New world earthworks

I learn this morning about a large earthwork, something more than 3,000 years old, in northeastern Louisiana. Sufficiently important to score as a world heritage site - and to think that I had never heard of it before. Perhaps there was enough to do keeping track of all the earthworks in and around the hills of the southwest of this country.

In the snap taken from gmaps above, the brown patch middle left is the 70 feet high mound known to Wikipedia, and no doubt others, as Mound A. While the half circles to its right, suggesting an auditorium focused on the blue marker, were once much more prominent. Perhaps we could ask Google to fly over again next time there is a drought, or whatever it is that makes these things more visible.

It seems that there has been a flurry of activity about all this in the media, including a piece in Nature, but the article at reference 2 has the advantage of being free.

It also seems that some engineers are waxing lyrical about the deep knowledge of large earth mounds exhibited by the builders. We are told that building durable earth mounds is nothing like as easy as you might think.

Plenty of debate about what is was all for. Just as there is about the ancient earthworks over here.

While Wikipedia offers something a bit more intelligible than an aerial photograph.

PS: the world heritage people were not terribly helpful. They offered lots of downloadable documents about this site, but they were not properly labelled, so it was impossible to pull out anything useful. Perhaps if I had taken a bit more trouble, I would have found my way around.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point.

Reference 2: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-native-americans-were-incredible-engineers-180978605/. The freebie.

Reference 3: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02439-0. The paywalled.