I always mistook mounds as cool, giant hills that formed over time as part of a natural process. I didn’t know that some of these mounds actually had important material culture inside.
Prior to this class, I had no idea that they were built by a previous civilization. It’s significant that there were actually people in the past who noticed the abundance of these mounds and dedicated themselves to studying them and discovering over 200,000 of them! For someone like me, the mounds would’ve been easily overlooked as just a part of nature.
This made me realize something important: in order to be a good archaeologist, you must be disciplined with the virtue of patience. I can not imagine how often an archaeologists gets stumped over because lingering questions go unsolved – the case of the mound builders was definitely an interesting case to follow up on in class. After the lecture, I have a new appreciation for the work that archaeologists do. They study and search for things that ordinary people take for granted, and behind every thing that they discover, they are able to piece together a story that amazes many.
Aside from the interesting facts of the mound builders, I also find it intriguing how they were discovered and what items they held within. I wonder why some were empty, while some contained ceramics and other cultural artifacts?
I definitely agree with you that the mounds are incredible works of architecture; so incredible that they could be mistaken by hills created by nature instead of actually humans! It’s unfortunate that a lot of people thought about human ancestors as too primitive or unintelligent that they couldn’t be capable of building such mounds, and attributed it to aliens, other civilizations, etc. I wouldn’t even know how to go about building one of these mounds- let alone thousands of them! It is interesting to learn about how intelligent and capable the mound builders were and they definitely deserve more credit.
I like how you speculated that these mounds could have gone unnoticed, and your perspective on how archaeologists need a lot of patience. It made we wonder what else could be going unnoticed? What else is overlooked? Still to be discovered?
I agree that archaeologists probably have a lot of patience and run into a lot of unsolved questions. It adds more respect to them, considering that the have the patience to figure out the truth and apply science and fact, instead of skimping over the hard questions and coming up with illogical theories (i.e. pyramidiots, aliens, etc.). It seems as if those conspirators may actually just be lazy and are unable to answer the hard questions, so they just try to find the answer in some imaginative alternate.
It is intriguing as to why some mounds were empty, while some had ceramics and other artifacts. I think it would be cool to see what one of these sites would have looked like active with people still occupying them, or even seeing people in the act of building a mound!