This book, written by Wilfred D. Logan, an archeologist with many years of experience in the National Park Service, increases our understanding of the peoples whose burial mounds are preserved within the national monument and other sites in the surrounding locale. The volume presents data, not heretofore analyzed, from a large number of excavations in northeastern Iowa, and systematizes the material to develop a background against which to view the Effigy Mounds and the people who built them.
This report, then, is an analysis of the results of the research of Keyes, Orr and others, and serves to place the remains of the national monument in a definite prehistoric context in the Upper Mississippi Valley. By so doing, the author presents a more complete understanding of the people who used the area, both in terms of their development from earlier occupants, and in terms of their relationship, at any given time, to their neighbors living in the Middle West during the centuries before Europeans first visited the river valleys of our Nation’s midlands.
