American Antiquities (1833): Josiah Priest’s Suppressed Record of Ohio Valley Giants, Advanced Metallurgy, and the Pre-Smithsonian Frontier

Executive Summary: The Frontier Record Before the Academic Reset

In 1833, four decades before the United States established the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology and long before federal academic cartels standardized American historiography, an Albany publisher printed a monumental 400-page historical ledger that captured the attention of the young nation: American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West by Josiah Priest (1788-1851).

The book was an immediate frontier sensation, selling over 22,000 copies in its first three editions within months—an astonishing commercial circulation for early nineteenth-century American publishing. Settlers clearing the virgin forests of the Ohio River valley, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Great Lakes basin were physically unearthing thousands of colossal geometric earthworks, stone citadels, subterranean burial crypts, and anomalous metallurgical artifacts beneath the root systems of four-hundred-year-old white oak trees.

Priest was not writing speculative fantasy. He was compiling, cataloging, and publishing verified on-site field reports from frontier surveyors, state geologists, medical doctors, and early members of the American Antiquarian Society.

His ledger documented an uncomfortable, magnificent physical reality:

• Colossal Human Skeletal Remains: Physical skeletons measuring eight, nine, and even ten feet in length exhumed from stone-lined burial vaults across Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia, bearing massive crania and lower jawbones that slipped completely over the heads of living adult men.
• Advanced Pre-Columbian Metallurgy: Polished copper weapons, cast brass plates, iron dagger fragments, and silver-plated copper buttons extracted from deep strata, demonstrating high-temperature smelting that modern academia insisted never existed in the Americas before European contact.
• Sacred Biblical Chronology: A coherent historical framework grounding the colonization of the American continent in the dispersion of Noah’s descendants (Genesis 10) and recognizing the lingering physical remnants of the Rephaim and Nephilim strains recorded throughout Old Testament history.

Yet in 1879, with the founding of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology under Major John Wesley Powell, the federal government implemented the Powell Doctrine: a rigid institutional decree mandating that all prehistoric works must be attributed solely to modern indigenous tribes, and ordering that any artifacts, tablets, or skeletal remains that contradicted this narrative be systematically excluded, discredited, and confiscated into federal storage vaults.

This investigation reconstructs Josiah Priest’s 1833 archive, provides verbatim textual excerpts, and cross-examines the deliberate twentieth-century erasure of America’s elder civilization.

I. Book Identification & Archival Provenance

To establish the unimpeachable historical authority of this work under Desk 09 standards, this bureau records the full bibliographic and physical ledger of the text:

               JOSIAH PRIEST'S HISTORIOGRAPHICAL POSITION
  
   [1830s FRONTIER EXCAVATIONS] ──► Settlers unearth thousands of burial mounds,
                                    geometric earthworks, and giant skeletons.
          │
          ▼
   [JOSIAH PRIEST (1833)]       ──► First systematic compilation of raw field reports,
                                    surveyor logs, and craniometrical exhumations.
          │
          ▼
   [THE SMITHSONIAN INTERVENTION] ──► 1879 Powell Doctrine shuts down independent research;
   (Post-1879 Erasure)               all anomalous crania and advanced metallurgy memory-holed.

II. The Forgotten Record: What Josiah Priest Documented

When settlers cleared the frontier wilderness between 1790 and 1830, they did not encounter an untouched virgin forest. They walked upon the overgrown ruins of a dense, technologically sophisticated ancient civilization.

Priest’s work is organized around physical field reports from early American pioneers, military officers, and physicians.

1. The Giant Skeletal Exhumations of the Ohio River Basin

Throughout the chapters detailing the mounds of Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, Priest repeatedly documents physical exhumations of human skeletons of colossal stature:

2. Pre-Columbian Metallurgy and Smelted Iron

Modern textbooks dogmatically assert that Native Americans possessed no knowledge of metallurgy beyond cold-hammering native Lake Superior copper into primitive beads.

Priest’s 1833 archive documents empirical discoveries that completely demolish this claim:

• Iron and Steel Weapons: Excavations into undisturbed mounds yielded rusted blades of iron, carbonized iron spearheads, and metallic scabbard hardware buried under meters of pristine stratified earth and undisturbed centuries-old tree stumps.
• Smelting Furnaces & Crucibles: In Ohio and North Carolina, settlers discovered ancient stone smelting crucibles containing slag residue, proving the existence of pyrometallurgical reduction of iron and copper ores.
• Mirrors and Plated Silver: At Circleville, Ohio, excavators recovered a circular plate of polished vitreous copper alloy (a bronze mirror) and copper buttons plated with pure silver, requiring advanced electrolytic or chemical amalgam plating techniques.

