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As with other continents, the mounds and pyramids of North America vary greatly. It could be that humankind has a primal need to build fake mountains, and that there are absolutely no connections between these sites. Or perhaps size and shape are irrelevant, and location is everything, and the guidelines for their placement was once universally known.
It is difficult to determine how many mounds were built in North America, for many have been destroyed by modern civilization but there were many. One hundred and fifty years ago, for example, there were approximately 20,000 Indian mounds in Wisconsin alone, with a large portion of them alongside the Mississippi River. Now, after a century of plowing, town construction and urban sprawl, there are less than 2,000 mounds remaining in the state.
As anyone who was in the area in 1927 would tell you: the Mississippi floods. In that year over one thousand people drowned, almost a million people were forced from their homes, and over five million acres of farmland were ruined. Regular flooding replenishes the soil in this region and makes it rich. This is the same reason the ancient Egyptians lived alongside the Nile. In fact, the similarities between the Mississippi and the Nile (floods and pyramids) caused the original settlers of Illinois to name new towns after places in Egypt, such as Goshen, Cairo and Thebes.
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Just east of St. Louis, near Collinsville, Illinois is the largest earth mound in the western hemisphere. It is 30 metres high and dates back to 1100-1400 AD.
"The largest of these mounds, Monk's Mound covers 16 acres; it rests on a base 1,037 feet long and 790 feet wide, with a total volume of approximately 21,690,000 cubic feet, a base and total volume greater than that of the pyramid of Khufu, the largest in Egypt. In all the world, only the pyramids at Cholula and Teotihuacan in central Mexico surpass the Cahokia pyramid in size and total volume. No other structure in the United States approached the size of the Cahokia pyramid until the building of airplane hangars, the Pentagon, and skyscrapers in the twentieth century."
There are more than one hundred other, smaller mounds at Cahokia as well as Woodhenge, which is of course a wooden counterpart to Englandıs Stonehenge.
According to the Cahokia website, in March 1998 something unexpected happened:
"During the process of installing horizontal drains to relieve the internal water in Monks Mound that had contributed to several severe slumping episodes along the west side (Second Terrace), the drilling rig encountered stones about 140 feet in and 40 feet below the surface of the Second Terrace. The operator said it felt like "soft stone," probably limestone or sandstone, and that it was mostly cobbles or slabs at least six inches in diameter. The drill went through about 32 feet of stones and the drill bit broke off. We have no idea what it is, what shape or size it is, or why it is there. It should not be there. No other cores or excavations have revealed stone in Monks Mound or any other mound at the site, or, as far as we know, at other Mississippian mound sites. We do not know its vertical thickness or the extent of it horizontally, other than the 32 feet that the drill went through."
These were made during the same Mississippian Temple Mound Building Period, as were mounds at Moundville (near Tuscaloosa, Alabama) and at Cahokia roughly 700 AD to 1400 AD.
The six flat-topped earthen knolls and a plaza were used for rituals by several thousand Native Americans between 1000 and 1500 A.D. The largest mound has a height of 63 feet. Only nine percent of this site has been excavated, but we already know that the mounds have caves underneath them as do some Mayan and Giza pyramids.
It may also just be a coincidence, but there is a Limonite mine at Etowah. Limonite is a iron-bearing ore with a very special use - as radiation shielding for atomic bomb tests, nuclear reactors and space stations. It is also what gives Mars its red color.
Poverty Point combines mounds with an aspect of ancient Rome an amphitheatre. Consisting of concentric ridges 5-10 feet high and 150 wide, the construction has a diameter of 34 of a mile, five times the diameter of the Colosseum in Rome. The ridges were built with 530,000 cubic yards of earth (over 35 times the cubic amount of the Great Pyramid of Giza). Of the earth mounds, one has a base of 700 feet by 800 feet and is 70 feet high. It is shaped like a bird.
This mound is conical, like Silbury Hill in England. Archaeologists believe that it was constructed by the Adena Indians (800 BC 100 AD). The mound sits on a 100 foot high bluff, and measures 877 feet in circumference. Originally it attained a height of 70 feet.
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