ABSTRACT
Travelers themselves were often more interested in the potential contents of mounds and earthworks than in the earthforms themselves, and they represented the settlers as interested in neither. From the beginnings of travel literature, reports of marvels had been a staple of its contents; for centuries monsters and physical grotesques had been reported in volumes of voyages and travels, and images of them had appeared in the margins of maps and prints. Relieved, by audience lack of interest, from the burden of producing drawings or photographs of the claimed marvels of the interior, travel writers could move at greater ease to unveil in prose the wonders of the American past. The actual landscape of the interior, meanwhile, lost more mounds, gained no large marvels, yielded no precious objects, and insisted on producing only small-scale unfamiliarities. Travelers wishing to describe the moundscape in detail were further frustrated by a simple physical inability to see some of its most artful features.
