Understanding the past has been an interest of human civilizations for thousands of years, since the very first myths and religions explained how the world came to be. And while the written word granted us a kind of record to be passed through time, interpreting prehistoric or physical remnants of our past was dominated by what each culture could imagine for many centuries. Today, archaeology, with its rigorous methodology and rational interpretations, has formed a narrative of logic to combat the narratives of faith, though its emergence and development was not a clean break. In the early days of archaeological practice, the mainstream consisted of a curious mixture of scientific method and superstition that today is quickly classified as pseudoarchaeology, and it took time for archaeologists to form conclusions based entirely on the remains they discovered instead of searching to justify the implausible. There is perhaps no better way to trace this process of development than by studying 19th century America's attempts at explaining the many earthen mounds discovered across the country. Beginning with the basic, racist premise that the Native Americans were too primitive to have constructed them, early archaeologists theorized that a lost race of men must have once walked North America, their identities ranging from the predecessors of the Aztecs to Vikings to God himself, and while each origin story had its own context, they all emerged from the same racism, American nationalism and ignorance.