Mound-Builders around the World.
The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XIX, 1881
by E. L. & W. J. Youmans, p 614
The term mound-builder is distinctively applied to the race that constructed the remarkable earthworks of the valley of the Ohio, and of the interior of the United States in general, but it is true that in nearly all parts of the world the practice of mound-building has prevailed, sometimes among nations that come within historical epochs. Mounds are found among the Celts and the Scythians, in the Sandwich Islands and in New Zealand, in Japan and India, and throughout the central parts of the Eastern Continent, as well as in both Americas, from the country of the Esquimaux to Chili and Fuegia. The earliest of human records refer distinctly to this method of honoring the dead. The heroic age of Greece, as sung by Homer, abounded with ceremonies and curious details relating to the tumulus erected over the bones of the slain hero. The burial of Patroclus, as related in the 23rd book of the “Iliad,” is an illustration of the practice of mound-building by the ancient Greeks:
The urn a veil of line covered o'er.
That done they bid the sepulchre aspire,
And cast the deep foundations round the pyre;
High in the midst they heap the selling bed
Of rising earth, memorial of the dead.”
