Mound, n.  An artificial hill or elevation of earth; a raised bank; an embarkment thrown up for defense; a bulwark; a rampart; also, a natural elevation appearing as if thrown up artificially; a regular and isolated hill, hillock, or knoll.
    To thrid the thickets or to leap the mounds.   --Dryden.
 Mound bird. Zool. See moundbird in the vocabulary.
 Mound builders Ethnol., the tribe, or tribes, of North American aborigines who built, in former times, extensive mounds of earth, esp. in the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.  Formerly they were supposed to have preceded the Indians, but later investigations go to show that they were, in general, identical with the tribes that occupied the country when discovered by Europeans.
 Mound maker Zool., any one of the megapodes.  See also moundbird in the vocabulary.
 Shell mound, a mound of refuse shells, collected by aborigines who subsisted largely on shellfish. See Midden, and Kitchen middens.


 mound bird
      n : large-footed short-winged birds of Australasia; build mounds
          of decaying vegetation to incubate eggs [syn: megapode,
           mound-bird, mound builder, scrub fowl]