Tag: Vanished Races

‘Prehistoric Worlds Or, Vanished Races’: The truth of the anti-giant conspiracy

Not very long ago, my daughter called me in a rush from a used bookstore in downtown Middletown, Ohio—a place that’s seen better days, rough around the edges, but still holding onto some hidden gems. She told me I had to come right away because she’d found something special and was guarding it like a treasure. When I got there, she handed me an 1885 original edition of The Prehistoric World: Or, Vanished Races by E.A. Allen. The book is barely holding together after all these years, its pages fragile and yellowed, but it’s a remarkable artifact. I bought it for a reasonable price, and it’s become one of my prized possessions. It’s not just a book; it’s a window into a time when exploration and curiosity drove inquiry, before modern institutions locked down narratives with rigid assumptions.

I’ve always been drawn to these topics. Back in high school, even as far back as fifth and sixth grade, I was ahead of my teachers in history and anthropology classes. I’d read widely—Joseph Campbell’s works, myths, comparative religion—and I knew much of what was being taught was incomplete or outright wrong. I endured it to graduate and escape that institutionalized mindset, which I saw holding back real understanding. In my twenties, I dove deeper into Joseph Campbell and even joined the Joseph Campbell Foundation. My adventures around the world, combined with a lifelong connection to southern Ohio, shaped my views. My wife and I have been married nearly 39 years, and throughout that time, we’ve visited Serpent Mound repeatedly—every few years, it’s become a touchstone for us.

Living in southern Ohio, near Middletown and Hamilton, I’ve always had a personal relationship with these ancient sites. Serpent Mound, the massive effigy serpent earthwork in Adams County, is one of the most famous, but closer to home are the mounds along the Great Miami River Valley. There’s the Miamisburg Mound, one of the largest conical burial mounds in eastern North America, built by the Adena culture around 800 B.C. to A.D. 100. It’s 65 feet tall, 800 feet around, and excavations in 1869 revealed layered construction with possible stone facing and burial goods like pipes and effigies. There are even reports that they found skulls in that mound that would fit over the top of regular people, and that these finds terrified the excavators and they abandoned the site, never to return. Yet, despite its proximity—right near where I grew up—schools never took us there on field trips. We went to other places, heard stories about Native American burials and the sadness of destruction by Europeans, but nothing about these advanced earthworks.

Then there’s the area across from Joyce Park in Hamilton, where Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park now sits near Fortified Hill, an older than 2,000-year-old ceremonial earthworks site tied to the Hopewell or earlier traditions. In Allen’s 1885 book, there’s a description and illustration of a large effigy mound or structure in that vicinity—two high peaks carved or shaped, possibly reflecting ancient alignments, even to constellations like Aries, thought to be around 5,000 years old in some interpretations. The book chronicles many Ohio River Valley mounds, dedicating significant portions to the Miami and Mississippi cultures, Mexico, the Aztecs, and global prehistoric peoples. It’s an adventurous, Victorian-era take—profusely illustrated, speculative, open to wonders without the heavy filter of modern politics or funding constraints.

What strikes me most is how this 1885 book feels more honest about discoveries than much of what came later. During that era, explorers and adventurers reported findings without preconceived notions imposed by institutions. Allen’s work reflects a time when people were excited about vanished races and prehistoric worlds, including reports of mound contents that challenged emerging narratives. Many 19th-century accounts from Ohio mounds mentioned unusually large skeletons—sometimes described as 7 to 9 feet tall—unearthed during excavations. These were often speculatively linked to biblical giants or to ancient, advanced peoples. Newspapers and reports from the time sensationalized them, but they reflected genuine observations before professional archaeology standardized explanations. Mainstream archaeology today attributes these to the Adena and Hopewell cultures—sophisticated societies with wide trade networks, astronomical alignments in their earthworks, and ceremonial practices—but dismisses giant claims as misinterpretations, exaggerations, or hoaxes based on crumbling bones and poor documentation.  I have come to understand that the anti-giant conspiracy that has permeated the sciences was a secular construct intended to disprove biblical narratives, rather than to understand them, which was a critical error from that perspective.

I can’t help but feel that institutional science took a wrong turn. After the late 19th century, education and research became centralized, often prioritizing narratives that fit political or funding needs over raw observation. The mounds were attributed solely to ancestors of modern Native Americans, like the Adena (800 B.C.–A.D. 100) and Hopewell (200 B.C.–A.D. 500), who built massive geometric enclosures and burial sites with precision. These are now UNESCO-recognized, like the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, celebrated for their engineering and cultural depth. Yet, in my view, this framing sometimes ignores anomalies or alternative interpretations to maintain control over the story.

This ties into broader questions I’ve pondered for decades. What if these earthworks—Serpent Mound with its debated alignments to solstices (summer sunset at the head, possible lunar or solar cycles), Miamisburg’s layered burials, Fortified Hill’s ceremonial space—are remnants of something older, perhaps offshoots of lost civilizations? Some speculate connections to Atlantis or pre-Ice Age advanced societies, which were wiped out by the Younger Dryas catastrophe around 12,900–11,600 years ago—a sudden cold snap possibly triggered by comet impacts and freshwater floods that disrupted ocean currents, leading to megafauna extinctions and cultural disruptions. Graham Hancock and others link this to Plato’s Atlantis, a global flood-like event ending an Ice Age civilization, with survivors possibly influencing later cultures.

