I'm a bit under the weather tonight so if I make less sense than usual thats my excuse. To follow up on the destruction of archaeological sites through burial I wrote an essay on the subject in the late 90's and how it destroyed the Kennewick man's site (I've posted it on my Blogger site http://argosfalcon-thetraveler.blogspot.... ).

I may have told this story before about my experience running into the wall of (we really don't want to hear that) science. It goes like this; I was working on a site in the early 90's just out side Santa Barbara along the coast, the site consisted of a number of burials and those remains were physically of the type one would expect of the pre-7000 B.P. populations. So when the radio-carbon dates came in at 11,500 B.P. the roof came in on us, the no thats not possibles and the questions on sample materials, on how and where we took the samples filled the air so to speak. So we retook some samples got dates around 7500 B.P. and all was right with the world, we never published the findings and the site was forgotten.

With mound sites, they have a very different history one that revolves around some of the earliest ideas about the origins of native Americans and others that may have come before Columbus. The thing that has colored the whole topic steams from the earliest writings about Native people (they are to primitive to have built these monuments) and the need to fit things into world view shaped by certain religions, popular folk histories, and prevailing social theory's. I would also add that in the 18th century there was a thriving fiction market in which the old world met the new in terms closer to the book of Mormon than the Sagas of the Vikings (in fact there was a law suite by one Albert Spalding, against J. Smith over stealing the body of a book that was to be published by someone Smith was working for).

I can on about this but this flu is getting the better of me, and I know I'm missing some of the points commenter's have written. So more soon, as I get my scanner up I'll post some material of a visual nature for you guys to ponder over.