Giant Skeletons and the Smithsonian Name: How the Story Began in North American Mounds

In 1894, Cyrus Thomas of the United States Bureau of Ethnology published a report of more than seven hundred pages on ancient earth mounds across North America. He recorded mound sizes, burials, objects placed with the dead, and human bones. His conclusion was direct: the mounds of the Mississippi Valley were built by Indigenous communities. They were not the work of a vanished secret race.