This book deals with the legendary builders of the Mounds - burial mounds located in the United States east of the Mississippi and competing with the Egyptian pyramids. Sinagua is only one of a long list of ancient American cultures that flourished and died before European settlers declared the New World their possession. These cultures have left no record of their achievements, customs, religious beliefs, and everyday life. We don’t even know what they call themselves. A modern specialist on ancient civilizations does not need to prove that the territory of the United States contains a wide range of highly developed pre-Columbian communities. It was so obvious.... As early as the 16th century, Spanish treasure hunters, such as Hernando de Soto in the southeast and Francisco de Coronado in the southwest, encountered both the ancient ruins of once thriving settlements and the living descendants of their creators. But the interests of the conquistadors were aimed at finding gold, not at scientific research - otherwise they would not have remained empty-handed. Two centuries later, waves of settlers from Europe poured from the Atlantic coast to the west, in areas that were considered wild and uninhabited. But instead they found traces of active human activity far more significant than one would expect from the relatively small number of Indians who inhabited these territories. Massive earthworks of any shape - pyramids, cones, hills, located by the ledges of the terrace and figures of animals, the creation of which required many days of hard work - are scattered across landscapes west of the Appalachians. It is impossible to know their exact number, since many were destroyed by the farmer's plow, eroded by rivers or absorbed by urban development before they could at least be somehow examined. But without exaggeration, we can say that their number reached hundreds of thousands. Of course, ancient America in the number of its pyramids significantly surpassed the Egypt of the pharaohs. One of them — still towering in Illinois — even has a larger base area than the great pyramid of Khufu. Around this ritual center, built of earth, in the XII century there was a noisy city. It had 12,000 inhabitants the same number as in London of that era. This town had strong ties to other settlements. Some of them were hundreds of kilometers away from its wooden palisades .. By "Builders of funerary hills and inhabitants of caves".