Edward Palmer's Arkansaw Mounds

Download or read book Edward Palmer's Arkansaw Mounds written by Edward Palmer and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1880s a massive scientific effort was launched by the Smithsonian Institution to discover who had built the prehistoric burial mounds found throughout the United States. Arkansaw Mounds tells the story of this exploration and of Edward Palmer, one of the nineteenth century’s greatest natural historians and archaeologists, who was recruited to lead the research project. Arkansas was unusually rich in prehistoric remains, especially mounds, and became a major focus of the study. Palmer and his team of researchers discovered that the mounds had been built by the ancestors of the historic North American Indians, shattering the then-popular theory that a lost non-Indian race had built them.