Tell me about the Mound Builders. Why did they build mounds?

It's not a laughing matter. There came a day when this half-savage ape looked thoughtfully upon the vast landscape created over aeons by forces far beyond his reckoning and said to himself, in some primitive tongue, "it's alright, but I think there should be a hill here".

And then he made it.

>he

>If I killed you all, would the mounds still exist?

So is this Mesoamerican influence?

that makes more sense

In the national anthropology museum in mexico city I read that mayans from tamaulipas called huastec and yucatec mayans would trade all over the gulf and into the Mississippi river.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillfort

A lot of work for a hunter-gatherer culture.

The Trelleborgs were built by prehistoric aviators

Almost certainly not, the distance is too great. There was trade going up from Mesoamerica to the southwest US, and there's definnite cultural influence there: You see mesoamerican style ball courts at some sites; but not really past that. We HAVE found a piece of mesoamerican obsidian in Oklahoma, but it would have been traded indirectly (IE, point A to B, B to C, C to D, etc) and the last person to even know about Mesoamerican states in parrticular was likely many, many points of exchange before that.

Pyramids are a pretty logical structure to come by via "convergent evolution", so to speak, the same way that people can easily indepedently come up with clubs or spearrs.

Native americans in what's now the US in general, even if they were generally tribal, weren;t hunter gathers for the most part: Most did farmiing, even iif they weren'tt entirely agircultural.

The Mississpians in particular, which is the group of cultures that made these mounds, were actually basically a civilization: An early one developmentally that probably only just meets the bar, admittedly, but they predominately had towns and cities (pic related being the largest, with 40k people, which is pretty damn impressive: bigger then london at the time) even if they were all wood and earthenware (but then again, so were a lot of more rural/smaller towns in medivial europe) and had social class distinctions. They were basically proto-states, they . They were on par with the early Olmec like at San Lorenzo, for instance, which was the first site of civilization in Mesooamerica.

Unfortunately, Mississippian civiilization collapsed before they could develop further.

Some other Mississippian sites

...

If I gave you that, would you die?

because they were mound builders

That’s a big mound.

4u

what did it look like inside a mound?

>>Unfortunately, Mississippian civiilization collapsed before they could develop further.
What happened to them, various european diseases?

I don’t get it?
Maybe leddit will find you more funny

>mound builders
Which ones?
To answer your very broad question, there's a lot of reasons why people built mounds. Some were for mortuary purposes, some for more generalized ritual sites (and a lot of those pulled double weight as local gathering, feasting and trade centers), and very rarely they were made to direct pilgrims to one of the above (look at the chilicothe highway).

>The Mississpians in particular, which is the group of cultures that made these mounds
the Mississipians were only the last major group to do so, they're significantly predated by the archaic mound complexes like that of Watson Brake (built over 500 years apparently) and Poverty Point, Adena/Hopewell interaction sphere, etc.

And hunter-gatherers DID build them btw.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung
>Its strategic location at the centre of major North American waterways, created a vibrant continent-wide trading network. Having direct contact with European fur traders and explorers of the 17th century, Aboriginal people continued to live in the area throughout the period of the fur trade and settlement eras. Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung permitted easy access to, and interaction with, people from other areas of the continent. It came to be known as a gathering place, where people would trade, share, celebrate and mourn. The Ojibway and their ancestors used the prominent sets of rapids along the Rainy River to fish. Because the rapids never froze, fish were in abundance during every season, thus supporting larger populations.

>So far at this writing, there have been almost 500 circle, square and octagon shaped earthworks, many of which were connected with road ways that also had sections where parallel walls lined both sides of the roadways very similar to earthworks found in central and southern Ohio. These earthworks, like our earthworks, show a people that not only inhabited an area in great numbers, but they also manipulated their topography.