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The trench wall at Poverty Point still shows those basket loads of dirt 3,000 years later
I drove out to Poverty Point in Louisiana last month and the park ranger pointed at the side of a fresh cut and said look close. You can see the thin layers where people carried baskets of dirt up the ridges one load at a time, and the bands are still there after 3,000 years. I stood there thinking about how my dad used to talk about the old timers who built things by hand, and here's a whole earthwork from folks who never had a wheel or a horse. What gets me is how much we still don't know about how they planned the whole thing, so has anyone here walked those ridges and heard a better explanation?
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park.iris13d ago
Take that idea a step further: each basket load was probably the same size every trip, so the layers might work like a kind of ruler once you measure how thick they are. That could tell us how many trips it really took, which is wild to think about.
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