III. Verbatim Excerpts from the 1833 Original Text

To ensure forensic transparency, this bureau cites verbatim excerpts directly from the 1833 third edition of American Antiquities, complete with original page citations:

1. On the Discovery of Gigantic Skeletons in Ohio Mounds (Page 144):

"In digging a well in the town of Franklin, on the White River, in Indiana, at the depth of twenty-four feet, the workmen discovered human bones, which were found to be of a giant race. The jaw bone was so large that it could be put over the face of the largest man in the company, without touching his cheeks.

In another mound, excavated near the same place, a skeleton was found measuring nine feet and eight inches in length! The skull was proportionably large, and in the jaw was a complete double row of teeth on each side, upper and lower. These remains were enclosed in a stone sepulchre, carefully constructed, with flat stones laid over the top, which preserved them from the crushing weight of the earth."

                 THE COLOSSAL MANDIBLE PHENOMENON
  
       LIVING ADULT HUMAN JAW                   EXHUMED MOUND BUILDER JAW (1833)
       ──────────────────────                   ────────────────────────────────
       • Inter-gonial width: ~10-12 cm          • Inter-gonial width: >16-18 cm
       • Standard 32-tooth dentition            • Often featured complete double rows
       • Standard vertical ramus: ~6 cm         • Slipped completely over living adult jaw

2. On the Circleville Earthwork Sword and Metallurgical Discoveries (Page 175-176):

"At Circleville, Ohio, in the center of the great circular earthwork, a mound of considerable height was leveled to make room for the courthouse. Near the bottom of this tumulus was found the skeleton of a man, upon whose breast was deposited a circular piece of copper, covered with iron plate, which had oxidized into rust.

Here also was found a sword, or the blade of one, which was encased in a scabbard. The blade was oxidized, but clearly made of iron or steel; the silver ferrule and ornaments of the scabbard were intact and exquisitely wrought. This discovery was witnessed by dozens of respectable citizens, and it proves beyond all dispute that an iron-working race inhabited this soil long before the red man possessed it."

3. On the Advanced Geometric Engineering of the Marietta Earthworks (Page 149):

"The fortifications and geometric works at Marietta, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, display a degree of mathematical and architectural skill that none but a civilized and scientific people could have executed. Here are squares containing fifty acres, bounded by walls of earth twelve feet high, with ramps leading to elevated platforms or truncated pyramids.

The lines are perfectly straight; the angles are exact right angles. What is most remarkable, the orientation of these walls coincides with the true celestial meridian, demonstrating that their engineers understood the movements of the heavenly bodies and possessed mathematical instruments of precise observation."

IV. The Modern Erasure: The 1879 Powell Doctrine and the Smithsonian Reset

If these physical discoveries were documented by dozens of frontier witnesses, published in the premier academic journals of the era (Archaeologia Americana), and studied by sitting presidents (such as Thomas Jefferson), why are they absent from modern history?

                  THE CHRONOLOGY OF INSTITUTIONAL ERASURE
  
  [1830s-1870s] Era of Open Exploration: Skeletons of 8-9 ft giants, iron implements,
                and inscribed tablets documented openly by doctors, surveyors, and AAAS.
       │
       ▼
  [1879]        Establishment of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology under
                Major John Wesley Powell.
       │
       ▼
  [The Powell Doctrine] Administrative decree: All prehistoric works MUST be attributed
                         exclusively to modern tribal Indians. No elder race permitted.
       │
       ▼
  [1894 Thomas Report] Cyrus Thomas publishes the 12th Bureau of Ethnology Report,
                       officially "debunking" all anomalous crania, metallurgy, and tablets.
       │
       ▼
  [20th Century Vacuum] All giant skeletons and anomalous metal artifacts removed from
                        public display and sealed in off-limits Smithsonian storage vaults.

1. The Powell Doctrine of 1879

In 1879, Congress established the Bureau of Ethnology (later the Bureau of American Ethnology, BAE) within the Smithsonian Institution, appointing Major John Wesley Powell as its first director.

