Bathurst Deane
Mound Builders
Mound Builders is the term used to describe a number of indigenous American cultures that were responsible for the building of over 100.000 burial and ceremonial mounds along the Mississippi Valley from as early as 6,000 years ago.
There was a reluctance, by many, to credit the ancestors of today’s Native Americans with the construction of these mounds and so were prepared to attribute their existence to almost anyone except the early ‘Indians’. The lost tribes of Israel or even the Vikings were suggested.
Ignatius Donnelly proposed that colonists from Atlantis were responsible for the construction of the mounds, devoting chapter three of part five of his book to the idea. Preceding Donnelly’s claim of an Atlantean connection for the Mississippi Mounds were those of the 19th-century writer, Lafcadio Hearn. Jason Colavito has expanded on Hearn’s probable sources, which include P.G. Wodehouse’s grandfather, John Bathurst Deane(a).
Colavito has now published The Mound Builder Myth [1723] in which he debunks the 19th-century white supremacist attempts to claim that the mounds “as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans.”
>Greg and Lora Little have also suggested a link between Atlantis and the Mound Builders(b). Another article more specifically claims that the Cherokee people were Mound Builders and are descendants of Atlanteans(c).<
(a) Roundup: Pharaohs’ Curse on “Today,” Greek Myths in the Bronze Age, and More – JASON COLAVITO
(b) The Mound Builders: Giant Skeletons and the Soul’s Journey to the Sky | Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. *
(c) Did the Cherokee Migrate from Atlantis? | Parisha’s Circle (wordpress.com) *