Oldest mounds show ancient Americans were organized
Story-Date: 10:32 a.m. PST Thursday , September 18, 1997

------------------------------------------------------------

Oldest mounds show ancient Americans were organized
Release at 4 p.m. EDT

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuter) - A complex of 5,000-year-old mounds shows that ancient
natives of what is now Louisiana were busily building things long before
anyone thought they could, archeologists reported Thursday.

The mounds show the first signs of complex social organization and even
agriculture, Joe Saunders and colleagues at Northeast Louisiana University
in Monroe said.

But they admitted they still did not know what the mysterious mounds were
for.

"We do not know. We know they lived on them," Saunders said.

The complex was found in an area called Watson Break and dates back 5,400
years, Saunders's team reported in the journal Science.

They had been studying the mounds for years but were just recently able to
accurately date them.

They said the complex of mounds and connecting ridges, surrounded by an
earthen enclosure, showed someone in the tribe had sophisticated leadership
skills.

"It takes planning and organizing and maintaining," Saunders said in a
telephone interview. "We generally had believed in the past that mobile
hunting and gathering cultures would not have the capability."

The mounds are neither small nor simple -- one was as tall as a two-story
house. Saunders said people probably lived on some, although the tallest
one was too pointy to be used for that.

"The largest mound is 7.5 m (25 feet) high; the other mounds measure
between 4.5 and one meter (15 and three feet) in height, and the connecting
ridges average one meter in height," they wrote.

Whoever built the mounds must have enjoyed the fruits of the Louisiana
countryside. They fished and ate local plants, and had enough free time to
make beads and tools.

The mounds were full of bits of bone, mostly from fish, especially catfish.
There were also plenty of seeds, including the edible weeds goosefoot,
marshelder and knotweed.

"They liked it there for some reason," Saunders said. Hickory and oak
trees grow nearby, and there was probably a swamp or quiet channel
nearby.

Saunders said he pictured local bands of hunters and gatherers coming
together seasonally to feast on the bounty of the swamp, and eventually
building a semi-permanent site.

He said it looked like the sites were occupied in summer and fall.

The researchers said the people who made the mounds may have taken the
first steps toward domesticating plants and eventual agriculture.

Botanist Charles Allen said the seeds found were from edible plants that
modern people "had forgotten about."

"It may be because they have ugly flowers," he said. But he had eaten
goosefoot greens. "It was good," he said.

"In the past it looks like people ground them and made some sort of bread
or porridge out of them," he said. "It would have been different from corn,
wheat or rice."



------------------------------------------------------------