A Serpent’s Tale: Discovering America’s Ancient Mound Builders

In this uneven work, Treese combines a fairly extensive survey of writings on American mound builders with sketches of her own field trips and other tangential materials. After describing a 1987 harmonic convergence celebration at Ohio’s Serpent Mound, she introduces early Smithsonian Institution researchers Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, whose 1848 book, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, is referenced throughout. Treese then visits the 18th century and moves forward, chronologically summarizing shifting hypotheses about different mound sites concentrated in the Ohio Valley region. This material forms the bulk of the work and helps convey how popular understanding has changed in regards to the various cultures that occupied these sites and built the mounds. However, Treese’s passages on her visits to museums and mound locations feel out of place; some are straightforward but others include irrelevant commentary on trolley bells or the excellence of the local barbecue. She devotes an entire chapter to Mormons and the mounds but finds no connections between the two, and her final chapter covers alternatives to mainstream theories on human migration to North America, including the notion that humans originated in Atlantis or Mu (aka Lemuria). Treese weakens her main chronology of scholarly thought by juxtaposing her own travels and wild theories of others. (Nov.)