Editor's introduction

The existence of monumental archaeological sites in the American Southwest and elsewhere (primarily the mounds of the Eastern Woodlands) have long been a source of both fascination and frustration for archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. The existence of these remnants of “lost” civilizations led to ruminations, not only on the nature of those civilizations and their relation to descendent communities (an association generally denied before the rise of professional archaeology) but about time, loss, and the limits of knowledge of our past. As the most archaeological of Romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote in “Ozymandias”: