Kurgans of North America

Mound Builder is a general term referring to the Native North American peoples who constructed various styles of earthen mounds for burial, residential, and ceremonial purposes. These included Archaic, and Woodland period, and Mississippian period Pre-Columbian cultures. The term Mound Builder was also applied to an imaginary race believed to have constructed the great earthworks of the United States, this while Euroamerican racial ideology of the 16th-19th centuries did not recognize that Native Americans were sophisticated enough to construct such monumental architecture.

The final blow to this myth was dealt by an official appointee of the United States Government, Cyrus Thomas of the Bureau of American Ethnology. His lengthy report (727 pages, published in 1894) concluded finally that it was the opinion of himself and thus the United States Government that the prehistoric earthworks of the eastern United States were the work of Native Americans.

Are they Kurgans[1] of North America if so, is there an Asian connection?

Mavi Boncuk |
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft [1793-1864]
American ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft was influential in studies of indigenous people in the North American continent. He travelled with an early geological survey through what is now Wisconsin (the Cass and Doty expedition), and was eventually superintendent for Indian Affairs for the territory of Michigan in the 1830s.

Although best known in general for recording stories and language of the Native American tribes, Schoolcraft is most important to archaeology in that he was among the first to identify evidence that the people who built the thousands of raised earthen structures throughout North America were the ancestors of the people being displaced by European in-migration, and not the mythical lost tribe of Israel called 'mound builders'. Source: K. Kris Hirst

Cyrus Thomas [1825-1910]
Cyrus Thomas was an American archaeologist, associated with the Smithsonian Institution, who spent his career studying Native American burial mounds throughout the midwestern United States. During the late nineteenth century, he was the Director of Mound Exploration at the Smithsonian, when he published several treatises proving that Native Americans had built and were buried in the burial mounds, putting an end to the moundbuilder theory. Or so one would think, anyway. Source: K. Kris Hirst

[1] "Kurgan" is a Russian word meaning "mound" and refers to the custom of building mounds for burial purposes It's speculated that the so called Kurgan were the original Indo-European people; lived northwest of the Caucasus, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, between 5,000-3,000 BC. Some scholars have suggested an earlier homeland in Asia Minor, 6,000-5,000 BC (Renfrew)
Aspects of Kurgan culture: domesticated cattle and horses, farming, herding, four-wheeled wagons, mound builders, hilltop forts, complex sense of family relationship and organization; counting skills; used gold and silver; drank a honey-based alcoholic beverage, mead; multiple gods (sky/thunder, sun, horse, boar, snake); belief in life after death evidenced in elaborate burials (Marija Gimbutas, 1956)