The Origin of the Mound BuildersCoffin, Alfred Oscar
History
The Origin of the Mound Builders
Coffin, Alfred Oscar
Indians of Mexico -- Antiquities; Mexico -- Antiquities; Mound-builders
Taking up the trail again at the Hollywood plantation, near Saint
Joseph, Louisiana, in Tensas Parish, we find ten mounds in a circle
facing the temple. A few miles southward, facing Natchez, in Catahoula
Parish, is another group. Crossing Louisiana, we enter Texas, and from
the Trinity to the Colorado River there are millions of mounds, all of a
conical form, that have baffled ethnologists for the last fifty years.
They are from one to five feet in height, and from thirty to one hundred
and forty feet in diameter. All scientists who have examined them have
pronounced them the “inexplicable mounds.” During the summer of ’87 and
’88 I have traveled for days among the same mysterious mounds in Texas,
stretching in an unbroken line toward the Rio Grande, and have
pronounced them “landmarks” that indicated the line of departure of the
Mound-builders, in their migration across the treeless prairies.
This conclusion brings us to consider the Mound-builders after the
migration, in their new home.
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II.
The Mound-builders in Mexico.
──────
“Nations melt
From Power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt
The sunlight for a while, and downwards go.”
We know that the Mound-builders had a knowledge of Mexico before their
southwestern migration, because obsidian was found in their mounds, and
this mineral is found only in Mexico.
No links are so conclusive in connecting the Mound-builders of the
Mississippi Valley with those of Mexico, as the truncated, pyramidal
mounds. True to the historical traditions that all great centers of
civilization have been along the great river basins, we would naturally
turn to the water-courses of Mexico to resume the trend of our
narrative, and we are not disappointed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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