The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans.

Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting.

Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history - but one that sounds like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost White race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this “ancient” myth has clear echoes in today’s arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, “alternative facts", and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.

The book is published by University of Oklahoma Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

“The Mound Builder Myth shows that the battle between science and superstition never ends.” (David La Vere, author of Looting Spiro Mounds: An American King Tut’s Tomb)