Reevaluating American Indian Architecture

ANNA BLUME | Professor in the History of Art Department

With the support of an FIT Faculty Development Grant, History of Art Professor Anna Blume is researching monumental American Indian architecture in the Mississippi River Valley, dating as far back as the fourth century B.C.

Professor Blume’s research focuses on three sites from different periods and geographic locations and considers the importance of monumental architecture to the people who made those structures.

Crigler Mound, Boone County, Kentucky, ca. AD 50–200. Postmarks and partially excavated earthwork. Photo: Courtesy of the William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, November 12, 1941 (119BE20).

Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio, ca. AD 1200. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1848), pl. 35.

Back to Research

Marching Bears, Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa, ca. AD 800. Photo: Clark Mallam, 1974, National Park Service (public domain).

Bolivar County, Mississippi, ca. AD 700–1200. Two earthen flat-topped mounds with earthen embankment. E.G. Squier and E.H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1848), fig. 22.

Anna Blume is a professor in the History of Art Department in the School of Liberal Arts. She earned a BA from Williams College and a PhD from Yale University and was awarded a State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2011–12.