and there were many, many things I’ve never heard of, mostly in Central and South America. Like? Like that two of the original cradles of civilization (i.e., Mesopotamia, Egypt, China) were in Mexico and Peru. Huge cities in the Amazon.
We still know far too little about the people that were here before Columbus, their civilizations, engineering, language, and writing. What’s now the U.S. was no wilderness: the forests were managed, the rivers were managed, the prairie was managed. The Americas were heavily settled. They terraformed both continents.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review).
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a…
This is not an insect book--it is a history book, but one that tells the history you didn't learn in school, or it tells the history in a way you never imagined. Five insects had a significant impact on human history. Silkworm moth, Oriental rat flea, human body louse, yellow…
First of all, I love that name. What the Fowke (a pseudonym)!
But mostly, this book opened a window for me and showed me how big, how dramatic, and how many ancient sites there were in Missouri. Everywhere! I was amazed to find so many in the county in which I live, Boone.
But, again, what makes this book sad is that most of these sites are gone, looted, bulldozed over, pilfered, vanished. Yes, deliberately. We clearly had no respect for the ancients. And we still don’t. A site in Fenton was recently destroyed for a Walmart.
Will the civilization after us destroy all our monuments? Hate to say this, but I hope so. Our hubris decrees it.
Unearth Missouri’s ancient past with a detailed survey of its mound sites and grave vaults.
This authoritative study compiles two seasons of fieldwork across central and southeastern Missouri, documenting numerous moundworks, burial practices, and the people who built them. Rich with maps and illustrations, it offers a clear picture of early archaeological methods and the region’s prehistoric landscape.
Fowke presents a ground-level view of exploration across river valleys and county sites, explaining how vault-graves, stone walls, and layered burials reveal the social and ceremonial life of ancient communities. The work combines descriptive field notes with a careful discussion of construction,…
Can I say I love the pictures most of all? I love the pictures. And maps. But 50? Why not 100! 200! (I know why: 50 is a nice round, familiar, patriotic number)
What I loved about this book was that it paid so much attention to Midwestern sites I can, and have, explored – Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian – and many places still on my list. It doesn’t dwell on the cliff dwellings and cities in stone in the west, what most people think of when they think of Indian towns.
And I love that it includes petroglyph and pictographic sites in the West, only a few of which I have visited. So this book is a joy and a torture: all these places I have yet to see!
Presenting "the real deal" of American antiquity-as opposed to the hyped fare of many cable TV shows-Kenneth Feder invites readers to explore the stunning technological, architectural, engineering, and artistic achievements of America's first peoples.
Part travel guide, part friendly reference, Ancient America showcases fifty iconic and publicly-accessible sites located across the contiguous United States-including monumental pyramids of earth, "castles" ensconced in cliff niches, and vast rock art galleries. Among the places profiled are four World Heritage Sites (Chaco Canyon, NM; Mesa Verde, CO; Cahokia, IL; Poverty Point, LA); numerous Historic Landmarks and National Monuments (including Crystal River, FL; Town Creek…
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
He might not be the godfather of Missouri archaeology, but he sure was the dean. This was his whole life! This book is by far the most concise, encyclopedic book of ancient Missouri, written in clear language, with great maps by his wife and research partner Eleanor Chapman.
You don’t have to have 14 PhDs and a language translator to read him. He’s an amateur’s dream, and I am very much an amateur! It's impossible to write about ancient Missouri without Chapman; he’s really indispensable, and I lean very heavily on these books, not just as a guide to what was there, but how to think about it, too.
He’s not mystical or magical, like too many American archeologists today. He just reports what he sees as the facts, ma'am. What I found tragic, though, is that a lot of the sites he covers have been deliberately bulldozed, drowned by reservoirs, ripped apart by looters. So many right here in the county I live in, Boone!
So it’s both fascinating and disheartening to read Chapman. 16th-19th century whites in America had very little respect for these ancient cultures, and things haven't changed much: we still think of these ancient civilizations as alien. They're not. This is our history, too.
Take a journey of 10,000 years through the history of the ancient, advanced civilizations who built great monuments here; a guide to the existing monuments on public land, likely within an easy drive.
The book covers cities, towns and sacred structures built by the Hopewell, who built towns throughout the Kansas City area; the Mississippians, cities with towering pyramids and large plazas along that river, especially around St. Louis and the Bootheel; the Oneonta, massive temples along the Missouri River; the Niúachi (Missouria), for whom the state is named; the Osage and Illiniwek (Illinois), who lived in towns in southwest and northeast Missouri; and the artists who carved marvels in stone at Thousand Hills and Washington State Parks. All still there today, thousands of years later. All free!
Guns, Furs, and Gold offers a riveting narrative of the American West by exploring the interactions of the Arikaras, Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahos with each other and with Euro-American traders, explorers, and settlers from 1804, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked on their voyage of discovery, to 1864, when…
What's Gotten Into You is a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who…
