The name "mound-builders" is used simply to designate those people who built mounds and of course in this broad sense it is a perfectly good term. The word, however, has very little scientific significance, since we know that more than one group of ancient people built mounds; that the mounds were not all built during the same period, and that sometimes several different groups used the same mound at different times. Consequently the term "mound-builders" as commonly used, refers merely to a practice and not a distinct race or culture.
     The popular notion that the mound-builders were a definite and well-known race who were quite different from the American Indian has few facts to support it. The more plausible theory seems to be that they were probably the ancestors of the Indians although perhaps so distant in ancestry that their customs and practices had little in common with those of Indians of modern tribes. However, this question is still a matter of dispute. Colonel Bennett H. Young, who assembled what was probably the finest collection of Indian relics ever secured in Kentucky, writes in his admirable report on "The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky" (Filson Club Publication No. 25: pp. 7-9) as follows:
     "On this subject two opinions are held and strongly advocated; the first, that the people who constructed these remains were of different and superior race to the Indians. Those so holding contend that the remains found in the shape of mounds, teocallis (or places of worship), fortifications, implements of various kinds, indicate that these people were a race of superior culture to the Indians; that these remains point conclusively to the fact that those who constructed them were an agricultural people of sedentary habits, and lived in organized communities; that the works themselves bear evidences of mathematical and engineering knowledge which the Indian never possessed or exhibited; and that the fortifications show that these people were at war with other nations, and that in such warfare it became necessary for these Mound Builders to erect stone, wooden, and earthen defenses, and that the evidences show that these were displaced by more aggressive and war-like foes. They also insist that the Indians themselves declared that they knew nothing of the people who builded these structures, and that they were concluded ages before even the red men found them, and that they could tell nothing concerning the origin or use of these monuments.
     "The second class insist that there is nothing in these monuments to indicate greater genius, greater skill or greater patience than the American Indian has exhibited along many other lines; that it is established beyond all question that in historical times the Indians constructed mounds and fortifications, and further, that their burials are similar in most respects to those of the Mound Builders. They say that the mere fact of structures being erected for military purposes demonstrates nothing, because the different Indian nations were themselves constantly at war with each other and were known to make long marches in order to punish or destroy other Indian nations who had inflicted upon them some real or imaginary wrong. They say further, that there was scarcely a tribe from the Atlantic to the western plains that did not have some capital or fixed location in which large numbers of their people resided, and that these subsisted upon the products of agriculture. They insist that De Soto found all of the tribes he visited were successful in cultivating maize and various vegetables and that the early voyagers along the Atlantic shores found the same thing true from Florida to Massachussetts, and that John Smith and his colony depended largely for subsistence upon the products raised by the Indians. They further argue that as the Indians are the only people except the white who, so far as we of this age know, have ever held the region over which these remains were scattered, that therefore it requires proof of the most positive character to show that they were not the work of the red Indians. They contend that this proof is lacking, and that the reasonable conclusion is that they were built by the red man, or the American Indian."
     Thus the controversy has waged, and it would be most unscientific to assume that any theory has as yet become positively established. All that we know is merely that the mound-builders were a prehistoric people who built mounds of earth for various purposes. That these mounds were prehistoric can hardly be denied. When Ponce de Leon forced his way through the Southern swamps he encountered them; when De Soto pushed through the primeval country they were in his path; when Marquette in his bark canoes floated on the bosom of the Father of waters he noted them on the banks; when La Salle carried his boats across the portages to the Allegheny they confronted him; when Boone reached Kentucky they were even then hoary with age and when he inquired of the Indians as to their origin they answered ''Our people did not build them; they belong to a people whom our forefathers fought and drove from the territory, but whence these people came and whither they have gone, we do not know."

                                                            from Ancient Life in Kentucky, Funkhouser and Webb - 1928