Aboriginal architecture Aboriginal architecture Architectural remains of Native American aboriginal culture consists principally of earth mounds, of considerable diversity in character and appearance, and some of them of enormous dimensions. There is in this fact alone nothing of peculiar interest.
Earth mounds, generally sepulchral in purpose, exist widely throughout the older continents.
But the American mounds are remarkable for their excessive numbers, their peculiarities of construction, their occasional great size, and the diversity of their probable purpose. They are found abundantly over the whole region from the Rocky Mountains to the Alleghanies, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, and to some small extent beyond these limits. In the State of Ohio alone there are said to be more than ten thousand mounds, with perhaps fifteen hundred defensive works and enclosures. About five thousand of them are said to exist within a radius of fifty miles from the mouth of the Illinois River, in the State of Illinois. In the South they are equally abundant.