major funding for Odyssey was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities additional funding was provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Polaroid Corporation [Music] the scoto river in Ohio was once a major Waterway for a people who left their mark on the land by building great structures of Earth embankments ramp Parts ditches and [Music] mounds civil engineer James Marshall sees the Mounds as proof their prehistoric Indian Builders were highly skilled in mathematics and surveying and Marshall is not the first to be impressed by the engineering skills revealed in these Mounds over a century ago these same Earthworks were surveyed by two citizens of the nearby town of chilicothe Ohio but Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis saw the Mounds not as proof of the skills of their Indian Builders but his proof instead that the Indians could not have built them that the Mounds were the work of a wondrous and tragically vanished civilization a lost race the Mounds and the great geometric Banks of Earth have been changed by time and so too have the stories white men have told about [Music] them this film is about those stories and the questions they've tried to answer who built the Mounds how and [Music] why the stories began in the late 1700s when white settlers pushing down the Ohio River came across mounds and Earthworks like these at Marietta everywhere in the Valley of the Ohio were immense brooding mounds and rings and lines of Earthworks to Farmers the Mounds were simply a nuisance but others saw the Mounds as miraculous proof that North America's prehistory was as rich as the Old Worlds and Central and South Americas who had labored to build such astonishing Works surely not the few Surly and clearly uncivilized Indians who then lived in the area but almost anyone else was a can Cate Harvard University's Ian Brown they were attributed to Vikings the Welsh the Lost tribes of Israel you name it every group had some sort of responsibility for the construction of the Mounds except the Indians by the early 1800s the popular imagination was seized by the idea that America had once been peopled by a race of Supermen or at least of white men or at least of people who built the Mounds as they passed through North America on their way to founding the great civilizations of [Music] Mexico learned gentlemen began Excavating Mounds finding in them ornate artifacts of stone pottery and copper and the remains of the mound builders [Music] themselves it was skulls excavated ated from Mounds in Tennessee and Mississippi that in the 1830s became the object of the first scientific attempt to answer the question who were the mound builders Dr Samuel Morton of Philadelphia was devising ways to measure skulls filling a skull with mustard seeds was the first step and the most important measurement skull volume Morton's goal was to use skull measurements to reveal the differences between races but his comparison of Mound build ER skulls with those of modern Indians showed them to be almost identical the only conclusion was that mound builders and Indians were the same race perhaps embarrassed by this finding Morton devised two major tribes within this single race the mound builders belonged to one of these tribes along with the people who created the high civilizations of Mexico and the modern North American Indian belonged to the other tribe which Morton called barbarus so he managed to fit his facts to the popular view that the mound builders were not the ancestors of the modern Indians who were clearly uncivilized Savages Morton's conclusions published in his book crania Americana also accommodated the idea that it was the barbarous Indians who wiped out the noble mound builders and increasingly popular view distilled in a mid 19th century poem by William Cullen Bryant as all The Verdant waste I guide my Steed the hollow beating of his footsteps seems a sacriligious sound I think of those upon whose rest he tramples are they here the dead of other [Music] days let the mighty Mounds that overlook the river or that rise in the dim Forest crowded with old oak sanser a race that long has passed away built them a disciplined and populous race heaped with long toil the Earth while yet the Greek was rearing on its Rock the glittering pathon the Red Man Came the roaming Hunter tribes warlike and Fierce and the mound builders van vanished from the earth the Solitude of centuries Untold has settled where they dwelt all is gone all save the piles of Earth that hold their bones the platforms where they worshiped unknown Gods the barriers which they builded from the soil to keep the foe at Bay one by one the strongholds of the plain were heaped with Corpses the brown vultures of the wood flocked to those vast uncovered sepers and sat unscared and Silent at their feast what was the appeal of the idea that the Mounds were built by a lost race the Smithsonian institution's Bruce Smith it was a very romantic and a very dramatic explanation for it and it was also an explanation that sort of left out the Indian groups that existed in North America uh when the first Europeans arrived and if you leave out these indigenous Indian populations as having anything to do with these mysterious mounds of the past you get a very around a very awkward problem that faced the uh the whites that occupi the Eastern United States if you connected these Mounds with the Indian groups that existed in the eastern United States this would demonstrate that these Indians had a relatively high level of cultural development which would have strengthened their claim of ownership to the lands that they were being driven out [Music] of it is no coincidence that the mound builder myth became more popular during the time when Indian tribes like the Cherokee and Chaka were winding their way along the Trail of Tears from their homelands in Mississippi Alabama and Georgia to the territories west of the Mississippi at the point of the white man's gun