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A Comment on John Rowzée Peyton and the Mound Builders: The Elevation of a Nineteenth-Century Fraud to a Twentieth-Century Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jeffrey K. Yelton
Jeffrey K. Yelton*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211
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Abstract

Blakeslee (1987) has suggested that the Mound Builder myth in part can be traced to John Rowzée Peyton, who reportedly crossed the Great Plains in 1774 and probed a mound, attributing it to a past, non-Indian civilization. However, critical examination of the account, first published in 1867, indicates that John Rowzée Peyton’s adventure actually was invented by his grandson, John Lewis Peyton.

Type
Comments
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 161 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1989

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References

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