American Antiquities, and Discoveries in the West, Josiah Priest, 1833

Focused heavily on the North American earthworks, fortifications, and burial mounds that fascinated early frontier researchers, this compilation details various 19th-century theories regarding a lost pre-Columbian civilization. Josiah Priest relies on contemporary travel journals, geographic surveys, and early academic findings to argue that ancient cultures from Europe, the Mediterranean, and Asia inhabited the American continent centuries before Columbus. The pages detail the physical layouts of massive structures across Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, illustrated by folding woodcut plates that map out complex geometric enclosures, trenches, and artifacts found within the soil.

Josiah Priest’s writing captures a major turning point in early American historiography and the popular "Mound Builders" myth that gripped the public imagination in the 1830s. Rather than viewing Native Americans as the creators of these sophisticated structures, the author attributes them to an extinct, partially civilized population, cross-referencing biblical texts and classical mythology to build his case. It stands as a vital piece of cultural history, illustrating how early American researchers attempted to construct a romanticized, ancient past for the continent before the birth of rigorous modern archaeology.

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