In Ohio, the mounds don’t fit neatly into short timelines. Serpent Mound’s age is debated—some radiocarbon dates suggest an Adena date around 300 B.C., others a Fort Ancient date around A.D. 1100, with possible repairs—but its astronomical sophistication and serpent symbolism hint at deeper roots. The book I found predates the heavy institutionalization that followed, capturing a spirit of adventure where discoveries weren’t immediately boxed into “primitive Indians” or dismissed. It dedicates half its 800 pages to American earthworks, showing alignments and complexities that modern textbooks often downplay.

My frustration stems from this: growing up here, no one talked about these sites in school. No field trips to Pyramid Hill or Miamisburg. No discussion of potential giant remains or alignments that “they shouldn’t even know about” at the time. It felt like a deliberate omission to preserve a simple narrative. Institutions, chasing grants and political correctness, built assumptions around limited data, leading to dead ends. Meanwhile, independent researchers and adventurers are bypassing them, returning to direct observation and instinct.

This book reminds me how much more open inquiry was in 1885, before the Smithsonian and universities solidified control. It shows we knew—or at least wondered—more freely then. We’ve gone downhill in some ways, prioritizing preservation of timelines over pursuit of truth. My daughter recognized that instinctually when she saved it for me. It’s a benchmark: a call to question, explore, and reject complacency in institutionalized science.

We need to return to that adventurous spirit—observe these mounds, ask who built them, why, how old they truly are, and how they connect to our story today. The earthworks along the Ohio River Valley aren’t just relics; they’re evidence of advanced understanding—astronomical, engineering, spiritual—that challenges easy answers. By reflecting on books like Allen’s, we see where assumptions went wrong and how rediscovering truth requires going beyond the official path.

Bibliography

•  Allen, E. A. The Prehistoric World: Or, Vanished Races. Central Publishing House, 1885. (Available via Project Gutenberg and archives.)

•  Ohio History Connection. “Miamisburg Mound.” ohiohistory.org.

•  Ohio History Connection. “Serpent Mound.” ohiohistory.org.

•  Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. hopewellearthworks.org.

•  UNESCO. “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.” whc.unesco.org.

•  Romain, William F. Various studies on Ohio earthworks astronomy.

•  Hancock, Graham. America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization. St. Martin’s Press, 2019. (For Younger Dryas and catastrophe discussions.)

•  Various 19th-century newspaper reports on mound discoveries (e.g., via historical archives).

Footnotes

1.  Radiocarbon dating debates on Serpent Mound: See Monaghan and Hermann (2019) reconciliation of dates.

2.  Giant skeleton reports: Often debunked as mismeasurements (e.g., Columbus Dispatch, 2019), but reflect period observations.

3.  Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: Firestone et al. (2007) and subsequent studies.

4.  Adena/Hopewell mainstream views: National Park Service, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.

Rich Hoffman

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A Treasure out of Middletown, Ohio: Unlocking the past with E. A. Allen’s 1885 ‘Prehistoric Worlds or Vanished Races

It took over a week of trying to finally meet up with a book seller in Middletown who had a unique treasure I wanted badly. He had a rare book called Prehistoric Worlds or Vanished Races that was published in Cincinnati that chronicled the observations of the early field of archaeology around the world at the tender year of 1885. This particular body of work had survived a lot and spent much of its life in the care of a powerful figure in Middletown’s history which is partly why it was still intact, so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and to start reading the massive volume from a time long forgotten. And after reading it only over a couple of days I found one of the key passages that I had been looking for that I hope leads to the repeal of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) so that proper investigations into the history of North America can take place. That passage states, “This country of ours, with its wide plains, its flowing rivers and great lakes, is said by scholars to have been the home of a people well advanced in the art of barbarian life. What connection, if any, existed between them and the Indians, is yet unsettled.” The key to that passage is that it admits in a time before the academic purge, that the Indians as Native Americans were not so “native” and that other people existed in North America historically that are much more important to who we are today, and thus, everything that is archaeologically discovered cannot fall under the criteria of NAGPRA, and should be studied properly without the sentiment of political convenience.

This NAGPRA mess really was the result of the 1988 book and then the movie that came out in November of 1990 called Dances with Wolves which was essentially an argument in favor of the Sioux Indian tribe against the White Man’s push for westward expansion. It was a political eraser to the impact of capitalism around the world and a direct way to solidify a political class of people into perpetual victimhood. It should be noticed that the NAGPRA law was enacted on November 16th by the Bush administration just a few days before the Kevin Costner movie was released just a few days later on November 21st. The buzz of the film adopted from the popular novel was on the mind of politicians in Washington and that law was their gift to the Sioux Indians because it was assumed that we all came to North America and took their land from them and now someone had to pay for that.