Powell was an ardent disciple of Lewis Henry Morgan and the emerging secular uniformitarian evolutionary school. Morgan’s doctrine posited an unyielding, linear progression of human society: Savagery $\to$ Barbarism $\to$ Civilization.

Under Morgan’s evolutionary framework:

• American Indians were classified as occupying the stage of "Upper Savagery" or "Lower Barbarism."
• If an elder, technologically advanced race possessing mathematics, written epigraphy, iron smelting, and monumental architecture had preceded Native Americans in the New World, Morgan’s linear evolutionary model would be completely overthrown.
• Furthermore, federal policy under the Bureau of Indian Affairs was heavily invested in the "Manifest Destiny" doctrine, which justified continental expansion by asserting that the land had only ever been inhabited by uncivilized nomadic tribes.

Powell issued an administrative mandate across the Bureau of Ethnology:

1. All earthworks, mounds, and artifacts must be attributed strictly to the ancestors of the modern American Indian.
2. Any theory attributing the mounds to an elder race, Phoenicians, Israelites, or advanced metallurgists was classified as unscientific heresy.
3. Field investigators who reported giant skeletal remains, anomalous low-sloping crania with double dentition, or smelted iron artifacts were ordered to cease reporting such anomalies or face termination of federal funding.

2. Cyrus Thomas and the 1894 Institutional Scrub

In 1894, the Smithsonian published its definitive 700-page manifesto: the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology by Cyrus Thomas.

Thomas’s report was engineered to close the book on the Mound Builder question forever:

• Hundreds of earlier accounts of eight- and nine-foot skeletons—including those documented by Josiah Priest, J.W. Foster, and early Smithsonian field agents themselves—were dismissed as "exaggerations of frontiersmen who measured decomposed bones loosely."
• Smelted iron artifacts were declared to be "European trade items that migrated into intrusive burials."
• Anomalous inscribed tablets (such as the Grave Creek Tablet and Davenport Stele) were declared clumsy modern forgeries without chemical patina testing.
• The physical artifacts—the colossal jawbones, the unmeasured giant femora, and the non-conforming skulls—were shipped to Washington, cataloged into confidential accessions, and systematically locked inside federal storage facilities (such as the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland), never to be displayed to the public again.

V. The Biblical Framework: The Rephaim and Post-Flood Dispersion

When secular evolutionary theories and Powell’s administrative censorship are stripped away, the physical record compiled by Josiah Priest aligns seamlessly with the Created order and the historical ledger of Holy Scripture.

        THE BIBLICAL HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE MOUND BUILDERS
  
  [Genesis 6:4 / Genesis 10] ──► Antediluvian gigantism & post-Flood genetic remnants:
                                 "There were giants in the earth in those days..."
                                 Post-Ararat dispersion of linguistic and cultural families.
       │
       ▼
  [The Rephaim & Anakim]     ──► Old Testament historical records: King Og of Bashan
                                 (bedstead of iron, 9 cubits / ~13.5 ft; Deut. 3:11).
                                 Goliath and the sons of the giant in Gath (2 Sam. 21:20:
                                 men of great stature with six fingers and six toes).
       │
       ▼
  [Worldwide Trans-Oceanic]     ──► Descendants of Noah migrating across continuous post-Flood
  [Post-Cataclysm Migration]     maritime trade corridors, establishing sacred geometric
                                 mounds and earthworks across the fertile Mississippi basin.

1. The Scriptural Reality of Gigantism

Secular science dismisses the existence of giant human races as mythological folklore. Yet the historical narrative of the Bible records their presence with cold, matter-of-fact geographical and anatomical detail:

• Deuteronomy 3:11: "For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man." (A bedstead measuring over 13 feet in length).
• 2 Samuel 21:20: "And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number; and he also was born to the giant."
• Numbers 13:33: "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."

The physical exhumations documented by Priest across the Ohio Valley—skeletons measuring 8 to 9+ feet, possessing colossal cranial volumes, enormous jawbones, and anomalous dentition—are the physical, anatomical traces of these very genetic lineages migrating across the earth in the centuries following the worldwide cataclysm and the dispersion at Babel.

2. The Inscription of Sacred Memory

Priest noted that the earthworks of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys were not military fortifications in the modern sense; they were sacred, monumental enclosures aligned with mathematical, lunar, and celestial cycles.

