A long-ignored prehistoric moundbuilding people.

By the 14th century more than a dozen accretional burial mounds reaching heights of 12 to 15 feet marked the floodplains of interior Virginia. Today, none of these mounds built by the nearly forgotten Monacan Indians remain on the landscape, having been removed over the centuries by a variety of natural and cultural causes. This study uses what remains of the mounds excavated from the 1890s to the 1980s to gain a new understanding of the Monacans and to gauge their importance in the realm of the late prehistoric period in the...