ABSTRACT
The early legacies of architecture and cultural landscapes in the American South include remarkable plazas and large, sometimes multi-tiered, earthen mounds built by people of Mississippian cultures several centuries ago. European settlers were so impressed by the scale of these constructions that they often could not attribute them to the handiwork of Native Americans. Romanticized tales of lost tribes of Israel or Phoenicia as the artful builders were eventually debunked. In places like Cahawba, Alabama, American settlers built their nineteenth century government edifices on top of the earlier Mississippian mounds. Such actions may have served aspirations of manifest destiny or simply as expressions of a hierarchy of local government surveillance over the surrounding space.
