Ever since European settlers stumbled upon the eighteenth-century mounds explanations and
interpretations of them - often ridiculous and seldom Native American - have appeared as sober
scholarship. Today 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 placed the
mounds in their native cultural context as she examines the fraught issues enveloping them in
the twenty-first century.
