America’s earthworks seemed to demand a history equal to their scale. DeWitt Clinton (1769–1828) believed their builders had possessed skills beyond those he attributed to the Indigenous communities around him. He therefore assigned the monuments to an earlier population that had disappeared. The visible remains were evidence; the separation of their makers from living Native peoples was an interpretation shaped by his judgment of those peoples.
Clinton gave the argument an influential public setting. His political standing in New York, together with his involvement in learned and Masonic institutions, brought antiquarian speculation before audiences that a private collector might never reach. A conjecture about remote history could acquire the respect attached to the person delivering it. His listeners did not have to examine each proposed distinction between ancient and modern peoples for the general story to become familiar.
The lost population also opened the question of where the builders had come from. Once they were detached from the surrounding communities, their ancestry could be sought in Mexico, Asia, or the biblical world. Writers could disagree about the particular migrants while accepting the initial assumption that someone else had made the monuments. Uncertainty about one part of the story encouraged further speculation within it.
That assumption had consequences for the way Indigenous history was understood. It denied continuity where the monuments might instead have prompted inquiry into the long histories of American peoples. The continent’s past was becoming a prominent subject of public learning, and the disagreement among antiquarians concerned more than a route across an ocean. They were deciding whose ancestors could be credited with the remains in the landscape.