Metallurgy II

The Smithsonian Institution had a rough/rocky start, but finally got off the ground in 1846 when Ephraim G. Squier & Edwin H. Davis were the official surveyors of what would come to be known as the Hopewell / Adena civilizations.

Their publication "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" - published two years later in 1848 - is considered a landmark in American scientific research, because it was the very first Smithsonian Institution publication. The book has 306 pages, 48 lithographed maps and plates, and 207 wood engravings.

In the wake of Squier and Davis’s report, questions were still looming about who the people were that built such amazing earthwork structures and mounds, which provided evidence of an understanding of higher mathematics, metallurgy, advanced engineering, and the cosmos?

However, these questions became a problem for the USA. In pursuit of "Manifest Destiny" they kept breaking treaties with Native American populations, forcibly moving them time and time again from reservations and lands the USA had promised to give them "forever". This became a PR problem, because the general public will not support military removal of "Indians" if they were more than simply "savages"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley_Powell

John Wesley Powell was a veteran of the Civil war, where he lost an arm, then took a job as professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan University, which allowed students (including young ladies) to take a "May term" trip to Yellowstone in Colorado. Here he met William H. Dunn, a local trading post owner. Together, Powell and Dunn hatched a plan to get the US Congress to supply the boats, equipment & camping supplies (including food) pay them to explore the Colorado River while allowing Dunn's friends to get rich trapping beaver, and killing buffalo along the way.

Their trip was a disaster with Dunn and the Howlund brothers hiking out of the canyon at "separation rapids". The Mormons at St. Thomas (now under water in Lake Mead) rescued them and got Powell back to SLC, then a train ride back to Washington D.C. However, Powell abandoned the other five men in his party in the desert of Nevada, north of Las Vegas.

In March 1879, the Bureau of Ethnology was established within the Smithsonian Institution... and Major John Wesley Powell was the director. In 1882 Powell, under instruction from Congress, established the Division of Mound Explorations. One of its purposes was to explore the origins of earthen mounds found predominately throughout the eastern United States. It was the first of three temporary, yet significant, subunits supported by the Bureau. In spite of its limited resources and with a staff never larger than twenty, the Bureau became recognized as the foremost center for the study of American Indians. Cyrus Thomas published his conclusions in the Bureau’s Annual Report of 1894, which is considered to be the final word in the controversy over the mounds’ origins. With the publication of Thomas’ findings, the Division’s work came to a close. Powell would remain to guide the new Bureau of Ethnology until his death in 1902.

Historical evidence seems to show that Powell INTENTIONALLY sabotaged the Smithsonian's research on the Hopewell/Mound Builder culture. This page has a sampling of some of the tactics used by Powell...

“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.”

-- Rydholm, pgs. 403-404.

"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:

•Did any of the Indian tribes of North America ever have contact with outside cultures prior to Columbus?•Were the Mound Builders a lost race or were they the ancestors of Native American Indians, who were at one time a more advanced culture?•Were all the American Indian tribes indigenous or does their ancestry DNA show a mixture from other cultures worldwide?•Did all the tribes of Indians evolve from a few families chasing Wooly Mammoths’ across the Bering Strait some 40,000 plus years ago?•Why weren’t the antiquities of the Mound-Building cultures better preserved?•Why don’t we read more about these early American civilizations in our early American history textbooks?•If all the Indians are from the same origin, why are there so many different Indian languages?•Did decisions made in the 1800s concerning the Mound Builders or the suppression of that information, have an impact on how history has been handed down to our day?

However, the Squire/Davis report had 30+ years head start - before Major Powell got into the game, more than 2,500+ ruins had been found. Many had been excavated, and there were wonderful examples of all kinds of things being publicly displayed...

Modern scholar's acknowledge that one of Squier and Davis's most important achievements was their systematic approach to surveying, mapping, documenting, and analyzing the sites they surveyed

E.G. Squire spent nearly three decades of his life surveying the Hopewell mounds. He eventually got sideways/then fired by the Major Powell because he refused to have his name/reputation on the books he insisted publishing, because of what he called "heavy editing" of his official reports by J.W. Powell.

Powell's eventually fired Squire over his refusal to remove his findings about metallurgy & large scale warfare from the Smithsonian's vol - 2, Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York (1849) that he published Antiquities of the State of New York in 1851 and included them.

However, Mr. Powell/The Smithsonian so thoroughly discredited him in a massive newspaper smear campaign, that most archaeologists today will not accept this second volume as fact.

Unfortunately, this has became the "official" scientific position of the USA, and allowed the moral justification for our inhumane treatment of Native Americans for the last ~150 yrs +/-

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. Archeological 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"

http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/smithsonianletter2.htm

The part that got Squires in trouble with the Powell/Smithsonian, was the fact that these were military fortifications, and that there was evidence of massive warfare/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 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...

The men who did the digging KNEW that these structures were the desperate last stand for the people they dug up.

Alma 50:1

"And now it came to pass that Moroni did not stop making preparations for war, or to defend his people against the Lamanites; for he caused that his armies should commence in the commencement of the twentieth year of the reign of the judges, that they should commence in digging up heaps of earth round about all the cities, throughout all the land which was possessed by the Nephites.

Alma 49:18

"Now behold, the Lamanites could not get into their forts of security by any other way save by the entrance, because of the highness of the bank which had been thrown up, and the depth of the ditch which had been dug round about, save it were by the entrance."

Alma 53:3-4

"...and he [Moroni] caused that they should build a breastwork of timbers upon the inner bank of the ditch; and they cast up dirt out of the ditch against the breastwork of timbers; and thus they did cause the Lamanites to labor until they had encircled the city of Bountiful round about with a strong wall of timbers and earth, to an exceeding height."

Alma 50:2-3

"...upon the top of these ridges of earth he caused that there should be timbers, yea, works of timbers built up to the height of a man, round about the cities."

Angel Mounds,

State Historic Site Indiana

Which is ironic, because today, you can still go see this type of "palisade, covered in clay" defensive structure...

Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon 16 yrs before E.G. Squire & Davis did their first survey and 18 yrs before the Smithsonian's first official publication

Two of the artifacts that Powell would spend a great deal of time/effort trying to "erase" had actually been on display to the public for many years in the Smithsonian's museum.

These "head plates" are referenced several times in the Book of Mormon (Alma 43, Alma 49, Helaman 1, 3 Nephi 4 & Ether 15) but is most memorable in the story of Captian Moroni, who tore up his coat, wrote on it, fastened to a pole and called it the "Title of Liberty" (Alma 46:13)

"And he fastened on his HEAD-PLATE, and his breastplate, and his shields, and girded on his armor about his loins..."

- Most Latter Day Saints translate this description mentally in their minds to "helmet"... because that is our background/culture/artwork depict this...