Local historian Ed Lentz, in his weekly “As It Were” column in This Week Community News, writes about the ancient mound-builders of Columbus, Ohio. It’s a great short summary and I highly recommend it to your attention.

Lentz presents a few of the historic accounts of excavations into mounds, which took place in the age “before modern archeology.” In many cases, these accounts are our only clues to what some of these lost mounds contained. One example of such an account is worth special mention.

An early antiquarian, upon digging into the mound that gave Mound Street its name, reportedly found “a skull so large that it would fit over his head.” This is the sort of claim that would warm the hearts of modern seekers for ancient giants, but Lentz points us to a later account, which notes that “none of this could be verified,” since every trace of these remains was lost.

Without hard evidence to verify such extraordinary claims, they cannot be taken seriously. They are entertaining anecdotes that may well have become exaggerated in repeated tellings of the tale — like that enormous fish your uncle once almost caught.