The monuments of America did not require a vanished people unrelated to the continent’s Indigenous inhabitants. James Haines McCulloh (c. 1793–1870) resisted that conclusion while continuing to place American origins within a biblical history of humanity. His inquiry therefore did not fall neatly on either side of the disputes around him. He could reject a popular explanation of the earthworks and still believe that the earliest American past had to be connected with the Old World.
His answer changed between Researches on America (1816) and the much larger Researches, Philosophical and Antiquarian, Concerning the Aboriginal History of America (1829). The earlier work gave more weight to specifically Asian connections. By 1829 he emphasized the differences between American languages and institutions and those of the nations available for comparison. Any inheritance they shared, he argued, belonged to a period before the dispersion from Babel.
This allowed America a long subsequent history of its own. Resemblances no longer had to identify a particular later nation that had crossed the sea. The difficulty of reaching the continent remained, but McCulloh answered it by changing the ancient map. Lost land connections had once permitted people and animals to spread before catastrophe separated regions that were now divided by oceans.
The explanation joined observations of real differences to a conjectural geography and an accepted scriptural beginning. McCulloh was revising within those commitments, rather than abandoning them. Reading the two books together matters because the later argument cannot simply be treated as an enlarged copy of the first. By 1829 he was offering his readers a much longer separation between America and the known societies of Asia, with a catastrophe required to explain the ocean between them.