But that’s not quite the whole story, in fact, its not even the beginning. As the field of archaeology has evolved and much has been learned, it has become obvious that the observations of those who were in North America should have been studied much better, and with even more vigor than we study the ancient Egyptians because the people who were in North America were much more sophisticated and advanced as a culture with trigonometry that pre-dates the Greeks well in place, and the story of migration across the Bering Strait was obviously wrong. Diffusion across both oceans was happening well before Jesus Christ was ever born of Mary in the Middle East and that was not the story that had been told by countless scientists, many who had their hands out for decades to Federal funds who insisted that scientists “discover” the dialogue that suited the political class, that the brakes of capitalism could be applied so that the aristocracy of political class warfare could demonize the American Constitution for a silent coup that had been in place essentially up to the Trump election of 2016. That part of the history we have been watching unfold, but what remains is the century long cover-up that Christopher Columbus did not discover the New World, he only brought the latest of a series of inhabitants and that the Indians he had encountered were just as new to that new world as he was. Only a few hundred years separated their migrations, but what we are talking about is thousands of years of activity.

In the political theater the American government needed a victim and the Indians were it. They have used the Indians to pass all kinds of casino bills across the nation to “help them” recover some of their losses. In my area I think of the Shawnee people and their claims to land lost during the 1830 Indian Removal Act which many are claiming in hindsight to be an immoral action that should have never occurred and activists have since used it to hammer home the point of unfairness applied to the peaceful people thought of as the Indians. However, the Indians themselves had many wars with each other, some tribes lost, some won and they were as the great writer of that book said, “well advanced in the art of barbarian life.” These latest European settlers, for which America was established with philosophies that emerged out of western culture, Greek, Roman, and the Scottish Rites, wanted to bring culture with them for which the primitive hoards wished to reject, so there was a fight and the Indians lost. Yet as we have analyzed over quite a long period of time there are two kinds of people functioning in our modern day, those who revere the primitive and those who revere technical advancement. We saw this most notably when a month after the Moon landing in 1969 where Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the foreign landscape the musical festival of Woodstock showed the deep insecurities of the human races to cling to their primitive past and fight anything that might pull the covers off that security blanket for them. That is why we have a two-party political system because the human race has always had those types of people and the conflict that ensued in the wake.

The evidence is clear that the original inhabitants that E. A. Allen wrote about in that new book of mine was talking about the Beaker people, a group of Celts that came from the British Isles around the time that Stonehenge was in its advanced stages. At least that is where the evidence is pointing. The Celts are dating much earlier in England these days than previously thought which is why there was such a use of swastikas in so many relics found in that period on North American soil. The Nazi’s used swastikas as a reverence toward their old Germanic heritage before the Roman Catholic Church swept away their history of Celtic religions and lifestyles. It also looks like the people of the British Isles who migrated with the religions of the Celts had come out of the Bible lands well before the Noah stories and were part of that pre-deluge culture that is referenced in what’s left of the Bible. And that all these stories are very disconcerting to modern religion and the science that the political class want to use to erase it all from people’s minds using the Indians as the deterrent.

My problem with the Bible as a document pointing toward historical efforts was because as it was put together there were entire sections of it completely left out, such as the Book of Enoch which describes events that took place before the life of Noah, and that it is relevant to any religious analysis. I do not trust the Romans who printed the first Bibles at the fall of their empire to decide what history was relevant for a religious document and which weren’t. All this history of course was playing out in the New World before even the Roman Empire was even a thing so of course there is a lot of desire for the last culture that was relevant to protect itself from the effects of the culture that came before them. And that is what has been happening and is really what the spirit behind NAGPRA is all about. It wasn’t created to protect the idea of the Indians being the first inhabitants of North America, it is to protect the religions of the world from a truth they did not want to face, that it wasn’t the Greeks and Romans who started western civilization. Likely we wouldn’t even know about Greek society and the works of Aristotle if not for the Muslims who protected it from the great purge at Egypt’s great Library at Alexandria when the Romans burnt it to the ground.

Great books that make honest observations that predate the purges of a political class, no matter where in the world they occur are very valuable and that’s what E.A. Allen was doing in Cincinnati in 1885, was looking at the Mound Builder culture and asking the right questions, and we should have been seeking answers to those questions. Instead, we have used sentiment, religion, and a fake morality to hide history from ourselves and protect a modern ruling class from the judgments of the true record and that is something I personally can’t stand.

And to get to the real truth, beyond the modern speculation that arises out of asking questions where the evidence has been removed in most cases, you have to read from books that were around before modern academia put their spin on it to protect those forces all out of a need to get their hands on federal funding which has controlled the message for the curious, and resolute. Which is why this new book is such a treasure for me, and points to just how valuable some of those old books are in those obscure bookstores that you see here and there, and that come out of private libraries that have been hidden from the public for decades, even centuries. And I am absolutely delighted with this one, it’s a window to the world that I have been wanting to see, and what’s out of that window are great things to come.

Rich Hoffman