Mima Mounds
Photo Source: National Park Service

Through out the western part of this country you can find mounds, sometimes very large mounds. At first you may think that what you are looking at is a hill, but gradually you begin to realize that it is not a hill at all, it is a mound. The difference being, that there is a good chance that someone built it. Some mounds were built to cover other buildings for example. A mound was found that covered an ancient workshop from Neolithic times. This country had many mound builders but the most famous were the Hopewell Indians who buried their most important people in mounds. It seems that many ancient people had their reasons for building these mounds. But scientists say that not all mounds were man made. Gophers are sometimes said to have constructed some of the mounds, especially the smaller ones. By this I mean mounds that are typically a few feet high and about eight to twelve feet across.

There are several theories on the Mima Mounds that are located about an hour's ride south of Seattle, Washington. They were first discovered by Captain Charles Wilkes over 162 years ago and I guess we can truthfully say that these mounds are still more of a mystery than anything else. These particular mounds are not really that big. They biggest are about six feet high and about 25 feet in diameter. What makes them so unusual is that there are thousands of these mounds in the area. Did some ancient people bury their dead in individual mounds? This doesn't seem to be feasible, they would always be digging and burying, but feasible or not, it is possible. Many scientists state the gopher theory when they refer to the Mima Mounds. All I can say is that the gophers must have been on the large side and I wouldn't want to meet one in a dark alley. But scientists have an explanation for this also. They say that the gophers built the mounds over centuries. By the way there are no remains of gophers or gopher bones found anywhere.

A few scientists state that they are sure that some small tunnels that they have found are gopher tunnels, but other scientists state that just because a gopher might have lived under a mound doesn't mean that he created it. Point well taken. Many animals move into holes and hollows that are already there rather than digging them out themselves.

Hopewell Indian Mounds
Photo Source: National Park Service

The theories don't end there. There are another group of scientists that are sure that the mounds were created by seismic activity. They feel that the ground was shaken and that is how the mounds appeared and to prove this one scientist covered a plywood board with sandy dirt and shook it. Small mounds appeared. Is this proof positive? I don't think so. Shaking a board with a couple of inches of dirt on it and shaking the ground might produce two different types of results, but some scientists think not.

What about water, could running water have somehow caused the mounds. It is thought that this is a possibility, after all, water is capable of almost anything. Why couldn't it move dirt around, after all it had enough power to carve out the Grand Canyon. So maybe floods pushed debris that gouged out areas of the ground which later became covered with soil. Or maybe frozen water, in the form of a glacier, did the job. If the mounds are not man made I sort of prefer the water theory.

Then there is the theory that different types of soil caused the dirt to shift. Some dirt rose up while other patches of dirt might have sunk, causing the mounds.

So far nothing has been found inside any of the mounds. This sort of rules out that they were burial mounds, but the ground is very acidic. There might be a chance that any bones would have dissolved long ago. But what about artifacts, none of them have been found either. This sort of leads us away from the theory of man made mounds, unless we have discovered a type of mound that was built for a long forgotten religious purpose that never had anything inside of it.

Scientists state that after the mounds were made a bog settled on top of them and preserved them. Evidence of the bog has been found. But guess what, there doesn't seem to be any gophers in the mound area today but they exist only a few miles away, why? There have also been reports of large rocks inside the mounds, rocks that are just too large for any gopher to have moved. Could these rocks have been the artifacts put there by some unknown race for some unknown reason? The local farmers claim that the mounds are getting higher, if they are right, what the heck is going on?