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Overview
Ever since eighteenth-century European settlers stumbled upon the mounds, explanations and interpretations of them - often ridiculous and seldom Native American - have appeared as sober scholarship. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) has intensified the debate over who "owns" the mounds - modern descendants of the mound builders or Western archaeologists. Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds is the first cogent look at all the issues surrounding the mounds, their history, their preservation, and their interpretation. Using the traditions of those Natives descended from the mound builders as well as historical and archaeological evidence, Barbara Alice Mann places the mounds in their Native cultural context as she examines the fraught issues enveloping them in the twenty-first century.Synopsis
In this account, Mann (English, U. of Toledo, Ohio), who is a specialist on the history and culture of the Native Americans of the eastern woodlands, takes to task archaeologists, anthropologists, politicians and all other Euro-Americans for persisting, in her view, in misinterpreting, mislabeling, or willfully ignoring the Native American's spiritual connection to the land of their ancestors as they seek to mine their sacred burial mounds for land or artifacts. The history of the Native American's struggle to prevent the destruction of their cemeteries, the meaning cemeteries and ancestors have to them, and the implications of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act are central themes. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR