LONG BEFORE EUROPEANS crossed the Atlantic and set foot on New World soil, lofty burial mounds dotted the American landscape. Concentrated in the Mississippi region, as far south as todays Florida, as far west as Texas, and as far north as Illinois and Ohio, they were built by Native Americans who lived in settled communities and interred their dead near their homes in mounds that were meant to be permanent. In contrast, nomadic Indian societies in the Plains and Pacific Northwest, always on the move, exposed corpses to the elements using trees, scaffolds, canoes, and boxes on stilts all of which were ephemeral. Most of the mounds were conical, some roughly rectangular, and others shaped in the form of animals, reptiles, and birds. All were built from earth that had been carried in baskets from borrow pits and then piled over the dead, the mounds increasing in size as new bodies were added. Some were low, no more than three or four feet high, while others rose to eighty or ninety feet. These sacred mounds were still plentiful in the 1540s when the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto made his extensive expeditions across the South, and they were still visible in 1832 when the poet William Cullen Bryant eloquently exclaimed, Are they here the dead of other days? . . . Let the mighty mounds . . . answer. Although most of the mounds have by now disappeared, flattened by successive generations of farmers and urban developers, a few can still be found in the South and Midwest. The awesome Etowah mounds pictured in this book (plate 1) stand on a tract of fifty-four acres next to the Etowah River in northern Georgia. Constructed over a period of five centuries, from around 1000 to 1550 the mounds were central to the political organization of a community that at its peak numbered several thousand people. The tallest mound, sixty-three feet high, was not used for burial; it supported the house of the chief and his family. From here, he could look down on the wattle-and-daub huts scattered across the village. The common folk living below simply buried their dead in the earth next to their homes. Chiefs and their families were buried in a different mound that eventually held 350 bodies, a number known from excavations carried out in the twentieth century. Precious objects jewelry made from copper, bone, shell, and pearl; pottery vessels and pipes carved with animal images; wooden and stone effigies were often placed in the designated mounds to accompany the dead persons spirit on its journey to the afterworld. Among the many artifacts found in this mound were two marvelous painted marble statues of a man and a woman in a sitting position, each weighing 125 pounds. These were probably ancestor figures buried as symbolic members of the Etowah elite. Atop the burial mound there would have been a mortuary temple housing the most exalted bones. The current chief s divine status was demonstrated by the bones of his ancestors stored at this elevated height. As in Excerpted from The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn Yalom All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.