For decades, living in Phoenix, I studied Georgia mounds. There was something about them that felt like the Chicago to Cahokia Mounds' New York. Why was Georgia such an important place for an ancient civilization?
We know the NA people moved in and used these mound areas and built upon them like Egyptians did with pyramids and Aztecs did at Teotihuacan.
There are plenty of legends among the Cherokee of Judaculla, a slant-eyed giant with superhuman strength who tried to take a tribal woman for his wife.
And, they weren't the only tribe with legends of giants. As far away as the Seneca up north in New York and into Ontario, there were legends of the "stone giant" cannibal.
You could spit and hit a land where the Native People had legends of these giants.
We only have proof that the Native People used the mound areas, but who actually built them and why?
Here in Georgia, there is a newspaper clipping of a giant being found near Rockmart, Georgia. Interestingly, that is about 19 miles from the Etowah Mounds, and today several miles from a well-documented Bigfoot land.
(newspaper below 1887)
This is a region with lots of mining. It seems that mining and giants always went together.
Let's discuss the Etowah mounds -
CARTERSVILLE GA
etowah mounds
The Etowah Mounds 54-acre ancient complex in Bartow, Georgia was supposedly occupied through three different phases. from 1000 CE to 1550 BC. Once again, an ancient location abandoned.
LINK: Artifacts. The artifacts discovered in burials within the Etowah site indicate that its residents developed an artistically and technically advanced culture. Numerous copper tools, weapons and ornamental copper plates accompanied the burials of members of Etowah's elite class.
Do the Cherokee take credit for the mounds? It was said that the Cherokee do not take credit for the mounds, but they do say they warred much with the "tribe" that built them.
The catch-all for explaining the builders of the mounds is "Mississippian Mound Culture." This was used throughout the mound building sites in the US. It's rather like the "Toltecs," a name given for the builders of the megalithic pyramids of Teotihuacan. It's also like the term "otamid" used by anthropologists to explain strange shaped skulls with archaic features and large sizes found througout the world. These terms mean nothing really, only an identifier of an unknown culture.
We had a missing tribe in the Phoenix, Arizona area called the HoHoKam. They lived in poorly built shacks and farmed. They utilized canals that archaeologists attribue to them building (10 feet deep and hundreds of miles across the Valley of the Sun) and they also attribute to the HoHoKam the Casa Grande Ruins that had pyramids and a huge building observatory. Given the lack of tools and building skills, it would seem a preoposterous thing, but one thing archaeologists won't tolerate is saying, "I don't know." They had a tribe in the area using these advanced things and they said they must have built them. It's rather like someone assuming you built your house because you use it.
Eagle Point Mound, Georgia
Early megalithic structures showed a strange, highly advanced construction technique we would have a lot of trouble imitating now, but then suddenly, when those cultures vanished, the people who moved in and settled had no idea how or who built these massive beasts.
So, earlier cultures reached a level of sophistication and then showed evidence of disappearing. Chinese pyramids, Egyptian pyramids, Finds in Mexico, Central, and South America, Malta, and other sites around the world are missing the intelligence that built the megalithic structures and then stopped building....
Interestingly, Wisconsin had these animal effigies on the ground, hundreds of them. These cultures showed mining, mounds, and animal effigies of this "Mississippian" culture, but they don't show these traits in the NA people when Europeans arrived. And, for tribes across the entire country that were generally isolated from other tribes to suddenly be building and mining and doing geoglyphs on the ground of the same design shows a traveling, trading culture of advanced knowledge. So where did those native people go?
America is rather like "Planet of the Apes." There were earlier structures that we live among, we hide the origins of them as "dangerous" to our self-important egos, and so we dance around the reality that WE did not build these. WE cannot claim them.
(article above) another giant found and other various mounds - all in a region of mining. These giants were often found with copper implements and shell ornaments.
There is a correlation made between Native American people and mining copper that they were mining as long ago as 6800 years ago, but that is made because no one recognizes any other people here before or beside the NA, although you speak to tribes around the US and they all have tales of the "others."
Tribes in Wisconsin, when asked if their people mined there long ago, stated, "no, it was the people of the North." And, honestly, we do not see in their lifestyle or what they valued, that the NA were mining metals or building societies based upon it, but trading, perhaps. In fact, when early Spanish arrived on the coast in Texas, the Karankawa Indians had arrows with copper tips. When asked where they got the copper, they traded with people to the north. And, as found in many mounds with giant remains, shells from the Gulf Coast adorned the buried.
Borjomi Gorge, GA find
Ockmulgee Mounds, Georgia had a 13-foot skeleton reportedly dug up.
Honestly, as archaeology is a forensic study, correlations are their main tool - you find something old in America and the only other older culture here was Amerindians, so attribute all these finds to these people.
We don't see either a knowledge among the present NA about how and why these structures were originally built, and we don't see them continuing the traditions. Why have traditions of amazing builds and mining and then suddenly not use it anymore??? This is like the Egyptians trying to explain the pyramids. There was an assumption these amazing structures were of the gods and so became sacred.
My best advice to those seeking answers is, enjoy the sites, enjoy the artifacts, but take the plaques that explain what you're seeing with a grain of salt. A great deal of that info is filtered, pasteurized, and stilted toward accepted narratives about history.
Does Georgia have ancient giants still in their clay soil? Oh, I would say most definitely!