The Origin of the Mound Builders — Reading Notes

A Traveler’s View of the Mounds

Coffin begins by inviting the reader to imagine a journey from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, crossing from the Alleghenies to the Western Plateau. Along the way, he says, one would find “thousands of mounds of earth with a conical or pyramidal apex.” This opening is not a dry catalog but a rhetorical device: the traveler’s question—“Who made these?”—is met with the unsatisfying answer “Indian mounds.” Coffin insists the mounds predate the tribes Columbus encountered, noting that ancient forests grew on their summits when Europeans first arrived. He recalls his own boyhood wonder at the mounds’ “rude art,” and as a man he has “wandered among the thousands of mounds” from the Great Lakes to the Mexican Gulf. The passage sets up a mystery that the rest of the book attempts to solve through scientific evidence.

Craniology and the Cephalic Index

Coffin devotes significant space to craniology, explaining that skulls are classified by the cephalic index—the ratio of breadth to length. He defines mesocephalic (index 74–78) as the human average, brachycephalic (above 78) as broad, and dolichocephalic (below 74) as long. These categories, he argues, can trace ethnic relationships. He cites authorities like Retzius and Morton, and refers to skulls from mounds in Tennessee and Kentucky. The excerpts show Coffin treating craniology as a hard science, but he acknowledges that it must be combined with philology. He does not claim to have measured skulls himself; instead, he synthesizes published data. The argument is cumulative: cranial types, when mapped across the Americas and compared to Old World populations, suggest connections that Coffin will later explore.

The Calendar Stone and Egyptian Affinities

A centerpiece of Coffin’s evidence is the Aztec Calendar Stone, unearthed in Mexico City less than a century before his writing. He describes it as a solid piece of porphyry weighing fifty tons, transported “many leagues, across a broken country, without beasts of burden.” From its carvings, he extracts a sophisticated calendar: eighteen months of twenty days, five complementary days, and a leap-year adjustment every fifty-two years. Coffin then compares this to the Egyptian Sothic cycle, noting that the number of lunar months in an Aztec cycle “correspond exactly” with the Egyptian great Sothic period of 1,491 years. He asks rhetorically whether such a “strange affinity” could be accidental, or whether a Turanian branch independently evolved into a counterpart of Hamitic Berbers. The implication is clear: diffusion, not independent invention, explains the similarity.

Traditions of Aztlan and the Flood

Coffin turns to Aztec ideographic paintings, which he says preserve traditions of creation, a universal flood, confusion of tongues, and a single couple saved in a boat that landed near Mount Colhuacan. All Aztec traditions, he asserts, insist on origin from a far-off island called Aztlan (Atlantis). He then cites Dr. Lapham’s location of “Azatland” in Wisconsin and Dr. Foster’s figures of effigy mounds, but notes that an Aztec painting published by Gemellé Carera shows the departure from Aztlan in canoes and rafts, with a teocalli (temple) beside a palm tree. Coffin’s rejoinder is pointed: “Now we all know palms do not grow in Wisconsin, but they do grow in Africa.” This geographic detail is meant to undercut a purely American origin and point toward transatlantic migration. The section relies on a single source and does not address counterarguments.

Coffin’s thesis is a product of its time—ambitious in scope, reliant on then-current sciences, and unapologetically diffusionist. Readers should note that the excerpts cover only the first half of the work; the later sections may develop the linguistic and mythological comparisons further. The book is best approached as a historical document of late-19th-century anthropological thought, not as a definitive study. Coffin’s personal voice—the boy who wondered, the man who wandered—gives the argument a narrative drive that rewards careful reading.

Reading Coffin’s The Origin of the Mound Builders, I kept pausing over his patient chase through old alphabets, wondering how much meaning we lose in a missing symbol. That same quiet awe followed me when I later opened The Ancient Phonetic Alphabet of Yucatan — Edition Insights, as if both books whispered the same unassuming truth: every mark we leave is just a stone set down for someone else to find.