Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley

Henshaw, Henry W. (Henry Wetherbee), 1850-1930Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.1
Word count
106K words
Chapters
11

Tags

English Originals History and CultureFolk Art Animal CarvingsPrehistoric ArtifactScience EnlightenmentArchaeological DiscoveryNature ObservationIllustrated GuideAcademic StudyNative North AmericansMississippi ValleyFolk Customs

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley by Henry W. HenshawAuthor: Henshaw, Henry W. (Henry Wetherbee), 1850-1930,Language: English, Class: E011: History: America: America, Release Date: Apr 17, 2006

Editor's review

This book is a focused study by Henry W. Henshaw of animal-form carvings unearthed from mounds in the Mississippi Valley, a primary document of early American archaeology. Its value lies not in final answers but in showing how late nineteenth-century scholars observed, classified, and debated these objects: the author examines the carvings' form, material, and possible symbolic meaning category by category, while responding to the heated contemporary debate over the identity of the mound builders. Readers can sense the caution and groping of a discipline whose methods were not yet settled, and see how visual material was used to infer the beliefs and contacts of ancient peoples. For today's reader it is more a slice of scholarly history: later research can be set against it to test its judgments, and its descriptions can be used to understand the physical features of the objects. Suited to slow reading as supplementary material for American archaeology, museum studies, or material culture research; not an introductory general history.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the closing and discussion sections first to grasp the author's central points of contention, then return to the detailed object descriptions.
  2. Prepare a notebook to organize the author's criteria for distinguishing animal categories, for comparison with later research.
  3. Look up place names and site names on a map as you go to build a sense of space and avoid fragmented descriptions.
  4. Read it as a historical source rather than conclusions, noting which inferences depend on assumptions of the time.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this book suitable for readers with no archaeological background at all? Not really. The whole book analyzes specific objects and assumes some familiarity with mound sites and archaeological classification. Readers starting from zero will easily lose the thread amid terminology and debate; read a general history of American archaeology first, then come back to it.
Can the views in this book still be quoted directly today? They should not be quoted as conclusions. The book reflects observations and inferences from an early stage of research, and some interpretations have been revised by later scholarship. The safer use is as a document in the history of the discipline, testing its methods and evidence against modern research.
How difficult is the English original? It is academic prose with long but grammatically regular sentences, and specialized vocabulary concentrated in descriptions of objects and sites. Readers with university-level English can finish it with a dictionary; the point is not speed but working through the argument paragraph by paragraph.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Henshaw, Henry W. (Henry Wetherbee), 1850-1930 Author · American · 1850–1930

Henry Wetherbee Henshaw (1850–1930) was an American ornithologist and ethnologist who served as director of the Bureau of American Ethnology. He devoted long attention to the birds of the American West and also engaged with the study of Native American cultures, and these two interests gave his writings a dual character, combining natural-history observation with ethnographic record. His representative work, Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley, discusses animal figures carved and recovered from Native American mound sites and falls within the fields of archaeology and ethnology. Henshaw's writing rests on materials gathered through fieldwork; his style is plain and sober, concentrating on the description and analysis of specific remains. Although Chinese translations of his works and related public materials are limited, he is still regarded as a scholar worth mentioning in the development of American museology and ethnology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.