Canals, Calendars, and Cities: The Builders and Astronomers of Native America
By Marcus Ellery Vance
Length4h 41m
About this audiobook
For most of the nineteenth century, educated Americans agreed that Indians could not have built the great earthworks of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The mounds were too big and too geometric, so a vanished race must have raised them: Toltecs, the lost tribes of Israel, wanderers out of Wales or Atlantis. Then the Bureau of Ethnology sent Cyrus Thomas, a Tennessean who expected to confirm the myth, to survey mounds from Wisconsin to Florida. He matched the pots, pipes and shell gorgets in the ground to work still made by Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek hands, and in 1894 he published his verdict. The builders were the ancestors of the nations still living around the mounds.
That verdict opens a tour of the hemisphere's builders, farmers and thinkers. It begins at dawn on the six concentric ridges of Poverty Point in Louisiana, raised by people who fished and hunted and had not yet planted a single seed of corn, and moves on through the Hopewell trade web, Cahokia, the desert canal-builders and Chaco Canyon's great houses. Then it turns south to the Maya who wrote in stone, the lake city of Tenochtitlan and the high Andes, before coming north again to the Haudenosaunee longhouse and its law, the northern forests, and the winter counts of the Plains.
At Poverty Point nobody wrote down what the hunters saw when the sun came up behind the bird mound. "The record was the ground itself, and the ground held."
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 41 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Mounds at Dawn
2Chapter 2: The Hopewell Web
3Chapter 3: City of the Sun
4Chapter 4: The Desert Engineers
5Chapter 5: The Great Houses
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6Chapter 6: Children of the Corn
7Chapter 7: The Writers of Stone
8Chapter 8: The People of the Lake
9Chapter 9: The Sky Kingdom
10Chapter 10: The Longhouse and the Law
11Chapter 11: The Northern Forests
12Chapter 12: The Winter Count
13About the Author
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