There are insights to be gained from comparing three very different books onthe mounds, mound-builders and moundvilles of later pre-Columbian and earlyhistoric-period eastern North America. These insights stem from the range ofperspectives embodied by the trio of hardbacks here, written by authors withdiverse backgrounds using very different kinds of case material. In onebook, historian Terry Barnhart gives us a rich reading of the historicalrelationship of American archaeology to ‘The Mound Builders’, identified bymany Euro-Americans in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as anactual lost race or civilisation that pre-dated the American Indianoccupation of the continent. In another book, writer Jay Miller seeks acosmological explanation of all eastern North American mounds, in some waysreaffirming the centrality of mound building to Native identities. In athird volume, editor-archaeologists C. Margaret Scarry and VincasSteponaitis, and 12 other authors, present the latest archaeologicalsynthesis on Moundville, a great town in Alabama often cited as thecivic-ceremonial core of a stereotypical Mississippian-era chiefdom (c. AD 1120–1650). Tacking between the three texts, wemight come to appreciate more clearly how we know, or might know, themound-builder past by contextualising and theorising that past better thanwe are currently doing.