Ancestral mounds : vitality and volatility of Native America /

This fascinating, thorough, insightful, and provocative study of the numerous and diverse earth mounds constructed by Native Americans from millennia ago to the present draws evidence from archaeology, history, ethnography, and linguistics. Beyond the usual interrogatives, anthropologist Miller concentrates on the "why" behind mounds by focusing on religious aspects. His regional focus is the current states of Oklahoma, Ohio, and others from the southeastern US. Cultures include Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks. The book offers extraordinary firsthand accounts in detail by the author and others about the uses of mounds for ceremonies, rituals, and other purposes. It reveals that Native Americans continue to construct and revitalize earth mounds each summer to celebrate and express gratitude for corn and other crops. The people maintain the mounds through labor, dance, song, and prayer for community solidarity, vitality, and renewal as an adaptation to sometimes uncertain and violent natural and social phenomena, including the Euroamerican forces of genocide and ethnocide. While reviewing more than two centuries of Eurocentric and often ethnocentric research, Miller challenges many academic and popular stereotypes, myths, and misconceptions about the meaning and significance of earth mounds. Summing Up: Essential. Gradaute students/faculty/specialists. --Leslie E. Sponsel, University of Hawai'i