Uploaded December 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Starting around 7,000 years ago and continuing for millennia, Native American cultures built thousands of earthwork mounds, mainly around the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. These mounds probably played a ceremonial role in communities with complex hierarchies. Earlier this year, a paper published in the American Journal of Science pushed the date of two of these mounds, those at the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge, back by several thousand years. This was based on a geological analysis of core sediments that had been taken from the mounds by different researchers some years before.
The research made the headlines, establishing the LSU Campus Mounds as the largest man-made structures in the Americas and by doing so, changing the way American prehistory had been understood up until then. Now, a team of archaeologists have published a response to this paper which questions some of its interpretations of the data. In this video I discuss both of these papers and also give a short introduction into the fascinating earthwork mounds that were a central focus of Native American communities thousands of years ago.
#ancienthistory #earthworks #prehistory
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✨ REFERENCES
Ellwood, B.B., Warny, S., Hackworth, R.A., Ellwood, S.H., Tomkin, J.H., Bentley, S.J., Braud, D.H. and Clayton, G.C. (2022). The LSU campus mounds, with construction beginning at∼ 11,000 BP, are the oldest known extant man-made structures in the Americas. American Journal of Science, 322(6), pp.795-827.
McGimsey, C., Saunders, R., Homburg, J., Hawkins, N., McKillop, H., and Mann, R. (2022). The age and construction of the LSU Campus Mounds: Consideration of Ellwood and Colleagues (2022). Society for American archaeology, 22 (5).
✨ MUSIC CREDIT
Music I Use: bensound.com/free-music-for-videos
License code: YD3SKFJMVNDTLWEX
✨ PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
CC BY-SA 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Artist’s impression of Watson Brake, credit: Herb Roe
CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
LSU Campus Mounds, credit: Spatms
Serpent Mound, credit: Pollinator
LSU Campus Mounds, credit: Spatms
Angel Mounds Indiana, credit: Hieronymous Rowe
Briscoe Mounds Illinois, credit: QuartierLatin1968
CC BY-SA 2.5 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5
Schematic plan, credit: Maximilian Dörrbecker
Grave Creek Mound West Virginia, credit: Tim Kiser
CC BY 2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0
Mound A, credit: Bart Everson
Monk Mound at Cahokia, credit: Greg Schechter
Public domain
Aerial view of Poverty Point
Starting around 7,000 years ago and continuing for millennia, Native American cultures built thousands of earthwork mounds, mainly around the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. These mounds probably played a ceremonial role in communities with complex hierarchies. Earlier this year, a paper published in the American Journal of Science pushed the date of two of these mounds, those at the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge, back by several thousand years. This was based on a geological analysis of core sediments that had been taken from the mounds by different researchers some years before.
The research made the headlines, establishing the LSU Campus Mounds as the largest man-made structures in the Americas and by doing so, changing the way American prehistory had been understood up until then. Now, a team of archaeologists have published a response to this paper which questions some of its interpretations of the data. In this video I discuss both of these papers and also give a short introduction into the fascinating earthwork mounds that were a central focus of Native American communities thousands of years ago.
#ancienthistory #earthworks #prehistory
✨ JOIN MY CHANNEL
youtube.com/channel/UC0Hs5t0U6Uf993Tba22YmKA/join
✨ SUPPORT VIA PATREON
patreon.com/MegalithHunter
✨ FOLLOW ME ON SOCIALS
Instagram & Facebook: @MegalithHunter
Twitter: @Megalith_Hunter
✨ REFERENCES
Ellwood, B.B., Warny, S., Hackworth, R.A., Ellwood, S.H., Tomkin, J.H., Bentley, S.J., Braud, D.H. and Clayton, G.C. (2022). The LSU campus mounds, with construction beginning at∼ 11,000 BP, are the oldest known extant man-made structures in the Americas. American Journal of Science, 322(6), pp.795-827.
McGimsey, C., Saunders, R., Homburg, J., Hawkins, N., McKillop, H., and Mann, R. (2022). The age and construction of the LSU Campus Mounds: Consideration of Ellwood and Colleagues (2022). Society for American archaeology, 22 (5).
✨ MUSIC CREDIT
Music I Use: bensound.com/free-music-for-videos
License code: YD3SKFJMVNDTLWEX
✨ PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
CC BY-SA 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Artist’s impression of Watson Brake, credit: Herb Roe
CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
LSU Campus Mounds, credit: Spatms
Serpent Mound, credit: Pollinator
LSU Campus Mounds, credit: Spatms
Angel Mounds Indiana, credit: Hieronymous Rowe
Briscoe Mounds Illinois, credit: QuartierLatin1968
CC BY-SA 2.5 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5
Schematic plan, credit: Maximilian Dörrbecker
Grave Creek Mound West Virginia, credit: Tim Kiser
CC BY 2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0
Mound A, credit: Bart Everson
Monk Mound at Cahokia, credit: Greg Schechter
Public domain
Aerial view of Poverty Point
