Mound Builders

The group of cultures collectively called Mound Builders are prehistoric inhabitants of North America who construct various styles of earthen mounds for burial, residential and ceremonial purposes.

These include the Pre-Columbian cultures of the Archaic period; Woodland period (Adena and Hopewell cultures); and Mississippian period; dating from roughly 3000 BCE to the sixteenth century CE, and living in regions of the Great Lakes, the Ohio River valley, and the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries.

As a comparison, beginning with the construction of Watson Brake about 3500 BCE in present-day Louisiana, indigenous peoples started building earthwork mounds in North America nearly 1000 years before the pyramids were constructed in Egypt.

Since the nineteenth century, the prevailing scholarly consensus has been that the mounds were constructed by Indigenous peoples of the Americas, early cultures distinctly separate from the historical Native American tribes extant at the time of European colonization of North America.

The historical Native Americans were generally not knowledgeable about the civilizations that produced the mounds.

Research and study of these cultures and peoples has been based on archaeology and anthropology.