Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2215
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
It's reckoned that there were a million mound sites in North America, if you go back to 1500. There's about 100,000 left, which is a lot actually. But most of them are massively destroyed and the other 900,000 have gone, just plowed under, turned into farmland.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The broad claim that most North American mounds and earthworks were plowed under and turned into farmland is well documented. The National Park Service records that of some 600 Hopewell earthworks once present in Ohio, most were leveled by settlers to flatten fields, and that nearly all of the many renowned earthwork complexes of southern Ohio were reduced by two centuries of plowing and later mechanized agriculture. The specific numbers Hancock cites, however, are not mainstream archaeology: the one-million total (and the paired figure of about 100,000 surviving) originates with independent researcher Gregory L. Little, who extrapolated far beyond the roughly 100,000 mound sites cataloged in the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology surveys of the 1880s to 1890s. Peer-reviewed and agency sources describe the original mound-building record as numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands regionally, with no continent-wide census supporting a pre-1500 total of one million. In short, the loss narrative is accurate while the one-million figure is a speculative estimate, not an established archaeological finding.