Poverty Point

Poverty Point was a bit too far out of the way for us last year, unfortunately. It's an ancient Indian earthwork site: built up between 1700 and 1100 BC. Much older than Cahokia, but younger than the pyramids of Egypt, and older than the MesoAmerican pyramids. One section dates back to 3900 to 3600 BC (beats the pyramids).

A TimeTeam video about a resistivity study came up in my wife's feed. There's speculation, and the study supplies some support for the idea, that the central plaza was built over a couple of (now extinct) mud volcanoes. Given the myths recorded later about people emerging from the earth--location, location, location: build something there.

One thing didn't make sense: a claim that the big mound (A) was built in 3 months. 238,000 cubic meters? I looked up the reference, and they concluded that the lack of obvious erosion or layering in the cores they took (in an area with plenty of rainfall), meant that "we cannot falsify the hypothesis the mound was built in less than three months."

Um. There seem to be other estimates. If you assume 50lb baskets, two per carrying pole (guessing that the locals invented them too), and that whether it was 1 digger and 1 porter or one doing both jobs and taking twice as long, that's about .05 m3 in maybe 40 minutes, and over 3 million man-trips. Give people a day off each week, and that's about 15,000 man-months. I've no intuition for how many people you could scrounge up to do that kind of work, but you'll need to feed them, so maybe double or triple the number to produce the food, and more to prepare it. Nominally this is before much agriculture (e.g. way before corn is found there), though I'll bet there was some, of quasi-wild varieties.

Not three months.

It looks like a very interesting site, and a long-lived one too. 2800 years of use. They estimate the last work was roughly about the same era is the famous collapses in the MidEast about 1200BC. China had some droughts about then, so maybe the Americas did too.