So... Why haven't you heard of it?

The Smithsonian Institution had a rough/rocky start, but finally got off the ground officially in 1846. Part of the reason it struggled for nearly 20 yrs as a concept, is that the Europeans made what seemed to most Americans as a valid argument "What does America have to show/give to the world in the way of ancient civilizations?" - The French under Napoleon, had raided all the Egyptian tombs, and carried all the treasure back to the Louve in Paris. The British had Stonehenge and the Viking burial tombs, other countries had lead expirations to the Far East deserts (China, Babylon, Greece) --- why fund an American Museum, when we had nothing to offer?

But... that all changed when a man named Mordecai Hopewell offered to let them excavate his family farm. What they uncovered has become known as the "Hopewell" Indian culture, or the "Mound builders"

In the wake of Squier and Davis’s report, questions were growing nationally about who the people were that built such amazing earthwork structures and mounds, and clearly showed evidence of an understanding of higher mathematics, advanced engineering, and the cosmos?

As the USA pushed westward, in pursuit of "Manifest Destiny" this began to present a political problem. Fundamentally, it appears that Americans, like the general public in Spain, would not support military removal of "Indians" who have advanced culture, mathematics, engineering & astronomical sciences... but, IF they were simply removing "savages"... the US government could continue breaking treaties with Native American populations, forcibly removing them from lands the USA had promised to them & their children "forever".

Going back as far as Hernando Cortez, the advantages of NOT noticing the culture of the natives was rewarded. Under Catholic rule, any lands that where populated by civilized people, had to have ambassadors/treaties and join the Spanish empire. But lands populated by "savages" could be treated differently, including forced slavery. So... when Moctazuma corrected the Spanish priests about the fact that Christ was NOT crucified on a "T" shaped cross, but was instead nailed to a simple wooden cross bar, then hoisted upon a tree... (which is the Jewish legal execution method for a "traitor to the nation", according to the Dead Sea Copper Scroll) Cortez realized that he was in trouble, and immediately ordered all of the codicies within the cities library burned. Literally thousands of Aztec codifies were destroyed - only a few dozen survived.

So, in 1879, after the discovery of the Newark Stones (1860 - 1867 - all hebrew inscriptions)

Major John Wesley Powell was appointed Director of the Bureau of Ethnology within the Smithsonian

Quotes from men who worked with him about Powell's character:

In 1863, when Congress chartered the National Academy of Sciences, Joseph Henry served as President of the Academy with the function of advising Congress on technical subjects when called upon. Upon the death of Joseph Henry, professor Othniel C. Marsh of Yale, who was a respected Paleontologist and a friend of Huxley and Darwin and a man who would become a major contributor to the documentation of biological evolution, became the president of the Academy. Professor Marsh would become a real ally of Powell for “he was more than an illustrious scientist with firsthand knowledge of the West; he was a man of power, shrewd in political manipulation, solidly backed. For years they were both “engaged in a bitter and rather disgraceful running fight with Professor Edward D. Cope of Pennsylvania.”

“John Wesley Powell was a formidable and dictatorial director of the Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of Ethnology, who in the century before last set down dictum which has ruled the academic roost in American anthropology for more than a hundred years”…Powell put forth the idea “that all early immigrants to North America and South America came by way of the hypothetical Bering Sea Land Bridge.”

"So thoroughly did Powell discredit all purported findings of ancient Indians that a later director of the Bureau of Ethnology admitted that for decades it was a career-killer for an archaeologist to claim to have discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian." -- Charles Mann, p. 148.

Career "killing" questions were known to include, but are not limited to:

• Were the Mound Builders a lost race or were they the ancestors of Native American Indians?
• Were Native American Indians, at one time, a more advanced culture?
• Did any of the Indian tribes of North America ever have contact with outside cultures prior to Columbus?
• How did all the tribes of Indians evolve from just a few families chasing Wooly Mammoths’ across the Bering Strait some 40,000 ?
• If Native Americans all have the same origin, why are there so many different Indian languages?

• Why weren’t the antiquities found in the mounds better preserved by the Smithsonian?
• As Hopwell/Mound Builders are what gave the Smithsonian International credibility, why aren't their artifacts prominently displayed?

Documents also show that Director Powell INTENTIONALLY and specifically sabotaged the Smithsonian's research on the Hopewell/Mound Builder culture. This page is a collection of some of them (https://erenow.net/common/lost-american-antiquities-a-hidden-history-silencing-the-ancient-mound-builders/19.php)

For example "the next time Congress voted money for this bureau in 1881, a group of archaeologists without telling him, persuaded Congress to decree $25,000 be given the bureau for further research, $5,000 must be spent in “continuing … investigation relating to mound-builders and prehistoric mounds. Powell was not very pleased. "

Using the 1882 funding from Congress, Powell hired Cyrus Thomas and established the Division of Mound Explorations. Thomas was not a field archaeologist. He visited the sites on which he reported, but did little if any field work. He had permanent and temporary field assistants and one clerical assistant. They provided him with their notes, which he organized, formed into a report - which was finally published nearly twelve years later in the Bureau’s Annual Report of 1894. This report is considered to be the final word in the controversy over the mounds’ origins, and unfortunately, the "Mongoloid - Bering Strait" (Out of Africa) theory has became the "official" scientific position of the Smithsonian, and provided moral justification for the US's horrific treatment of Native Americans over the last ~150 yrs +/-

Oddly enough, in his report, Thomas argued that The Bat Creek Inscription actually supported his hypothesis that "the Cherokee constructed many earthen mounds"; the evidence being that "the stone represented characters of Cherokee syllabary".

Major J.W. Powell's influence on the Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian can not be underestimated, as witnessed by Item #2 - from "page 2" of the Smithsonian's Current Official statement;

"The physical type of the American Indian is basically Mongoloid, being most closely related to that of the peoples of eastern. central, and northeastern Asia. Archaeological evidence indicates that the ancestors of the present Indians cane into the New World - probably over a land bridge known to have existed in the Being Strait region during the last Ice Age - in a continuing series of small migrations beginning from about 25,000 to 30,000 years ago"

Congresses's stated purpose for allocating these funds "was to explore the origins of earthen mounds found predominately throughout the eastern United States". Instead, the Bureau used the money to became dominant recognized authority for the study of American Indians... as opposed to allowing Native Americans to speak for themselves.

Powell would remain to guide the new Bureau of Ethnology until his death in 1902.

"Why trust the knowledge of a brick maker about jewels?" - Og Mandino

However, we actually have the testimonies / original records of the men who actually dug the mounds, ...which contain several accounts of finding swords...

E.G. Squires and the other men digging KNEW that these structures were created as a desperate last stand by the civilization they were uncovering...

but, John Wesely Powell KNEW about the Book of Mormon...

What got E.G.Squires in trouble with the Smithsonian, and eventually got Powell to fired him, was the fact that he refused to deny that these were military fortifications, and that there was evidence of massive warfare, and the death of thousands;

"Human bones have been discovered ...in nearly every part of the trench skeletons of adults of both sexes, of children, and infants... They seem to have been thrown together promiscuously. The skulls were in some cases fractured, as if by a blow from a hatchet or club. "

There are a dozen such testimonies by men of the era who actually dug the mounds (NOT Powell/his staff who edited the papers) - all of whom talk about these "fortifications" being selected for their military advantage of high ground or water sources within the walls...