The Mythologized Legacy of the North American Mounds
Ancient landscapes the world over were once encrusted with earthen mounds, variously called cairns, tumulus, barrows, burial mounds and kurgans. In England, Silbury Hill near Avebury in the English county of Wiltshire, Read More
Burned Bones, Mysterious Timber Circles & the Rites of the Ancients - Adena Culture in Mason County
Mason County, West Virginia is a place rich in history. Founded in 1804, the county is named after George Mason, who was a delegate at the American Constitutional Convention of 1787. In October of 1774, Colonel Andrew Lewis successfully lead the ...
Bones of the Child, Tools of the Shaman: Ritual and Cosmology at the Hopewell Tunacunnhee Mounds
Near Trenton in Dade County, Georgia, is a place called Tunacunnhee, supposedly named after a Native American word meaning “Lookout Creek”. Located just a few hundred yards east of Lookout Creek is an archaeological site known as the...
Ghost Talkers and Puma Men: Adena Totemism and the Shamans of the Early Woodland Period
The people of the Adena Culture are widely regarded as the first builders of mounds and earthworks in the Ohio Valley.
By conventional dating the culture spans the period of 1000 BC to around 300 AD. Adena people built conical burial mounds...
Seafarers and Shell Rings: Strange Formations on the American Coast a Hallmark of Faraway Visitors?
Just south of Awendaw, South Carolina, in the Francis Marion National Forest, is an example of a type of architectural artifact that still baffles archaeologists. For every explanation someone offers up, there are many more that refute it. He...
Foundations of Stone – Part II : Investigating the Megalithics of West Virginia and the Connection to the Pleiades
Returning to the Charleston area, one crucial detail of the earthworks omitted from Cyrus Thomas’ published report is the existence of a series of “graded ways” which connected the earthworks on both sides of the Kanawha, which can be s...
Foundations of Stone – Part I : Investigating the Megalithic Aspect of Late Archaic and Woodland Cultures in West Virginia
The data for this article regarding the Charleston Earthworks is largely derived from the handwritten manuscript of P.W. Norris. The authors have used this version of the report due to the needless exclusions of data and erroneous measurement...
