Unnamed Mound Builders

The narrator begins his history of the city of Jackson in the distant past, which includes the "nameless though recorded predecessors [of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples] who built the mounds" (81). Conventionally referred to by historians and anthropologists as 'the mound builders,' these prehistoric peoples may have inhabited the continent for upwards of five thousand years. Many of their mounds still remain on the landscape of Mississippi. Their actual purpose or purposes are not thoroughly understood, but in several of his stories Faulkner uses them to evoke a mythic past along with a sense of dread or wonder.