Episode 56

Them There Hills: Mounds and the Myth of the Moundbuilders - Ep56

It’s all about mounds and moundbuilders on this week’s episode with Anna and Amber.

LinksCahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis (via WorldCat)Cahokia MoundsWatson Brake, a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in Northeast Louisiana (American Antiquity)12th-Century Cahokia Was a “Melting Pot” (Archaeology)Cahokia and the Excavation of Mound 72 (Lithics Casting Lab)The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point: A Place of Rings (via WorldCat)Moundbuilders (Newberry)Early pottery: Technology, Function, Style, and Interaction in the Lower Southeast (via WorldCat)White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities (Smithsonian)Check out KenFeder’s take on the myth of the moundbuilders over on Archaeological Fantasies. He’s also the author of this week’s Dirt Book Club entry, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science andPseudoscience in Archaeology.ContactEmail the Dirt Podcast

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.