Earthworks in Your State
Working on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas spent years surveying Indigenous earthworks in the United States east of the Rockies, producing an 1894 map pinpointing their locations. He reported thousands of such mounds and argued that old myths of an ancient mound-building race were false, correctly concluding that Indigenous Americans were their builders. Each point on the map represents clusters of multiple mounds or indiviual mounds. Higher-resolution images can be found here. Credit: Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution. Bureau Of American Ethnology., Cartographer. Distribution of mounds in the eastern United States. Composed by Thomas, Cyrus, Iler [Washington, D.C.: U.S.G.S., ?, 1894] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2023593003/.
