"Giants" have been associated with many of the mounds.
Moundsville, Alabama boasts a small forward (6' 6", as I recall), who was buried with the trappings of authority.
Years ago, when I visited the site, the park displayed a reconstructed section of a perimeter wall around the Great Mound. I assume this was based on posthole diggings and that it's still there.
The wall surprised me. I would have taken a simple palisade in stride, but the reconstruction depicted a bastioned wall with fighting platforms and a complex gate. (All wood, of course.) No ditching was depicted, but the effect was, nonetheless, to suggest a considerably more sophisticated style of warfare than I would have imagined. I had recently read a very little bit (strictly a layman's idle curiosity) about stone age hillforts in Britain, and that was the comparison that popped into my head.
I wonder if anyone here knows if this kind of fortification is found in other pre-Columbian sites and whether there is related physical evidence (of fires, human remains, etc.) for large scale fighting among the mound builders?
From one of my favorite articles in The Atlantic Monthly, The Diffusionists Have Landed:
The Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad's famous identification, in 1961, of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, from just after A.D. 1000 is, of course, a notable exception, no longer in dispute. But that discovery has so far gone nowhere. The Norse settlers, who may have numbered as many as 160 and stayed for three years or longer, seem to have made no lasting impression on the aboriginal skraellings that, according to Norse sagas, they encountered, and to have avoided being influenced in turn. The traditions of the Micmac people, modern-day inhabitants of the area, have not been seriously investigated; another people historically associated with this area, the reputedly fair-skinned Beothuks, have been extinct since 1829. The Vikings came, kept to themselves, and left -- that appears to be as much revision of the long-standing history of New World settlement as the hard-core academic establishment will entertain.I love is when random data from totally unrelated sources play hell with any conventional whizdumb.Snip
To many, the inventionists have clearly gained the upper hand, having marshaled shards, spearpoints, and other relics that indicate the independent cultural development of a native people whose Ice Age ancestors came overland from Northeast Asia. Still, the diffusionists have a habit of raising awkward questions -- questions that even some mainstream scholars find hard to ignore, much less to explain away. Who carved Phoenician-era Iberian script into a stone found at Grave Creek, West Virginia? How did a large stone block incised with medieval Norse runes make its way to Kensington, Minnesota? Why would a rough version of the Ten Commandments appear in Old Hebrew script on a boulder-sized tablet near Los Lunas, New Mexico? Conversely, how could the sweet potato, known to be indigenous to the Americas, have become a food staple throughout Polynesia and the Pacific basin as early as A.D. 400? And why would dozens of eleventh- to thirteenth-century temple sculptures in Karnataka, India, include depictions of what appears to be American maize?
Why are these large buildings always considered as temples? Especially when we know zero about their daily life.
(Also, posthole interpretations are in the eye of the beholder :-).
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