Mound Builders still fascinate us. In his latest book, Martin Byers states that while Mound Builders were Native Americans, their sociopolitical complexity is a myth. He claims that prehistoric Eastern Woodland chiefdoms never developed. Rejecting evolutionary “community polity” models of tribes and chiefdoms with unilineal descent and exclusive territoriality, he tells an “alternate” historical story of Mound Builders from 200 BC to AD 1450 that focuses on the abrupt appearance of widespread “bifurcated” Hopewellian and Mississippian mound-building. When Hopewell earthworks were abandoned, dispersed initial Late Woodland “nonbifurcated” social systems emerged, followed by “integrated” terminal Late Woodland communities. Mississippian “bifurcated” societies (replicas of Hopewell) appeared abruptly, but their mound centers were abandoned by AD 1450, when nucleated late Mississippian settlements (“integrated” social systems) were established. Historic Mississippian polities in the Southeast described by Europeans were ruled by hereditary chiefs, but Byers believes that they were heterarchical societies led by revitalized autonomous cult sodalities.

Byers is critical of models of cultural change presented by archaeologists who conducted excavations at Hopewell earthwork and mound complexes and Mississippian mound centers and/or examined curated cultural materials and documents from earlier investigations. For Byers, large Hopewell geometric earthworks and Mississippian temple towns are really the same type of site, ceremonial centers with collective burials that were visited by members of many different tribes who stayed in “hostels” during times when rituals for the living and dead and sacred games were conducted. From Byers's perspective, Mound City and Cahokia may not look that different, but anyone who excavated Hopewell and Mississippian sites is aware of the great differences. Byers may be correct about transient activities at Hopewell earthworks. Variation in the form of excavated structures inside and near the embankments, and the absence of food refuse or storage pits in them, seems to support this view. The mobile Hopewell lived at a time when there were no villages or effective maize farming. They congregated at earthworks for scheduled rituals, which helped integrate their often dispersed populations.

Large Mississippian mound centers were different, surrounded by palisades with bastions and occupied by elites and commoners who lived in houses with storage/refuse pits (often concealed beneath house floors). Many Mississippian pits contain the remains of rice rat (Oryzomys palustris), a commensal species attracted to foods stored for year-round use that is associated with sedentary occupations. While quite common at late prehistoric villages, their remains have only been found at a handful of Middle Woodland sites. There also is ample evidence for institutionalized hereditary inequality at Mississippian sites. By conflating Hopewell tribes and Mississippian chiefdoms into a single “bifurcated” social type, and by ignoring their definitive differences and the results of new investigations, Byers's story of the Mound Builders becomes just another myth about these remarkable ancient Native Americans.

In writing his story of the Mound Builders, Byers takes ideas such as “social cycling,” kinship by “filiation,” and “false starts” in social evolutionary trajectories elaborated by Joyce Marcus, Kent Flannery, David Anderson, and Vernon James Knight, Jr. (among others), and repackages them as parts of his overly complicated concepts. His “dual complementary heterarchical community/cult sodalities” are just one example of this. He claims that pantribal companion-based cult sodalities had leaders who organized and integrated different kin-based communities and built mounds and earthworks. Cult sodalities were the core of “bifurcated” mound-building societies. However, Byers does not present any ethnographic descriptions of these processes. Instead, he describes them using Western analogies and metaphors: squatters, hostels, franchises, bailiffs, judges, etc. Indigenous perspectives are rare. In spite of his claims of cultural continuity, he develops models without any real ethnographic analogues and reinforces the view of Native American Mound Builders as remarkable cultures that no longer exist. This denies their connection with their Native American descendants.

For 50 years, Robert L. Hall used ethnographic and archaeological data to document continuity and variation in Native American ideology centered on world renewal, fertility, adoption, healing, and mourning. Byers uses most of Hall's concepts in his dual model of deep structural cosmology/ethos and surface structural ideology/worldview, but he ignores adoption rituals (e.g., calumet ceremonies) that would have increased cultural and genetic variation in burials beneath mounds, which Byers attributes to the reburial of individuals from distant lands by leaders of cult sodalities. There are many more contradictions and inconsistencies in this book and no real empirical tests of the models he discounts. For new insights, readers should read Hall's work, the studies that Byers criticizes, volumes on the Hopewell and Cahokia authored and edited by Mark Lynott (Hopewell Ceremonial Landscapes of Ohio: More than Mounds and Geometric Earthworks, 2015) and John Kelly and James A. Brown (Cahokia: City of the Cosmos, forthcoming) in Oxbow Books’ American Landscapes series, and George R. Milner's The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America (2004).