Indians and Aliens

IT TOOK JASON Colavito eight years to write The Mound Builder Myth, but the project seems tailor-made for 2020. It starts with multiple waves of a pandemic and ends with conspiracies, white supremacists, and a battle between science and superstition.

At the heart of the book lie the large earthen mounds that cover a vast portion of North America. The earliest of these, Colavito points out, “were standing in their solemn glory five centuries before the Egyptians raised their pyramids.” They were built by Native Americans, but in the 19th century a legend took hold that a lost white race had constructed them. This manufactured myth didn’t just ignore indigenous American civilizations. It fed into the