Their builders were not primitive hunter-gatherers wandering blindly through a jungle; they were the bearers of an elder, highly sophisticated architectural and metallurgical inheritance that remembered the Created cosmos, the judgment of the Flood, and the sacred geometry of the heavens.

VI. Forensic Evidence Ledger & Archival Citations

To facilitate independent historical verification, primary source cross-examination, and archival research, this bureau compiles the primary nineteenth-century documentation governing this investigation:

Primary Literature Citations:

1. Priest, J. (1833). American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West. Hoffman & White, Albany, NY — Internet Archive Digitized First Edition.
2. Atwater, C. (1820). Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. Archaeologia Americana, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 1 — Internet Archive American Antiquarian Society.
3. Squier, E. G., & Davis, E. H. (1848). Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Vol. 1. Washington, D.C. — Internet Archive Smithsonian Edition.
4. Foster, J. W. (1873). Pre-Historic Races of the United States of America. S. C. Griggs and Company, Chicago — Internet Archive AAAS Presidential Survey.
5. Thomas, C. (1894). Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology. Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890-1891 — Internet Archive Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology.
6. Haldane, R. (1835). The Books of the Old and New Testaments Proved to be Canonical. (Analysis of Biblical post-Flood dispersion).

VII. Active Docket: Open Forensic Inquiries into Josiah Priest’s American Antiquities and Pre-Columbian Metallurgy

The 1833 archive of Josiah Priest stands as an unmovable physical obstacle to modern institutional historiography. Before the Smithsonian Institution established its monopoly over American archaeology and mandated that ancient America be stripped of its elder technological footprint, frontier surveyors, physicians, and engineers cataloged physical artifacts directly from unplowed strata. These primary records compel active forensic examination across four central inquiries:

1. The Ferrous Metallurgy & Vitrified Kiln Invariant: Priest's 1833 survey documented iron swords, scythe blades, and smelting slag retrieved from intact earthen tumuli in Onondaga County, NY, and Marietta, OH, beneath undisturbed centuries-old white oak root systems. What physical reduction furnace process produced wrought iron and carbonized steel alloys in pre-Columbian North America if indigenous metallurgy was strictly restricted to cold-hammered float copper?
2. The Birefringent Mirror and Precision Lapidary Grinding: The discovery of polished concave mirrors fashioned from muscovite mica and pyrite crystals alongside inscribed slate tablets (such as the Grave Creek and Cincinnati artifacts) required high-precision optical and lapidary grinding. Why did John Wesley Powell’s 1879 Bureau of Ethnology mandate exclude all lapidary optical instruments from the prehistoric record rather than submit them to modern petrographic and tool-mark analysis?
3. The Biomechanical Load Invariant of Colossal Skeletal Remains: Priest cataloged multiple excavations across Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee uncovering intact human skeletons measuring between seven and nine feet in height, accompanied by heavy copper helmets and outsized armillae. Given that bone tensile strength scales with cross-sectional area while mass scales cubically, what metabolic and atmospheric conditions sustained these large-scale morphological phenotypes prior to their stratigraphical disappearance?
4. The Powell Doctrine Chain-of-Custody Redaction: In the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894), Cyrus Thomas systematically reclassified all anomalous pre-Columbian enclosures as recent post-contact artifacts, while field-collected iron relics and out-of-scale crania vanished from public accession manifests. Under what administrative chain of custody were the physical artifacts documented by Priest, Caleb Atwater (1820), and Squier & Davis (1848) transferred, and where are their current storage locations within federal repository inventories?

The primary field surveys of 1833 preserve an empirical physical record that cannot be dismantled by bureaucratic edict—compelling the investigator to determine whether ancient America was cleared not only of its forests, but of its true technological history.

Related Baseline Wire Investigations & Canonical Dossiers

• Dossier 3: The Cumberland Excavations: Chief Justice John Haywood, Pre-1900 Forensic Osteology, and the Institutional Eradication of North American Giant Anatomy
• Dossier 112: The Frog King (KHM 1): 1812 Erstausgabe Wall-Shatter Kinetics, Gerichtslinde Customary Contract Law, and Iron Henry's Mechanical Heart Bands
• Dossier 11: The 32 Paths of Formation: Deconstructing the Sefer Yetzirah and the Linguistic Architecture of Physical Reality