woodland period moundbuilders of the bluegrass - Kentucky ...

MOUNDBUILDERS, RELIEF CREWS, AND ARCHAEOLOGISTSIn the Bluegrass region, people have recorded and studied Adenamounds and earthworks for over 200 years. Our understanding of Adenaculture, however, has depended on an assortment of events, discoveries,and characters.The Moundbuilder MythDuring the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, Adenamounds and earthworks stirred the imagination of European explorers,pioneers, and travelers heading west of the Appalachian Mountains.A few were moved to action. Constantine Rafinesque, a naturalist andprofessor at Transylvania University, made detailed drawings anddescribed several central Kentucky examples.They all wondered: “Who built these mounds?” Historians andscholars hotly debated this question throughout the nineteenth century. Itmay seem strange to us today, but many seriously credited the Egyptians,Mongols, or Welsh.Others thought a vanished race, the Moundbuilders, had built them.They believed that the ancestors of living American Indian peoples hadbeen brutal savages. In their minds, these people could not possibly havebuilt mounds - they drove off or killed the ‘real’ Mound builders. It alsodid not help that nineteenth-century native peoples with historic links tothe Ohio Valley lacked direct recollections or stories, myths, and legendsof moundbuilding.The crew (and dog!) pause for a photograph during work at a Montgomery County mound.