The Mound Builder Myth

In The Mound Builder Myth, Jason Colavito tells a lively story, and one with implications for our current struggle between myth in the service of White nationalism and the diverse, messy, but aspirationally more accurate version of America’s past being produced, revised, and debated in monographs, journals, and sundry forms of newer media. In a narrative that races from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, Colavito lays out the ways in which White Americans created a version of “their” continent’s past that downplayed and denigrated the monumental architectural achievements of Native Americans. Colavito is well-suited to this task, having previously written about the intersections of myth, history, and speculative fiction. As he admits, his previous work has not endeared him to the Ancient Aliens crowd, and one suspects The Mound Builder Myth will exacerbate that alienation. Most of the action occurs between Thomas Jefferson’s late eighteenth-century assertion that mounds...

Alienation · American history · Ancient history · Art · Art history · Assertion · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Political science · Race (biology) · Sociology · White (mutation) · American History and Culture · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Classics · Computer Science · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law