Canals, Calendars, and Cities: The Builders and Astronomers of Native America

For most of the nineteenth century, educated Americans agreed that Indians could not have built the great earthworks of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The mounds were too big and too geometric, so a vanished race must have raised them: Toltecs, the lost tribes of Israel, wanderers out of Wales or Atlantis. Then the Bureau of Ethnology sent Cyrus Thomas, a Tennessean who expected to confirm the myth, to survey mounds from Wisconsin to Florida. He matched the pots, pipes and shell gorgets in the ground to work still made by Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek hands, and in 1894 he published his verdict. The builders were the ancestors of the nations still living around the mounds.

That verdict opens a tour of the hemisphere's builders, farmers and thinkers. It begins at dawn on the six concentric ridges of Poverty Point in Louisiana, raised by people who fished and hunted and had not yet planted a single seed of corn, and moves on through the Hopewell trade web, Cahokia, the desert canal-builders and Chaco Canyon's great houses. Then it turns south to the Maya who wrote in stone, the lake city of Tenochtitlan and the high Andes, before coming north again to the Haudenosaunee longhouse and its law, the northern forests, and the winter counts of the Plains.

At Poverty Point nobody wrote down what the hunters saw when the sun came up behind the bird mound. "The record was the ground itself, and the ground held."