Indian Mounds in North America

What does the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County Ohio have to do with the Mormon Movement in nineteenth century America? Hundreds of such mounds existed in North America when European Settlers arrived.

“The earthworks encountered by the Europeans were a source of great fascination to the new settlers—but only after they convinced themselves that the mounds had to have been built by a superior race, and that couldn't be the Native Americans. Because the new Euroamerican settlers could not, or did not want to, believe that the mounds had been built by the Native American peoples they were displacing as fast as they could, some of them—including the scholarly community—began to formulate a theory of the "lost race of mound builders." The mound builders were said to be a race of superior beings, perhaps one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, or ancestors of Mexicans, who were killed off by later people.
“The English who came to North America convinced themselves first that the people already inhabiting the land they were settling were literally descended from the Canaanites from Israel.”
“By the late 1870s, however, scholarly research led by Cyrus Thomas (1825–1910) of the Smithsonian Institution and Frederick Ward Putnam (1839–1915) of the Peabody Museum reported conclusive evidence that there was no physical difference between the people buried in the mounds and modern Native Americans.”