The Mound Builder Myth was comprehensively refuted by scientific archaeology in the late nineteenth century, particularly through the work of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the investigations of figures like Cyrus Thomas, whose 1894 report definitively established that the mounds of the Mississippi Valley had been built by the ancestors of contemporary Native people.

But the myth had done its cultural work, and the correction of the scientific record was slow to penetrate popular consciousness.

The parallel development of American archaeology as a professional discipline and the consolidation of the American historical narrative in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a historiography that had relatively little room for complex Native civilizations.

The dominant narrative of American history began with European contact — with Columbus, with the Spanish conquests, with the English settlements of the seventeenth century — and treated the period before contact as a kind of empty historical space, populated by peoples without writing, without cities, without the markers of civilization that European traditions had identified as significant.

Cahokia did not fit this narrative.