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The Adena mounds
A burial mound is a heap of earth raised over one or more graves, and in the Ohio valley they were built up in layers across generations. Adena precedes and grades into Hopewell, and the division between them is an archaeological convention rather than a break in population. In the nineteenth century the mounds were attributed to a lost "mound builder race" — Phoenicians, Vikings, Israelites — because Americans of the day would not believe the ancestors of the peoples they were displacing had built them. The Smithsonian survey of 1894 refuted this; the myth persisted for decades regardless.
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