MoundLore engagement report

Best tweets

• Sep 30, 2026331x their median

  Wisconsin LiDAR https://t.co/ljPFrROYKh

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• Sep 2, 2026164x their median

  In 1869, a group of Ohio citizens decided they were finally going to find out what was inside the enormous prehistoric mound overlooking the Great Miami River at Miamisburg. They started from the top and sank a vertical shaft essentially the entire way through it, eventually reaching below the original ground surface. Two horizontal tunnels were cut outward from the shaft. Eight feet down they encountered a human burial: a skeleton placed sitting upright, reportedly covered with bark and clay. Then the mound kept going. At roughly 24 feet they hit a carefully arranged layer of flat stones. Farther down was another feature surrounded by decayed logs. Between them were layers of earth, ash, charcoal and stone… the remains of separate construction episodes accumulated as the monument grew. And this wasn’t some little pile of dirt. Miamisburg Mound is still about 65 feet high, roughly 300 feet across and contains around 54,000 cubic yards of earth. It stands on a ridge another 100 feet above the Great Miami River valley. Ohio History Connection considers it one of the two largest conical mounds in eastern North America. The 1869 excavation actually lowered the summit by several feet. And after driving a shaft through almost the entire monument, they still had examined only a tiny fraction of it. Miamisburg Mound has never been systematically excavated. Which means one of the largest surviving Indigenous earthworks in America still contains almost its entire archaeological record exactly where its builders left it.

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• Mar 16, 202528x their median

  Tucked away in Ohio’s countryside is a site few have heard of, but one that whispers of an ancient past—Cross Mound. A forgotten earthwork, a mysterious design, and a history that barely made it into the textbooks. Let’s uncover what’s left of its story. 🧵⬇️

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• Sep 1, 202626x their median

  How Many Pyramids Are Still Hidden Across America?! 😳 -Ed Barnhart https://t.co/CFvqqbRhav

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• Apr 24, 20259.2x their median

  Heading into the Ohio Valley for the next few days. I’ll post photos as I go nothing flashy. Just what I see, how it feels. This’ll be the spam thread so I don’t flood the feed. Follow along if you’re into that kind of thing.🧵

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• Apr 28, 20254.1x their median

  In a quiet corner of Ohio, American Revolutionary heroes are buried alongside ancient mounds built over 2,000 years ago. Marietta’s Mound Cemetery is more than a graveyard. It’s where two civilizations separated by centuries share the same sacred ground🧵

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• Sep 3, 20266.4x their median

  There’s an ancient city outside Phoenix that archaeologists excavated twice. Then they buried it again. Snaketown sat along the Gila River and for centuries was one of the major communities in the desert world archaeologists call Hohokam. This wasn’t a handful of houses hanging on in bad country. It had hundreds of homes, cemeteries, public spaces, two large ballcourts and fields fed by canals cut across the desert. That last part matters because the Phoenix basin only looks empty if you don’t know what was here. People along the Gila and Salt built enormous irrigation networks and supported permanent communities in a landscape most Americans still imagine as basically uninhabitable before modern plumbing. Snaketown helped blow that idea apart. Archaeologists opened huge parts of it in 1934–35, then came back in the 1960s. They found generations of houses, cremations, canals, ballcourts and enough pottery and other material to help build much of the archaeological timeline still used for southern Arizona. And then they covered it back up. Not metaphorically. They filled the excavations. There’s no reconstructed city sitting there for tourists, no trail wandering through exposed foundations, no attempt to freeze the place at the exact moment archaeologists found it. Congress protected the site in 1972, but Snaketown remains on Gila River Indian Community land and is closed to the public. I think that’s what makes it such a good archaeology story. Most of the time discovery gets treated like the dirt was just hiding the important part. At Snaketown, eventually somebody understood the dirt was protecting it. So one of the most important ancient cities in the Southwest was opened, mapped, photographed and studied, then handed back to the desert. Most of it is still there. You just can’t walk through it.

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• Sep 2, 20265.4x their median

  Where angry waters roll (1936) - Edwin Sundberg (American, 1898 - 1978). Digitally enhanced by me. https://t.co/eaKK6BDJ55

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• Jan 3, 20263.5x their median

  I remember walking beside them, trying to match their pace. Old cemeteries first. Always first. We’d move through them together, slow, almost absent-minded, like this was just another stop along the way. Stones leaning into grass. Some names still sharp, others worn down to nothing. I’d read what I could, then stop trying. I wasn’t there to learn who they were. I was there because we were there. I stayed close. Close enough to feel included, far enough to not be in the way. Then, somewhere past the marked ground, things would change. We’d leave the rows and paths behind. No signs now. No dates. Just land. Hills that didn’t quite make sense. Shapes that weren’t natural enough to ignore but not obvious enough to explain. Conversation would thin out. Someone would stop. Someone else would nod. Indian burials. Old mounds. No one turned to me. No one lowered themselves to my level to explain. I wasn’t being taught. I was being allowed to witness. Cemeteries felt like endings. These places didn’t. They felt occupied in a way I didn’t yet have words for. Like something was still present, not demanding attention, just expecting respect. I stood the way they stood. Hands still. Feet planted. Watching where they stepped and, more importantly, where they didn’t. I learned without realizing I was learning. I was young enough that I didn’t fully understand death, but old enough to recognize when something mattered. The Ozarks helped with that. I felt small there. Looking back, I think what stayed with me wasn’t the sites themselves, but how I was positioned in them. I wasn’t centered. I wasn’t the reason we were there. I was simply present, absorbing the weight of it without anyone trying to frame it for me. I didn’t walk away with facts or stories. I walked away with a feeling I still recognize. That sense of standing on ground that remembers, even when you don’t yet know how. That feeling still drives me.

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• Sep 2, 20262.5x their median

  On July 3, 1976, during America’s Bicentennial, somebody buried a time capsule on top of a prehistoric burial mound in Marietta, Ohio. It is supposed to stay there for 100 years. The mound is Conus, a roughly 30-foot-high burial mound surrounded by its original ditch and embankment. It formed part of the much larger Marietta Earthworks, an Indigenous ceremonial landscape of mounds, geometric enclosures and a massive graded passage descending toward the Muskingum River. When the Ohio Company founded Marietta in 1788, the earthworks were still substantial enough that the new town was laid out around them. Several major features were deliberately reserved as public ground, making Marietta one of the earliest examples in the United States of an attempt to preserve ancient earthworks. Much of the complex was eventually destroyed anyway. Ancient embankments were leveled. Much of the Sacra Via was lost. Soil from earthworks was even hauled away for brickmaking. Conus survived largely because in 1801 Marietta placed a cemetery around it. That created an extraordinary landscape. An ancient Indigenous burial mound sits at its center. Around it are generations of American graves, including an unusually large concentration of Revolutionary War officers and some of the men who founded Marietta itself. Then in 1976 another generation carried something to the summit. A time capsule was placed beneath a plaque on top of Conus with instructions that it remain sealed until July 4, 2076. People built a monument for the dead here roughly two thousand years ago. Then Americans arrived and buried their own dead around it. Then, on the nation’s 200th birthday, Americans climbed the same mound, placed something important underground, marked where they put it, and asked people in the distant future to come back for it. Different culture and a different purpose but somehow a familiar act. In 2076 somebody is supposed to climb those stone steps and dig up a message from 1976. I hope to be there. The capsule will be 100 years old. The United States will be 300. The mound beneath both of them will have already been ancient for most of that story.

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